Ep. 1777 - The ＂Prince of Darkness,＂ Ozzy Osbourne, Dies at 76
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Summary
The Prince of Darkness has died, Hunter Biden is extolling the virtues of crack, and Michael Knowles is at the White House working on a top-secret project. Plus, PureTalk is giving you a Samsung Galaxy A36 for free with a $35 qualifying plan.
Transcript
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The Prince of Darkness has died, Hunter Biden is extolling the virtues of crack,
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and I am at the White House working on a top-secret project.
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. Great news on the cultural front. You know Burning Man? You know
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that thing that all your hippie friends went to like 10 years ago? Just the most insufferable
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hippies that you know? Well, it's dying. It's dying. It's just embers. It's Ash Man now.
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I have many more pearls of wisdom to give you, but first you need to go to puretalk.com
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phone today. That is puretalk.com slash Knowles to switch to my wireless company, America's wireless
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company, PureTalk. Big update on a personal story that's not just a personal story. It's really a
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political story, which is why I talked about it on the show yesterday, I guess, or Monday, was it?
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I mentioned that I appeared to have been debanked from one of the biggest payment processors in the
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country, the largest one by the number of merchants. That was Stripe because Stripe processes payments
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from X. Not that I get a lot of money from X, but every tweet, I don't know, you get like two cents or
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something. And so for six, seven months now, I hadn't gotten any payments and X told me to talk to
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Stripe and Stripe told me to talk to X and X said it was Stripe's fault. So anyway, I couldn't get an
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answer on any of it. It was insinuated to me that this might have been a debanking situation. And so I
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just posted about it on Twitter. And I want to thank all of you. A lot of you called a great deal of
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attention to this, came to the attention of a lot of federal regulators and a lot of people who have been
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dealing with this debanking issue, not just from Stripe, but from many financial institutions
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in recent years. And I'm really pleased to say that Stripe reached out to me personally.
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And so I took the call. It was actually, I took the call kind of late because I was at the White
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House yesterday working on that secret project I mentioned. Maybe we'll get to more of that later
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on. So anyway, by the time I picked it up, they said, hey, we want to reach out to you because
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we want you to know this was not intentional debanking. This was not political. This was
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not anti any kind of discrimination. This began because of what seems to have been an administrative
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issue from a government agency. And so we totally got our lines crossed and, you know, it's been
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six, seven months, but we want to work with you to resolve this. And so I take them at their word. I
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think that that's a plausible explanation. So it seems to me this very likely is not a debanking issue.
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Necessarily. But I guess that really highlights the problem. I'm really pleased to say that in
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talking about this personal matter that I guess they're going to resolve, we then got to the
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political matter, which is really at the heart of this, which is a lack of transparency from these
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financial institutions. Because I wasn't even told what the issue could be for six or seven months.
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And I have a public platform with millions of followers across social media channels.
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Most people don't. Most people, if they're turned off from a financial institution,
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they have no recourse and they're not going to hear anything. They won't even be told why they
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were turned off. And so I'm really pleased to say Stripe is interested in this. They want to work
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together on some legislative fixes for the right to know, for customers to know at the very least
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why their financial services are being cut off. Because I think a lot of the debanking that we
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have seen, again, I'm relatively convinced this is not an example of political targeting or anything
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like that. I take Stripe at its word. I think it's fair. But we know there have been a lot of examples of
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that in recent years, haven't there been? And the people, this could affect millions and millions of
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people. The people who are debanked very often aren't even told why they're being turned off.
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These institutions have no obligation to tell them why they're being turned off. In some cases,
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contracts won't even let them tell the customers why they're being turned off. So that has to be fixed
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with a legislative answer. Because the lack of transparency allows legitimately bad operators
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in financial services to target political opponents or religious opponents. And you can't
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even challenge it because you don't even know what you're challenging. So anyway, very pleased to all
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of you for calling attention to this matter. Very pleased that Stripe wants to work on it.
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We're working on that now behind the scenes. My team is in touch with their team and they're
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working on that. I think we need a legislative fix because we need to make sure, while I'm so happy
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that the boys are back in town here in Washington and we have good government and a unified
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government, we need to make sure that we protect ordinary Americans who hold ordinary political
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views, who have ordinary beliefs and do ordinary things. Protect them from activists who are
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legitimately targeted by all manner of financial institutions. So anyway, I'll keep you posted on
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that as we continue to investigate exactly what went on and how to fix it. Then, big cultural news.
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Ozzy Osbourne is dead. The Prince of Darkness. He's dead at 76. That used to be kind of old. Now,
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that's very young. Ozzy just did his final concert days ago. I think I even covered it on the show.
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He did his final, at least, I at least saw it on Twitter. He did his final concert and then he died
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shortly thereafter. We don't really know the circumstances of his death. You know, he'd been
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very sick. He had Parkinson's. So this causes some reflection because Ozzy Osbourne lived a pretty
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colorful life. And there's a rule, nil nisi bonum. You don't say anything bad about the dead.
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And I really don't mean to. Ozzy Osbourne seemed like a pretty nice guy in many ways. And he was a
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colorful cultural figure. He was also the Prince of Darkness. I never was into Ozzy Osbourne's music.
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I got a kick out of that reality show a little bit in the 2000s. But at the risk of sounding like
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a satanic panic church lady, I think there are some problems with that kind of music.
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And I'm not alone. John Cardinal O'Connor, one of the great cardinals in the history of New York,
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he once alleged that Ozzy Osbourne's music led to, potentially led to demonic possession and suicide.
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And Osbourne opposed this. And it was all part of the big fight over heavy metal music and
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occult symbolism in the culture. And at that time, the very secular liberal culture making fun of the
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uptight prudish Christians. But there's an infamous moment in Ozzy Osbourne's life in 1989 when he tried
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to murder his wife, Sharon. And she writes about this in her memoir. It's a very publicized event.
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And what's interesting is not even that he tried to murder his wife. It's how he did it.
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The account, I want to get the words right. According to Sharon, and I think to Ozzy,
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he allegedly told her, quote, we've come to a decision that you've got to die. We.
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Who is we? You know, Ozzy for years did a ton of drugs. And he was infamous for this.
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So even the other guys in Black Sabbath would say, you know, Ozzy, man, he could go harder than
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anyone. He was just completely insane. There's a story about him in a meeting of record executives.
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He said that he got up and, and, you know, made funny faces or something on the table. And I think
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in Sharon's telling, he got up, goose stepped along the board table and exposed himself or something
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like that. Something really a little quirky. And anyway, then it culminates in this near,
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near murder of his wife. He says, we've come to a decision that you've got to die.
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Then he lunged at her and tried to strangle her. And she clicked a panic button and the
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cops came and arrested him. She said that it was the most frightened she's ever been.
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It seems kind of like John Cardinal O'Connor was right.
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And I'm really not saying any of this to knock Ozzy, because in many interviews and many parts
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of his life, he seemed like a sweet guy. And he played up kind of some of the dark symbolism
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as a matter of art or, or maybe even as a matter of irony. But this doesn't, this doesn't get you
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around the troubling elements in, in not just his career, but in the kind of symbols he engaged in,
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he proved that you can't live ironically forever. I guess this is a point I've made on the show many
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times. If you're ironically satanic for your whole life, dark stuff, bad stuff is going to happen.
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And so people are going to be recounting all of his crazy antics, you know, biting the head off a bat
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or whatever he did, a chicken, what did he do? I think it was a bat. All these crazy things.
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And, and in the final count, all of Ozzy's antics are the worst parts of his life.
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They're the worst parts of his life. It reminds me, it's not just Ozzy Osborne. It's really any
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young man who's ever gotten his blood up a little bit and partied a little too hard and been a little
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too crazy is, you can look back and say, oh boy, I was crazy in my youth at college or in my twenties
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or whatever. But when you actually get into the antics, they're usually degrading and they're the
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things that you're not really proud of and they can have horrible consequences on your life.
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So it's not to say that Ozzy had the worst life ever or anything like that. In many ways,
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he had a kind of a nice life, but all the stuff he's most famous for was bad and embarrassing.
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And in the final count, you probably want to focus on the good things. And just anyway,
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recommendation, pray for Ozzy. We pray for Ozzy and take, take that as a little bit of a lesson.
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Don't. All the stuff that we laugh at and we go for it, this was his real life. He really did try
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to murder his wife and he really did do these degrading things that clearly shortened his life.
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And let's not do that. Let's try to avoid that. Okay. Hold on one second. I'm going to get to really,
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I covered that crazy Hunter Biden interview the other day, where he talked about how the Democrat
00:13:00.060
Party is just awful, and he was just going off, pure id, unvarnished, where he said, this place,
00:13:07.080
they're awful, they're all frauds leading the Democrat Party. There was one part of the interview
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that I missed out on, that I forgot about. It's when he extolled the virtues of crack.
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Does crack cocaine make you act any differently? No. Is it safer than alcohol? Probably. People think
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of crack as being dirty. It's the exact opposite. When you make crack, what you're doing is you're
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burning off all the impurities so that it combines with the sodium bicarbonate, which makes it smoke,
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that's all. I'm getting the distinct impression that Hunter Biden has learned nothing. He's managed
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to learn nothing from his life, his degenerate life full of horrible mistakes and terrible sins
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that have disfigured him spiritually and even physically and destroyed his family and made him
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a laughingstock. He was a promising guy, graduate of Yale Law School, was in the Navy, had every
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advantage in the world, had the sad thing in his life, which is his mother died when he was young.
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But other than that, had every advantage in the world and he squandered all of it. Now he's a
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laughingstock and a punchline and he's learned nothing. He can't even come out and say crack is
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bad. He says, no, actually, crack is really good. Did you know that? Crack, it's like when you talk to,
00:14:23.740
at a lower level, but just as annoying, when you talk to your super duper pothead friend,
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I'm not saying someone who every once in a while takes a puff of the sin spinach. It's a popular
00:14:33.140
thing to do, even if it's not advisable. I'm talking about your wake and bake, choom gang,
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just hippie, pudding-headed friend who insists not just that pot isn't that bad. They say,
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no, man, it's really good for you. Did you know, man, it's actually, I'm self-medicating
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and it makes me relaxed, man. It's good for your brain. And it's, no, it's not. It's horrible.
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It's got more tar in it than cigarettes and it turns your brain to mush and makes you dumb
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and introspective, but not even in like a good introspective way, just kind of like quiet and
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shy and increases anxiety and ultimately will make you schizophrenic if you smoke enough of it. It's
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not good, but you can't even say, it's one thing for someone to say, well, that's maybe not the best
00:15:20.380
thing. You know, I have a couple of drinks at night. It's probably not the best thing, but you know,
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whatever. That's, I choose to, I choose my vice, but, but don't tell me it's good. Don't tell me
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these, that's what Hunter's doing. And so why do I say this just to make fun of Hunter? No, I do it
00:15:34.460
because this is the Democratic Party broadly. Hunter is the avatar of the Democrats broadly.
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They know they've screwed up. They know, they know, they know they're out of government. They know
00:15:46.800
the Republicans control everything. They know they've screwed up. They know something has to change.
00:15:52.480
Whenever you focus on what that thing is, they have to defend it. Yeah. Maybe you guys got a
00:15:58.120
little too woke. No, we're not. We didn't get, we didn't get woke enough. What are you talking
00:16:01.880
about? We got too woke. Well, we defend the rights of the, no, we believe in equality and the pro and
00:16:07.660
the trans and the LGBT and the individual. Okay. All right. You don't say you're too woke.
00:16:12.940
I don't know. Maybe you're too tied in with a big business. No, what are you, what are you talking?
00:16:18.300
We're much better for the economy. No, what do you, we, we support the, all these corporations
00:16:22.480
that are trying to import slave labor with mass migration and they won't, they'll admit in the
00:16:28.380
abstract something's wrong and they got to change. But when you get to the nitty gritty, they don't
00:16:33.480
know what it is that they have to change. And this, this could be a real benefit for Republicans in
00:16:39.800
November because, in next November, not this November, the midterm elections, because in the midterms,
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the first midterm after a party takes the White House, that party tends to get completely destroyed
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and the opposing party retakes the House. That is almost always what happens. And that's what I'm
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assuming is going to happen in 2026, except that the Democrats are just so bad. They're so, so lost.
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They got rocked by losing the popular vote. I think that's what did. It's not even just that Trump won,
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which would have been bad enough for them because they spent 10 years calling him Hitler and they
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tried to prosecute him on four different fronts and they tried to kick him off the ballot and they
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set the stage for him to be murdered not once but twice. And that all failed. But the cherry on top,
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the thing that was the real gut punch to the Democrats is they lost the popular vote too.
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So they can't even, they can't even fall back on their stupid argument that the electoral college
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is a threat to democracy and we really won. If you really change all the rules and if you really
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squint and hold your head cockeyed, you know, then actually we actually won. They can't even do that.
00:17:41.400
They lost everything. And so they, they don't know what to make of it. They know something has
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to change. Now they might not win back the house. And according to Mark Halperin, who is a plugged in
00:17:52.060
political journalist, according to Mark Halperin, the Democrat leader in the house, Hakeem Jeffries,
00:17:57.980
thinks that the socialist Muslim in New York, Zoran Mamdani, who is likely to be the next mayor of New York,
00:18:03.840
is going to single-handedly destroy Democrat chances to win back the house.
00:18:10.780
And Hakeem Jeffries' office is denying it. But Mark Halperin is a good journalist. In fact,
00:18:16.020
I just recently was on Mark Halperin's show. Mark Halperin told me things about my political
00:18:22.400
relationships, about things I, things I do in politics behind the scenes that were not public.
00:18:28.840
I said, how do you know that? Hold on. How do you know that I, he's a very serious political
00:18:35.080
journalist. He is really plugged in. I believe him. I certainly believe him over the office of
00:18:39.200
Hakeem Jeffries. What is he saying that Jeffries is saying? He is, he is saying that Hakeem Jeffries
00:18:46.380
strongly believes that if Mandani wins, Jeffries cannot win the majority. People who have spoken
00:18:52.900
directly with the leader, Jeffries, believe this, and they think that it's going to be too far.
00:19:00.920
Now, Mark Halperin's mouth to God's ears, that could be great.
00:19:07.320
Because there's no clear direction for the Democrats, are they going to go more in the
00:19:10.880
Rahm Emanuel direction, more in the Andy Cuomo direction? We got to ditch this woke stuff. We
00:19:15.440
got to ditch the trans issue or whatever. We got to ditch the total mass migration, open borders
00:19:20.120
issue. We need to get back to the center. Or are they going to go to their rising stars? AOC.
00:19:25.200
And who's that chick? The new AOC, whatever that girl, the black lady, not that she's the black AOC,
00:19:30.280
whatever her name is. That one or Zoran Mamdani or all the rest. Queer liberation, globalize the
00:19:36.320
intifada, eat the rich, whatever, open the borders. They don't know. They don't even know which one is
00:19:42.700
cynically going to help them right now. A very, very good sign for Republicans. And if the Dems
00:19:48.760
can't come up with an answer soon, you know, the clock is ticking on the midterms. So there's one
00:19:53.540
issue that is bedeviling Trump right now. It is the issue that has been eating at him and there's
00:19:58.560
not that much that he can do about it. It's the Jeffrey Epstein issue. Alan Dershowitz, who was the
00:20:02.960
lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein and the lawyer for Donald Trump in his impeachment hearings, and just a very
00:20:07.760
famous lawyer who's been in American politics for decades. Alan Dershowitz thinks he has the answer
00:20:13.880
to the Jeffrey Epstein political quagmire. He says the thing to do is to get Epstein's partner
00:20:21.200
and madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, to testify before Congress.
00:20:26.100
She knows everything. She is the Rosetta Stone. She knows everything. She arranged every single trip
00:20:32.820
with everybody. She knows everything. And if she were just given use immunity, she could be compelled
00:20:39.160
to testify. I'm told that she actually would be willing to testify. And there'd be no reason for
00:20:45.220
her to withhold any information. So I don't see any negative in giving her the kind of use immunity
00:20:52.240
that would compel her to testify. So she ought to be summoned in front of a congressional committee.
00:21:00.500
So that's Alan Dershowitz's call. It's surprising a lot of people because a lot of people think Dershowitz
00:21:04.620
is seriously implicated in the Epstein files. I don't think he is. I know it's not popular to
00:21:11.000
say that. They all think, oh, Dershowitz, he was on the island and he was doing all sorts of creepy
00:21:14.820
stuff with all these girls. I don't think he's seriously implicated in this at all. He was Epstein's
00:21:19.560
lawyer. But he was O.J. Simpson's lawyer too. His job was to defend bad guys. I don't think he's
00:21:25.760
seriously implicated. And notice how confident he says, release the files. Hollywood celebrities who
00:21:31.140
might be implicated. Kevin Spacey, I think it was, said, release the files. This would suggest,
00:21:37.160
even now, Dershowitz's saying, let Ghislaine talk. Why? Because he's not afraid that bad
00:21:45.040
information is going to come out about him. In fact, I think this is the strongest argument yet,
00:21:49.160
and you know I hate to say I told you so, that you're never going to get seriously new information
00:21:54.560
about Jeffrey Epstein. You think you will? Release the files. Release the list. Release Ghislaine
00:21:59.660
Maxwell. Dig up Jeffrey Epstein. If he's dead. If he killed himself. If he didn't kill himself.
00:22:04.160
Just get him. Anybody. We want more information. I don't know that you're going to get it. But
00:22:10.080
that does not mean that Madame Ghislaine is not going to testify because the House
00:22:14.540
looks like it's going to subpoena her. Hold on one second. We will get to more beautiful,
00:22:20.120
important stuff in my mellifluous tones. But before we do any of that, you must text Knowles,
00:22:26.060
K-N-A-W-L-E-S-2-9898-98. The government is doing great stuff right now on Capitol Hill,
00:22:32.400
over at the White House. It's all great. You need to make sure that you track your personal finances.
00:22:38.020
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The House is going to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell. Tim Burchett, Republican from Tennessee,
00:23:42.680
has requested that Chairman James Comer summon Ghislaine for testimony. So now Comer said that
00:23:51.600
Birchett needs to introduce a formal motion, which was approved by voice vote. Since she's in federal
00:23:57.340
prison, the committee will work with the DOJ and Bureau of Prisons to find a date when this
00:24:02.460
congressional committee can depose her. Okay, that's fine. It's interesting. It's kind of an
00:24:06.560
off-ramp for everybody here. And you'll get answers, whatever answers there are. You're not going to
00:24:11.480
find anything new. I've said it from the beginning. I will say it again. If Jeffrey Epstein is who the
00:24:17.440
government says he is, he's just a weird sex freak who was friends with all the most rich and
00:24:22.600
powerful people, but those two facts have nothing to do with each other. If that's all he was, you
00:24:27.020
already know everything you're going to know. And if he was something else, if he were an asset of
00:24:32.600
intelligence, as was suggested in reporting, allegedly from Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who
00:24:40.040
prosecuted him, who then was up for labor secretary under Trump, Trump won, then that's one thing.
00:24:46.060
If he was a super duper spy for the CIA and Mossad and MI6 and the KGB and whatever, okay,
00:24:52.960
if he was anything in between, if he's not what the government says he is, if he's what some of you
00:25:00.200
think that he is, you've also heard everything about him you're ever going to hear. Simple as,
00:25:05.180
simple as. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just telling you how it works. Now, speaking of the
00:25:10.900
White House, you know, I'm at the White House. I'm, well, right now I'm at a hotel. I'm at a fancy
00:25:15.620
hotel around the White House because right near the White House, they mostly have fancy hotels.
00:25:19.940
And you can tell I'm at a fancy hotel if you're watching the show because I have fancy blue glass
00:25:24.900
water. I would be perfectly fine having normal plastic bottle water, but the fancy hotels, they have
00:25:30.360
blue glass water. That's how you know. DC is a very wealthy area these days. And I'm very excited
00:25:37.260
to be working on a project at the White House. And I'm not going to tell you all that. I said it's
00:25:41.520
super duper top secret. It's only top secret because I'm not going to tell you about it yet.
00:25:45.100
But it's very exciting. It has to do with American history and it'll be coming out in a little bit.
00:25:48.620
So I'll keep you posted about all of that. But it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun. And it's,
00:25:53.040
I think it's going to have some important cultural import, which is what we got to do.
00:25:56.540
We have to, the Trump administration has a great opportunity now, especially because we have
00:26:01.040
unified government. So we have to right certain wrongs, immediate wrongs. Things like the pro-lifers
00:26:07.320
who were political prisoners under Joe Biden, who demonstrated against wholesale infanticide and
00:26:12.340
they were locked up for it. In some cases, elderly, elderly women. They had to be pardoned. They had to
00:26:17.160
be released. The political prosecutions of the January 6th, they had to be released. Those are
00:26:22.460
immediate issues. Then there are less immediate, but still urgent issues like political targeting,
00:26:31.200
potential debanking issues. We were talking about earlier in the show. Real threats to people that
00:26:36.940
even if they're not being pursued right now, could be pursued the minute Democrats get power again.
00:26:40.440
We need fixes to those kinds of things. But then, then we need long-term policies for the United
00:26:46.700
States to make us fiscally solvent, to stop the flow of mass migrants, all the rest of them. Then we need
00:26:52.080
cultural stuff. And I'm just telling you, having, now that the boys are back in town, I've spent a lot of
00:26:58.380
time in DC since January, on the Hill, at the White House, everywhere in between. And this government is
00:27:06.520
moving very efficiently. This is, this is the A-team. They're doing a very, very good job. And they are not
00:27:12.020
disregarding the cultural level. Because I think about that executive order at the end of Trump 1, make
00:27:17.680
federal buildings beautiful again. That was really important. A lot of people are going to say, oh, you
00:27:23.000
know, who cares? It's not a big deal. Just buildings. Just buildings. What are you talking about? That's the,
00:27:28.420
that's, this is the nation's capital. What it looks like tells you about the country. What it looks like will
00:27:35.760
affect the way that the government is run by the people who are living and working in it. If you, the, the
00:27:41.840
great example of this is in New York. When we had old Penn Station, the old, grand, beautiful Beaux-Arts
00:27:47.660
Penn Station. When you walked in, you felt like a king. You felt like a dignified person. And we had
00:27:53.040
dignified work and we had a dignified city. Then they leveled it and they turned it into a rat maze
00:27:57.580
called the New Penn Station in Madison Square Garden. And there you feel like a rat and you act like a rat.
00:28:02.000
It's filthy. It's dirty. People behave in rodent-like ways. We don't, we want, you think about a
00:28:08.820
courtroom. When you have a courtroom that looks like just some tiny, brutalist little room, you think you're at
00:28:13.480
the communist commissar's office. You doubt justice. When you're in a big temple of justice, you feel the weight
00:28:20.020
of justice. You feel like you're, you're, have to live up to something that is much bigger than you. You're going
00:28:25.640
to get a more just government. The good, the true, and the beautiful are transcendentals and they're all related
00:28:30.760
to each other. So anyway, pardon that digression. The Trump administration is working on that kind of thing too.
00:28:36.000
On the cultural front, this little project we're working on together. And then also,
00:28:40.940
I got a little update here on the Make Federal Building's Beautiful Again Act. It's going into
00:28:45.340
effect. It's happening. There are these longer term issues, which I think is terrific. And, and all of
00:28:50.020
that is tied in with a truth social post that Trump made the other day. I meant to get to it yesterday,
00:28:54.220
but we have time today. Trump is called on the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians.
00:29:01.220
That's the old names. Then they changed their names to what? The Washington, what is it called
00:29:05.220
now? I have Professor Jacob sitting in the corner here. The commanders, I think, commanders and the
00:29:10.900
Cleveland Guardians. That's the baseball team. He has demanded that they change their names back.
00:29:17.120
He said, the Washington whatevers, he had the same reaction as me. I don't even remember. Guardians,
00:29:23.060
I kind of remember, the Washington whatevers should immediately change their name back to the
00:29:26.720
Washington Redskins football team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians,
00:29:30.840
one of the six original baseball teams with a storied past, are great Indian people in massive
00:29:34.740
numbers want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from
00:29:39.080
them. Times are different now than they were three, four years ago. We are a country of passion and
00:29:44.060
common sense. Owners get it done. This matters. This really matters. And he actually, Trump had a
00:29:51.820
follow-up. He goes, my statement on the Washington Redskins is totally blown up, but only in a very
00:29:58.580
positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don't change the name back to the original
00:30:04.680
Washington Redskins and get rid of the ridiculous moniker Washington Commanders, I won't make a deal
00:30:08.860
for them to build a stadium in Washington. Love this. Love this. The Libs are going to say,
00:30:14.100
that's authoritarian. You can't. And the Libertarians too. And the squishy Republicans. That's
00:30:17.720
authoritarian. You're not allowed to interfere in the football team. Why would you do it?
00:30:22.360
Yeah, you can. Yeah, you know why? Because he's the president. And the president's got a lot of
00:30:27.620
power. And that's just the way it is. I think it's a fine thing. But even if you think that's a bad
00:30:32.620
thing, it's a true thing. He's got a lot of power. And he should use that power for good stuff.
00:30:38.440
Because the Libs use the power when they get it for bad stuff. We should use it for good stuff.
00:30:42.020
After they say that the president shouldn't put this pressure on the NFL and the MLB,
00:30:47.720
then they're going to say, well, it's just silly. It's a distraction.
00:30:52.320
Who cares? It's just words. And I think to myself, have you people learned nothing? Have
00:30:58.180
you learned nothing over the last 60 years? It's just words. The Libs changed all the words. You
00:31:07.680
remember that? The Libs changed all the words. And then they changed our whole culture because of
00:31:10.900
that. Oh, it's just a word. Okay. So then you don't mind if you're forced to call a man she.
00:31:18.620
Call a guy named Billy Sally. You don't mind. It's just words, right? Who cares? It's just,
00:31:23.200
you don't mind that now in reporting or in even government documents, you're not allowed to
00:31:28.960
refer to illegal aliens. You have to refer to future undocumented, super duper beautiful,
00:31:32.480
dreaming Americans, right? You don't mind because it's just words. Oh, or do words matter?
00:31:37.100
Words do matter. Does culture matter? Do sports matter? Do festivals matter? Do games matter?
00:31:44.200
Does popular culture matter? Of course it does. Of course it does.
00:31:49.000
Trump goes way into it. He goes, the owner of the Cleveland baseball team, Matt Dolan,
00:31:53.600
who is very political, has lost three elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change.
00:31:58.760
What he doesn't understand is that if he changed the name back to Cleveland Indians,
00:32:01.560
he might actually win an election. Indians are being treated very unfairly.
00:32:05.260
Look, he says it's the Indian. I'm just on behalf of the Indians here. He's flipping what the Democrats
00:32:08.980
do. They say, it's all these like white Democrats. They say, we have to change the name of the
00:32:13.300
Cleveland Indians because it's offensive to Indians. And they say, hey, Indians, is this
00:32:19.460
offensive to you? And the Indians say, how? How? How would this be offensive? We're not offended at
00:32:24.920
all. We like the name, whatever. Hello, the great spirit loves the name or whatever. So they like it
00:32:31.080
and people pretend to be offended on their behalf. Trump's flipping it. He's saying, no,
00:32:35.060
you changing the name, that's very unfair to the Indians. I love it. This is really good stuff.
00:32:38.980
Words matter. Culture matters. In some ways, if we get the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland
00:32:48.240
Indians back and we build some nice buildings here in Washington, D.C., and we tell as we head into
00:32:53.480
the bicesquicentennial, the 250th anniversary of America, we tell the real story of America,
00:32:57.820
not the stupid nonsense that the Marxists and the radical left want to tell us and the multiculturalists
00:33:02.540
and all the rest of it. And we tell that story and we teach that story to our kids. We indoctrinate
00:33:07.100
them with that true story that leads to a civic mythology, which every state has to have. If we
00:33:13.520
do that, the effect of that could be much grander even than these nuts and bolts policies, which we're
00:33:19.880
also getting out of the Trump administration. Now, speaking of incentives, PBS and other public
00:33:27.880
broadcasting are all whining because Trump is defunding them. We'll get to that momentarily.
00:33:32.780
We are celebrating a decade of the Daily Wire. That's 10 years of saying the quiet part out loud
00:33:39.020
and building something that actually matters. Something that the libs can't cancel or burn down
00:33:43.540
or we're not slowing down. We are scaling up with new talent, such as Isabel Brown and her new show
00:33:48.860
premiering this fall. New docs like Journey to the UFC, the Joe Pfeiffer story premiering Friday on
00:33:53.380
Daily Wire Plus. Here's the thing. Members get it all first. The drops, the trailers, the truth,
00:33:57.760
uncensored. Plus you get to connect with a community that doesn't think biology is optional. What do you
00:34:03.080
think about that? Celebrate 10 years with us. Go to dailywireplus.com. I want to tell you my favorite
00:34:09.860
comment from yesterday. It's from Lewis Fishman124. It says, husband gets caught looking at this new
00:34:16.480
website, Only Philanthropy. Do you see that? It's the porn website run by the girl from the ATT
00:34:21.600
commercials. It says, husband gets caught, but honey, she means nothing to me. I'm doing this for
00:34:28.360
philanthropy. That's a good, that's a good excuse. Should we try that excuse out? I don't know.
00:34:35.080
I don't know. Maybe. Now, before I get to public broadcasting, a really important cultural shift.
00:34:42.500
Burning Man. Burning Man is burning through money. Burning Man is this festival in the desert where hippies
00:34:48.620
go and they all have sex with each other and do a bunch of drugs and worship a burning effigy of a
00:34:53.140
demon. They've been doing this for 10 years now, more than that. It's all the hippies go. Well,
00:34:59.520
it's dying. According to a report from Bloomberg, though Burning Man eschews money during the festival,
00:35:06.960
you're not allowed to sell and buy stuff. You just got to all give it to each other, man. You know,
00:35:10.540
like, cool. We're all getting together, man. Despite that, it costs money to put on.
00:35:15.640
And Bloomberg writes, money is something Burning Man Project, the non-profit that runs the event,
00:35:20.520
can't do without. Lately, it's been an increasingly urgent concern. Last year,
00:35:25.920
after Burning Man Project spent about $59 million throwing the Bacchanal, tickets failed to sell out,
00:35:31.200
putting the year's revenue on track to fall $20 million short of expenses. That's about half as
00:35:38.220
short as the budget deficit for the Stephen Colbert show, which just got canceled.
00:35:43.580
Stephen Colbert was losing $40 million a year, but Burning Man, not far behind, $20 million.
00:35:50.020
Its leaders stumbled out of the desert and found themselves staring down a financial cliff.
00:35:54.640
Everything is now at risk. Chief Executive Officer Marion Goodell wrote in a series of online
00:35:58.800
missives sharing the news last fall. Okay. So you have this story. Burning Man, the hippie Bacchanal,
00:36:04.420
good word to use for it, is dying. You're hearing some other news stories. Young people are returning to
00:36:11.460
church. The national decline in Christian identity has finally leveled off after decades.
00:36:16.380
Mass number of conversions and baptisms, not only in America, but in France and elsewhere.
00:36:22.840
Those two stories are not disconnected. They're actually the same story. Burning Man came up
00:36:30.720
in the age of the new atheists. Burning Man came up in the age when stupid people were religious and
00:36:39.060
smart people were irreligious. But when you're irreligious, supposedly, you still search for
00:36:46.220
meaning. You have to find meaning in your life. No one actually wants to just be a bag of flesh.
00:36:51.620
Even if you pretend that you're a bag of flesh, you still think. And you still think about yourself,
00:36:55.720
and you still worry about the eternal problems, and you still dread death, and you still desire love,
00:37:01.000
and you're still left with yourself. It's a line that an alcoholic buddy of mine told me that he
00:37:05.460
learned in AA. Wherever you go, there you are. There you are. So they search for meaning and they
00:37:12.080
have to find it somewhere. So where do they find it? They've rejected Christianity. So what do they do?
00:37:15.600
They just go to paganism. And the Burning Man Festival is just purely pagan. It would have fit in
00:37:20.240
perfectly in ancient Rome, or ancient Greece, or ancient Carthage. Carthage was actually more
00:37:25.880
commercial, so that's maybe a little bit of a bad comparison. Or the ancient Near East, or anywhere.
00:37:30.660
You just go, you worship burning effigies, you do a bunch of drugs, and you have sex with a bunch of
00:37:35.380
people, and you cheat on your wife. That's if you have a wife. Or you cheat on your girlfriend,
00:37:38.620
and you dress up like a weirdo. And that's all it is. And now that paganism, which filled the whole
00:37:45.100
of the atheism, is giving way to Christianity. Ever ancient, ever new. It's a good sign. And it's
00:37:53.020
a sign of the times. Bye-bye Burning Man. All the cool guys. You know where the cool guys are going
00:37:58.280
now? They're not going to the desert to have weird drug-fueled orgies. They're going to church,
00:38:03.200
and probably they're going to Latin Mass. Now, the culture shift is really big. Why is this all
00:38:09.560
happening? David Brooks, who is a kind of conservative, but even more of a centrist
00:38:14.920
columnist at the New York Times. David Brooks has a theory that part of the reason the culture is
00:38:20.220
shifting is not just this organic movement, but because the conservatives are finally doing what
00:38:25.240
they've said they're going to do for decades, and they're defunding the left. When I was a baby
00:38:30.480
pundit in my 20s, working at places like National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page,
00:38:34.860
I recall writing pieces that said defund the left. And in those days, we conservatives were upset
00:38:40.880
about something called the Legal Services Corporation, which we thought was skewed left.
00:38:45.440
And since then, to be fair, the government has contracted with, I think, two-thirds of the
00:38:51.020
nonprofits in this country to provide services. And a lot of those money goes to pretty left-wing
00:38:55.420
organizations. So conservatives had some basis in thinking that a lot of federal spending was going
00:39:00.740
toward one ideological side more than the other. And so that defund the left, which conservatives
00:39:04.840
have talked about since I was a baby pundit many centuries ago, now they're actually doing it.
00:39:12.920
Now they're actually doing it. So it's a little bit of the chicken and the egg. The culture changed
00:39:17.860
enough that we got political power, but the political power then allowed us to change the
00:39:22.360
culture. And so it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg. But one notable change, one big shift is,
00:39:28.280
we used to say we're going to defund the left, and then we didn't do it. And now we're doing it.
00:39:32.640
Now Trump is doing it. Now congressional Republicans are doing it. Why? What changed?
00:39:39.380
Two things happened that allowed that shift. One, national issues overtook local issues.
00:39:46.080
People now focus on national issues. And part of that is driven by economics, by the way. You don't
00:39:52.240
really have local newspapers anymore. The reason you don't have local newspapers is that local mom and
00:39:56.760
pop shops are the ones that advertise in the local newspapers. And local mom and pop shops are being
00:40:01.220
driven out of business by Amazon and Walmart. And so when you can't fund the local newspapers,
00:40:06.120
then everyone just focuses on national political issues. And whereas 50 years ago, your identity as
00:40:10.920
a New Yorker or an Oklahoman, or even forget about that, down to the county level or the town level
00:40:17.240
might have mattered more to you. Today, we're all just kind of, well, either American or we're part of
00:40:23.760
our ideological tribe. So rather than looking for the local news, as opposed to the news from some other
00:40:28.600
county, you're looking for the right-wing news instead of the left-wing news or the left-wing
00:40:32.540
news instead of the right-wing news. But in any case, you're talking about national issues
00:40:35.360
because that's what has a major audience. That's the first part, driven in part by economics.
00:40:41.040
And then the other shift is we stopped being libertarian. We were much more libertarian,
00:40:46.600
especially during the Tea Party era 13 years ago, 15 years ago. We talked like libertarians,
00:40:52.300
even if we didn't always act that way in the 90s and the 80s. And now we're not really libertarian.
00:40:56.960
And libertarianism is broadly considered kind of cringe. No offense to my libertarian friends
00:41:01.220
out there. But classical political philosophy is back. Religion is back. Traditionalism is back.
00:41:11.280
We're back. And so we're going to wield political power. This is really, really good stuff. And it's
00:41:17.580
actually happening. And it's hilarious because the people who are running PBS and NPR and all these
00:41:22.440
liberal stations, they're pleading. They're saying, no, no, we're not biased. What are you talking?
00:41:26.700
You're not biased. No, please give us our money. We don't even need federal money. But please don't
00:41:31.700
take it away from us. But we don't need it. We don't even take federal money, really. But please
00:41:36.540
keep giving it to us. Anyway, I want to tell you more about that because it's very hilarious the way
00:41:41.860
they flail about. But we don't have time. We don't have time. We have to do it tomorrow.
00:41:46.620
In the meantime, I mentioned to you that I'm on the road. There will be no Membrum Segmentum today.
00:41:51.720
I'm sorry. I have to travel because I'm going to the Napa conference in California to speak. It's
00:41:57.980
one of the biggest Catholic conferences anywhere, I think, basically in the world. And I'm going to
00:42:02.100
be giving a speech there and having some cigars. So in any case, I hope to see you out there if
00:42:05.960
you're going to Napa. If not, I'll see you tomorrow. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.