In this episode of The Michael Knowles Show, Michael and Matt discuss why Americans are dying younger, why Kamala Harris is running for president in 2020, and why the FBI thinks Donald Trump was behind an assassination attempt on the president.
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00:03:23.440We're talking about really basic issues here.
00:03:26.300That's what the media don't want to talk about.
00:03:28.460So that's a good sign that that's exactly what we should talk about.
00:03:30.800I understand that Americans dying younger than comparable countries is not the sexiest issue.
00:03:38.040It's really sexy and meme-y and internet-y and weird to talk about, you know, couches and, and weirdness actually for that matter and joy and the black women of color being the first to break the historical, historic glass ceiling of achievement, of accomplishment, of joy and whatever, you know, all that gobbledygook that they're trying to push.
00:04:01.440But how about a simple question, hey, lady, Kamala, you're the VP, the White House is now saying you're sort of the president.
00:04:10.520Oh, because of fentanyl that you are allowing across the border.
00:04:13.960That, that's an issue that would drive me to go vote, especially these days when everyone, it seems, knows someone who has been affected by the worst drug crisis in American history that is being intentionally promoted by Kamala Harris, whose job it is to resolve the border problem.
00:04:36.620Inflation is up 20.2% since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office.
00:04:43.180Now, the Democrats want to blame Trump and the Republicans for this.
00:04:46.640And the way that they can get away with it, at least a little bit, is they can say, well, the massive spending that led to the inflation began under Trump's presidency because it began during COVID and COVID started on Trump's watch.
00:05:02.680It's true, Trump was the president, but who was pushing all the massive spending?
00:05:06.260All the massive spending was being pushed by the Democrats.
00:05:08.800When the Democrats were pushing all that crazy spending, it was guys like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and the Republicans who were saying, no, we got to cool it on this spending.
00:05:18.060It's sort of like blaming Trump and the Republicans for the COVID lockdowns and the school closures and the masking rules and the social distancing.
00:05:26.860Yeah, sure, these things did occur while Republicans were in office, while President Trump was president.
00:05:34.580But they were all being pushed by the Democrats.
00:05:37.300And the Republicans only gave into it reluctantly because they were backed into a corner and Democrats still wielded some political power.
00:05:44.620So, and to say nothing of the terrible economic policies and the spending policies under Biden himself, notably the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which even liberal analysts observed would make inflation worse.
00:05:57.580And inflation has been really, really bad.
00:06:05.120The libs don't really want to talk about it.
00:06:07.620Those are the sort of things we have to shine a light back on.
00:06:10.640Back when Joe Biden was the nominee, people were talking about those kinds of problems because he just faded into the background, you know, and we weren't even sure if he was alive or dead.
00:06:20.240Now the libs are propping up Kamala Harris.
00:06:23.160The only way they can talk about that, or the only way, rather, that they can achieve that is by stopping her from talking.
00:06:29.780Well, okay, that all ends at the debate.
00:06:34.360There are all sorts of things we could attack, Kamala peddling racial identity in a way that she totally flipped on, Kamala running to the left, running to the center, being an empty suit, this and that.
00:07:26.160Burning Man is millennial Bacchanal, you know, some kind of Dionysian festival from ancient Greece, but just in modern, hippy-dippy, New Age-y world.
00:07:36.340You just go to the desert and do a bunch of drugs and weird sex stuff and then go home.
00:07:42.220Burning Man has been really, really popular for more than a decade.
00:07:47.560For that period of time, Burning Man tickets have sold out almost immediately, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
00:07:54.280Burning Man was the Taylor Swift concert of its day, but now, less than two weeks before the festival kicks off, there are still tickets available.
00:08:04.000People don't want to go to Burning Man.
00:08:05.880And I love this because Burning Man is really bad.
00:08:07.600I mean, you could probably ascertain my opinion of the festival from how I described it, but it's just a weird pagan orgy.
00:08:15.320But it's not even as cool as the old pagan orgies, it's just like a sad, modern, liberal simulacrum of an old pagan orgy.
00:08:22.980So it's really weird, and you go to the desert and worship some idol and do things that are not conducive to your flourishing.
00:08:30.360But the good news is, people aren't going anymore.
00:08:35.220And this is a vindication of the wisdom.
00:08:36.980If you marry yourself to the spirit of the age, you'll find yourself a widow in the next.
00:08:42.240The most devastating, you could always critique Burning Man for being a cult and new agey and decadent and debauched and bizarre.
00:08:53.200But now you can attack it for not even being cool because all of these fads, they fade away.
00:09:02.160We make fun of the hippies from the 60s and the early 70s, but they were kind of cool at the time.
00:09:08.700Now we look back on them and we mock them because they seem like total losers.
00:09:12.920But that's true whenever we give in to spiritual fads, the fashionable heresies and bizarre behaviors of our age.
00:09:24.260And the things that endure are true religion, for starters, but even at a lower level, tradition endures.
00:09:34.060And so we mock the old fogies who are traditionalists, but think about it with fashion.
00:09:40.680If you buy a powder blue tuxedo with ruffled shirts and big bell bottoms, you might seem hipper than the guy wearing a classic black tuxedo in 1974.
00:09:54.900But by 1984, you're going to look like a joke.
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00:11:38.720Speaking of changing times, going along with various fads, Kamala Harris' campaign has just declared it will not support Medicare for All.
00:11:49.740A campaign official told Peter Doocy, who's the Fox News White House correspondent, that Harris will not be pushing the subject of single-payer health care, Medicare for All.
00:13:25.640No one really cares about the obfuscations and the constantly changing her mind and lying to your face and gaslighting you and all the rest.
00:13:32.840Because everyone knows that she is subservient to the Democrat machine.
00:13:38.820No one views her as an individual with ideas.
00:13:42.080They all view her as a lieutenant who just got promoted, who's going to go along with whatever the machine says.
00:15:37.920Nothing about the campaign would change.
00:15:39.680Nothing about the campaign has changed from Biden to Harris.
00:15:43.880Now, there are some ways to make Kamala individually particularly unlikable to a lot of Americans.
00:15:52.140And the issue, it should have been the first thing that we thought of, but the issue that seems to have the most currency on individuating Kamala Harris and really making her unlikable to suburban voters, centrist voters, even center-left, is the one that we've all been talking about for years.
00:16:14.980I started a tour now, I guess, five or six years ago, and it was the campus speaking tour, Men Are Not Women and Other Uncomfortable Truths.
00:17:36.640Kamala just picked a guy who made it his jihad as governor of Minnesota to trans the kids, who came out and said, I want this state to be a sanctuary and a refuge for trans kids.
00:17:49.120Run away from your parents, kids, and come over here to my white van with candies and puppies of a state, and we're going to make sure that you get all the trans stuff you want, man.
00:17:57.700This is a guy who put tampons in the boys' bathroom in the fourth grade in public schools, as many people have noted.
00:18:04.400And it's an issue where the Democrats are trying to defend as much as they can.
00:18:48.460Because either she says yes, which I think she has to say, and she turns off 58% of voters, turns off 47% strongly.
00:18:55.980Or she says no, and now her presidential ticket looks completely incoherent, and it puts her at odds with the ostensible president, Joe Biden, her own administration, the Biden-Harris administration.
00:19:06.280Either way, she gets knocked down a peg on an issue that is visceral, that is very emotional, that the vast majority of Americans agree with us on.
00:19:15.140Of course, Kamala would have to speak to the press in order to get her on the record.
00:19:18.060But at the very least, you could get it at the debate.
00:19:20.680Now, the debate is going to be completely unfair because George Stephanopoulos is actually probably the most prominent Democrat propagandist in public life.
00:19:29.180He was Bill Clinton's White House communications director.
00:19:31.740He went to ABC News and pretends to be an objective journalist there, but he's a total dem operative.
00:19:38.640So the odds that something like this would come up are very small.
00:19:42.580Trump has to use his time at the mic to ask Kamala Harris that.
00:19:46.900And so, you know, some issue comes up, some social issue, and Trump can give whatever answer he wants.
00:19:53.000But then at the end there, I mean, this is debating 101, and I'm sure he'll be great at it.
00:19:59.640He can just say, listen, look, I think it's terrible what people are doing to kids.
00:20:04.180You know, they're castrating these kids.
00:20:05.740They're sterilizing kids, going into the schools, taking kids away from parents because they want to pretend that a little boy can be a little girl.
00:20:13.160This is the sort of thing that Kamala Harris supports.
00:20:16.280So, look, Kamala, maybe you disagree with that.
00:20:19.300I'm not even doing a Trump because I want to make sure the words are very precise here.
00:21:37.380But this puts certain Democrats like Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden or Debbie Stabenow from Michigan or Lloyd Doggett, who's the senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee in the lower chamber.
00:21:54.560This puts them in a bad position because this is the problem when your party is inclined toward caprice and totalitarianism, when they're not really guided by any enduring principles beyond, you know, if it feels good, do it, liberation, power, give me more power.
00:22:11.840When the will to power is really all that motivates you, then your positions could change radically day by day.
00:22:39.380But then this handful of Dems, who were just, they were just being good, loyal Democrats attacking whatever Trump wanted to do.
00:22:44.960Now these guys look like jerks because now they're opposed to the Kamala Harris policy.
00:22:49.140That's what happens, man, when you work for Stalin.
00:22:53.040You know, that's what happens when you work for political leaders who are guided solely by the arbitrary use of their will rather than by any objective and reliable conception of justice.
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00:27:15.800Libertarians might say, hey, look, it's a free market, man.
00:27:22.500If you don't like Google, build your own Google.
00:27:25.360You know, we can never use the government, the evil government, to break up a beautiful, noble corporation, you know,
00:27:34.320an instantiation of the true exalted principles of the free market.
00:27:39.540Why, yes, Sindar Pichai and Google, they're basically like a utopia.
00:27:45.200They're like Galt's Gulch and all hail the great corporations.
00:27:49.240Sometimes you hear that from libertarians.
00:27:51.480And then you get the lullbertarians, you know, the left libertarians who just shill for the regime.
00:27:57.700And they'll come up with whatever answer conduces to leftism.
00:28:01.860But I don't mean to make fun of the libertarian position here too much.
00:28:05.860Because, yeah, you have to be worried about the government overstepping.
00:28:11.700I'm all for a robust and effective and efficient government within the proper sphere of the government with protection.
00:28:17.020You know, you don't want it to be arbitrary and capricious.
00:28:19.200You don't want to be totalitarian or something.
00:28:20.580But the people who are defending Google here, I think they just don't know anything about Google.
00:28:29.460The people who are defending Google on free market grounds, the people who are preposterously suggesting that if you don't like Google's monopoly, build your own Google.
00:28:37.960I think they seem to forget that Google was started by the government.
00:28:42.600When Google began, its founders, Brin and Page, were on a comp sci team at Stanford.
00:28:54.060This institute, this research team, received a ton of funding from the Massive Digital Data Systems Program.
00:29:05.680The MDDS program was managed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:29:10.960It was a CIA program and the National Security Agency.
00:29:15.360Google has always had a very, very cozy relationship with the federal government.
00:29:19.840Lots of military contractors, lots of intelligence contractors, spooks in and out of that organization.
00:29:26.580This is not exactly a mom and pop on Main Street, okay?
00:29:29.080So, unfortunately, what the free market kind of argument, you know, build your own Google argument ends up doing is it protects all the worst parts of this pseudo-crony capitalism.
00:29:45.160No, no, Google does all the dirty work of the government.
00:29:53.240When the government doesn't want to get its hands too dirty, when the government doesn't want to overtly censor you for being a conservative, when the government doesn't want to overtly surveil you for whatever reason,
00:30:03.420they'll get their allies in the supposedly private sector to go out and do it for them.
00:30:10.100But the government will also massively fund these groups and work with them very closely.
00:30:14.320There will be people in government who go into Google and then from Google back into government like a revolving door.
00:30:19.560Or, break it up, baby, we see the effects of this.
00:30:23.620You can either break it up because, in principle, you're afraid of private enterprise having too much power or government having too much power.
00:30:32.000In the case of Google, it's kind of both.
00:30:33.600Or you can just break it up because the effect of it in America is bad.
00:30:38.560Every day, even on, like, Christmas, you know, on major holidays, they're always promoting in their Google Doodle some radical left-wing thing.
00:30:55.460Now, speaking of shadowy, powerful cabals, one in five voters and one in three Republicans thinks that the FBI is behind the Trump assassination attempt.
00:32:28.540I'm reading what voters are thinking, and I'm pointing out, I'm defending the voters who think that.
00:32:35.480Because it's weird, sure, that the Secret Service and the FBI both lied about it.
00:32:40.860It's weird that it was allowed to happen in the first place.
00:32:43.680And furthermore, the very fact that voters think this presents a major, major problem for the FBI and for the government.
00:32:54.800We were touching on this a little bit last night backstage live at the Ryman.
00:32:59.000The government is the government because it claims authority.
00:33:05.660That's what makes the government the government.
00:33:07.360It's not because the founding fathers were the most perfect men who ever walked the earth, and they waved their magic wands and said, now this government is legitimate.
00:33:18.320It's not because of some piece of parchment called the Declaration of Independence.
00:33:22.340It's not even because of some piece of parchment called the Constitution.
00:33:26.540The government is the government because you obey the government.
00:33:28.860Even if you hate the government, even if you don't think Joe Biden's alive anymore, you will follow the laws we assent to the authority of the state.
00:33:48.700But the other reason we do it is because the government makes a plausible claim to represent justice.
00:33:53.620This is why Christians say, this is why we read in Scripture, that the government is actually good in that God institutes the government for our own good.
00:34:05.800We need to have the enforcement of laws.
00:34:08.320We need to have some kind of peace and stability in order to achieve our natural ends, feeding our families, having families, and having kids, and to achieve our natural ends.
00:34:18.240It's difficult to pray and live out a religious life in the midst of carnage and civil war and anarchy.
00:34:27.760And it means that the ruler in the Christian understanding, and really in the classical understanding of the state, the ruler has limits on his power.
00:34:38.400Because he is, in paganism, he's bound to the gods.
00:34:42.840Or in Christendom, he's bound to the true God.
00:35:03.900We get it from the moral order that we can perceive, because the natural law is inscribed on every human heart, and through our faculties of reason.
00:35:13.140You know, the ruler is a representative of justice.
00:35:18.340The problem is, when the people lose faith in the justice department, this is the worst part of the government for people to lose faith in, then the authority of the government goes away.
00:36:01.740The king rules for the common good, and he rules for justice.
00:36:07.780The tyrant rules for his own private interest, and he rules based on his arbitrary will.
00:36:12.300The increasingly arbitrary will that the left seems to be exercising day by day, changing their minds on all manner of political issues, lying, saying one thing and doing another, bringing the media along, and attacking and potentially even establishing the conditions to kill their political opponents.
00:36:36.880It's not just about we need to drain the swamp or something.
00:36:39.160When this number of people think that the FBI could possibly have tried to kill Donald Trump, you're dealing with an existential crisis of the legitimacy of the regime.
00:38:01.340That's why she's changing all her positions.
00:38:02.820Now, speaking of people trying to kill Trump, this is a story from last week, but I want to get to it.
00:38:09.340A Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran has been arrested and charged for trying to kill out Trump, to carry out multiple assassinations, one of them being killing Trump.
00:38:23.180The case was just revealed by the Justice Department.
00:38:27.460There have been a number of attempted assassinations of Trump.
00:38:34.320A lot of powerful people are trying to kill Trump.
00:38:40.760I think in part the story is coming out now because the liberal establishment wants to prepare Americans for a war with Iran as Iran is threatening Israel and the United States is not going to let Israel fight a war on its own.
00:38:51.900So it's just kind of baked into U.S. policy that we will defend a number of nations.
00:39:00.020But look, we're out there spending a ton of money and military equipment defending Ukraine.
00:39:04.120And we're going to defend Israel, which we have a longer relationship with and a stronger relationship with.
00:39:08.760So in part, I think the reason the story is being leaked right now is just to say, hey, look, hey, remember, Iran's really bad.