Ep. 406 - The Cult of Self-Love
Summary
Pop singer Lizzo twerks about self-love in front of a giant inflatable butt at the MTV Video Music Awards. Plus, Beto O Rourke gives the slave owner s answer on abortion, and a man leaves his wife for freshman congressman and socialist squad member Ilhan Omar.
Transcript
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The pop singer Lizzo twerks about self-love in front of a giant inflatable butt at the MTV Video Music Awards.
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We examine how the cult of self-love can actually lead to self-hatred.
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Then, future also-ran Beto O'Rourke gives the slave owner's answer on abortion at a campaign event at the College of Charleston.
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And a man leaves his wife for freshman congressman and socialist squad member Ilhan Omar.
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When pressed for comment, Representative Omar brushed off the allegations, stating,
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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I can't take credit for that Omar joke much as I would like to.
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That one was going around Twitter yesterday, and I first saw it on the account BoomyLeaks,
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which has the handle NotWokeyLeaks, so give him a follow.
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There's a lot to get to today, a lot of weird sex going on.
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If we have time, we'll even get to some updates in the Jeffrey Epstein story.
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But I have to begin with the Video Music Awards.
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No, you didn't, because nobody really watched it.
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But there was some seriously culturally relevant stuff going on.
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But it tells you a lot about the culture that you are in.
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A singer who I had never heard of or seen before, but now I'm like downloading all of her stuff
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Lizzo stole the show at the VMAs by twerking in front of a giant inflatable butt.
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The VMAs are very, very stupid, and they pretty much always have been,
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And especially this one, because it was the lowest rated VMAs ever.
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I mean, we have several YouTube videos that have many more views than that.
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The reason that it matters, though, there are actually two reasons why this matter.
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And it tells you something about the state of culture right now.
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The first reason for why this matters is it shows just how far our culture has fallen.
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So for those of you who aren't watching this, there's this singer, and she's a voluptuous lady.
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So this is important to the whole story of the song.
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She's a more full-bodied performer, trying to be polite about this.
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And then a bunch of other singers come out or dancers, and they go and they start dancing around.
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And then behind them is this huge, like two or three story tall, inflatable butt.
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And that's our culture, which produced Bach, which produced Chopin, Mozart, which produced Gregorian chant.
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Our culture, which built the Sistine Chapel, which sculpted David by Michelangelo,
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which sculpted the Pietà , the Duomo, the Cathedral of Chartres, the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
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That culture has now decided to reward, as its high point of the year, a giant inflatable butt and a woman rattling off gibberish
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while other women come on stage and just shake around.
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And because it used to be, it's not like we never had low culture before.
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We've had fart jokes and comedies for as long as there have been comedies, for thousands of years.
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And the low culture has told us something about the high culture.
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And the high culture has built these cathedrals and written these symphonies.
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This is the high culture, which is the low culture, which is a giant inflatable butt.
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And what you can't quite tell when they first come on, but you quickly learn,
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is that the girls in their costumes are wearing assless chaps.
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And then Lizzo continues to speak in this sort of slang.
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And then the girls twerk in the assless chaps for the nation.
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This shows the contradiction of the sexual revolution in a particularly hilarious way.
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Again, I would point you to the giant inflatable butt.
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And the contradiction here is that on the one hand, feminists tell us,
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feminists tell women in particular that dressing nicely and putting on lipstick and wearing a dress
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is horribly oppressive and it is degrading because it objectifies women,
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On the other hand, we are told that going on national television in assless chaps
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and twerking in front of a giant inflatable butt is empowering because it gives women sexual agency.
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Some of us knew that feminism was a lie from the very beginning.
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We were told that gender studies, for instance, was an important step in empowering women.
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Now we're seeing that gender studies is erasing the whole category of women altogether through gender ideology.
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They are so good at pointing out all the flaws and weaknesses and bad aspects of culture.
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Everything that was wrong with the way that women behaved and were treated in the 1950s and 60s,
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But the left's trick is that we never hold them to account for proposing an alternative.
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They say it's terrible that women are staying at home and raising children.
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It's terrible that they wear dresses and wear lipstick and do their hair.
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Does anybody seriously believe that these women dancing on stage are respected more than a 1960s housewife?
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Does anybody really believe that these women, that women generally are made better off today by casual sex
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and a culture demands that they get a job and a culture that discourages marriage
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and a culture that discourages men from taking responsibility for their actions?
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But then we get to the second reason that Lizzo's twerky VMA performance really matters for the culture.
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So on the one hand, you see how the culture has just been totally destroyed and degraded.
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But the more urgent reason, I mean, look, we could complain about the culture decaying all day.
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The more urgent reason why this VMA performance matters is because Lizzo is singing about self-love.
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Self-help books are like the dominant category of books, and they have been for decades.
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On the left and on the right and in the center and in people that are not political at all.
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It's all about self-help, self-love, self-self-self.
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It's certainly the biggest trend in social justice circles.
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If you read any left-wing website, you'll see that there are all of these pushes toward self-love.
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Right before she walks up and gives this speech, she says, I got a bottle of tequila.
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And she drinks, I mean, I assume it's water, but she ostensibly drinks an entire bottle of tequila, which is loving herself.
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And then she gets up and talks about loving yourself.
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And maybe it was accidental or maybe she's just a good artist and she understands the symmetry there.
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Self-love is like drinking yourself into a stupor.
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It makes you feel good for a little bit and ultimately it leaves you with a bad hangover.
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To quote Homer Simpson, alcohol is the source of and the solution to all of life's problems.
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She's talking to a room full of extraordinarily privileged and wealthy people.
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Even the ones who aren't celebrities have just gotten to go there.
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They've flown out to wherever the MTV Video Music Awards are.
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They've bought an expensive ticket and they're dancing around with a ton of celebrities.
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And just all they're doing is indulging their own pleasures and their own desires.
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It shouldn't be hard to feel good in the society.
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And what aspect of the society is telling you not to love yourself?
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We have the most indulgent society probably in the history of the world.
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At our most rigorous universities, we've taken away academic rigor.
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There are kids at elite universities in this country who are given little private rooms
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with crayons and puppy dogs if their candidate doesn't win an election that they want them to.
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Well, really, if their leftist candidate doesn't win the election.
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I don't think conservatives get the safe spaces.
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The whole moral scheme of the culture is if it feels good, do it.
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And I think, I don't know if you've ever heard of Lizzo.
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And so coming into this without any frame of reference, I think gives you a certain clarity
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because you think, oh my gosh, what has been going on?
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Well, I've been looking away from the Video Music Awards.
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The premise of self-love is you deserve everything you want.
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Not only do you not deserve to feel good as hell,
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People feel good as hell like some of the time.
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You know, if you've got to go out there and say,
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It was one of, you know, I just kind of default to C.S. Lewis,
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but it was one of those types of guys said that,
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doesn't have to talk about how intelligent he is to the stupid guy.
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It's always the stupid guy talking about how intelligent he is
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I'm really physically attractive to the ugly person,
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I'm really physically attractive to the good-looking person
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Like there is almost no exception to this rule.
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If you are constantly prattling on about self-love,
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You're just trying to convince other people that you do
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I need to think about how I'm entitled to more things.
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the people who talk about self-love all the time
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You think that selfishness and self-centeredness
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and you're probably not going to be responsible