The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 Yesterday, I visited the White House to conduct back-to-back interviews with four members of

00:00:04.760 President Trump's cabinet, four of the most powerful people on earth. I sat down with

00:00:10.000 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy, Education Secretary Linda McMahon,

00:00:15.700 and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. We discussed everything from interest rates and tariffs

00:00:22.000 to whether or not vaccines cause autism. Some of their answers are going to make

00:00:27.880 Democrat heads explode. Some of their answers are going to make some squish Republican heads

00:00:34.060 explode. So without further ado, let's get into them. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:57.880 Welcome back to the show. President Trump has finally addressed the hootie bombing boys chat.

00:01:02.200 You know, the one with Mike Waltz and JD and Pete Hegseth and all those guys. So we'll get to that

00:01:06.480 in one moment. First, though, go to tryarmra.com slash Knowles. There's a lot of talk these days

00:01:12.160 about getting back to basics, whether it's politics, culture, even health. Well, you want to get back

00:01:16.980 to the most basic things ever that you've ever experienced in your whole life. You got to check

00:01:20.760 out Armra colostrum. Colostrum is not some newfangled health fat. It's the first food that

00:01:26.160 all mammals receive in life. Nature's original superfood contains over 400 bioactive nutrients

00:01:31.540 that your body needs to thrive. Armra found a way to harness this incredible substance in its purest,

00:01:37.560 most potent form. You know, Mr. Davies, my producer, he's a little bit more into working out and health

00:01:43.560 and stuff than I am, not telling any tales out of school. He swears by the colostrum, okay? What makes

00:01:50.440 Armra colostrum different is their proprietary cold chain biopotent pasteurization technology.

00:01:56.720 Unlike other supplements that lose their potency through processing, Armra preserves all those

00:02:01.380 crucial nutrients in their most bioavailable form. He's even convincing me that maybe I need to start

00:02:07.020 working out, you know, get a little bit healthy. We've worked at a special offer right now for our

00:02:11.620 listeners. Right now, you get 15% off your order when you go to tryarmra.com slash Knowles,

00:02:16.920 K-N-A-W-L-E-S, or enter code Knowles. That is T-R-Y-A-R-M-R-A dot com slash Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S.

00:02:27.400 First off, I really want to thank the White House for the invitation yesterday. I flew down. There were

00:02:32.840 a handful of us in a room. The audio is a little rough because there were a few of us. Jack Posobiec

00:02:39.400 was there. A number of my friends were there. Sarah Gonzalez was right next to me. So it was,

00:02:45.580 there were a lot of interviews going on. I was thrilled that I was able to interview four really

00:02:51.200 the top people in President Trump's cabinet. When Trump came in, he said, and his communications

00:02:56.980 team said this was going to be a transparent White House. They were going to transform their

00:03:00.620 approach to media. I called at the time. I said, forget about New York Times and Washington Post.

00:03:04.720 You guys ought to focus on the new media. They didn't need any cajoling. They understood

00:03:09.380 that, I think, implicitly. They understood how important podcasts and streaming were to

00:03:13.460 the Trump victory. And so they're doing it. Yet another promise made, promise kept.

00:03:17.520 They invite the first ever Podcasters Row to the White House. And anyway, I was very honored

00:03:23.160 to be part of it and so thrilled that I could sit down with these people in particular.

00:03:27.900 So right before I walk in, the Health and Human Services Department announced that it had

00:03:34.160 fired 20,000 bureaucrats. This is as I'm coming into the room to set up the camera and the

00:03:41.160 microphones. Then I sit down with RFK Jr. We don't have time to get into the whole interview.

00:03:47.960 You can see the whole interview over on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel and my X account.

00:03:52.100 And I think it's up on Daily Wire. But we touched on a number of issues up to and including the most

00:03:58.000 controversial part of RFK's public career. That is vaccines. And he raised a lot of eyebrows with

00:04:04.380 this answer. For the people who are asking questions about whether or not they'll vaccinate

00:04:09.660 their kids or whether they should vaccinate their kids, will anything change about vaccine policy?

00:04:15.480 Yeah, everything's going to change because we're going to have good information. And, you know,

00:04:21.320 none of the vaccines that are given, you know, people said to me during the hearing, oh, well,

00:04:29.140 this link between autism and vaccines has been disproven. None of the vaccines that are given

00:04:36.520 during the first six months of life have ever been tested for the only one was the DTP vaccine. And

00:04:42.880 that one study that was done, according to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of

00:04:48.180 Science that found that there was a link. They threw out that study because it was based upon

00:04:53.940 CDC surveillance system, VAERS, and they said that system is no good. I think it begs the question is

00:05:00.260 why doesn't CDC have a functional surveillance system? Great point by Secretary Kennedy here.

00:05:06.900 So that the headlines that are I think they're making like international news right now is as I asked

00:05:11.560 the question, OK, regardless of your views on vaccines, all the nonsense from the Senate confirmation

00:05:15.860 hearing, is anything going to change about vaccines? Rubber meets the road now that you're the

00:05:20.820 secretary. And he said everything's going to change. And that's going to be the headline. And that's what's

00:05:24.940 going to make the liberal heads explode. But listen to what he follows it up with. He says everything's

00:05:29.120 going to change because we're going to have good information. So what is his proposal here? Is Kennedy's

00:05:35.240 proposal ban all vaccines? I didn't hear him say that. Is Kennedy's proposal to mandate all vaccines

00:05:41.660 as basically the policy in America now. So I certainly didn't hear him say that. He just said

00:05:47.520 we're going to have good information. Because right now we don't have good information. And what the

00:05:53.200 libs will say is, well, what are you talking about? We have the vaccine injury reporting system,

00:05:58.140 VAERS. And you say, oh, we do? OK, well, let's incorporate that into our studies. And then out of

00:06:03.940 the other side of the map, the liberals will say, well, that system is totally unreliable

00:06:07.000 because it's self-reported. Let's say, OK. So Kennedy's point is, how is it we're the most advanced,

00:06:14.580 richest, most powerful country in the world? And on this controversial issue that pertains to public

00:06:19.440 health, an issue that touches on probably literally every baby born in America, we don't have reliable

00:06:28.280 information. Shouldn't we do that? So all Kennedy's calling for here is more information,

00:06:36.000 information, following the science, more rigorous studies, better systems. And the libs are going

00:06:40.300 to lose their minds over that. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about their

00:06:43.600 position. So there's a lot more that we got to in the Kennedy interview. Just go check out the

00:06:47.280 full interview. It was quite interesting. I have to move on to Scott Besson now. I sit down with the

00:06:50.920 Treasury Secretary, one of the most important people on earth. And I brought up the tariffs, which is

00:06:55.720 the most interesting aspect of President Trump's economic policy. It's certainly the most

00:07:00.780 controversial. And I wanted the Secretary to clear something up for me, which is that I'm not one of

00:07:07.340 these free traders. You know, I just inject Milton Friedman into my veins. I don't have any questions

00:07:13.420 about global free trade. I am totally open to tariffs. I recognize that tariffs serve a great

00:07:18.560 purpose. I recognize that the Republican Party was in many ways founded on tariffs. Abraham Lincoln said,

00:07:24.700 give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest country on earth. So I'm all about it, baby. When President

00:07:29.080 Trump started to refocus GOP economic policy, a ton of establishment Republicans pulled their hair

00:07:35.140 out and wailed and gnashed their teeth. I was not one of them. For Trump's first term, as he runs the

00:07:41.400 second time, and his third term, he, I think, makes good arguments for tariffs. But some of those

00:07:47.700 arguments contradict each other. Not even the arguments Trump is making, but the members of his

00:07:53.140 administration. So on the one hand, we're told that the purpose of tariffs is to make sure that

00:07:59.860 we don't have unfair trade practices being pushed by other countries. So, you know, if India has a 200%

00:08:04.980 auto tariff and we're not tariffing the products coming in from India, that's unfair. So we use them

00:08:10.320 as leverage to reduce barriers to trade. And so then we're going to reduce our tariffs and then we'll get

00:08:15.160 more trade. That's one argument for tariffs. That's the tactical leverage negotiating argument.

00:08:19.440 Another argument for tariffs is that we've emptied out America's industrial base and we need tariffs

00:08:24.840 in order to protect certain industries so that companies invest in America, regrow American

00:08:30.200 manufacturing jobs, defend American national security. So in a period of global conflict or

00:08:34.400 even a pandemic like in 2020, our supply chains don't get cut off and we're not caught up the creek

00:08:39.420 without a paddle. That's a different argument for tariffs. The third argument for tariffs is that

00:08:44.600 it's a great way to raise revenue. So we don't need to only raise our revenue by taxing our citizens.

00:08:49.200 We can get the revenue from the other countries, but by importing goods, charging a tariff on it,

00:08:54.180 making those countries pay to fund our government. Three different arguments for tariffs. And all of

00:09:01.340 them are worthwhile goals. The issue is that they're in conflict with each other. So for instance,

00:09:06.980 if you are only threatening the tariffs in order to reduce trade barriers so that you can reduce your

00:09:12.100 tariffs eventually, then you're probably not going to get the new jobs and you're certainly not going to

00:09:16.160 get the revenue. Just necessarily, by definition, you wouldn't get the revenue because the whole point

00:09:20.060 is to reduce the trade barriers. If, on the other hand, you're focused just on reshoring American

00:09:25.960 manufacturing and growing jobs in America, okay, well, that can be great. That's a worthwhile go.

00:09:30.140 But then you're definitely not going to get the revenue because the revenue is coming in by

00:09:34.000 importing more goods. So my question to the secretary was, given these competing goals,

00:09:40.460 how do you rank their order of importance? What are you really after with the tariffs? And I thought

00:09:47.800 the secretary gave a really interesting answer. There are these competing desires that the tariffs

00:09:54.900 could serve. As treasury secretary, how are you ranking those priorities?

00:10:01.300 Well, I don't do the ranking. President Trump does the ranking. And look, President Trump, if we go back,

00:10:07.020 Alexander Hamilton was the original tariff man. Why did he do it? He did it to raise revenues for the

00:10:13.300 new country. And he did it to protect U.S. industry. President Trump has added a third leg for

00:10:19.420 negotiations, whether it's closing the border, the immigration, the fentanyl crisis, or as a way to

00:10:28.560 prevent people from trading with Venezuela. So I think it'll become clearer after April 2nd.

00:10:36.840 I love this answer because Scott Besant is a very intelligent man. He's a very successful investor.

00:10:44.620 He was an economics professor. He's the real deal. And how did he answer my question?

00:10:51.640 By restating the question. I said, here are these three competing goals. What are you after? How do

00:10:58.060 you rank them? And he first says, well, I don't rank them. I'm not the president. I'm the treasury

00:11:02.640 secretary. I work for the president. The president ranks them. And then he goes on to restate my

00:11:08.020 question. He says, here's one reason people use tariffs. Here's another reason. Here's another

00:11:11.280 reason. Here's why we used it historically. Here's why they've been good for America. But he doesn't

00:11:15.220 rank them. And then you can see that little focus he puts on at the end. And President Trump in

00:11:22.060 particular is focusing on them for negotiation. I think this is a deeper answer even than it seems

00:11:28.020 on the surface, not just for negotiation for leverage with Japan or Europe or whatever.

00:11:33.260 Negotiation just broadly. Negotiation meaning

00:11:38.220 he will not even reveal what his motive for the tariff is.

00:11:46.340 And so when Scott Besson here says, I think we'll just wait until April 2nd. President Trump has

00:11:50.880 said he'll announce reciprocal tariffs on April 2nd. I think that Besson is perfectly embodying,

00:11:58.060 not just not articulating, but embodying the Trump strategy, which is I'm going to be unpredictable.

00:12:04.120 In other words, in answer to my question, how do you rank the priorities of these tariffs?

00:12:07.360 He says, yeah, wouldn't you like to know? Wouldn't you like to know, Michael? And

00:12:12.120 wouldn't you like to know China? And wouldn't you like to know Russia? And wouldn't you like to know

00:12:17.320 Europe? Because if the administration states the goal of the tariffs, that might help quell the

00:12:24.800 markets a little bit, but it will also remove the negotiating leverage. So it was one of the most

00:12:30.040 beautifully articulated non-answers I've ever heard. There's so much more to say. First,

00:12:34.980 though, text Knolls to 64,000, delete me, makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal

00:12:42.440 data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone

00:12:47.460 vulnerable. I was shocked when I discovered how much personal information of mine is floating around

00:12:53.260 online. Obviously, I'm a public person, so I knew there was a lot of stuff on there, but things where

00:12:57.280 I thought, how on earth did the internet figure that out? And since I have been doxxed and attacked

00:13:04.620 and people try to blow me up sometimes, it's very important to get some of my private information

00:13:08.840 off the internet. That's why I strongly, strongly recommend delete me. Not even just me. I'm a

00:13:14.620 relatively public person. Even my producers. I was just chatting with one of my producers

00:13:19.660 mere moments ago. She was telling me how she has signed up for delete me. I think everyone

00:13:25.280 should do this. So your privacy is a really, really important thing. So right now, you can

00:13:30.700 get 20% off. Keep your private life private. Sign up for delete me. Get 20% off by texting

00:13:38.060 Knolls, K-N-W-L-E-S, to 64,000. The only way to get 20% off is to text Knolls, K-N-W-L-E-S,

00:13:44.460 to 64,000. Knolls to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply.

00:13:48.840 So I then sat down with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Lee Zeldin is in the cabinet meetings.

00:13:55.760 He enjoys the rank of a cabinet official, but the EPA is not an official cabinet department.

00:14:02.980 So that's why he's not Secretary Zeldin. That's why he's the EPA Administrator.

00:14:06.520 But it's still a very, very important role in the government. And it's a very, very bloated

00:14:11.580 department. And it's a department that has a huge economic and political drag on the country.

00:14:16.060 So Lee Zeldin hits off the top, telling us what he's doing. But to me, what was even more eye-opening

00:14:24.880 was him exposing the corruption in the EPA before he got there.

00:14:31.460 So we just announced a couple of weeks back what is the largest deregulatory action in the history

00:14:36.660 of this country. Trillions of dollars of deregulation. The cost of living is going to go

00:14:42.300 down. Jobs are going to go up. We are going to be able to accomplish so much of President

00:14:46.800 Trump's agenda through our work at EPA. Instead of giving $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance,

00:14:54.020 which says the Climate Justice runs through a free Palestine, how about instead...

00:14:57.580 That's a real example, by the way, that you're giving.

00:15:00.000 And that grant was canceled. I canceled that one, too. $50 million EPA gave to Climate Justice

00:15:05.240 Alliance. And that's what they say Climate Justice runs through. It wasn't even a domestic

00:15:10.500 slogan that caused outrage.

00:15:14.620 $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance, which is focused not on the sum monster or on the polar

00:15:21.140 bears, on the ice caps, but on Palestine or whatever. That seems like an abuse, doesn't

00:15:27.960 it? It seems like the sort of thing that Elon uncovered with USAID, which is that USAID was

00:15:32.920 spending your taxpayer money ostensibly for foreign aid to poor countries around the world so that

00:15:38.700 kids wouldn't starve. But actually what they were doing was they were giving money to groups like

00:15:43.600 the Tide Center, a left-wing organization that was then laundering that money and sending that

00:15:48.880 money back to BLM so that BLM could go in and loot your local stores and burn down your neighborhood

00:15:54.260 and pressure politicians to be more left-wing. And then the politicians would take more of your

00:15:58.860 money to give to USAID, and it would be a vicious cycle, a little laundry cycle.

00:16:03.680 Well, the same thing was happening at EPA. Lee Zeldin gives other examples that are just

00:16:08.080 absolutely mind-boggling. He told me when he showed up for work the first day, something

00:16:12.300 like 5% of EPA employees were actually coming into work, showing up to the office five days

00:16:17.760 a week. I think the number, I forget the exact number, you get 4%, 5%, maybe a little bit

00:16:22.580 higher. This is the year of our Lord, 2025. Even if COVID were an excuse, I don't think it's a very

00:16:30.500 good excuse. How are you making that argument? So anyway, his stories about the corruption in the

00:16:36.640 EPA. I already had a pretty low view of the EPA. I mean, the EPA has been a villain for conservatives

00:16:40.860 for a long time. It's actually the villain in Ghostbusters. And this raised my eyebrows even.

00:16:46.260 Okay, before we move on past these interviews, one last one sat down with Linda McMahon, not only the

00:16:51.020 education secretary, but the very last education secretary that we will ever have if President

00:16:56.980 Trump's policy goes through. And I asked her a basic question, which is, you're hearing a ton of

00:17:05.240 misinformation about what closing the education department will mean for America and how poor

00:17:11.860 kids will suffer and no one will be smart and kids will go hungry and blah, blah, blah. And I said,

00:17:16.480 hold on, I just want to know, can you just tell me, what does the education department even do?

00:17:22.360 Let me think of office space. When the consultants come in, they ask all the employees,

00:17:25.940 what exactly is it that you do here? What exactly is it that the education department does?

00:17:34.620 Well, first of all, let me tell you what the education department does not do.

00:17:38.540 We do not educate a single student. I mean, Michael, when you think about this for a second,

00:17:44.100 from the time the Department of Education was set up in 1980 until now, we've spent over $1.3 trillion,

00:17:50.800 no, over $3 trillion, over $3 trillion. Scores have consistently gone down. We are not doing

00:17:59.240 something right.

00:18:01.560 Clearly, I then asked Secretary McMahon, I said, how is it seeing how the education department has

00:18:09.360 failed on every metric, every metric that they set for themselves and that their supporters set for

00:18:14.960 them? If it's failed, how could anyone possibly still support the education department? So if you

00:18:19.820 want to check out her answer to that, if you want to hear Lee Zeldin's exposure of the corruption in

00:18:26.460 the Biden EPA, if you want to hear more from the Treasury Secretary, whose words can move global

00:18:32.320 markets, whose actions can move global markets as we await the big tariff announcement. And of course,

00:18:36.200 if you want to hear more from Secretary Bobby Kennedy on a whole range of issues, including firing tens

00:18:44.580 of thousands of bureaucrats and ending the chronic disease epidemic and vaccines and all the rest of

00:18:49.500 it, go check it out on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel, because we don't have time for it in this

00:18:54.400 show, because we got to move on to really important things like Ghibli. You know Ghibli? Ghibli is an

00:19:00.720 Italian word actually, but it's used for Japanese animation. And Ghibli has taken over all of social

00:19:07.380 media because, well, actually we'll get to why Ghibli is taking over all of social media, why people are

00:19:13.200 memeing this one particular form of Japanese animation all over the internet. But I want to

00:19:20.600 zoom in because we're talking about the White House on a particular instance of this. The White House

00:19:25.240 yesterday posted a Ghibli meme. So this was after the White House posts this picture of a woman, an

00:19:36.680 actual just photograph of a woman. Virginia Bazora Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon,

00:19:42.900 convicted of fentanyl trafficking, was arrested by IceGov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the

00:19:48.160 U.S. She wept when taken into custody. The White House then posts a Ghibli, a really cute little

00:19:55.120 Japanese animation of this woman crying in handcuffs while a tough looking, kind of Tom Holman looking

00:20:01.320 guy, DHS agent in his uniform is arresting her in front of an American flag. And it was so funny because

00:20:09.200 the woman, she's crying in this really cartoonish way, you know, tears just spouting out of her eyes. And

00:20:14.340 it's so funny. And it's so funny that the White House is posting this meme, shows you, you know, I was

00:20:21.160 hanging around the White House grounds for a fair bit yesterday. And the median age there is like 29

00:20:26.980 or something, you know, I mean, this is it's a young administration that they're they're intellectually

00:20:32.320 very plugged in. They have their finger on the pulse of the culture. They're very online as as most of us

00:20:37.980 are very online these days, you know, very online used to mean you're totally fringe and no one pays

00:20:42.200 attention to you. But now your grandmother is very online, possibly, you know, I mean, now that's where the

00:20:48.900 popular culture happens. That's where memes happen. That is ideas replicating themselves and

00:20:53.020 transforming. And so the White House posts this and just want to get off the bat because some squishes

00:21:00.040 took big issue with that meme. There is nothing wrong with celebrating this woman's removal from

00:21:05.960 the country. She's an illegal alien. She was already convicted of other crimes, including fentanyl

00:21:12.200 trafficking, poisoning Americans. One of the biggest mass poisonings ever and maybe the single biggest

00:21:19.240 mass poisoning ever in recorded history. Certainly up there, certainly in the top five. This woman then

00:21:27.400 comes back into the country. She's deported again. There's nothing wrong with celebrating that. But

00:21:30.520 some people said that the meme is bad because it makes her look kind of sympathetic. She's not a

00:21:36.120 sympathetic figure, but the meme, crying, all that kind of makes her look sympathetic. And I think

00:21:40.800 there are three levels here. One, the kind of tired view that the libs are spouting is that the meme is

00:21:48.520 bad because this drug dealing illegal alien convict already deportee deserves to stay in America.

00:21:56.100 Okay, that's the tired view. Then there's the wired view, which is what you're hearing from the more

00:22:01.580 moderate Republicans. They say, this meme is bad because this woman doesn't deserve to stay in

00:22:07.340 America, but it makes her seem sympathetic. Okay, I get it. Then I think there's the inspired view.

00:22:12.900 There's one level up, which is the meme is good because it creates controversy, because it sort of

00:22:21.780 makes the woman seem sympathetic maybe, but then you look into it. And because it forces a conversation

00:22:27.920 about who this woman is in particular and who really all the deportees are at this point.

00:22:36.260 That's the 5D chess level of viewing the meme. And memes operate, there's a reason that memes just

00:22:41.760 spread as if of their own volition. There is a power to memes, even greater maybe than the power of an

00:22:49.500 idea because memes are evocative and they have images and they in some ways bypass the conscious

00:22:54.620 reason. And so the meme goes viral. Everyone's talking about it. Now everyone's talking about

00:23:00.340 this random woman. No one would have heard about Virginia Vazora Gonzalez if not for that meme.

00:23:05.400 Even if the White House posted the picture, no one would really have talked about her.

00:23:08.240 It's because of the meme. And then in as much as it becomes a debate, even the liberals

00:23:12.320 then have to admit, yeah, she dealt fentanyl. Yeah, she was already deported. Yeah. So once again,

00:23:18.400 it puts the liberals in a position of defending the indefensible. It's like when Trump signs an

00:23:23.640 executive order about paper straws, it seems kind of silly. It seems kind of a waste of time. It's

00:23:29.520 trivial, right? Except no. Now you've put liberals in a position where they're defending paper straws,

00:23:33.980 which no one likes. Zero people like that. Same thing goes for, well, certainly for the mass

00:23:40.540 deportations, transing the kids. Oh no, don't talk about transing the kids. It's a divisive social issue.

00:23:47.360 Maybe. I don't think so. I think it's an 80-20 issue, at least. Maybe higher. So great,

00:23:52.760 you take an 80-20 issue. You force the liberals into a position of defending the indefensible.

00:23:57.220 Fine by me. There's so much more to say first, though. Go to fastgrowingtrees.com.

00:24:03.520 Code Knowles. Did you know Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the U.S.

00:24:07.840 with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers? They have all the plants

00:24:12.400 your yard needs. Fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more. I was

00:24:17.260 just talking to Mr. Davies. Mr. Davies especially loves Fast Growing Trees because he is building a

00:24:22.720 house, and he says he needs trees for a privacy fence. What are you hiding? What are you hiding,

00:24:28.800 Mr. Davies? He's hiding his beautiful house, I guess. Fast Growing Trees has got you covered.

00:24:34.280 Find the perfect fit for your climate and space, plus Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your

00:24:39.400 dream yard. Order online. Get your plants delivered directly to your door in just a few days without

00:24:44.360 ever leaving home. Their Alive and Thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy.

00:24:48.880 Get support from trained plant experts on call to help you plan your landscape, choose the right

00:24:53.460 plants, and most importantly, learn how to care for them so they don't wither and die. Whether you're

00:24:58.180 seeking privacy, shade, or natural beauty for your yard, Fast Growing Trees has you covered. No green

00:25:04.540 thumb required. Right now, our listeners will get 15% off their first purchase when using code

00:25:10.580 Knolls at checkout. An additional 15% off. FastGrowingTrees.com. Use code Knolls, K-N-W-L-E-S.

00:25:16.880 FastGrowingTrees.com. Code Knolls. Now is the perfect time to plant. Use Knolls to save today. Offer is

00:25:21.460 valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. My favorite comment yesterday is from

00:25:28.060 Eleg2134, who says, thank you, Michael, for calling out parents who post public content of their

00:25:33.400 children. You're welcome. I really don't like it when parents post public content of their little

00:25:38.500 kids. Don't do it. Chase the likes some other way. Post pictures of your lasagna or something.

00:25:44.560 Okay, what is Ghibli? As I said, Ghibli is the style of Japanese animation, and the only reason

00:25:48.700 we're talking about it now is because it's everywhere. People are taking every photo,

00:25:51.960 personal photos, but especially political and historic photos, and they're Ghiblifying them.

00:25:56.520 Because you can just do it in AI. So the immediate cause of this trend is that the new ChatGBT came out,

00:26:03.480 and it's really good at the push of a button at turning any image into the style of Japanese

00:26:08.400 animation, which is particularly funny because though I'm not a fan of, well, really any animation

00:26:14.000 because I'm a grown man. But I know some people are huge fans of Japanese anime, and apparently

00:26:18.820 this style of anime is meticulously hand-drawn. So it's kind of ironic that a computer can now just

00:26:23.940 spit it out in three seconds. But that's the technological reason why this has taken off.

00:26:28.640 But that doesn't explain everything. We have plenty of technologies available to us that we don't use

00:26:32.260 all the time, or that we don't use in any particular way. In this case, what I've noticed about the

00:26:38.060 Ghibli trend is people are using it to take images of the worst things they can think of—grotesque

00:26:46.380 images, violent images, dangerous images, nasty—and Ghiblifying them. Because the Ghibli style paints

00:26:56.500 pictures in a really serene way. Often evokes nature. It's kind of soft, kind of cute. So the one that I

00:27:04.080 saw last night, I was just Googling this or searching it on X, and it's a picture of Hitler

00:27:08.540 with the Grand Mufti. But it's in this really nice, sweet, serene style. And as we've talked about on

00:27:16.340 this show, Hitler, for the secular liberal culture, Hitler just takes the place of the devil. They mock

00:27:24.360 the notion of the devil, but we need some idea of what evil is personified. So Hitler takes that

00:27:29.160 place. Hitler, being a rather evil fellow himself, nevertheless takes on this kind of absolute

00:27:35.520 wickedness because of that mythos. Also because secular liberalism inverts reality such that in

00:27:42.460 our culture traditionally, and in reality as it is, there's the incarnation of absolute good in the

00:27:48.320 person of Christ. And then evil is not the sort of thing that has a separate existence. We don't live

00:27:54.980 in a Manichean dualistic world. Evil is merely the privation of good, which is an observation of

00:28:02.820 the Neoplatonist Plotinus, and then it comes to us by way of St. Augustine and the Christian tradition.

00:28:07.760 And so there's a really keen insight. There's absolute good, and then there's evil, which is the

00:28:11.580 privation of good. Modernity flips that and says there's neither God nor the devil now, and there's

00:28:16.600 certainly no incarnation of good, but there is the incarnation of evil, and that's the historical

00:28:20.800 person of Adolf Hitler. Anyway, that's a windy and pedantic way of explaining just one Ghibli meme,

00:28:26.400 but there are many others. There's this video that it was like a mashup here. Do we have the video?

00:28:31.880 Yeah. So it's like Osama bin Laden, the Twin Towers, Jeffrey Epstein, even the porn lady who slept with

00:28:40.660 a thousand guys in a day, the meme of a girl with the house burning down, the picture out of the

00:28:48.900 Vietnam War, of the guy, you know, about to have his head blown off, being executed, and all right,

00:28:54.380 these are good. It's too fast for me to keep up with all of them. Patrick Bateman, you know,

00:28:57.700 as he's about to chop up Paul. You get the point. Culturally, technologically, I understand why the

00:29:06.400 Ghibli thing is happening now, because ChatGPT was updated. But why this style of animation? And why

00:29:12.140 these images? Why is it disproportionately these evil, horrific images? There's the incongruity

00:29:20.500 of this really serene, cute kind of animation style with really evil, wicked things. That is

00:29:26.960 funny in itself. But that raises the question then also, why the Ghibli style? ChatGPT can make all

00:29:33.280 sorts of animation styles. Why wasn't it Peanuts? Why wasn't it The Simpsons? Why wasn't it

00:29:37.100 South Park? Why did Ghibli take off? I think the reason is because our politics is particularly

00:29:45.300 nasty and violent and dangerous at the moment. I think that's what makes it so funny.

00:29:51.860 There are periods of our history, of any nation's history, when politics is kind of boring and normal.

00:29:59.380 When, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans, even if they secretly hate each other, they'll make

00:30:03.180 a big show in public of, well, you know, we get along and, you know, Tip O'Neill and I fight during

00:30:08.180 the day, but then we have a drink at six o'clock. We have great respect for each other. My opponent's

00:30:12.660 a good family, man. We both love our country. We want to serve our country. We just have different

00:30:16.880 ways of doing it by gully. For much of my life, that's how politics worked. We're not in that time

00:30:22.320 anymore. Because of the left, I think the left actually is the one who really started this

00:30:27.240 by seriously questioning presidential elections and calling their opponents Hitler all the time

00:30:32.120 and by, well, just having a greater deal of animus toward the right than the right has for the left,

00:30:39.280 which is borne out in social science. The right has responded and the right responded in the person

00:30:43.280 of Donald Trump, who's not always so nice to the left anymore and who makes fun of people's faces

00:30:47.920 and who just pummels them into the ground with his rhetoric. And because President Trump won and

00:30:53.780 the left couldn't accept that and they burned cars in Washington, D.C. and they tried to remove

00:30:58.660 him. They tried to stop him from winning in the first place by corrupting the DOJ and the FBI.

00:31:04.000 They tried to remove him from office with bogus investigations and impeachments. They justified

00:31:09.040 his murder and nearly got away with it twice. One time, really close, within a hair's breadth.

00:31:14.380 Tried to remove him from the ballot. You know, all of the, I mean, really crazy stuff because

00:31:17.820 there was a shift in politics. That is why, that is the reason that Ghibli has taken off in this way

00:31:24.740 on social media. From the humor in the culture, by way of contrast, you can see what our political

00:31:37.660 order is like. The thing that makes it funny is that Ghibli is really nice and serene and takes evil

00:31:43.160 stuff and makes it look beautiful. That's, that's what people are seeing in the culture.

00:31:48.080 They're seeing a lot of evil, violent stuff. And it's, it's not so nice out here. It's not so nice

00:31:53.140 when you're not in the Japanese animation. Okay. Speaking of dangerous things, violent things,

00:31:59.040 nasty things, big story, stop the presses, man bites dog. Andrew Tate has been accused of choking a

00:32:08.940 woman two weeks after he returned to the United States. Andrew Tate, you know, we've talked about

00:32:14.940 him a few times on this show. He's this social media influencer, but he made his bones prostituting

00:32:22.420 women on the internet for pornography. And he's, he faces these charges in Romania of running a criminal

00:32:28.220 enterprise and rape and all sorts of bad stuff. So the headline now is that one of his girlfriends

00:32:35.140 is accusing him of choking her, hitting her, all the rest. And you can see the text messages and

00:32:40.060 stuff like, you know, he's telling her, I really want to hit you. And I really like hitting you and

00:32:44.820 you, I own you and you're my slave and all this kind of weird stuff. I don't know if the, if that's

00:32:50.460 true. I don't know if the allegations are true. However, I guess I'm inclined to think they're true

00:32:54.900 because this man has bragged about doing these things before. That's kind of part of his

00:33:00.980 brand, I guess. And has even, I think has even been filmed, you know, smacking women and all sorts

00:33:07.640 of stuff like that. Now his defense of that, from what I've seen, again, I haven't delved deeply into

00:33:12.260 Andrew Tate's oeuvre, but his defense of that is when a video came out of him hitting a woman and

00:33:18.360 threatening a woman and saying all the things that have come out in these text messages, he says,

00:33:22.700 oh, we were just playing around. That's our, that's our kink basically. And I, I kind of believe

00:33:27.760 him on this. He clearly, it's one thing for a man to hit a woman. That's horrific enough,

00:33:34.660 but for a man to text about how excited he is to hit a woman and, you know, wait for the response

00:33:40.920 back, that's clearly a deeper kind of pathology. So that's why I'm speaking about it because I don't

00:33:46.880 think anyone, including Andrew Tate would dispute the, the basic allegations of this case or this

00:33:53.720 allegation or this, this claim that's just come out recently within the last couple of weeks.

00:33:59.240 The question is, is it, is it good or bad? You know, was it all in good fun or was this abusive?

00:34:08.080 And I guess my question is, what's the difference? I've made this point before when, when people are

00:34:14.120 really ironic all the time, they're really ironic. Millennials are guilty of an extreme degree of

00:34:19.640 irony. And I think, well, if you're ironic all the time, then I think you're just kind of earnest.

00:34:26.840 If you do something ironically all the time, then that's just what you're doing. And that's just who

00:34:30.580 you are. And, and the story about Tate, it, it gets to a much deeper political and spiritual problem,

00:34:39.060 which is he appears to be a slave to his own passions. If this stuff is true, if the things he's

00:34:45.940 said in public are true, that he really gets off on hitting women and feeling that he owns them and

00:34:51.280 branding them, putting his name and tattoos on their bodies, if all these things are true,

00:34:55.640 they obviously appear to be true, then he's got a problem. He's a slave to his own disordered appetites

00:35:01.360 and passions, which means he's a slave. Being a slave is not just being chained up to a cabin in

00:35:08.560 the antebellum South. In fact, the deeper and more insidious form of slavery, ultimately the only form

00:35:14.840 of slavery that can ever really take control of you is this personal slavery where you, your reason

00:35:21.680 and your will are slaves to your appetite and your instinct. And that's what seems to have happened

00:35:27.120 here. It's a buddy of mine who's a recovered alcoholic tells me about a line from AA, which is a,

00:35:33.560 it's a warning. It says, wherever you go, there you are. You think you can run away from your

00:35:38.760 problems. You think you fly to another country or leave your family or whatever you're going to do.

00:35:43.880 You think that way I'm going to put my problems behind me, but wherever you go, there you are.

00:35:48.120 So if you have, now I'm moving beyond Tate, I guess he's an example of this. If you have some

00:35:55.240 addiction, if you have some perversion that has been solidified over time, you know, you're addicted

00:36:03.580 to pornography or so you get, you go into more extreme pornography or you get addicted to drugs

00:36:08.740 and you go into more extreme kinds of drugs, or you get addicted to any bad habit, gluttony, pride,

00:36:13.480 wrath, any of it, that's just going to be with you. Okay. And there's no, there's no way to free

00:36:21.340 yourself from that ultimately because you, you require God's grace. You'll, you'll never actually

00:36:26.020 free yourself from that, but you, but having received God's grace, you can cooperate with

00:36:30.080 God's grace. And this is why the man who sins is a slave to sin. This is what Christ means in the

00:36:37.420 gospel when he says, the man who sins is a slave to sin. And sin is a very, very heavy yoke that will

00:36:46.220 break you down to the ground. And the alternative to that is to accept God's grace and to cooperate

00:36:52.140 with God's grace and to put our Lord's yoke upon you, which is a yoke. It's a yoke meaning don't do

00:36:59.600 that weird sex thing that, that Andrew Tate likes or whatever. Don't hit people. Don't give into wrath.

00:37:05.500 Don't give into pride. Don't, don't eat the fifth cupcake even, you know, don't do vice and sin

00:37:12.140 because there will be a real yoke upon you, but the yoke is easy and the burden is light. It's a

00:37:18.300 much better yoke than the alternative. That's where true freedom is anyway. And that's why the liberals

00:37:23.080 don't understand what freedom is. You know, America's on the comeback, but the fight from

00:37:27.880 truth is far from over while the left tries desperately to keep its grip on media education

00:37:32.680 and the courts daily wire is leading the charge for free speech, fearless journalism and the values

00:37:36.260 that made our country. Great. Now's the time to join us stream my show ad free and watch along with

00:37:41.700 my producers in the chat. Plus get exclusive content you won't find anywhere else. Access

00:37:46.200 premium entertainment, join a community of thinkers, not followers, watch anytime, anywhere on desktop,

00:37:51.780 mobile and TV with the daily wire plus app. Don't just watch the culture war happen around you. Be

00:37:56.560 part of the movement. Subscribe now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. Finally, finally, I've arrived at

00:38:03.540 my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you in the mailbag. Our mailbag is sponsored by

00:38:06.720 pure talk. Go to pure talk.com right now. Pure talk.com slash Knowles. Make sure you put the

00:38:13.300 slash Knowles in there. Get a year of daily wire plus for free with a qualifying plan. Take it away.

00:38:18.720 Hi, Michael. Huge fan of the show. My question is about surrogacy. So let's say paid surrogacy

00:38:27.280 was against the law as I think it should be. But a sister or friend wanted to be a surrogate just to

00:38:38.740 help out, I don't know, a sister or friend. And it's a heterosexual couple. You know, the sperm in the

00:38:46.860 egg is from that couple just for whatever reason. The woman can't carry it herself. What are your

00:38:53.600 objections to that scenario? I do object to that scenario because the primary issue with IVF and

00:39:04.600 surrogacy is not the exploitation of women whose eggs you buy and whose wombs you rent. That's part

00:39:12.520 of it. But the more basic issue is the commodification of children. That's the big issue with surrogacy.

00:39:19.640 And that is inseparable from surrogacy. Because to engage in surrogacy, you got to go to a doctor.

00:39:28.160 The guy's got to commit a gravely immoral, disordered act almost all the time. The woman

00:39:35.140 has this procedure that is highly invasive to harvest her eggs. Then they pay this unethical

00:39:42.640 scientist. And the scientist in a Petri dish mixes up some babies. And then usually most of the

00:39:48.800 babies are just killed or indefinitely frozen. And then one or two of the babies are implanted in

00:39:54.120 this other woman. This creates other problems for the baby because there was a study, I forget what

00:39:58.260 year it came out, somewhat recent, that children who were born via surrogacy have greater emotional

00:40:06.980 problems, antisocial behavior, aggression, emotional disturbances by the age of seven than kids who were

00:40:14.480 born in the old-fashioned way. And this might be because a baby is ripped away from the only mother

00:40:19.740 he's ever known in his very first moments of life in the world breathing air. So who knows why it is,

00:40:24.880 but that's also been demonstrated. But even that is a little bit beside the point. IVF and surrogacy

00:40:30.360 turns human beings from proper subjects with rights and moral obligations into commodities to be bought and

00:40:37.700 sold on the open market and to be cooked up in a laboratory by unethical scientists. So that's the

00:40:42.000 problem. It doesn't matter if you take the renting of the womb out of it. If instead you're just

00:40:48.140 borrowing a womb from your friend, that essential problem is still there. Next question.

00:40:55.700 Hey, Michael. I was recently listening to the John Crist episode that you were on,

00:40:59.200 and I thought you guys brought up a lot of really interesting points. One in particular that you've

00:41:02.380 brought up multiple times on your own show, which is about lying and whether or not it's ever okay to

00:41:06.700 lie. You brought up several scenarios, one specifically involving Nazi Germany, and your

00:41:13.700 solutions to the problem seems to me like they might actually still be breaking the commandment

00:41:17.900 because the commandment itself does not say you shall not lie. The commandment says you shall not

00:41:21.980 bear false witness. And to me, that includes deception. And so some of those scenarios that you came up

00:41:28.800 with were deceiving either because they were leaving information out or because they were manipulating

00:41:33.340 language or, you know, things like that. And so I agree that you shouldn't just give the people up,

00:41:39.340 but I also think, and I also agree that lying is wrong, but I also think that some of those scenarios

00:41:43.880 that you came up with were in fact breaking that commandment. And so I'm curious what your

00:41:47.900 understanding of what the commandment, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,

00:41:52.620 actually means. Thank you.

00:41:54.660 Good question. What you're doing, which is interesting, is you're expanding out

00:41:58.500 my understanding, meaning I was answering the question of whether or not it's ever okay to lie.

00:42:06.500 You said, well, is it, you're expanded that out to say, well, is it ever okay to even slightly

00:42:10.120 mislead or even slightly, you know, deflect or prevaricate or whatever. But what's funny is when

00:42:16.160 you read the commandment, the commandment is actually more restricted in the words than what

00:42:22.040 we were talking about, because to bear false witnesses is actually a legal procedure in a court.

00:42:26.220 And I'm saying you can think about it beyond a courtroom, but the commandment actually is

00:42:30.500 speaking of a courtroom, isn't it? To bear false witness, you know, under oath in a trial or some

00:42:36.520 sort of civil dispute. So no, I'm not too worried about that. In terms of the answer to the Nazis,

00:42:46.060 for those who didn't listen to the John Crist episode, I was on his podcast. Go check it out on

00:42:50.400 YouTube. And we were asking, you know, the Nazis come to the door, you're hiding Jews in your

00:42:55.180 basement or something. They say, are you hiding any Jews? And you could think on your feet. Here's

00:43:03.420 an easier example. Have you seen any Jews recently? You say, no, I haven't. Because maybe you haven't

00:43:07.740 seen them since yesterday. You're kind of, it's a little mental reservation, but you're not quite

00:43:11.540 giving them everything. You could even go further, maybe say, are you hiding any Jews? I could say,

00:43:15.860 well, no, I'm not. I'm not. They're hiding themselves in my basement. I'm not hiding them.

00:43:19.820 I don't, you know, you could, you could deflect or you could speak in a way that is not exactly

00:43:25.240 telling a lie, but is certainly not giving him what he wants. And the argument for that is,

00:43:29.720 and this is, you don't need to just take it from me or you asking the question. You can also hear

00:43:33.540 it from St. Thomas Aquinas or many other doctors of the church. The issue is no one, you do not have

00:43:41.900 an obligation to give people information that they do not have any right to have.

00:43:47.820 You understand? So the Nazi who comes to the door has no right to that information.

00:43:54.100 So if you deflect, and this of course has been debated for centuries, and there is a variety

00:44:02.020 of opinion on the subject, but the examples I gave, I think are pretty safe. I think you're allowed to

00:44:06.880 use language in a crafty way. I don't think that violates the commandment. Next question.

00:44:11.900 Puff King Knowles, I have a question for you about something you have referred to earlier as

00:44:17.620 virtuous pagans. Because on the one hand, yoga may supposedly summon demons, but on the other,

00:44:23.800 and while I would never reference anyone real, like our friend Arun, having a pagan conception of

00:44:32.420 deity and afterlife seems better for such a person than being an atheist, even with the supposedly

00:44:37.700 demon-summoning yoga. So with pagan religions, when does the demon-summoning end and the virtue

00:44:44.420 begin? And when and how does the godly virtue outweigh the supposed demons while practicing

00:44:51.800 a form of paganism? Thank you so much for your thoughts and clarification, Puff King Knowles.

00:44:56.380 Really good question. I'll leave Arun out of this for now. Though maybe I'll get to Hindu. Arun is a

00:45:01.040 Hindu. But maybe I'll get to that in a moment. Because there are three kinds of paganism. There is

00:45:08.120 paganism that's kind of monotheistic, meaning the paganism of Aristotle and Plato, for instance,

00:45:16.160 Socrates, who clearly understand that there is one god, even though they lived in the time before

00:45:23.320 Christ. And they weren't Jews, so they didn't have this monotheistic conception as a matter of

00:45:30.880 revelation. It comes to them through natural philosophy. But they would certainly count as

00:45:37.120 virtuous pagans. Then there is fabulous paganism, which is the kind of paganism where you start

00:45:44.900 burning things to the god of the rain so that your crop will be harvested. And now you're getting

00:45:52.700 into a little bit more trouble because it's superstitious. And superstition certainly opens

00:45:56.580 you up to worshiping demons. And sometimes it becomes outright idol worship and sacrificing

00:46:00.760 babies to Baal and things like that. That's bad. There's a third kind of paganism, which is

00:46:05.700 civic paganism. It's a kind of civic religion. I mean, every polity has it. I was just in Washington,

00:46:11.420 D.C. Washington, D.C. on the National Mall has an obelisk in memory of George Washington and a

00:46:17.580 Greco-Roman tomb in honor of Abraham Lincoln that makes Lincoln look like Zeus. Okay? There is

00:46:23.560 obviously a civic religion aspect of this. These are temples to democracy, as the liberals sometimes

00:46:28.660 call them, call the buildings in Washington, D.C. So that's a kind of civic paganism, which is really

00:46:33.800 just about the health of the polity. And those are all different sorts of things. So what I would

00:46:38.660 encourage you to do is be Christian, which is the fullness of truth. But pagans can intuit

00:46:46.780 aspects of true religion because the existence of God can be known with certainty from human reason

00:46:53.520 in the created world. But it'll take you a lot of the way there, but it won't take you all the way

00:47:00.240 there because God also reveals himself to us. So once your reason takes you to God's existence,

00:47:03.820 existence, then you've got to keep going. And sometimes people can be sidetracked by superstition

00:47:09.940 and demon worship, which is bad. Okay, today's Fake Headline Friday. The rest of the show continues

00:47:15.980 now. You don't want to miss it. Become a member. Use code KnowlesKinnaWLS. So check out for two

00:47:19.260 months free on all annual plans.

00:47:20.500 Fake Headline Friday. The rest of the show is a great day.

00:47:36.620 Bye.

00:47:37.620 Bye.

00:47:38.620 Bye.

00:47:38.680 Bye.

00:47:38.740 Bye.

00:47:38.820 Bye.

00:47:38.880 Bye.

00:47:39.000 Bye.

00:47:39.120 Bye.

00:47:39.140 Bye.

00:47:39.240 Bye.

Ep. 1703 - My Day at the White House with Four Cabinet Members

Summary

Transcript