Ep. 1488 - Trump's Nearly 100,000 Attendees Shatters Rally Record
Episode Stats
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170.50723
Summary
Trump held his biggest campaign rally ever in Wildwood, New Jersey, and it drew a crowd of 80,000 to 100,000 people. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden tries to shake hands with some people in Tampa, Florida.
Transcript
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President Trump held a rally down the Jersey Shore over the weekend, and news outlets,
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as well as Wildwood, New Jersey officials, are reporting that his appearance drew a crowd of
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between 80,000 and 100,000 people. His biggest campaign rally ever, and it took place in liberal
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New Jersey. You can see all the crowds there, right there on either Maury's Pier or one of
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the big Hollywood Wildwood boardwalk piers, all sorts of fun rides, and then lots and lots of
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people, and the crowd swelled and swelled until you get up to that 80,000 or 100,000 number.
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The unexpected rally made national headlines. Many people are shocked. Most don't know what to make
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of it. I am not shocked, and I do know what to make of it, and that is because I have spent a lot
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of time in Wildwood, New Jersey. Until the age of 18, I spent a lot. I don't know, three weeks a year
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or more maybe in Wildwood. I smoked my first cigar in Wildwood. I was conceived in Wildwood,
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and I sort of wish I didn't know that, but I do, and I was, just as many people over the years have
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been conceived in Wildwood. I am not shocked by the turnout, but I understand why some people are.
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The population of Wildwood is around 5,000. The surrounding towns, Wildwood Crest, Cape May,
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North Wildwood, combined bring that number to around 14,000. The numbers swell during the summer
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season, but it's still off-season. The season down there doesn't begin until Memorial Day.
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So where do the 80,000 people come from? Atlantic City is about an hour away. Philly,
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about an hour and a half. Wilmington, Delaware, I guess, is only about an hour and a half away.
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I don't know who came from where, but I do know that the people who went put in an effort to be
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there. And why? Why was Wildwood, New Jersey, surrounded by blue cities, the site of Trump's
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biggest rally to date? Because Wildwood is a nostalgic place. Bobby Rydell sang about those
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Wildwood days in the early 1960s. The first rock and roll record ever was first performed by Bill
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Haley and his comments in Wildwood in 1954. Wildwood was the hot place to be in the middle
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of the 20th century, as America was growing and flourishing and getting rich and having lots of
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babies. Wildwood offered middle-class and even blue-collar Americans a fun, bright, totally American
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beach vacation for their growing families. Wildwood is a time capsule from the absolute height of our
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nation's relative wealth, power, and optimism. It is the kind of place that makes a person want to
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make America great again. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. Jennifer Lawrence is calling former Vice President Mike Pence gay
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at some gay award. I think it was the GLAAD, the gay, lesbian, something, something,
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something award. So she's calling him gay. We will examine whether Mike Pence is or is not,
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slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could
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save. PolicyGenius.com slash Knowles. Trump pulls 80,000 to 100,000 people in Wildwood.
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Meanwhile, President Biden tries to shake hand with a ghost at some speech he was giving in Tampa,
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Florida. Biden walks away from the lectern. He's got his hands out to shake someone's hand,
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stumbles a little, and realizes no one's there. And he looks out into the relatively small crowd.
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I guess this is a rally for abortion. Rally. From the camera, it looks like there's about two dozen
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people there. It says, reproductive freedom. Let's go. Let's kill those babies. And he goes to shake
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hands. And it's just a ghost. I don't know what Joe Biden's seeing. He might be imagining someone
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standing there. It might really be a ghost for all we know. In any case, the man no longer has
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situational awareness. Yes, he's in decline. Yes, he probably has some kind of dementia.
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Yes, he doesn't speak well anymore. He doesn't even have situational awareness. And that really
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matters for Biden because that was the one thing he had. He never had much of an education. He never
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had much in the way of convictions. He probably, you know, not the sharpest tool in the shed when it
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comes to IQ. But he always, being a really successful empty suit politician, he always knew
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how to glad hand. He always knew how to simper. He always knew how to win the crowd in the room and
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tell them whatever they wanted to hear. He has lost that. He no longer can really read a room. He no
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longer can really play to a room. He's trying to shake hands with people who aren't even there.
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Bad, bad news. So the only thing they can do, especially if the Biden crowds draw, who knows,
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a handful of people and the Trump crowds draw, you know, the population of the state of New Jersey
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or something, they've just got to keep him to very, very tailored on-camera appearances where they
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can edit the performances and avoid the big rallies. The way they were able to do that in 2020 was by
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shutting down the country over COVID. There's some indication they might try to do that again.
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But whichever of their tactics ultimately is successful, they just need to find some way
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to make sure that this is not a campaign that is won on the campaign trail.
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The one political gift Biden had, that situational awareness, that ability to flatter people in
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the moment, even that is gone. So the guy is left with nothing. Now, one last speech to get to
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before we move on to other news. Commencement speeches at American universities are generally
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terrible in recent years. Back 150, 200 years ago, even less than that, even in the early
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20th century. Commencement speeches involved serious people giving disputations in Latin,
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Greek, sometimes Hebrew on serious subjects. Now, it's usually a bunch of clowns getting up,
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doing a little soft shoe routine for the clapping seals who are in the audience. I'm mixing metaphors,
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but it paints a picture at the very least. It's just jokes and flattery, and the whole university
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system is basically a joke and flattery. You pay a quarter million dollars. For a lot of these schools,
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it's very difficult to get in because everyone's applying to college. And then you don't really
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learn very much there, and many of the things you learn are not true. And then you get some degree
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that increasingly has little value, might even be a worthless degree at this point. So the commencement
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speeches in recent years have reflected that. You lose the serious scholars, you lose the serious
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statesman, you bring on Will Ferrell or somebody. Not to pick on Will Ferrell, but those kind of
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speeches. So they're always terrible. The comedian speeches tend to be the worst of all because they
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just show what a clown show the universities have become. And yet there was one exception over the
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weekend. That would be Jerry Seinfeld. So not just a modern commencement speaker, but actually a comedian
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who gave one of the best commencement speeches I have heard in years at Duke University.
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Let go of this idea that you have to find this one great thing that is my passion,
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my great passion with your shirt torn open and your heaving pec muscles. It's embarrassing.
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Just be willing to do your work as hard as you can with the ability you have.
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We don't need the heavy breathing and the outstretched arm from your passion.
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It makes co-workers uncomfortable in the cubicle next to you.
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Find fascination. Fascination is way better than passion. It's not so sweaty.
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I will give you my three real keys to life. No jokes in this part. Okay, they are number one,
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bust your ass. Number two, pay attention. Number three, fall in love.
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Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful advice. I love the first part, which some of us have heard before,
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but it's worth repeating. Forget about my passion, my passion, my passion. Find something that fascinates
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you. What's the difference between, some people would say they're the same thing. My passion is
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just what fascinates me. Not really. My passion, my passion, my passion is all about me, me, me, me,
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me. It's all about some internal performance. It's all about me as detached from the rest of the
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world. My economic circumstances, my social circumstances, my actual hard skills. No,
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all that matters is my burning passion. No one cares about your passion. Something that fascinates
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you is outside of you. It allows you to stop thinking about yourself for five seconds.
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It will absorb your attention. It will inspire you to focus your efforts on this thing.
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And maybe you'll be successful at it. Maybe you won't be successful at it.
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If a thing fascinates you, you're more likely to be successful at it because it's about the work that
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you are doing and the goal you want to achieve. It's not about being a certain type of person.
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It's a subtle distinction, but Seinfeld totally nails it and he's totally right. A man wrapped up
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in himself makes a small package. Indeed, hell is the place where we have nothing to do but amuse
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ourselves. Focus on that thing outside of you. It's going to be much better for you. And then he gives
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those beautiful pieces of advice afterward, which we'll get to in just one second. First though,
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K-N-W-L-E-S, to 98, 98, 98. That is Knowles to 98, 98, 98. He says, number one, bust your ass.
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Very true. I've never seen anyone make it who doesn't work very, very hard. I used to think
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when I was a kid that the people at the top didn't work very hard because they've got all their money
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in their yachts and they don't need to work. It's only the people at the bottom
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who have to work really hard. The people at the top, you work so that you don't need to work.
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You make all that money so you don't need to work anymore. Not true, in my experience. The people at
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the top work very, very hard. Usually they work harder than anybody else. He's right about it.
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Jerry Seinfeld obviously has done that. Jerry Seinfeld easily could have retired in what,
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1999 with zillions and zillions of dollars. And no, he keeps going out, hitting the road.
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He keeps doing movies. Sometimes they flop. Sometimes they're better than others. He's
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giving commencement speeches. The guy just keeps working. Number two, pay attention. This is related
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to his bigger advice at the top. Pay attention. Be focused on other things. And he says, look,
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my whole life I've just been focused on little trivialities. What's the deal with airline food?
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That kind of stuff. But by paying attention, by paying a little bit more attention than the
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people around him, he gets a little bit of an advantage. For him, it's in comedy. For you,
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it could be in engineering or accounting or welding or I don't know, whatever it is you do. But if you
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pay attention, you get those details and you recognize that knowledge is power and knowledge
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is a prerequisite for freedom even because freedom is willing, predicated on understanding.
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You're going to have an advantage. And then number three, this is the most beautiful thing.
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He says, fall in love. And this is not sappy. This is not saccharine. This is not
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mamby-pamby stuff. Fall in love because your desire is what's going to shape your character.
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Fall in love because charity is not only a virtue, it's a theological virtue. Not only a theological
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virtue, it's the greatest of all virtues, without which we're nothing but a clanging symbol.
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And fall in love because our loves are going to define where we end up.
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I also gave a graduation speech over the weekend and I gave it at a homeschool co-op, a homeschool
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hybrid system with one graduate. I was asked to do it and I said, I love the idea of it so much
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that I did it. I gave a graduation speech to one person. And coincidentally, this was the topic that
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I was speaking on. Very similar to what Jerry Seinfeld was talking about. The difference between
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the greatest sinners and the greatest saints is not necessarily their degrees of education. It's not
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necessarily their intelligence. There have been very, very intelligent sinners before. The difference
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is their loves, where their love is oriented. Do you love the good and you're drawn toward the good?
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You know, like Dante says at the end of the Divine Comedy in Heaven, he says, and I could feel
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my soul turning as a wheel. It was all beginning to turn by the love that moves the sun and the other
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stars. Or is your love oriented toward selfish things, toward temporal things, toward material things,
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toward things that are not going to serve you in the long run? Fall in love, Jerry says. And this is very
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important. In our modern age, we're told, you know, suppress your loves, deny your desires. No, no,
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no. You got to, you got to, it's all, it's all about love. It's all about desire. You've just got to
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make sure that, that love is in the right place. Not all love is equal. I know we say love is love
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these days. Uh-uh. No, there are different kinds of love and different orientations of love and
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different, different, um, those, those, those can make all the difference in your life. Beautiful speech.
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He also, just a few other bangers before he, before we move on from Jerry.
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He tells the graduates they should embrace privilege. He says, today we're embarrassed
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about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.
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Beautiful way to put it. Chestertonian, if you ask me. So true. We're embarrassed that our parents
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gave, gave some of us a better life than others. You know, our privilege, right? We're embarrassed if we
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grew up in a good neighborhood. We're, we're embarrassed if we have white skin. We're embarrassed if we,
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no, I'm this, you, you should never be embarrassed about your family. You should never be embarrassed
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about some aspect of your ethnicity or that you, you can't change. You didn't choose. You don't need
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to be embarrassed about that. You should never be embarrassed that you had parents who gave you a
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good upbringing that you should, you shouldn't be embarrassed about privilege, period. You want,
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I want my kids to have privilege. I, I want to work to make sure my kids have privilege.
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And ideally more privileged than I had. We all should do that. It's not that we want,
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we shouldn't deny privilege. We should use it responsibly, but we don't act responsibly.
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That's why we're proud of things we should be embarrassed by. Think of what we're proud of
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these days. We're probably have a whole month where we were proud of all the weird sex stuff
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that people do. That's not, that's one of the things we should not be proud of. Perfect,
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perfect observation from Seinfeld here. Then he says, don't lose your sense of humor. It's an
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essential surviving quality. It is worth the occasional feeling of discomfort to have some
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laughs. So true. This affects people on the right, even as it does on the left. The left is humorless.
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The right has a problem with this too, though. Some people on the right, they just want to be so
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angry all the time. And they, you don't understand they, the evil they out there, they're destroying
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our lives and we need to be angry and pull our hairs out. Nah, man, man. And who is they? Well,
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it's the Democrats. It's the leftists. It's the globalists. It's the, this is, some people would say
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it's the Jews. You always, that's one of the recurring prejudices that crops up in history,
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or it's the UN or it's the WEF or it's the whatever. But ultimately, if you follow that back
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far enough, it's concupiscence. It's the, it's the fallen state of the world. It's because Adam in the
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garden ate an apple. That's really what it comes down to. So it's a fallen world and there are all,
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all sorts of, I'm not denying that we individually and we collectively and we, we all contribute to
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that fallen nature because we commit sins. But you're not, that's not going away anytime soon.
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That can be redeemed and is redeemed, in fact, if you believe as I do in the crucifixion, the harrowing
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of hell and the resurrection and the ascension and the second, in second coming, the end of the world,
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you definitely believe in that this will be redeemed. But in the meantime, it's a fallen world.
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The only way to get through the fallen world without pulling your hair out is hope, the theological
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virtue and faith and charity. But second only to those virtues, humor, have a sense of humor because
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things are a little off. We all know that things are a little off. We all know that things are not
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as they should be. So you'll laugh or you cry. Great, great point. Now, speaking of funny things,
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some, and speaking of the Jews, I guess, some, some Princeton libs are out on a hunger strike because
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they hate the state of Israel so much and they're really upset. And so they're, they're on a hunger
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strike at Princeton. They're, they're boycotting their eating clubs this week and they're complaining
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that they're hungry. This is absolutely unfair.
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My peers and I, we are starving. We are physically exhausted. I am quite literally shaking right now,
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as you can see. We are both cold and hot at the same time. We are all immunocompromised.
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And based on the university's meeting yesterday with some of our bargaining team,
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they would love to continue physically weakening us because they can't stand to say no to unjust murder.
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I will say, I truly do not feel like I'm doing anything special. This is my choice and I would
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not spend my birthday doing anything other than being here and standing in solidarity with you all
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and standing in solidarity with our siblings and innocent people in Gaza.
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Okay. She's right about a couple of things. One, she's not doing anything special. That's true.
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Two, this is exactly what she'd like to be doing on her birthday. This is how she's oriented her love.
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And there are all sorts of psychobabble reasons that I could go into about how these Princeton kids
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ended up doing this, but I'll, I'll avoid the temptation to, to read their minds. I'll just observe
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their actions. They chose to be there. They chose to go on a hunger strike and then they
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whine and complain about it. Then they blame the administration. The administration is forcing us.
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No, they're not. You're choosing to go on a hunger strike. And in this case, I don't, I think there
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are many other better reasons to go on a hunger strike, but you think this is a good cause. Okay.
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Well, if you're going to do it, then how about you suffer silently, darling? You know,
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how about you kiss it up to God? No, you can't. You got to make a big show about it.
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Even though you're the one starving yourself. Reminds me one time I was giving a speech at
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Loyola Marymount with Drew Clavin. And at one point, these black students came in and they had
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duct tape over their face. And I don't know why they were angry. I don't know why the black student
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organization was angry at me. I don't think I'd said anything to offend them. Otherwise, other than
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maybe I made fun of BLM or something. Usually it's the transvestites who protest me. But in this case,
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it was these black students and they put tape on their mouths. They probably didn't even know who
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Drew and I were. They just heard conservatives are here and conservatives are awful, terrible racists. So they
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came in. They said, we're being silenced. And I said, hey, any of the kids with the tape on your
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mouths, here's the microphone. Whatever you think you're being censored from saying, here you go.
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Here's the mic. You can say whatever you want. Anybody want to take the mic? Not one person. Not
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one person came up. Because they put the tape on themselves. And they put the tape on themselves
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as a big performance. They were so upset that in theory, they had been prevented from
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speaking that they didn't actually come up with anything to say. They didn't have anything to say.
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Just a big performance because it carried some social currency and because they didn't know what
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else to do. Because they hadn't, getting back to our first point, they hadn't really cultivated their
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loves. They didn't know what they want. They know things they hate. They don't really know what they
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love. They don't, other than tearing things down, I guess. They don't really know what they love.
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They don't have a good and reasonable and sturdy destination to which their love can propel them.
00:23:47.420
You know, one of my favorite things that I'm doing these days is the Michael And series of long
00:23:51.400
interviews. In this series, I've covered an array of topics. This episode might be the most shocking
00:23:57.060
yet. I sat down with Dr. Robert Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today,
00:24:01.160
about the control that big tech has over the minds of people around the world. If you were not notified
00:24:06.220
that we released the episode this weekend, after watching the episode, you may have an idea why.
00:24:11.300
Here's a quick teaser. We published a landmark study in which we show bias in Google search results can
00:24:18.660
change people's views about anything at all. How bad is it? I gave a briefing, a private briefing,
00:24:26.940
a few minutes later, one of them walked out. I know exactly who it was. And he walked up to me
00:24:30.520
and said, Dr. Epstein, based on what you just told us, I predict you're going to be killed in some sort
00:24:35.820
of accident in the next few months. But a few months later, my beautiful, amazing wife was killed in a
00:24:50.480
Yes. Then there's another part of me, which is the science guy. Every single thing we do is
00:24:56.240
relevant to everything that's happening right now. With the algorithms shifting the views of people
00:25:03.040
who are undecided on some issue or other around the world by the billions.
00:25:20.780
The full episode is now available on The Michael Knowles Show, YouTube, Spotify, and X channels.
00:25:27.080
It would appear that this interview is being somewhat suppressed on one of those platforms.
00:25:32.640
I'll leave it to your imagination which one it is. So you can get it elsewhere too, though,
00:25:36.700
Spotify, and X. Oops, did I just, okay. Subscribe to all of those and watch the ad-free version on
00:25:44.040
Daily Wire Plus. Speaking of looking ridiculous, a trans-identifying soccer referee
00:25:51.820
has just become a soccer manager. Still trans-identifying, but he's transitioned from
00:25:59.820
referee to manager. This guy goes by Lucy Clark. I don't know what his real name is. He's the first
00:26:04.500
openly transgender referee who's now the first trans manager in the top five divisions of English
00:26:12.200
women's soccer. In British English, that's called football, but in real English, we call it soccer.
00:26:20.760
So J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, had a funny tweet about this. She said,
00:26:25.560
when I was young, all the football managers were straight, white, middle-aged blokes,
00:26:29.420
so it's fantastic to see how much things have changed. And then there was an article in the Daily
00:26:35.780
Mail. Daily Mail, British paper. It's got a picture of this trans-identifying guy who is like real. He
00:26:43.900
looks real manly and real British. You can kind of tell in the face and a little bit in the teeth.
00:26:51.720
No knock on the Brits, but they don't have great dental care there. And he's got a wig on. He just
00:26:57.180
looks like a big British dude with a wig on. And the headline says, J.K. Rowling is accused of
00:27:03.000
cruelty as she mocks transgender football manager by comparing her to a straight, white, middle-aged
00:27:08.240
bloke. At which point, J.K. Rowling responds and says, I didn't compare him to one. He is one.
00:27:16.180
And what strikes me about this is not even the trans issue, which I'm so sick of talking about.
00:27:22.220
It's the breakdown of interpretation. J.K. Rowling's correction here of the Daily Mail is not
00:27:32.200
an anthropological correction so much as it's a grammatical and rhetorical correction.
00:27:39.160
The Daily Mail, when they say she compares this woman to this man, she says, no, it's not.
00:27:46.200
J.K. Rowling is not comparing anyone. J.K. Rowling is just describing the person.
00:27:52.320
He is a man. This means that we have a crisis of meaning. And I think we all know that we have a
00:27:59.380
crisis of meaning. We don't know how to compare things anymore. We don't know what things really
00:28:04.000
are. This is why we ask the question, what is a woman? This is why we all misuse the word literally.
00:28:09.660
You know, every, it used to be just teenage white girls. Now it's all of society would misuse literally
00:28:14.620
and say, oh man, that literally killed me. Oh, this food is literally the greatest thing I've ever had in my
00:28:21.600
whole life. Oh, this is literally, literally, I'm literally dead. If you're speaking, you are of
00:28:27.520
course not literally dead. I hope. But unless you're Joe Biden, I guess. In that case, you might
00:28:33.160
be literally dead and still, still reanimated somehow by some evil principalities and powers.
00:28:37.640
And the word literally, as I've observed before, not just to be cute, because it tells you something
00:28:43.260
about interpretation, about meaning. The word literally is a confounding word because literally,
00:28:47.580
Andrew Klavan has made this point. Literally refers to letters and letters are signs and symbols. So
00:28:52.900
even the word literally has this implicit suggestion that there's more to the world than just what we
00:29:02.220
would call literal. So we got to take a little trip back to understand how we got to the point
00:29:07.420
where the British newspaper doesn't know what a man is and doesn't know what comparison is.
00:29:13.080
We have to take a little trip back to the Middle Ages and think about the four kinds of interpretation
00:29:18.740
that in the Middle Ages were commonly understood that we've since forgotten.
00:29:23.700
When you would examine a text in the Middle Ages, especially the Bible, the four things you would
00:29:30.820
think about are the literal meaning, just the most basic intentional meaning you can come up with of
00:29:40.680
the text, followed by the allegorical or typological meaning, followed by the moral meaning,
00:29:47.980
followed by what is called the anagogical meaning, anagogical meaning pertaining to the end times.
00:29:54.620
So to make that concrete, you think about the book of Exodus. What is literally the story of the
00:30:01.400
book of Exodus? Literally the story is the Israelites leave Egypt and they go to the promised land.
00:30:09.140
They go to what is now the nation state of Israel. Okay, that's the literal meaning.
00:30:13.980
What is the allegorical or typological meaning? The allegorical or typological is looking back in
00:30:22.820
the past to understand the present, to see a figure of the present in the past. So the allegorical meaning
00:30:31.380
would be that, you know, God takes the, the, his people from slavery into freedom, slavery in Egypt into
00:30:43.080
freedom in the promised land. Okay. And so the allegorical meaning would be that, that God, when he becomes
00:30:49.840
man in Christ, brings his people from slavery and the bondage of sin into true freedom. That's the,
00:30:59.940
that's the, this is why Exodus is a kind of a figure of, of the salvation that Christ brings.
00:31:06.940
Okay. What's the moral meaning? The moral, you know, what's the moral of the story? The moral meaning is
00:31:11.760
we should follow God, even when it's inconvenient, even when we have to give up things that we consider
00:31:18.700
to be comforts, things that we're attached to. There are plenty of Israelites in Egypt who did
00:31:24.500
not want to go follow this guy, Moses through the desert, give up all their nice material possessions
00:31:29.100
and go starve in the desert potentially in search of some promised land that they were told they had.
00:31:34.340
But the faithful ones did it and it's a good thing that they did. And then finally the anagogical as it
00:31:41.620
pertains to the end times. Anagogical relating the present to the future. Well, I guess the anagogical is
00:31:49.980
that we're, we're all kind of in exile, right? We're all in Exodus. The, the, the Exodus is kind of the figure
00:31:55.880
of history and we're, we're here. This is, this is not real. This earth is not really our country. We're pilgrims
00:32:03.280
and we're going to another place. Our true home is in heaven. Our true home is with God. And we're
00:32:10.680
here passing through as pilgrims on this fallen world to get to the true promised land, which is
00:32:15.000
not the nation state of Israel. The true promised land is the kingdom of God. Okay, there you go.
00:32:20.800
That's a very basic way of understanding, of interpreting at four different levels, this,
00:32:27.100
this book of the Bible. We don't do any of that anymore, do we? Four different meanings,
00:32:32.780
all on top of each other. We don't really do that anymore. And the reason we don't do that is in
00:32:38.180
the Daily Mail tweet, which is we deny meaning. This is why everything's got to be literal. This
00:32:45.960
is why everything's got to be material now. This is why when we really are trying to talk about the
00:32:49.960
soul or the spirit, we talk about like the brain. I'm going to upload my brain. We make everything
00:32:55.380
physical. Even when we talk about spiritual discomforts with regard to our sexuality,
00:33:01.840
we now make it all physical in the transgender ideology. We say, oh, it's, yeah, we, it's,
00:33:06.740
there's just an imbalance and I've got to chop up my body to be more like my true self.
00:33:11.600
We, at an even deeper level than that, we deny that there's such a thing as objective truth.
00:33:17.760
That's why we use phrases like your truth and my truth. And we can, we never seem to be able
00:33:21.340
to reason about anything anymore. It makes me think of it. There's a painting by René Magritte
00:33:27.260
called The Treachery of Images. You might've seen it. It's a painting of a pipe and it says,
00:33:31.040
this is not a pipe. It's a picture of a pipe. It says, this is not a pipe. I was talking to my
00:33:37.200
friend Spencer Clavin about this. And he said, well, you know, that image, it's not just that it's a bad
00:33:42.840
painting. It's, it's downright satanic. And the reason it's a satanic painting is because it denies
00:33:50.300
the relation between symbol and symbolized. There's a, there's a symbol of a pipe, which is the
00:33:56.200
painting of the pipe. But then the painting says, this is not a pipe. There's no connection between
00:34:00.300
symbol and symbolized. My body is a symbol of my soul, right? There was, there's the, the physical
00:34:08.460
world has a metaphysical meaning or we're all just warm food and we're all just, we're all just going
00:34:16.080
to take a dirt nap someday. But that's, that's not it. It's so, it's not, the crisis of meaning is not
00:34:24.340
just that we don't understand what a woman is. We don't understand what a woman is because we have a
00:34:29.520
crisis of meaning and that threatens everything. Because if, if, if nothing in this world means
00:34:34.660
anything, then what are we living for? We throw out morality. We throw out any sense of duty. We
00:34:39.800
throw out glory and honor. We throw out love. What's the point of love? It's all just, this is
00:34:45.760
why the modern materialist people, they talk about love as an illusion, just little chemicals firing
00:34:49.780
off in your brain. It's all fake. Then what's the point of life? You, you lose the very point of life
00:34:57.640
if you don't recognize that, that things are not merely what they appear, that there's in a way,
00:35:07.960
maybe the transgender activists understand this, where they say, you know, that, that husky looking
00:35:13.020
man over there, he's not really what he appears. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is
00:35:16.420
things are not merely what they appear. They are often what they appear. There is a literal meaning,
00:35:21.060
but then there's more to that. There's allegory. There's morality. There is the anagogical meaning.
00:35:26.940
The story is going to end at some point. And very often we only understand the meaning of the story
00:35:32.800
when we look backwards. There's people at the end of their life coming to some sense of what
00:35:36.280
their life has meant. If you lose that, then we're all just wandering around like a bunch of idiots.
00:35:41.780
And we, we say that life is nothing but a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying
00:35:46.520
nothing. Not a good way to live. And what you should do, one, one thing that will help your living
00:35:52.440
is subscribing to the Michael Knowles YouTube channel. Smash and subscribe.
00:35:55.660
Ring that bell. Now on the flip side of famous women, you have JK Rowling speaking a lot of sense.
00:36:04.520
We also have Jennifer Lawrence who is fully embracing the rainbow agenda up to and including
00:36:11.780
calling Mike Pence gay. I was in love with a homosexual. It was my first love. I tried to
00:36:18.820
convert him for years, but now I know conversion therapy doesn't work. Did you hear me, Mike Pence?
00:36:36.140
This is kind of a new one to me. I mean, I've heard this kind of line all the time. This is all
00:36:43.600
what the left and the pro LGBT people say. They say, if you, if you disapprove of, you know, a fella
00:36:50.480
dressing up like a chick and then reading books to little children in the library, you're probably
00:36:56.280
secretly gay. If you disapprove of our extremely decadent, disordered lifestyle, you probably have it
00:37:04.040
or desire it or something, but I never heard it about Mike Pence. Does any, does anybody seriously
00:37:09.400
believe that Mike Pence wants to go, you know, hit the local gay bars? He wants to go hit the
00:37:15.400
local drag queen story hour? No, I don't think so. He just, he just disapproves of that kind of stuff.
00:37:21.460
Even, I don't know, they made it out like Mike Pence was, you know, affixing electrodes to
00:37:26.260
homosexuals and zapping them until they weren't gay anymore or something. That isn't true.
00:37:31.500
So that's, that's almost entirely made up. He's just, he's just publicly disapproved of this kind
00:37:37.260
of behavior. And, and for that great sin, he, you know, they, they malign him in all sorts of ways.
00:37:43.340
They did that to Pence a lot though. Remember that time they called Mike Pence a misogynist for
00:37:47.660
refusing to cheat on his wife. He wouldn't go on dinner dates with young women. Isn't that man?
00:37:52.920
He's a misogynist. He won't even cheat on his wife. But, but now they're saying he's gay.
00:37:56.960
Okay. Okay. Why? What is this about? This is not about Mike Pence or even the LGBT stuff.
00:38:03.120
This too is about a denial of reason. This, this too, because what Jennifer Lawrence,
00:38:10.640
what all the libs who say this kind of stuff are, are implying is that one can never
00:38:16.300
have disinterested approval of anything. If you disapprove of something, it must be
00:38:25.000
because you secretly desire that thing. That's the only explanation in liberal, because in liberalism,
00:38:33.120
you're just supposed to let anyone do whatever they want. Of course, in practice, that's not what they,
00:38:37.840
they, they don't want to let a, they don't want to let women have their own sports leagues.
00:38:41.300
They disapprove of that. You know, they don't want to let us have our nice just families and live our
00:38:46.520
lives normally and raise the American flag and, you know, have hot dogs on the 4th of July. They
00:38:50.340
don't want to let us, they don't want to let us run businesses normally. They don't want to let us
00:38:53.820
speak on college campuses. They don't want, so there are plenty of things that they disapprove of
00:38:57.900
that they don't secretly desire necessarily. But that's what they say about us. They say,
00:39:04.860
if, if in any way, if you oppose the rainbow stuff, you're a secret homosexual or transvestite or
00:39:10.720
something. It's the, because why? Because you can't, what they're implying is you can't know
00:39:20.940
anything that you are not actively or passionately involved in. We know this isn't true. You don't
00:39:26.740
need to suffer cancer to be an oncologist. You don't need to be covered in third degree burns to
00:39:33.260
become a firefighter. You, but, but the way to, the way to have that sort of disinterested approval,
00:39:45.440
disapproval rather, is to use your reason to just figure out what a, what a thing would be like to
00:39:52.300
know something about that thing through our reason objectively, rather than through our direct
00:39:55.920
experience. The libs can't do this. Liberalism is about empirical experience. Ultimately, it,
00:40:01.960
it comes to a denial of reason, a reason that destroys itself, that destroys its own basis by
00:40:07.640
denying the source of our reason, which is the intelligence that created the universe.
00:40:11.760
And so they end up with this. Mike, apparently Mike Pence is gay. News to me, probably news to Mike Pence.
00:40:18.100
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Prince Z413 had my favorite comment last week. It says, voting for a Kennedy is like voting for
00:41:54.680
a Clinton. Enough is enough. That's really true, actually, in that both the Clintons and the Kennedys
00:41:58.680
present themselves as moderate Democrats, but they continue generally to move left with the Democrat
00:42:06.460
Party because they don't really stand for all that much at all. They're just kind of
00:42:09.500
avatars of the Democrat establishment. That's true. It's a real indictment of conservatism
00:42:16.060
that any conservatives have considered voting for Robert F. Kennedy in 2024. Now, that's probably out
00:42:25.160
because Kennedy embraced abortion up until the moment of birth. He's trying to walk that back now,
00:42:30.120
but maybe we'll get to that if we have time. But real indictment. Okay, guys, what is it going to be
00:42:36.380
next? We're going to be voting for Malia Obama. We'll say, you know, I longed for the good old
00:42:40.800
days when Democrats were reasonable, like under Barack Obama. I just want to go back to the good
00:42:47.240
old days when men were using women's bathrooms and they were in women's sports leagues, but it
00:42:54.380
wasn't mandatory that we watch them strip naked all the time. I just want to go back to the good old.
00:43:00.260
No, we're just moving the culture further to the left. It's pathetic. No Kennedys. No Kennedys,
00:43:05.000
no Obamas, no Clintons, no libs. We got to be conservative. Now, speaking of saucy accusations
00:43:15.480
on the old libidinous front, we turn from Jennifer Lawrence to Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels is now
00:43:24.380
alleging that Donald Trump metooed her basically, you know, that he pressured her. She didn't know
00:43:29.560
what to do. She was this little wallflower and she somehow ended up in Donald Trump's hotel room and
00:43:34.120
she didn't know how she got here. She was so scared. Oh, she was nervous. She was sweating.
00:43:38.940
And Bill Maher, a liberal who's not with us, but he's somewhat more reasonable than the
00:43:56.520
It is not a Me Too case. I mean, I wasn't assaulted. I wasn't attacked or raped or coerced or
00:44:03.940
blackmailed. They tried to shove me in the Me Too box to further their own agenda. And first of all,
00:44:09.300
I didn't want any part of that because it's not the truth and I'm not a victim in that regard.
00:44:17.940
She's talking about he was bigger and blocking the way. It's all the Me Too buzzwords.
00:44:23.440
She said there was a power imbalance of power for sure. My hands were shaking so hard.
00:44:29.680
She said she blacked out. Blacked out? She's a porn star.
00:44:38.240
That doesn't mean she's been subjected to the likes of Donald Trump.
00:44:47.340
That's the job. It's kind of like Stormy Bob. Bob Stormy. F***.
00:44:52.520
Action. And let's go and we're losing the light.
00:44:56.820
So I just think this is... I just think she's not a good witness.
00:45:00.360
She's not a good witness and Bill Maher's totally right here. That first clip that you heard is from Bill Maher's show in 2018 when she said,
00:45:07.180
yeah, it wasn't Me Too'd. I'm not a victim in any way. I slept with Trump. You know, I slept with about a billion people.
00:45:14.180
Didn't think twice about it. But now, Bill Maher observes, now it's... The story's changed a little.
00:45:20.980
Oh, he blocked the door. Oh, there was a power imbalance. Whatever.
00:45:24.320
However, Stormy Daniels is obviously a liar. We know she's a liar because she signed an official statement years ago saying,
00:45:32.820
I did not sleep with Donald Trump and I did not receive any hush money payments.
00:45:35.840
I couldn't have received a hush money payment because I didn't sleep with Donald Trump.
00:45:41.020
She signed that official statement. Now she's saying, oh yeah, I lied about that.
00:45:50.500
Even though now I also stand to make a lot of money by changing my story, I'm totally telling the truth now.
00:45:56.840
She was lying then or she's lying now or she's just the kind of person who lies when it suits her.
00:46:02.760
And to Bill's point, she is a prostitute and she's not...
00:46:05.980
I'm all for redemption and I don't think anybody is beyond redemption.
00:46:11.920
You know, when I go on the podcasts with the OnlyFans girls,
00:46:15.400
I'm the one who's not making fun of them and not castigating them.
00:46:26.740
The point is not that prostitution is great and we shouldn't, you know, don't judge man.
00:46:32.600
You very much should judge the sin and recognize that we're all sinners and all fall short of the glory of God.
00:46:38.160
And we can turn away from our sin and God's grace is available to all of us.
00:46:43.660
And as far as I can tell, Stormy Daniels is totally unrepentant.
00:46:46.380
And she is the kind of woman who would do anything, including degrade herself for money for her whole career.
00:46:52.840
And she doesn't seem to have repented of that at all.
00:47:07.880
And the fact that she's such a terrible witness is actually good for the Trump campaign.
00:47:12.480
And most people know the whole thing is rigged and is just a political witch hunt.
00:47:18.560
However, I want to raise another possibility, which is maybe she's not lying.
00:47:22.900
Maybe when she uses all this Me Too language, maybe she sincerely believes it.
00:47:31.520
Because this incident allegedly happened in 2006.
00:47:37.700
And sometimes people's feelings about things change.
00:47:44.000
Memories, especially as they're that far in the past, become notoriously unreliable.
00:47:48.860
This is why we don't admit this kind of evidence in court generally.
00:47:52.760
It's why we have statutes of limitations on crimes.
00:47:59.020
And then we got rid of all the statutes of limitations.
00:48:01.720
And as a result of that, there was a lot of injustice done.
00:48:09.220
Feelings change, people change, memories are unreliable.
00:48:14.940
We've thrown those out in the pursuit of some virtue.
00:48:22.780
The modern world is not so bad because it's so evil.
00:48:28.880
When a religious scheme is shattered, it's not just the vices that run wild.
00:48:44.820
But even if she's not a total liar, there's still a reason to have statutes of limitations.
00:48:54.080
Before some of the stories that I really want to get to today, though, I've got to take a pause.
00:48:59.380
Because our Daily Wire comedy, Burcham, launched yesterday.
00:49:10.940
The most important thing, though, is one of the cast members of that show, Roseanne Barr, who I've been a fan of for a very long time.
00:49:18.080
And I got to spend a little bit of time with at the premiere party in Los Angeles.
00:49:21.480
Roseanne Barr then shows up on the show of another friend of mine, Megyn Kelly, smoking my cigar.
00:49:29.160
I'm going to start referring to myself as the artist formerly known as Roseanne.
00:49:42.760
She kind of is a George Burns kind of character.
00:49:56.020
He was there last night distributing his favorite cigars.
00:49:58.580
And this is, I believe, a Michael Knowles offering we have here.
00:50:03.520
It was wrapped in plastic, and I said that God is providing me with a way to satisfy my
00:50:20.560
But as soon as I get around comics, I've got to smoke.
00:50:38.920
When we were chatting, I didn't realize that Roseanne, I should have realized.
00:50:45.360
So I'm glad she was able to swipe a Mayflower cigar from the table at the premiere.
00:50:49.720
But we've got to get a box of Mayflowers to Roseanne pronto.
00:50:52.180
Okay, and you've got to go check out Roseanne's new show with Megyn Kelly, with Adam Carolla,
00:50:57.000
with a lot of great people, Mr. Burcham at Daily Wire+.
00:51:02.700
Use code Knowles at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.