The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 The data are in. The science is settled. America is getting super duper gay.

00:00:07.420 I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:17.400 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from yesterday is from Matt,

00:00:21.460 who says that for breakfast, Joe Biden loves muffins because muffins spelled backwards is

00:00:27.080 sniff him. Got him. That is true. Joe Biden does love smelling people's hair. There is a Gallup

00:00:35.680 poll out that shows, you know, what great respect I have for science and data. A Gallup poll comes

00:00:41.260 out and shows that America is getting extremely gay. Specifically, that's not specific enough.

00:00:48.800 America is identifying much more as LGBT. And, you know, this is a little complicated because

00:00:58.640 the L and the G presuppose that there are biological sexes and, you know, men are men and women are

00:01:05.340 women and gay guys are men who are attracted to men and lesbians are women who are attracted to

00:01:09.940 women. But then the T comes in and confounds all of that because the T presupposes that there's not

00:01:15.820 really any such thing as men or women and women can become men and men can become women. And you're

00:01:21.300 not really born this way. You know, everything's kind of fluid and changing all the time. So it's

00:01:25.780 very, very confused. But the number of Americans who identify with any of those letters increasing

00:01:31.160 pretty dramatically. The traditional percentage of Americans who identify this way, it's about 2%,

00:01:38.860 maybe, maybe goes up to 3%. By 2017, that number rose to 4.5%. So it rose pretty significantly.

00:01:48.420 And then in just the last four years, that number has risen again very significantly to 5.6%.

00:01:54.360 So it's getting quicker and quicker. But the, the more curious number is when you drill down into the

00:02:02.120 generations because for Americans born before 1965, the number of LGBT identifying Americans is around

00:02:11.640 2%, a little bit less than 2%. When you get to millennials, that number jumps to about 9.1%.

00:02:21.160 That is a pretty, pretty high. Then when you get to Gen Z, that number jumps extremely high. That jumps to

00:02:31.320 15.9% of Americans. I have to believe that there is some biological basis for sexual desire.

00:02:42.600 You know, there's this kind of debate, are you born this way? Or does culture do it? You know,

00:02:47.700 I don't think that you just sort of freely choose your sexual desires. So I don't think, for instance,

00:02:53.740 that Liberace was ever going to end up married to a woman. I just, that just does not seem

00:02:59.380 very likely to me. However, I don't think that 16% of Zoomers just so happen to be born this way,

00:03:10.060 right? With, with all these sort of ever expanding alphabet identities. I don't, if the numbers were

00:03:16.840 increasing that dramatically, I, I would have to assume there's something in the water.

00:03:22.740 However, if the numbers were, if it was purely a biological thing, 100% and the numbers were

00:03:28.740 increasing that way, Alex Jones would have to be right, right? They're, they're turning the fricking

00:03:32.920 Zoomers gay, right? That would, or not, yeah, I guess more T or G or B or what, you know, it kind of

00:03:40.100 gets very complicated, which is kind of my point. I think human sexuality is just a very complicated

00:03:43.780 thing. And there are all these different factors in here, but surely, surely politics and culture

00:03:50.500 plays some role in this as well. You should check out Harry's razors. Harry's delivers a close,

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00:05:07.280 redeem your offer. Go check out Harry's razors. I did a book club episode not that long ago

00:05:13.760 with Spencer Clavin and we were discussing Plato's symposium. And Plato's symposium is very strange

00:05:19.100 for modern readers to read because it's basically a big gay dinner party. And so a lot of modern sort

00:05:24.920 of conservatives or Christians will read this and say, wait a second, what's going on here? And

00:05:28.260 there's a huge cultural factor at play in these sorts of behaviors. The reason this poll I think

00:05:35.480 matters is because right now, if cultural and political factors have some role here,

00:05:41.580 the cultural and political factors are all pushing in one direction, namely away from the sort of

00:05:48.020 traditional understanding of these sexual questions toward a much more radical one. For instance, we

00:05:53.420 talked about my friend Ryan T. Anderson and his extremely hilariously titled book, When Harry Became

00:05:59.960 Sally. Now that's kicked off of Amazon. Amazon used to remove products that were

00:06:05.360 politically incorrect, but they had this exception for books. They were not going to remove books.

00:06:10.820 So you can buy books by Hitler on Amazon, right? You know, you can, you can buy any sort of book that

00:06:15.840 you find distasteful and you can buy books that express mainstream conservative opinions like men

00:06:21.560 cannot become women. They sort of under the radar got rid of this exception the other day.

00:06:27.560 So now all of a sudden, Ryan Anderson's book, which is very academic work on the rise of

00:06:32.900 transgenderism as an ideology. That book is gone now. You're not allowed to say that.

00:06:39.560 Amazon private company, right? So this is in the field of culture, but they've got a lot of political

00:06:44.460 power too. They are now limiting the scope of, of reasonable and acceptable thought on these sexual

00:06:53.500 questions and specifically on the gender question. Because I think most of the way the culture and

00:07:00.720 politics are pushing in recent years is pushing in the direction of the T and the direction of gender

00:07:05.920 ideology. This is now being considered hate speech. Can you imagine what this means for

00:07:13.400 other sorts of conservative books that in any way touch on these sorts of questions? My book coming

00:07:17.540 up, Speechless. This book is going to be out in June, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.

00:07:23.400 No doubt it's going to fall afoul of the Amazon policy. If Ryan Anderson's book is going to fall

00:07:27.880 avowal of it. Certainly mine is too, and probably many others as well. Beyond just that kind of cultural

00:07:32.580 business realm, the government is pushing in this direction. There is a, a bill before the California

00:07:39.260 State Assembly, one of the most insane legislative bodies in the country that is going to require

00:07:46.480 department store chains to make their children's section gender neutral. They want this to be in effect

00:07:54.260 by 2023. This is called a California bill 2826 from Assemblyman Evan Lowe. You'll be shocked to find out

00:08:04.220 that this person is a Democrat. This would apply to stores with 500 or more employees. So if you go

00:08:09.620 into Target or something, right, and you say, oh, I want to buy a little, a little outfit for Johnny.

00:08:15.380 What do you do? You go in, you go to the children's section, then you go to the boys section.

00:08:18.640 What this bill would say is, no, you're, you're not allowed to have a boys sections. It's basically

00:08:22.960 just going to make it a lot more time consuming to pick out outfits and toys for your children

00:08:28.480 because they're not, you're not going to be allowed to label anything. Why? Because the premise here

00:08:33.420 is there's really no such thing as little boys and little girls. Little boys and little girls are

00:08:36.960 not different. Underscores why the gender ideology is so at odds with kind of traditional

00:08:43.080 homosexual activism because the homosexual premise is there's a, actually there's a huge difference

00:08:49.920 between boys and girls and don't make a boy who's attracted to a boy go date a girl. The gender stuff

00:08:55.800 gets rid of all of that, but this is being pushed at the governmental level. Then in this kind of

00:09:02.440 middle ground at a, at a school in Minnesota, that's not quite the government, but it sort of is the

00:09:07.920 government and it's public and it's education is coercive. There's a middle school teacher

00:09:12.920 who is teaching children who are 11 to 13 years old, who is, who is basing at least one of his lesson

00:09:20.360 plans around praising a transvestite prostitute. Take a, now that we have zoom school, now that people

00:09:28.280 aren't really going into classrooms, you can watch some of these lessons. Take a listen to

00:09:32.120 Mr. Perucco's person of the day. So I apologize for the very long wait for our suggester,

00:09:39.120 but Perucco's person of the day is Marsha P. Johnson. So if you don't know much about Marsha

00:09:48.240 P. Johnson, they were known as a fierce advocate for gay rights and as an AIDS activist and a

00:09:53.940 self-identified drag queen. In addition to all of their advocacy, Marsha was also well known for their

00:10:00.460 president, for their presence at the Stonewall uprising and the subsequent demonstrations

00:10:05.220 throughout Greenwich Village that protested the police raids that had been taking place at local

00:10:09.700 gay gathering places. Johnson's work paved the way for a louder and more prominent voice in the

00:10:15.520 injustices that were being done in and to the gay community. The interesting part here is that Johnson

00:10:20.680 himself was actually discriminated against by the community, uh, for being a drag queen. In 1973, the

00:10:27.940 committee in charge of a pride parade said that they were not going to allow a drag queen at the

00:10:32.700 march because they felt that they were giving the community a bad name. That's actually a very

00:10:37.560 telling aspect. I mean, first of all, this lesson plan is obviously not suitable for 11 year olds.

00:10:42.940 You should not, you know, be paying tax money and sending your kids to schools so that your 11 year

00:10:47.880 old can hear hagiographies of transvestite prostitutes. That's crazy. But what he says there at the end is he

00:10:55.280 says, you know, actually, uh, the gay community in the seventies didn't, didn't really like this guy

00:10:59.580 because, uh, they thought it was, it was like kind of just too weird. It was too out there, uh, for the

00:11:05.340 kind of activism they were doing. And you see the same, this same kind of issue today. I mean, all of us

00:11:12.440 have, uh, gay friends, no gay people. And, uh, I have yet to encounter one of them who say, yeah, this,

00:11:18.220 this whole transgender movement where you're, uh, forcing kids to learn this crazy ideology and question

00:11:24.240 their sex and sometimes go on puberty blockers. That's great. Oh yeah, man. I love that. That's

00:11:29.240 terrific. No, of course. And that there was that tension going back to the seventies, but right now

00:11:33.280 the left, the mainstream left schools, corporations, the government is pushing this kind of ideology on

00:11:42.140 children. And it actually goes up all the way to the federal level. Even moderate Joe Biden in this

00:11:49.460 return to normalcy sort of administration is appointing people to very high level positions

00:11:55.720 in the department of health and human services who do not just embrace this gender ideology

00:12:02.020 themselves. Do not just, uh, you know, take this premise. And by the way, when you're in a position

00:12:08.960 of power and you're embracing these kinds of premises, it is inevitable, at least in this day and age,

00:12:14.620 that you're going to force those premises onto your work and on, onto society. But there are

00:12:21.020 people in the administration who are supporting this ideology for children, puberty blockers for

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00:13:44.100 appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services for Joe Biden is a fellow by the name of

00:13:51.020 Dr. Rachel Levine. Dr. Rachel Levine is named Rachel because he identifies as a woman. A man who

00:14:01.020 believes himself to be a woman is in a leadership role at the Department of Health and Human Services.

00:14:08.800 Just going to leave that there. That's actually, I don't want to speak that broadly today. I want to

00:14:15.060 get into a very specific aspect of what Assistant Secretary of HHS, Rachel Levine believes.

00:14:21.780 Rachel Levine does not just want to force gender ideology on our sort of national self-understanding.

00:14:33.480 Rachel Levine also supports puberty blockers for children, fundamentally screwing with children's

00:14:42.980 biochemistry because Johnny decides to pick up a Barbie doll or Jane decides to play with a toy truck.

00:14:52.000 In January of 2020, so not that long ago, Rachel Levine tweeted out, quote,

00:14:57.640 new study has found that transgender youth with access to a puberty blocker have a decline in chances

00:15:02.760 of suicide plus mental health problems now and in the future. By the way, these studies are few and

00:15:08.620 far between and their methodologies are very questionable. So one ought to be cautious with

00:15:13.940 these sorts of new studies that just conveniently happen to back up people's deeply held political

00:15:19.180 views. This study is important because it's the first to show the specific association. There you

00:15:23.640 have it. It's the first. Obviously, you've got to look into this more deeply, but the argument here

00:15:28.240 is people who suffer from gender confusion and sexual confusion are depressed and anxious and in the

00:15:36.240 case of transgenderism can be suicidal. And therefore, what we need to do as a society is embrace ideas,

00:15:45.880 even if those ideas are manifestly false, like the idea that men can become women, in order to reduce

00:15:50.440 this rate of suicidality. And we even, what's so important is we need to push this on kids. We talked

00:15:58.680 yesterday about how the reason that the left focuses on education is because education shapes the

00:16:06.240 way we view the world. And when we're young, we are much more susceptible to things. That's why we have

00:16:11.040 a rating system for movies and TV shows. It's because if an adult is exposed to certain material, it's

00:16:17.960 going to be much less influential on their thought one way or the other than if a little kid is exposed to

00:16:23.740 certain material. It's why we have rules around, or we used to have rules around pornography for children that are

00:16:31.180 different than for adults. If you, if you wanted to go buy a Playboy down the street, you'd have to show

00:16:35.220 an ID, right? Kids don't get to do that, but adults, because you're a little more formed, the ideas

00:16:40.060 theoretically, you can handle it. This is the argument behind age of consent laws. The reason that it's

00:16:48.040 creepy when an old guy dates a young teenager is because the young teenager or younger, they're not really

00:16:55.620 free to consent. Because the, the idea here is that through education, specifically through liberal

00:17:01.940 education, right? Education to make sense of your liberty, you tame your base passions, you tame your

00:17:06.800 appetites, you develop your higher, higher faculties, you develop your will, and then you can exercise your

00:17:13.040 freedom. Right now, the left in pursuit of gender ideology, and really they're just using gender ideology as a way to

00:17:21.320 get more power, is throwing age of consent laws out the window. If it suits their ideology, they're willing

00:17:28.000 to pump kids full of a bunch of chemicals and stop them from going through puberty. What happened to age

00:17:32.540 of consent? It's a really bizarre, ironic phenomenon too, because we, we talked about the Marilyn Manson

00:17:39.000 sex scandal a few weeks ago, how this actress, Evan Rachel Wood, is accusing Marilyn Manson of abuse. And what's

00:17:45.640 interesting about the story is that Evan Rachel Wood consented to this relationship. I think she was

00:17:50.740 engaged Marilyn Manson for a long time. She consented to all the weird, depraved sexual acts that he was

00:17:56.100 performing on her, I think, maybe with some exception, but it seems as though consent was a big part of

00:18:01.380 this. And yet what she says is, I couldn't really give consent. Even though I know I, I consented, you

00:18:08.180 know, we were in this relationship, but I wasn't really giving consent because he groomed me when I was 18

00:18:13.840 years old and he was older. He manipulated me. He brainwashed me. I wasn't really in, in control of

00:18:22.100 my liberty. I couldn't really make a free choice. So at the same time that the left is questioning

00:18:28.460 the ability of certain adults to give consent, they are now embracing the ability of three-year-olds to

00:18:36.220 give consent or 10-year-olds to give consent to, to stop going through puberty, make life-altering

00:18:42.040 decisions. That doesn't make any sense, except in the raw pursuit of power. What's funny is the kind

00:18:50.260 of Evan Rachel Wood and Marilyn Manson of it all gets back to a much more conservative understanding

00:18:54.960 of liberty, which is that liberty isn't the freedom to do whatever you want, pursue whatever desire you

00:19:00.120 have. That true liberty is the right to do what you ought to do. That's what Lord Acton thought.

00:19:06.660 That's what our founding fathers thought. It's what old uncle Aristotle thought. It's what Christ

00:19:10.220 teaches in the gospels, but somehow we've just completely lost our minds on this sort of thing.

00:19:15.500 So you've got the culture pushing in one direction. And the reason that the left focuses on sex

00:19:22.300 is because sex is very important. The left often accuses the right of being obsessed with sex

00:19:28.800 and the, and more broadly speaking, the culture wars. But you'll notice in all of these sort of

00:19:34.940 sexual specifically, but cultural more broadly debates, it's never the right that is aggressing,

00:19:42.220 right? It's never, it's always the left that's pushing this crazy stuff.

00:19:46.860 So what, what the left does is they go in and they say, Hey, we're going to pump your kids full

00:19:51.240 of puberty blockers because we think that boys can become girls. And then conservatives will say,

00:19:56.440 Whoa, man, that's weird. No, no, don't do that. And they'll say, why are you so obsessed with sex?

00:20:00.260 Stop. Come on, just stop obsessing about that. It's not, it's, it's totally normal. Don't,

00:20:06.920 don't be weird. We're just going to go pump your kids full of puberty blockers. Don't be,

00:20:09.960 but don't be so obsessive and weird about that. We say, ah, I think you're the one that's pushing

00:20:14.380 a cultural agenda. And you see this clearly in the statistics here. And I'm sort of half joking

00:20:21.300 when I say America is getting super duper gay. What I actually suspect is that maybe for some people

00:20:26.660 who some people probably, you know, they, they know their sexual desires from pretty young age.

00:20:32.460 And these things are, have maybe more of a biological basis for some people, it's more of

00:20:37.940 a margin call and, you know, maybe they're confused and they have lots of different desires. Human

00:20:41.900 sexuality is complicated. And then for some people, I suspect they're just identifying this way

00:20:47.360 because there is social cache to it in the same way that our culture now, uh, discourages people from

00:20:55.140 being white, right? You have HR trainings in corporate America that say be less white.

00:20:59.640 So what do you get? You get white people pretending to be black. You get people like Rachel Dolezal.

00:21:04.820 You get people like that NYU professor. You get people, all sorts of people who are pretending to be

00:21:11.380 different races. It seems like these stories crop up every couple of months in the same way.

00:21:16.160 I suspect you're getting people who have basically ordinary sexual desires who are now saying,

00:21:20.660 no, I'm other, I'm trans, I'm gender non-conforming. I'm a, uh, homosexual. That's a new one. That's

00:21:29.460 where you don't put, I think it stands for postmodern and it means you just don't want people to know

00:21:33.480 your sexual views. So it means like you're a straight guy, but you, you want to sound like

00:21:37.620 really cool. There's one I read called NUTOIS. This is in the list of the hundred genders. NUTOIS,

00:21:43.640 I believe is when you are sexually confused, but also French. So you just become NUTOIS.

00:21:49.880 Moi, je suis NUTOIS. Je ne sais pas. Uh, you get people who are identifying that way because it

00:21:56.540 carries social currency and the way that being able to claim membership in any aggrieved minority

00:22:03.360 confers social currency today. So too, that can be true in the realm of race. That can be true in

00:22:09.920 the realm of sex. And that's obviously true in the realm of sexual desire as well. So as you've

00:22:15.580 got the culture, all pushing in this direction, this does have real world consequences. It has

00:22:22.680 real world consequences in, for instance, the discouragement of the forming of families.

00:22:29.700 And when I say family, I don't mean the sense that we, you know, we can all have different kinds

00:22:33.140 of families that that's, I mean, I mean specifically families that will have children. That is declining a

00:22:39.080 lot. Uh, I think some sort of squishy conservatives were celebrating a story that came out a while

00:22:44.700 ago that divorce rates are hitting all time lows. Well, that's great, but you got to read,

00:22:49.620 read the second part of the story, which is that marriage rates are hitting all time lows too.

00:22:54.100 And what happens when people don't get married, birth rates are hitting lower and lower numbers.

00:23:00.600 The United States right now is a dying country in the sense that we are not replacing ourselves.

00:23:06.220 Our birth rate is below replacement. Is it possible that cultural and political factors

00:23:13.660 have a role in this as well? Is it possible that on the cultural front, this idea that you are

00:23:20.200 discouraged from forming a family, discouraged from forming sort of the traditional nuclear model,

00:23:26.220 does that play a role in it? Does the economic front play a role in it? The idea that you're

00:23:31.400 encouraged to just delay having kids, delay getting married, pursue your career, work, work, work.

00:23:35.660 Everyone in the household needs to go work. Uh, kind of the, I guess I'm sounding a little left

00:23:40.740 wing here because this is in a way, a critique of modern capitalism, but I suspect that too is

00:23:47.200 discouraging families and specifically discouraging people from having babies. And now you've got some

00:23:52.760 Republicans, some very conservative populist Republicans, and even some squishes like Mitt Romney

00:23:57.700 pushing back and saying, wait a second, if our public policy is ordered toward not having kids and not

00:24:02.600 having families, maybe we should just rework our public policy to encourage those sorts of things.

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00:25:25.840 what number? 64,000. Also, definitely check out the Ben Shapiro show today where Ben will be

00:25:32.360 dissecting the cancel culture war and the wars over canceling and over canceling cancel culture and

00:25:39.220 over canceling the people who want to cancel cancel culture. Also, there's a ton of narratives going on

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00:26:19.600 The collapse of families is a social problem and a political problem and an economic problem.

00:26:41.160 It is, the family is the bedrock political institution. If that collapses as it has collapsed,

00:26:51.040 look at marriage rates, look at birth rates, that poses an existential, truly an existential threat

00:26:58.500 to the country. A lot of our other hot controversial political issues come from that because when you

00:27:04.720 have a country that's below replacement, when you have a dying country, people who want to keep the

00:27:09.520 economy going are going to encourage mass migration, which is what you're seeing. People are going to,

00:27:16.520 obviously mass migration involves lots of questions of assimilation, what the character of the country

00:27:20.660 is, who Americans are, what does it mean? If they sort of native born Americans don't want to have

00:27:26.540 kids, then other people are going to come in. How do you assimilate those people? Lots and lots of

00:27:30.980 questions. Mitt Romney, can't believe I've got to say a nice thing about Mitt Romney, but I do.

00:27:35.640 You know, I try to play fair. I, I've said many tough things about Mitt Romney for at least a decade

00:27:41.440 now, but he is seeing a problem. Romney and Tom Cotton are proposing a minimum wage plan. This follows

00:27:51.940 after Mitt Romney proposed a plan of direct payments to families who have children. Now,

00:27:59.260 I don't know that I love Romney's proposal on the direct payments to families, but I like the idea

00:28:05.900 of it. I like the idea that our public policy is not just neutral. Our public policy for a long time

00:28:11.020 has been discouraging family formation, has been discouraging people from having kids. And so now

00:28:18.020 we shouldn't just throw our hands up in the air. We should try to fix that policy. We should try to

00:28:23.440 govern, use the political power that people give us to try to turn that back a little bit more in the

00:28:28.240 other direction. So Romney has that plan and he's also pushing this idea of a $10 minimum wage. Now,

00:28:35.620 generally speaking, at least the more libertarian minded people among the conservative movement

00:28:40.640 hate the idea of minimum wage and minimum wage is a dangerous thing because there are a lot of

00:28:45.160 problems that can result from that. But I actually think this proposal from Romney and Cotton is a

00:28:49.600 pretty good one, which is that right now the left is pushing for a $15 minimum wage. It's almost

00:28:57.420 certainly going to happen. So how can conservatives mitigate this and also make it work for us? Well,

00:29:05.680 $15, maybe it's a little high. Maybe that's too radical a way to increase the minimum wage. So what

00:29:10.540 if we did it a little more gradually, a little more conservatively, you brought it to $10

00:29:13.640 per hour. You also had a carve out for the youth minimum wage. So the youth minimum wage would increase

00:29:21.620 more, more gradually for $25 an hour to $6 per hour. So you're not having young people totally booted out

00:29:27.900 of the labor market in favor of, you know, if everyone's going to get $15 an hour, you're going

00:29:32.800 to go for the person who is more qualified, who's older, who has more experience. This would also have

00:29:40.360 some carve outs for businesses with fewer than 20 employees. But then here's the key.

00:29:44.480 The legislation would require e-verify. It would, it would, so you, so Democrats are pushing this $15

00:29:55.460 minimum wage. Republicans are saying, gosh, there's no way we're going to totally avoid this. But what

00:29:59.760 if we kind of make the minimum wage part of it work a little more for us and then use this minimum

00:30:05.400 wage issue to get e-verify. And e-verify is a way to discourage employers from using illegal

00:30:12.320 foreign labor. That would be very good for families. That would be very good for American

00:30:19.520 workers. One of the reasons, I mean, there are economic pressures that have discouraged people

00:30:23.780 from family formation and from having kids. Namely, you used to be able to support a family on the

00:30:29.180 wages of one American worker. The other, the other spouse would stay home. Now that's really very

00:30:37.640 difficult. And part of that is because a lot of, especially lower wage workers are competing with

00:30:42.460 this flood of, of cheap foreign labor. This is something that conservatives have been talking

00:30:47.060 about a long time, but even old school leftists like Bernie Sanders have been talking about.

00:30:51.540 It was been saying, you know, unlimited immigration is really good for zillionaires who want to pay low

00:30:57.700 wages, but it's really bad for the American worker. The people pushing it, it's this weird kind of

00:31:04.220 dynamic of left-wingers in corporate America and even the sort of libertarian right-wingers like

00:31:08.700 the Koch brothers, for instance, famously very in favor of much more immigration. So I think this is

00:31:16.100 a decent enough plan. I like the big win of e-verify. I can't, I also can't believe I have to say another

00:31:22.020 nice thing about Mitt Romney today. There's a lot of debate over the future of the Republican party and

00:31:27.980 Trump's role in the Republican party. You've got people like Liz Cheney, who's in house leadership,

00:31:33.880 who hates Trump. We'll get to her in a second. Romney also obviously hates Trump. He was a true

00:31:39.160 never Trumper. He didn't vote for Trump either time. He doesn't like the guy at all, but, but Romney

00:31:44.360 was asked about 2024. Hey, you know, Mitt, do you have any thoughts about 2024? Do you think Trump

00:31:50.220 will run? And Romney calling it like he sees it. He says, yeah, if Trump does run, he's going to win

00:31:57.420 in a landslide. Will President Trump continue to play a role in my party? I'm sure he will. He has by far

00:32:03.260 the largest voice and a big impact in my party. I don't know about his family members, whether they

00:32:07.760 intend to do that, but, but I expect he will continue playing a role. I don't know if he'll

00:32:11.740 run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I'm pretty sure he will win the nomination. You think he would

00:32:18.760 win the nomination? Oh, I think he'd win the nomination if he runs. I mean, a lot can happen

00:32:22.880 between now and 2024. So, and I'm not great at predicting. I'm a, I subscribe to Yogi Berra's

00:32:28.640 philosophy in that regard. He said, I don't like, I don't like predicting, particularly if the future

00:32:33.380 is involved. So I, I, I don't really know what'll happen there, but I, I look at the polls and the

00:32:39.300 polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President

00:32:45.020 Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide. Wins in a landslide. So what Mitt Romney

00:32:51.680 is saying here, and he actually, he goes on to say this pretty explicitly. What he's saying here is

00:32:57.700 Trump is the leader of the Republican party because Mitt then goes on later in the interview and he

00:33:03.040 says, you know, look, I represent a very small portion of the Republican party. Uh, and Trump

00:33:09.600 represents the Republican party. That's why he would win the nomination in a landslide.

00:33:15.060 So Romney, it's very, actually a very good interview because he also touches on part of

00:33:22.440 the Trump phenomenon, which is this idea of populism. And few people would accuse Mitt Romney

00:33:27.940 of being a populist, except if you look at some of the policies proposing these days, maybe there's

00:33:35.720 an argument that you could be made, but Mitt Romney makes a simple point. It's, it's a, a plain truth,

00:33:41.220 a self-evident truth that populism is popular. Populism, uh, is successful, uh, because it's

00:33:49.280 popular, uh, which is part of its name. Uh, and populism hasn't disappeared where it tends to get

00:33:54.980 installed, whether Italy or Argentina or Peru. And, and, uh, uh, and so there's a populist movement

00:34:01.600 on the right in our country and on the left. And those movements, I don't believe are going to be

00:34:06.520 going away anytime soon. Although I think over time, uh, that policies that, that endure and that

00:34:13.900 really help the American family will be more successful. So I remain, if you will, a more

00:34:18.100 traditional conservative than, than some of the populist, uh, rhetoric within my party.

00:34:23.920 Uh, Mitt Romney is such a tragic figure. Mitt Romney, it's too bad because he's saying a lot of smart

00:34:29.400 things in here and he's actually doing a lot of smart things right now, but he just doesn't

00:34:33.520 doesn't quite get it. He doesn't, I don't know. I think for a lot of people, Trump sort of broke

00:34:37.960 them. And I think he doesn't, he actually doesn't understand what is meant by populism and his role

00:34:43.600 in all of that. I sort of think it's just because Romney's been running for president for decades at

00:34:49.420 this point. He's just, it's kind of skewed his perception. You remember when, when Romney was

00:34:53.460 running for the Senate against Ted Kennedy, he said, uh, he basically ran away from the legacy of

00:34:59.780 Reagan. He ran away from being called a conservative. He said, I wasn't a conservative during the

00:35:03.420 time of Reagan Bush. I was an independent during the time of Reagan Bush. I'm, I'm not that

00:35:07.160 conservative. I think he ran, he was sort of pro abortion, right? When he, when he ran for Senate

00:35:11.020 and then he pretends when he runs for president, he says, I'm severely conservative. And now he says,

00:35:14.700 I'm a traditional conservative. Well, all these terms are kind of useless. I want to, I want to

00:35:20.220 bring them all down to earth. What Romney is saying on his, by, by intimating that we should have a

00:35:28.160 pro family sort of policy. That's a populist idea. Whatever populism you want to say is motivating

00:35:36.340 Trump. I think a lot of it has to do with overthrowing the old ossified conservative

00:35:44.760 political order of the last 20 years and saying, Hey, wait a minute. Why are we just serving these

00:35:49.800 zillionaires who hate our guts? Why are we shilling for hedge fund managers in wall street? The majority of

00:35:56.180 whom don't like us at all. Why are we supporting trade deals that are bad for the American worker?

00:36:01.140 Why are we the kind of blue collar base of the Republican party doing these sorts of things

00:36:05.960 that are really killing us and breaking up our families and breaking up our society and breaking

00:36:11.340 up our American way of life? Let's not do that. Let's break these old sort of silly ideological

00:36:17.580 maxims that I don't think made very much sense even when they were more popular. And let's focus on

00:36:23.840 the family, the worker, the nation, American sovereignty, getting out of this sort of globalist

00:36:32.760 regime that is not really serving most Americans and certainly not conserving our way of life.

00:36:40.600 Romney's kind of saying the same thing, saying, yeah, we need a very active policy to support families.

00:36:46.240 Yeah, we should maybe raise the minimum wage, but only in a way that will curb immigration.

00:36:51.800 These are very populist things. If any other politician were proposing what Romney is proposing

00:36:57.340 right now, we would say, oh yeah, this is someone part of the MAGA movement, you know,

00:37:01.500 part of the Trump movement. But because it's Romney and because Romney is often very distasteful

00:37:05.840 in the way he presents things, we don't like it very much. But I wish Romney would embrace

00:37:11.620 his inner populist. I think he actually would be much more successful in some of the wisest stuff

00:37:17.080 he's done in his whole career. All right, I've said too many nice things about generally squishy

00:37:21.100 Republicans, so I got to get back to knocking the squishes. This debate that Romney is talking about

00:37:26.280 where he says, you know, yeah, I like these kind of populist ideas, but I hate Trump. I would never

00:37:30.720 vote for him. The question is, what is Trump's role in the future of the Republican Party? And you saw it

00:37:36.240 split almost perfectly yesterday on C-SPAN, where you had the Republican minority leader,

00:37:42.320 Kevin McCarthy, answered a question about Trump's role in the party in a pro-Trump way. And then Liz

00:37:50.000 Cheney, this lady who is sort of in leadership, you know, it's a minor leadership role, but she is,

00:37:55.840 she totally smacks Trump down. Do you believe President Trump should be speaking,

00:38:01.400 or former President Trump should be speaking at CPAC this weekend? Yes, he should.

00:38:04.440 Congressman Cheney? That's up to CPAC. I've been clear in my views about President Trump and the

00:38:12.240 extent to which following January 6th, I don't believe that he should be playing a role in the

00:38:19.180 future of the party or the country. On that high note? Kevin McCarthy, pretty funny here. And what's

00:38:28.640 amazing is after, you can see the cringe sort of creeping on him as Liz Cheney answers. She goes,

00:38:35.080 yeah, I hate Trump. You shouldn't have any role in the party, any role in the country. I'm Liz Cheney

00:38:38.600 and I approve this message. And McCarthy is just thinking, ugh. And then once she finishes and he

00:38:43.200 makes his little joke, they walk in opposite directions. McCarthy goes one way, Cheney goes the

00:38:49.360 other. My question listening to this is, why do Republicans tolerate this woman?

00:38:59.020 Why on earth is Liz Cheney in leadership? Well, there's a practical reason. She's in,

00:39:04.880 or a technical reason rather. She's in leadership. There was a vote on her leadership. She's in

00:39:09.800 leadership because they made it a secret ballot. If this had been a public ballot, she would not be

00:39:14.480 in leadership because everybody knows that the Republican base, the Republican voters do not

00:39:18.980 think this woman represents them because this woman doesn't represent them. Even Mitt Romney's

00:39:24.460 willing to admit that. He says, yeah, I represent a small portion of the Republican party and Donald

00:39:29.380 Trump is the leader of the Republican party is effectively what he's saying. So I'm not saying

00:39:34.420 kick Liz Cheney out of the house, though probably she should be primaried and probably she would lose.

00:39:39.380 I'm not saying kick Mitt Romney out of the Senate. I'm actually kind of more on Mitt's side here

00:39:43.660 where Mitt's saying, yeah, I represent the small portion, but Trump's the leader. Okay. If he,

00:39:47.620 if Trump is the guy who represents the Republican party, why on earth is Liz Cheney in the leadership?

00:39:55.140 What is the point of it? I'm saying, yeah, fine to disagree. Big tent party. I'm, I'm cool with

00:40:00.460 that. I have no, I really have no problem with that. But in leadership, this woman does not represent

00:40:06.880 the party. Now, shockingly, I've got to get back to some other never Trumpers and kind of squishy

00:40:14.860 Republicans saying some good things. Never say on this show that I am unfair or I'm only carrying

00:40:23.380 water for certain politicians or others. I, uh, I'm willing to compliment the kind of never Trumpers

00:40:30.140 in the squishes when they, when they do and say good things because I don't, I actually don't want

00:40:34.860 to cast them into outer darkness all the time. Sometimes I do. I actually want to bring them

00:40:39.780 over to our way of thinking. If, if Mitt Romney would just actually listen to the very things that

00:40:45.360 he is saying and get over his deep seated hatred of Donald Trump, who's a polarizing figure we all

00:40:50.440 grant. And if Mitt Romney could come on over more to the conservative side of things, I think that

00:40:55.460 would be great. He's obviously an intelligent guy. He's an articulate guy. He's a, he's a good

00:41:01.620 looking guy, right? And just as a retail politics matter, he looks good. If he could come over to

00:41:05.960 our way of thinking, thinking, great, I welcome him in. This is true of a number of the other kind

00:41:10.300 of squishier Republicans who've, who've really gone squishy in the age of Trump. Guys like, uh,

00:41:15.960 Ben Sasse, for instance, who I thought yesterday had a terrific performance grilling Joe Biden's

00:41:24.160 nominee for the department of health and human services, not the fellow who thinks he's a lady,

00:41:29.640 the assistant secretary, but the actual, uh, nominee for secretary of HHS, the Sarah.

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00:42:13.160 American meat delivered. Ben Sasse, who has invoked the ire of many conservatives in recent

00:42:20.740 weeks and months because he's, he was a never Trumper and he often attacks members of his own party and he

00:42:28.280 was censured by his own state Republican party. Sasse had a great performance yesterday going after

00:42:36.100 Xavier Becerra. Becerra was the former attorney general of California and a real, real radical.

00:42:46.220 Becerra went after nuns, tried just like the Obama Biden administration did. Becerra went after

00:42:57.000 nuns because he wanted to force them to pay for abortion drugs and contraceptives. So Sasse grilled

00:43:05.540 him on this point. I tried to say to Senator Grassley, I understand that Americans have different,

00:43:12.880 deeply held beliefs on this particular issue. And, and I absolutely respect that. By the way,

00:43:18.480 I have never sued the nuns, any nuns. I have taken on the federal government, uh, but I've never sued

00:43:27.140 any, uh, affiliation of, of nuns. Hold up. Point, point that there before we really get into what Sasse says.

00:43:35.480 It is technically true that Becerra never sued nuns. What he did was even crazier. He wanted to

00:43:46.860 sue nuns. The federal government under the Trump administration would not let him sue nuns and to

00:43:53.840 try to force them to pay for abortion drugs and contraceptives. So Becerra sued the federal

00:43:58.380 government so that he could get his right back to sue the nuns and try to force them to pay for abortion

00:44:04.180 and contraceptives. Sasse totally not going to take his lame excuses. You know, well, you're an

00:44:11.160 incredibly smart man. You know, well, that what the federal government did was make sure that you

00:44:15.520 couldn't target the nuns. So you sued the federal government because the federal government said

00:44:20.080 the nuns didn't have to buy contraceptive insurance. You can put 17 layers of, you were following the

00:44:25.880 law to go after the federal government for administering the program or doing X or doing Y that

00:44:29.700 made it difficult for you to, for California to administer the program. But it was just about nuns

00:44:34.700 buying contraceptive coverage. Was there something else the federal government did that you were suing

00:44:39.100 them for when, when in the case called California versus Little Sisters of the Poor? Senator, the case

00:44:46.680 was not again, that was not the name of the case. And what I will tell you is that our actions were based

00:44:52.020 on trying to follow the law that when the federal government took action, which we believe did not

00:44:56.820 comport with the law. At that point we took action and our action was based on the law. And so, as I've

00:45:03.180 said, we, we may disagree on how we see this and I respect the differences that we may have, but my

00:45:08.800 action was to follow the law. No, it wasn't. Your, your action was to attack the law, to dispute the law

00:45:19.980 in court because the federal government interpreted this federal law and you didn't like it because

00:45:27.080 the government's interpretation said you couldn't sue the nuns. So stop, please stop this ridiculous

00:45:33.200 posturing, this ridiculous proceduralist posturing and get to the heart of it. You wanted to sue the

00:45:38.700 nuns to make them pay for abortions and contraceptives and the federal government didn't want you to do it.

00:45:45.440 So you sued them. Speaking of trying to grow the American family, speaking of trying to reverse

00:45:52.100 this course of national death and decline, one good way to, to reduce that is to stop killing our

00:45:57.720 babies and to encourage a culture of life rather than a culture of death. But Becerra, Becerra's a

00:46:03.880 good politician. You know, he's a, he's a shrewd guy. So he knows how to portray this where if you

00:46:09.240 didn't know the facts of this case and you just watch this exchange, maybe you'd say, oh, they both got good

00:46:13.920 points in. But sass, sass, got to give it to him. He won't let up.

00:46:18.460 What about the law as the federal government's conscious, conscience exceptions applied in the case

00:46:24.500 where you sued the federal government? What about the law applied to anybody except the nuns and other

00:46:29.500 similarly situated religious institutions? You were targeting religious liberty.

00:46:35.300 Because what, what, what about the law? I know we're talking about the, what about the law though?

00:46:39.300 What were you trying to do with the law, pal? And this, this is the big issue. Right now under

00:46:45.680 moderate Joe Biden's administration, you've got the leader of HHS pushing politics toward encouraging a

00:46:54.940 culture of contraception and abortion. This is the issue. You've got this world in which the,

00:47:06.960 the government, right? I think the conservatives for too long have kind of embraced this libertarian

00:47:13.820 idea that there's the government and the government can never do anything and anything the government

00:47:16.820 does is bad. And you know, we can't ever use political power that people give us. And this

00:47:21.540 has given the left the opportunity to completely transform the culture. But politics and culture,

00:47:27.340 which is, it's got a little blurry line in between those things. They can encourage things one way or

00:47:31.820 the other. And by the way, when they say one thing, they exclude other things. So getting back to what

00:47:38.860 we're talking to at the top of the show, if you have a culture and a culture backed up by a political

00:47:45.000 regime that says that it is simply a fact that men can become women, women can become men, and it's

00:47:52.240 bigoted to say otherwise. And you drill this into kids' heads from kindergarten onwards. And then you use

00:47:58.700 the law to say, we should pump kids full of puberty blockers if, you know, Jane likes to play football

00:48:06.080 at Thanksgiving or something. And we should fundamentally change their biochemistry. What

00:48:10.480 you're doing is you're saying, this is the way the world works. And all of those incentives are going

00:48:17.660 to be compounded. You know, conservatives used to understand how incentives work. You know, when you

00:48:22.060 incentivize something, you tend to get more of it. When you disincentivize something, you tend to get

00:48:26.500 less of it. For a long time, the left was focused entirely on transforming the culture and the

00:48:34.740 right was focused on getting more tax cuts. And that was it. And the right completely gave up

00:48:41.360 on these cultural sorts of issues. And the left aggressed and aggressed and aggressed on issues

00:48:47.860 of race, on issues of sex. We're seeing that all today. The result of this has been a politics of

00:48:55.580 division, a politics of confusion, a politics of hollowing out our institutions and our tradition.

00:49:01.660 And we got some tax cuts. And look, I like tax cuts. I love tax cuts. But there's much more.

00:49:08.920 And if conservatives, whatever the conservative movement, the Republican Party is going to be in

00:49:13.280 the future. If it does not focus on preserving the American family, then up from that, the American

00:49:20.600 local polity, you know, local towns, thriving communities. And up from that, the American

00:49:28.080 sense of nationhood, the American sense of our way of life. If we don't preserve that,

00:49:33.840 we are doing absolutely nothing at all. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:49:39.320 More tomorrow.

00:50:09.320 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Our technical director is Austin Stevens. Supervising producers,

00:50:15.900 Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky. Editor and associate

00:50:21.260 producer, Danny D'Amico. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup by Nika Geneva. And production

00:50:28.120 coordinator, McKenna Waters. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:50:34.360 Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Democrats worry about how to cancel Republicans while Republicans

00:50:39.280 worry about being canceled. And Amazon engages in digital book burning. We'll get to that on

00:50:43.860 today's show. Give it a listen.

Ep. 708 - Beyond Okay To Be Gay

Summary

Transcript