Ep. 951 - The Climate Change Assault Continues On Ukraine
Episode Stats
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Summary
As the casualty count mounts in Ukraine, as the Chinese Communist Party begins ratcheting up the aggression in Taiwan, and as the post-Cold War world order seems to be on the brink of collapse, the Biden administration wants to make sure that you don t get distracted from the real threat, global warming.
Transcript
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As the casualty count mounts in Ukraine, as the Chinese Communist Party begins
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ratcheting up the aggression in Taiwan, as the post-Cold War world order seems to be on the
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brink of collapse, the Biden administration wants to make sure that you don't get distracted from
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the real threat, global warming. Hopefully President Putin would realize that in the
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northern part of his country, they used to live on 66% of a nation that was over frozen land.
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Now it's thawing and his infrastructure is at risk and the people of Russia are at risk. And so I hope
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President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.
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Yes, that'll stop Putin. The man currently shelling civilians and killing children in Ukraine,
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the world leader famous for assassinating journalists and poisoning his political
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opponents with nerve agents, the ex-KGB spy who openly brags about his ambition to reassemble
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the Soviet Union, once known as the evil empire, that man is going to call off his soldiers
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out of fear of Greta Thunberg and the sun monster. So hopes John Kerry and the Biden administration.
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And the scariest part of all is that John Kerry just might be the most lucid tactician
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in the entire administration. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Jay Mace who says,
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now. I'm not joking when I say John Kerry, who believes that fear of the sun monster and a Swedish
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child yelling at him will stop Vladimir Putin from conquering Ukraine. I'm not exaggerating or lying
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when I say John Kerry is one of the more reasonable, sane people in the administration when we're talking
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about tactics on this Russia-Ukraine situation. The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has been
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making the rounds. What are we doing? How is diplomacy working? How are the sanctions going to
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work? And he was asked a very simple question. What sanctions are you placing on Russia? How are
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you going to squeeze Vladimir Putin and the Russian economy to resolve this situation in Ukraine? And
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what is that going to mean for Americans? And the Secretary of State wants to reassure everybody
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that the sanctions are going to do absolutely nothing. Russia's economy is fueled by gas and the U.S. is a
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consumer. So would the U.S. consider cutting off oil and gas purchases from Russia?
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Well, what we're doing, Nora, across the board is making sure that we inflict maximum pain on Russia
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for what President Putin has done, while minimizing any of the pain to us. We're in full coordination
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with other countries, both consumers and producers alike, to minimize any impact that this may have on
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energy prices and on gasoline. Okay, hold on. Hold on a second here. You'll notice Secretary of State
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Blinken did not answer the question. It was a pretty good question, actually. And he didn't
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answer it, though I think the fact that he didn't answer it means that he actually did answer it.
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She asks him, the reporter asks him, are we going to go after Russia's oil and gas?
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Russia makes all of its money on oil and gas. Now, America consumes a lot of oil and gas. So if you go
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after Russia's oil and gas, that's going to hurt Putin, but it's going to also hurt the Americans
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who are filling up their tanks. It's going to disproportionately hurt poor Americans, right?
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We all need to fill up the tanks of our cars. And so people who have less money, if the price of oil
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and gas goes up, people who need to not just fill up their tanks, but also heat their homes. We use oil
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for a whole lot of stuff. All consumer goods are going to go up in price if we see oil and gas prices
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go up. So it's going to disproportionately hurt poorer Americans, but it's going to hurt all
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Americans. How are you going to do that, buddy? And he says, well, what we want to do, we want to
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really hurt Putin, but we don't want to in any way hurt the American oil consumer. Well, that's not
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possible, right? So how are you going to do it? Well, thankfully, the deputy national security advisor
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to Joe Biden gives a blunter answer. And it's the answer we all suspected when we heard Blinken run
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his mealy mouth, which is they're not going to do anything. Targeting the Russian energy industry
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is totally off the table. Is that what you're saying, Khalid? What I'm saying is that our measures
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were not designed to disrupt in any way the current flow of energy from Russia to the world. Now,
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we have also said we are going to cut off Russia's access to cutting edge technology. That technology
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can be used across many sectors. And so as it relates to Russia's long-term productive capacity,
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we are seeking to degrade that capacity, but nothing, nothing in the short term as it relates
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to energy. No, we want to reassure the world. We are not in any way going to hurt Russia's only
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industry. You know, the only industry that gives Putin his money with which to wage the war in
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Ukraine. We're not, we're not going to touch that, but we are going to lever some, some pretty heavy
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sanctions on Russian haberdashers. Yeah. Oh yeah, buddy. You're, it's going to be bad. Russian
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trinket makers, Russian ice cream parlors. Oh yeah, we're going after them hard, but the oil
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and gas industry, which funds the entire country, as John McCain said, one of the few precise things
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and accurate things that John McCain observed is that Russia is a gas station with a country
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attached. They're just entirely reliant on oil and gas. Yeah, we're not going to touch that.
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That'll show you Putin. No, no, no, don't worry. It's okay. Greta Thunberg and John Kerry are going
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to yell at Putin. So that's going to stop the war. Okay. Okay, buddy. Oh my gosh. How do these people,
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how do these people make it to such positions of power? It's a, it's a simple problem actually
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that they're dealing with, which is they don't want to make any decisions. They know that any
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decision you make, especially when you're talking about the presidential level of politics, any decision
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that you make is going to help some people and hurt other people. There are, there are no easy
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decisions that make it to the presidential level. If it goes all the way up there, you're dealing with
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really, really difficult problems and they don't want to deal with that because they're extremely
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immature and irresponsible and living in a fantasy world. These are the kind of people who can't tell
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the difference between men and women. They don't think you even have to make a decision there.
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They don't think that you, no, it's, listen, if you're a man, maybe you can be a woman. If you're a
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woman, maybe you can be a man. Actually, actually you don't even need to be a man or a woman. You
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can be any of the other 57 genders. That's fine. Is it any wonder that these people can't make the
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simple decision? No, we're going to sanction, if we're going to sanction Russia, we're going to
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sanction Russia. When Donald Trump sanctioned Russia, what did he do? Did he go after the,
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the Russian, Russian garments association? No, he went after the pipeline. He went after Nord Stream
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too. And it worked by the way, Russia did not launch a full invasion of Ukraine during the
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Trump administration. And does that lead to some problems at home? Maybe not if you catch it early
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enough, by the way, does that cause some consternation in Europe? Yeah, maybe it does.
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But Donald Trump, Donald Trump laid it out for Europe. He said, hold on, we're paying for your
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military so that you can go pay Russia to go give you your energy. We're paying for your military
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specifically because you're afraid that Russia is going to invade you. And then what are you doing?
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You're taking all those savings, all that money that we're allowing you to save by paying for your
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military and you're giving it to Russia to get your energy. That's not going to work. We're not
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going to do that. Okay. We're protecting Germany. We're protecting France. We're protecting all of
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these countries. And then numerous of the countries go out and make a pipeline deal with Russia where
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they're paying billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia. So we're supposed to protect you
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against Russia, but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia. And I think that's very
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inappropriate. And the former chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company
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that's supplying the gas. Ultimately, Germany will have almost 70 percent of their country
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controlled by Russia with natural gas. So you tell me, is that appropriate? I mean,
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I've been complaining about this from the time I got in. It should have never been allowed to have
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happened. But Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they were getting from 60 to 70
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percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline. And you tell me if that's appropriate,
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because I think it's not. And I think it's a very bad thing for NATO. And I don't think it should
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have happened. What happened when Donald Trump posed that problem to Russia? The mainstream media in the
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United States said, he's undermining NATO. Donald Trump is undermining NATO. Not at all. He was
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strengthening NATO. He was strengthening NATO by weakening Russia. But now we've got the worst of
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all worlds because this administration doesn't want to make any choices. No one does. No one is
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thinking about the broader strategic picture or the common good. They're all just thinking about
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themselves. Summed up perfectly by Joy Behar on The View, who said, you know, the worst part of this
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whole Ukraine issue, what's going to happen to my Roman holiday? Estimates are 50,000 Ukrainians will
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be dead or wounded. Yeah. And that this is going to start a humanitarian crisis, a refugee crisis in
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Europe. We're talking about 5 million people that are going to be displaced. I mean, it's heartbreaking
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to hear what is going to happen. Yeah. Well, I'm scared of what's going to happen in Western Europe
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too. Yeah. You know, you just, you plan a trip. You want to go there. I want to go to Italy for
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four years. I haven't been able to make it because of the pandemic. And now this, you know, it's like,
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who's going to, what's going to happen there? When Joy Behar started saying this, I thought it was the
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setup to a joke. You know, yeah. And you know, the real problem is I don't get to stay at my Tuscan
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Villa this summer. And I didn't even get to last year either, but it wasn't. She was dead serious.
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She was 100% serious. And this is instructive. This is how our elites think. I'm not just talking
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about the elites in government. I'm talking about the elites in government, media like Joy Behar,
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the elites in private industry. They're not thinking about the national good. They're not even thinking
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about the global humanitarian good. They're just thinking about numero uno. You know, you know,
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gosh, this really teaches me about suffering because I feel, I feel bad for those children
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being shelled in Kiev right now. But, but I might not even get to go to the Uffizi this summer.
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Can you, you know, it's suffering, right? Ain't that, ain't that just the way suffering works?
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Knowles. That is LifeLock.com slash Knowles for 25% off. Forget John Kerry. Forget Greta Thunberg.
00:13:57.140
Forget Joe Biden's fake sanctions that aren't actually going to stop any industry in Russia or squeeze
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Putin at all. The left has one more strategy here to stop Vladimir Putin. This one I think actually
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has the best chance of doing it. Slam poetry. Dear President Vladimir Putin, I'm so sorry that I was
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not your mother. If I was your mother, you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light.
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Never would this story's plight the world unfurled before our eyes, a pure demise of nations sitting
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peaceful under a night sky. If I was your mother, the world would have been warm. So much laughter and
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joy and nothing would harm. I can't imagine the stain, the soul-stealing pain that the little boy you
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must have seen and believed and the formulation of thought quickly taught that you lived in a cruel,
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unjust world. Is this why you now decide no one will get the best of you? Is this why you do not
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hide nor away shy from taking back the world? Was it because so early in life, all that strife
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wrapped your little body with fear? Two more minutes of this, I would be willing to turn over my family.
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I would surrender my entire country. This is psychological warfare. I believe this is prohibited
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by the Geneva Convention. So torturous is it? People are making fun of this actress, Anna Lynn
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McCord. If Putin were actually strapped down to a gurney and made to watch this, I promise you he
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would stop the war in Ukraine. So painful is it? In the words of Harold Bloom, the late, great literary
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critic, slam poetry is the death of art. The death of art, the death of foreign policy apparently as well.
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The saddest thing about this little viral clip of this actress reading her slam poem to Vladimir
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Putin. Her strategy is no less effective than John Kerry's. What her strategy is, hey, hey, Vlad,
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I think you're acting really bad and you need to stop being so mad and invade Ukraine. It's insane.
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Maine. Maine, right? So that's her strategy. Here's John Kerry's strategy.
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It's going to get really hot, Vladimir. No, not because of our weapons. We're not going to fire
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any weapons or anything, but because of the sun. So stop, please, because of the sun monster.
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And here's Joe Biden's actual official strategy from the White House. Hey, Vladimir Putin,
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we're going to, we're not going to let people buy Russian toy dolls anymore. You know, those stacking
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dolls where it's the doll and you open, there's like 10 more dolls inside the doll. We're not going
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to let people, they can still buy your oil, but we're not going to let them buy those dolls anymore.
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The, all of those strategies are equally effective. They don't do anything.
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We are, our, our nation is being led by the slam poetry actress lady. It's, it's just, it's just a
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lot of the slam poetry actress lady wearing suits with really serious faces and, and, you know,
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really prim and proper haircuts, but it's exactly as effective. There, we have been so hollowed out
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morally, intellectually, politically, economic, we've been so hollowed out. I don't know that we are,
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we are capable of serious international action anymore. We had a reprieve during the Trump
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administration. He actually was, was pretty good on the international front.
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But Donald Trump was the, was the bull in the China shopper. Donald Trump is in no way the foreign
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policy establishment that generally speaking runs our foreign policy. And by the way,
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he ended up getting run out by the deep state anyway. So he was the exception, not the rule.
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The rule is really pathetic. How did we get so hollowed out? In part, I think I've, I've said
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this before about Tik TOK. You know, we always play Tik TOK videos here to show you what the youths
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are listening to. I would not be surprised if I discovered that Tik TOK were just a Russian
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psychological, or Russian, a Chinese psychological operation to hollow out America. I would not be
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surprised at all. I feel that way about a lot of social media. Well, there was a really brilliant
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idea just came up in the wall street journal. Saw this article yesterday. I think it's great. And
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in an article by Thomas Lehrman and Brad Wilcox, the idea is no Instagram or Tik TOK without parental
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consent. Okay. Now what does that mean? Well, look, if, if, if I want to go on a, if I want,
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if I'm a teacher and I want to take my students on a field trip, what do I have to do? I need to
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give a permission slip out and the parents or guardian need to sign the permission slip and
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say, okay, my kid can go on the field trip. There are a whole host of activities for which
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you need a little permission slip. If you want a kid to be able to do it. And then there are a lot
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of activities that kids are not even permitted to engage in. Well, how come they're allowed to go on
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Instagram and Tik TOK? This just gaping whole old pathway straight to hell where there is all sorts
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of insane content. I'm not just talking about the obscenity and the porn that's on these,
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on these channels. I'm talking about the, the weird, creepy ideological stuff. That's going to
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convince your kid, little Johnny, that he's really a little Jane and convince him that he,
00:19:29.520
his country is evil and all sorts of really wacky ideology. Obviously there should be a permission
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slip. Now this seems to me to be a pretty fair middle ground compromise between on the one hand,
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the licentious animals who think that little kids need to be able to do whatever they want.
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They should go to drag queen story hour and that's a blessing of Liberty. And then on the other hand,
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the conservatives who think this stuff should just be banned and Tik TOK should just be banned and
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pornography should not even just be age limited, but just ban, just, just get rid of it. That's what
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we did for most of American history. Let's just go back to that, right? That would be, that'd be much
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more what I'm interested in, right? I'm just saying this, let's, let's get back to a
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semi-reasonable kind of national policy. Nobody benefits from allowing creepy grooming drag queens
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to go on Tik TOK and pervert your kid's mind. So let's just get rid of it. Okay. But let's,
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we're not ready for that. Let's have a middle ground. You need a permission slip for this stuff.
00:20:25.860
How do you do it? Instagram's not going to do it by itself. Instagram, Tik TOK, all of these social
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media companies are preying on your child. They're finding the most, the, the weakest parts of your
00:20:37.680
child's psychology, the most vulnerable aspects of their mind. And they're gunning for those and
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their algorithms are feeding those. And there have been huge reports on this, feeding eating disorders,
00:20:47.680
feeding all sorts of psychological disorders and pathologies because it gets more clicks.
00:20:51.720
It keeps the eyeballs on the screen longer. And that way they get to sell you more things from
00:20:55.480
their advertisers and they get to collect more data from your kids. So that's, that's what the media
00:21:00.200
companies are going to keep doing. How about we use our political power and our elected representatives
00:21:04.800
to go in and say, no, you can't do that. Sorry. You need a permission slip. Fine by me. It's a
00:21:09.140
middle ground compromise. I would much rather go in with a wrecking ball, knock down these woke big
00:21:14.020
tech companies servers, and then plow the ground with salt where they once stood. But if, if you think
00:21:19.540
that's a little too far right wing for right now, okay, I'm willing to grant, maybe that's the case.
00:21:23.760
At the very least we need the permission slips. We need limits. Okay. This gets to something I talked
00:21:29.080
about yesterday. I got to it at the very end of the show, but I don't want to, I don't want to just
00:21:33.360
skip over it. This is really important. There's a new report out from the center for immigration
00:21:37.560
studies. The United States population of legal and illegal immigrants has now reached an all time
00:21:46.100
high. That's 46.6 million immigrants in the United States. This is up 1.6 million since Joe Biden was
00:21:54.720
inaugurated. It's a huge increase and it's just a huge percentage and it's just too many immigrants.
00:22:00.320
Okay. Part of my family were immigrants. The Italian side, part of the family came on the
00:22:06.500
Mayflower and they were here from the very beginning, but part of my family came basically
00:22:09.620
on a sardine boat from Sicily and they were immigrants. So I'm not, I don't have a problem
00:22:13.040
with immigrants per se. I'm sure lots of these immigrants, legal ones, and frankly, some of the
00:22:18.140
illegal ones, I'm sure they're very nice people, but you can't just replace the population of a country
00:22:25.220
with lots of foreigners who have no connection to your national rituals, your beliefs, your
00:22:30.580
traditions, your language, who are not part of the people of the country and expect to have the
00:22:37.200
same country. It's not possible. You can't assimilate 50 million people overnight, period.
00:22:44.440
You can't do that at all and you can't expect to have the same country that you would have
00:22:48.520
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your iPad. It's so easy. Rather than driving to the brick and mortar store where you go, you drive
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there, it takes what, 10, 15 minutes. You go, you wait in line. It takes however long. You get
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peppered with questions. What, what make and model? Is it the 2009 GTZ Civic or the whatever? Then you
00:23:33.680
answer the questions. They go in the back. They don't have the parts. There's too many parts to stock
00:23:36.780
these days. They say, oh, we're going to have to order it. Come back in a week. You drive. Don't do that.
00:23:40.040
RockAuto.com. They've got the best, most reliably low prices. No gimmicks. They just always reliably
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low. Same prices for pros and do-it-yourselfers. The website's so easy to navigate. Even I can do
00:23:50.940
it. That's pretty amazing. I'm not the handiest guy in the world when it comes to these logistical
00:23:54.880
things. Go to RockAuto.com right now. Check out all those parts. Write Knolls, K-N-O-W-L-E-S in that
00:24:02.760
how did you hear about us box. Tell them that we sent you. You can thank me later. For many years,
00:24:08.300
the Republican line, even the conservative movement line on immigration was, we don't want
00:24:14.860
illegal immigration, but we want lots of legal immigration. Illegal is bad. Legal is good.
00:24:23.740
And there should be no limits to legal immigration. Even Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the most
00:24:27.320
right-wing, conservative, rock-ribbed president of my lifetime. He said, I want more legal immigration
00:24:32.900
than ever. I love immigration, but it's got to be done the legal way. No, that's wrong. That's the
00:24:38.540
wrong line. Okay. I don't, I don't besmirch anybody's reputation. I don't, I don't think
00:24:45.700
that people engaged in this kind of talk necessarily with bad intentions, but it's crazy. If there's no
00:24:51.720
limit, then what? Okay. We've got 330 million people in America. What, let's just bring in 330
00:24:56.060
million people next year. We've already got 46. So let's say the majority of America is just
00:25:01.680
foreigners with no real connection to American history or tradition. Would that be a good idea?
00:25:06.420
Would you support that? No, of course not. You, you wouldn't help the immigrants exactly. In some
00:25:11.020
ways you would, I guess, but you would completely destroy America. So the place they're coming to
00:25:14.720
wouldn't really exist anymore because America is not just an idea. It's a place and it's a people
00:25:20.260
with traditions and connections and rituals and a language. So you can't do that. You've got to have
00:25:25.540
some kind of limit. The limitless immigration thing. It's, it's the same as the Joy Behar problem.
00:25:31.120
The problem is that the ruling elite have been governing without any thought toward the common
00:25:37.520
good, without any thought toward the national good. They've been thinking about the good of
00:25:42.160
their own pockets and their own success at the ballot box. The Democrats support limitless
00:25:47.400
immigration, legal and illegal, because immigrants broadly, not just illegal, but legal too,
00:25:53.140
are likely to vote for Democrats. So the Democrats like that more immigration, please.
00:25:58.940
And the Democrats are opposed generally to a lot of traditions in America. So if you flood the country
00:26:04.120
with people who have no connection to those traditions, you're going to weaken those traditions.
00:26:06.660
Okay. That's why they like it. Why do the Republicans like it? Because for a long time,
00:26:09.700
we were the party of the chamber of commerce and the chamber of commerce likes cheap labor.
00:26:12.960
And they know that when you flood the country with immigrants, the, the cost of labor
00:26:16.760
decreases. And so they get to fill their pockets. Right. So that's both purely selfish motives without
00:26:25.360
any thought to the common good. Actually it harms the common good. And what do we have? We have a
00:26:30.620
country that's falling apart with little faith in our institutions, little connection to our past,
00:26:34.160
toppling our statues. We barely feels like a country anymore. It's very difficult to project our
00:26:39.920
influence overseas right now, for instance, because we don't, what are we projecting? We don't even
00:26:45.380
know what we're projecting. This immigration issue is an important one. It's not hateful. It's not
00:26:52.740
bigoted. It's not even xenophobic or nativist, these kinds of silly terms to say that a country needs to
00:26:58.780
have limits. Country needs to have borders. Country needs to have a people that, that do things together,
00:27:03.560
that have a national memory, a national history, national ritual and practice means you can't let
00:27:10.000
everybody in. And the, it's going to be basically impossible to teach Democrats that lesson. At least
00:27:16.180
the Republicans that need to figure it out. There are shifting political winds. I will tell you that
00:27:19.980
CPAC is going on right now. I was really hoping that I could be able to get down there. I was planning
00:27:23.820
on going. Very grateful to CPAC for the invitation. We couldn't make the logistics work. So maybe next
00:27:29.300
year, you know who is going to CPAC though? Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard. Who is Tulsi Gabbard? Well,
00:27:35.660
you might remember her as a Democrat candidate for president in 2020. But Tulsi wasn't your usual
00:27:42.940
Democrat candidate for president. She's a Democrat. She's a liberal. Make no mistake about that. She
00:27:47.760
supports abortion, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases. She supports all sorts of Democrat policies,
00:27:54.360
policies, but she broke with the Democrats over their kind of desiccated, corrupt ruling
00:28:02.640
establishment. She was very anti-Clinton. She was very anti-war machine, even though Tulsi Gabbard
00:28:08.340
served in the military. So she's got a lot of credibility here when we're talking about war and
00:28:12.900
foreign policy. So why is Tulsi a Republican now? It's not really even the issues so much. I think
00:28:20.560
it's a little bit generational. It's a little bit generational. I saw, this is going to seem like
00:28:27.640
it's not connected, but it actually is. On President's Day, on Washington's birthday, the GOP
00:28:33.500
account posted on Instagram a picture of presidents that it liked. And it had all the hits for the
00:28:41.020
Republicans. It had Ronald Reagan. And it said, you know, thank you to all of our not you presidents
00:28:48.140
who've made America great, right? And the not you was Joe Biden. And then all the rest were these
00:28:52.160
Republican presidents. But which Republican presidents did they pick? They picked people
00:28:57.720
like Ronald Reagan. Yeah, we all like Reagan. Picked people like Donald Trump. Yeah, we all
00:29:03.140
like Trump. They picked the Bushes. They thought, you know, the Bushes, that's great. And they left out
00:29:09.060
presidents like Teddy Roosevelt. He's a Republican, right? And that had been the view of the Republican
00:29:14.420
Party. We're the party of the Bushes. We're the part. We hate Teddy Roosevelt. He was sort of a
00:29:20.300
progressive. He was a conservationist. He didn't want to just destroy all of the natural parks and
00:29:25.700
environments and just, I don't know, create more industry there. We're the Bush Party. And if you
00:29:31.600
looked in the comments on Instagram, it was all these Republicans saying, what? Wait, hold on,
00:29:34.440
the Bushes? Hold on, you have the Bushes over Teddy Roosevelt? What are you talking about?
00:29:37.720
Seems like a minor point. But it's more and more evidence of something we've seen since Trump.
00:29:44.580
The Republican Party is reimagining itself. During the Bush years, the Republican Party was the party
00:29:48.860
of the plutocrats and the big business. And they hate the environment. And they're super pro-immigration.
00:29:54.120
And they love bombing the Middle East. And they never saw a war they didn't want to start
00:29:58.760
or at least ratchet up. And the Republican Party of Trump is not that.
00:30:04.800
We were told that Donald Trump was completely changing the Republican Party. He was making
00:30:11.580
it into something that's not. The opposite is true. The opposite is true. Donald Trump was in
00:30:16.540
many ways returning the Republican Party to what it was when it was founded, the party of Lincoln,
00:30:20.860
the party up through Teddy Roosevelt, the party really up through the 1970s or 80s even,
00:30:27.960
who's returning it to something more traditional. Now, before we get to the mailbag, there is some
00:30:32.220
breaking news, which is that Joe Biden has made his pick reportedly for the Supreme Court.
00:30:39.560
So his pick, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal, I'll pull it up right now. I just
00:30:43.280
got it. I got the notification on my phone. Biden plans to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the
00:30:49.080
Supreme Court. She's ostensibly the more qualified candidate for the Supreme Court. There were a few
00:30:54.200
other people being considered. There was a lot of political pressure from close Biden allies to go
00:30:58.760
with someone else. Ketanji Brown's got a sterling resume. She's probably a complete lunatic,
00:31:03.200
so that's too bad. The reason I mention it, though, as well is there was a news report yesterday that
00:31:08.400
the George Floyd family lawyer was really pushing for Ketanji Brown. And I thought, okay, I don't
00:31:16.460
really care who the nominee is. Any nominee from Biden is going to be terrible. I thought, why do I care
00:31:21.980
what the George Floyd family lawyer thinks about the Supreme Court? Why do I care what the lawyer
00:31:29.860
for the family of this career criminal who has been turned into the greatest saint in American history
00:31:34.640
because he was killed while resisting arrest in a police altercation while committing a crime?
00:31:40.420
Why do I care? How perverse has our judicial process become and our process of government,
00:31:48.140
even when we're talking about naming the judges, that that sort of thing is important. This nomination
00:31:55.380
for the Supreme Court has been sort of poisoned from the beginning because Joe Biden said he's not
00:31:59.480
going to pick the most qualified candidate. He's really only looking at race and sex, which is
00:32:04.940
ugly to most Americans. It's repulsive to most Americans. More and more evidence. So he picked
00:32:10.380
the candidate who's probably most qualified. Okay, I can only imagine. In a way, I don't want the most
00:32:16.320
qualified candidate from Joe Biden because it means that that person's going to be extremely intelligent
00:32:20.600
and capable and clever and probably better at getting her way. But that's the news. You know,
00:32:24.940
it's more important than ever to understand just how insidious the foreign threats are within our
00:32:29.500
own country. We have just the way for you to do it. Our new show, The Enemy Within, is a docu-series
00:32:34.880
featuring acclaimed journalist and expert in national threats, Lee Smith. In the fourth episode, Lee
00:32:39.620
describes how the NBA has come to depend on China for much of its profit and as a result, how the NBA and its
00:32:45.540
players have become a mouthpiece for CCP propaganda. Also, you got to make sure to check out Ben Shapiro's
00:32:51.520
new show, The Search. His second episode features his good friend and highly lauded historian,
00:32:56.200
Neil Ferguson. These two great series are exclusive to Daily Wire members. If you're not currently a
00:32:59.980
member, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to join. And also, you know, Daily Wire is making a ton of
00:33:04.800
new content, including movies, including comedy, including docu-series. Shut in, our first original movie
00:33:10.760
premiered last week. Our new films, Hyperion, which is soon to be released, and our summer blockbuster,
00:33:15.960
Terror on the Prairie with Gina Carano. They're all coming out. All this great content is available
00:33:21.060
to Daily Wire members, so make sure to become one today. Head on over to dailywire.com slash watch
00:33:26.280
to check it all out. We'll be right back with The Mailbag.
00:33:28.560
First question in The Mailbag from Lydia. Hey, Michael. You keep talking about how Putin did
00:33:46.100
not invade any sovereign nations while Trump was in office, because Trump was too unpredictable.
00:33:51.060
And while I agree with that, I've been struggling with the fact that China invaded Hong Kong in 2020,
00:33:56.080
despite Trump being in office. Is there a serious difference here? Sincerely,
00:34:00.300
Sen Bapira. Well, there is a difference. First of all, China already had Hong Kong.
00:34:06.320
The British gave Hong Kong back to China over 20 years ago, what, 1999? I think something like that.
00:34:11.540
So they already had it. That's a categorically different situation than what you have in Taiwan,
00:34:18.360
which is ostensibly still independent and free, at least more so than Hong Kong has been.
00:34:23.000
The encroachment into Hong Kong has been more gradual. But let's even grant the premise for a second.
00:34:29.900
Let's say that the situations were comparable. I never suggested that no one was ever going to test
00:34:37.840
Donald Trump because Donald Trump was so scary that he completely intimidated every threat around the world.
00:34:45.240
He was unpredictable. And so these foreign hostile leaders had to make their own risk calculation.
00:34:54.700
I'm sure a lot of people thought that Donald Trump was not really going to deploy forces. In fact,
00:35:00.020
Donald Trump ran as one of the most anti-war candidates in recent history, certainly as the
00:35:05.720
most anti-war Republican we've had in a long time. Right? He said the Iraq war was terrible. He didn't want
00:35:10.580
to send our kids overseas. He wanted to focus on America first and wanted to give up global empire.
00:35:15.280
So if you just heard that, if you were Putin or Xi Jinping, you would say, okay, well, it's time for
00:35:21.420
me to go in and I'll take Ukraine and I'll take Taiwan respectively. But the thing about Trump is
00:35:27.000
every so often he just shoots some missiles into Syria or into Afghanistan or every so often you'd have
00:35:35.380
little rocket man, a name given to Kim Jong-un by, by Donald Trump. You'd have him say, you know,
00:35:42.900
I've got a nuclear button. I keep the nuclear button on my desk at all times. And, and then what does,
00:35:48.840
what does Donald Trump do? Does he go to a podium? He says, listen, we should not use this kind of
00:35:53.360
rhetoric. We need to tone down here. And no, he sends out a tweet. He says, yeah, little rocket man's
00:35:58.560
got a button on his desk. Well, he should know that I've got a button too. And mine's a lot bigger
00:36:02.680
and mine's a lot more effective and mine actually works. And the international community says,
00:36:10.080
what is this maniac doing? He's going to start a nuclear war on Twitter. And if you're Vladimir
00:36:15.280
Putin, when you hear that, you say, you know, maybe I'll hold off on Kiev. Maybe I'll just stay
00:36:22.780
in Crimea for now because this guy, this game show host, reality TV star, real estate mogul tweeting
00:36:31.380
maniac. He might just do it. He might just freaking do it. Xi Jinping, he says, well, look,
00:36:39.060
maybe I'll go a little further into Hong Kong. And then what does Trump do? Trump starts clobbering
00:36:42.760
him with tariffs, starts a massive trade war that poses huge risks to the United States.
00:36:47.720
Xi Jinping thought that would never happen. They thought, because for 20 years you had people,
00:36:52.620
including Joe Biden, especially Joe Biden, saying, we want China in the international community. We want
00:36:57.260
a rising China is good for everybody. Let them into the World Trade Organization. Who cares if
00:37:01.320
they violate the treaties? Who cares if they steal our IP? Who cares if they illegally subsidize steel
00:37:06.160
aluminum? That's okay. We want a rising China. Trump says no. Trump used a lot of salty language
00:37:11.640
that this is a family show, so I'm not going to repeat. And he goes in and he starts a massive
00:37:14.920
trade war. It's very unpredictable. And it's an example of China calls Trump's bluff. It turns out
00:37:21.860
it's not a bluff. And then what happens? China releases a virus that shuts down the world for
00:37:27.040
a couple of years. Perhaps accidentally, perhaps not accidentally. But people forget this because
00:37:33.900
we all focus only on COVID. Don't forget, we were winning that trade war with China before COVID
00:37:38.840
happened. So anyway, these leaders are making their risk calculations. And the key here is not
00:37:43.880
even to be the most aggressive or on the flip side to be the most dovish. The key here is be
00:37:48.760
unpredictable. From Matthew, dear Mr. Knowles, you seem to be an educated and very well read man.
00:37:54.400
Thank you, Matthew. I'm handsome too. I'm so well, we're complimenting me. I'll take everything you
00:37:58.520
got. As such, my questions relate to some of the founding texts of Western literature,
00:38:03.200
namely the Trojan epics. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid. First, which one is your
00:38:10.380
favorite and why? Second, how should one go about reading them? Just dive in with the Iliad or read
00:38:15.860
some other sources to gain some context. Love the show. Keep up the good work. Well, I'm partial to
00:38:20.400
the Aeneid because the Aeneid inspired my favorite poem, which is The Divine Comedy by Dante. But if
00:38:26.140
you told me just right now you're going to sit down and read all of these, what's your favorite? I would
00:38:29.160
probably say The Odyssey is my favorite. It includes one of my favorite lines from Telemachus, who says
00:38:37.180
it's a wise man who knows his own father. It's just a really salty, funny line. And it's just a
00:38:42.780
wonderful story. So how would I dive into reading them? I would pick up an annotated copy and I would
00:38:49.040
read it and I would read all the notes. This is really important. Speaking of Dante, when you're
00:38:54.000
reading Dante, one problem that people have with reading Dante is he has so many literary and
00:38:59.340
political allusions that people just don't get these days. Unless you're a medieval Florentine,
00:39:04.440
you're not going to get some of them. So you need an annotated copy. So get a good, nice,
00:39:09.840
thick one. For Dante, it's the Durling Martinez. There are other good translations and annotated
00:39:14.980
versions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. I like The Fagels, but there are others.
00:39:20.180
So get a critical edition. Just read all the notes and you'll get it. And it's going to be
00:39:22.880
plotting and plotting and plotting. And the first time, you're going to need all the notes. And
00:39:25.920
maybe even the second time you read it, you're going to need all the notes. And then you're going
00:39:28.420
to be able to really, really enjoy it. So that's what I would do. I don't think you need to go
00:39:32.340
necessarily take a course or read it in any particular order. Just jump in, whatever grabs you.
00:39:36.640
I don't really care for The Iliad as much as The Odyssey. So The Odyssey comes after The
00:39:41.040
Iliad. But for me, I would go for The Odyssey first. Your mileage may vary. Part of reading
00:39:47.020
is erotic. You know, sometimes people say old books are sexy. Books actually are sexy. And this
00:39:54.260
is an important thought on how to pursue education. Alan Bloom in The Closing the American Mind says that
00:40:02.260
education is so sterile, kind of like our relationships. We don't have love affairs anymore.
00:40:05.980
We have relationships. I'm in a relationship with my partner. Oh, that sounds hot. That's
00:40:10.380
about as hot as an accounting firm. No, you're supposed to be in love. You're supposed to be
00:40:13.540
drawn. Dante talks about this. Where we are drawn to grow in wisdom and maturity should be a sort of
00:40:21.160
erotic thing. We turn our loves, our natural desires toward the good. We perfect our loves and then we
00:40:28.200
grow. So if you have an attraction to a story, let's say it's The Odyssey, you should pursue that.
00:40:34.580
If you have an attraction toward adventure stories, you could either waste all your time
00:40:38.320
watching stupid Marvel movies or you could turn it towards something that will be a little bit
00:40:42.280
more edifying. So do that. Don't suppress your desire. Don't deny your desire. But turn your
00:40:48.480
desire in a way that's going to be more edifying. Is your home's title still in your name? With one
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dailywire to ensure your title is still in your name. From Kelsey, I need the love guru. Speaking of
00:41:25.040
Eros, I'm a 29-year-old woman with a beautiful eight-year-old son. When my son was four,
00:41:30.580
I met my boyfriend. Before things got serious, I said I wanted what I wanted, which consisted of
00:41:35.160
marriage, kids, and to follow God. He also wanted these things, so it was a great match. I love him
00:41:40.000
to pieces, and he's been amazing. He stepped up and became the father my son did not have.
00:41:45.300
He's raising him to be a good Christian and a good patriot. However, we've been together four years,
00:41:50.060
and he doesn't seem to have any future plans of marriage, which in turn means children as well.
00:41:54.240
As I said, I'm 29, so the clock is ticking, and he is 44 years old, so I feel the time is not on
00:42:00.000
our side. Any thoughts? I do have some thoughts. I need to know a little bit more detail about your
00:42:05.720
situation. Are you a widow? Were you previously married to maybe the father of your son? Was that
00:42:15.420
like a real marriage? Were you not married? Was it more impregnated by this guy, and then he was a
00:42:22.880
deadbeat, and he ran off? Those things are going to matter a little bit in terms of what you should do
00:42:28.920
now, but all things being equal, let's say the first boyfriend who gave you your child. Even bad
00:42:37.840
things can result in good things. Let's say he was a total deadbeat. He ran off. You meet this guy.
00:42:43.300
He really is the father figure to your son. He's been dating four years now. I would tell him
00:42:47.860
to piss or get off the pot. That's what I would tell him to do, because it's not going to get any
00:42:54.320
easier. Men sometimes need a good kick in the rear, and four years is long enough, and if he doesn't
00:43:00.820
want to marry you, and he doesn't want to have more children, and he wants to keep his options open,
00:43:06.360
and maybe he wants to be able to run off at some point, then that's no good. Better to rip that
00:43:10.680
band-aid now, but maybe he's a good guy, and he just needs a little encouragement, and you should give
00:43:14.260
him that encouragement, and you can point him to this clip and say, you know, my friend Michael gave me
00:43:19.020
to give you that encouragement, too. From James, hello, Michael. I'm a 21-year-old black guy who's
00:43:24.440
spent the last couple of years listening to your show because I realized how important having some
00:43:28.520
political knowledge is. I find your show to be a trustworthy source of it. My 16-year-old sister
00:43:33.940
has also recently dove into politics, but for a different reason. Her woke CRT-teaching English
00:43:40.700
teacher has instilled all the horrors of America bad and racist ideology into her. She informed me that
00:43:46.840
she doesn't believe that cracker is a slur against white people because white people are the oppressors,
00:43:51.860
not the oppressed. She told me I wouldn't want to vote for a Republican unless they have my values
00:43:56.340
and are not a racist piece of garbage, which is highly unlikely, okay? I've challenged her views
00:44:01.500
a couple of times, but I never pushed too hard for fear of pushing her away since we used to be very
00:44:05.840
close. I'm just unsure how I should speak to her or what I should say to convince her that she and all
00:44:11.420
her friends have been misled. I just don't want to see my sister turn into the average Twitter user.
00:44:16.840
There's two problems here and they both come back to the same thing. They both come back to religion.
00:44:22.660
One, your sister is obviously steeped in this CRT ideology, critical race theory. Critical race
00:44:30.220
theory derives from critical theory. Critical theory derives from cultural Marxism. Cultural
00:44:34.220
Marxism derives from Marx. There are obviously lots of distinctions along the way, but to quote
00:44:40.040
Whitaker Chambers, the ex-communist turned conservative, Marxism is not the newest ideology in the world.
00:44:45.280
It's the second oldest. It began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent told Eve,
00:44:49.100
ye shall be as gods. It is a vision of the world without God. It's an anti-Christian vision of the
00:44:57.160
world. So if you view the world in this way, with the oppressor and the oppressed and this whole sort
00:45:01.080
of dialectical view, then you're going to have problems. The second part is, your sister is viewing
00:45:09.580
herself primarily through the lens of race. Through this religious lens, first of all, and then she's
00:45:17.220
grounding her identity primarily in race. That's a big problem too. Not to say that race does not
00:45:23.300
exist. Not to say that race doesn't have some effects in the world. But if your identity is
00:45:28.100
primarily in race, you're going to have a lot of problems. I do not think of myself primarily as white.
00:45:34.620
Well, I guess I'm not, I'm sort of swarthy. I do not think of myself primarily as swarthy. I do not
00:45:40.400
think of myself primarily as Italian, primarily as waspish, primarily as English or Irish or Welsh
00:45:46.440
or anything like that. I think of myself, I don't even think of myself primarily as an American. I'm
00:45:51.600
very patriotic. I love my country deeply. I certainly love my American identity, but primarily I view
00:45:57.660
myself as Christian. I'm a Catholic. I view myself as a child of God, someone made in the image of God.
00:46:06.820
I, I grant my identity in the God who says my name is I am that I am being itself. And so I don't get
00:46:14.300
too hung up on the race stuff or the this or the that or the other thing. I don't know about your views,
00:46:19.740
but it sounds like you don't view yourself primarily as a black man. I'm a black, you say I'm a black guy,
00:46:24.800
but you say that sort of incidentally. You don't say I'm a black man. Forget my nation. Forget my
00:46:29.500
creator. Forget my, I'm a black. No, of course, it's very silly, very silly thing to do. So both
00:46:34.500
of those issues are religious problems and your sister's going to have to sort that out before
00:46:38.380
she can figure out how completely wrong she is. Maybe she could listen to this show. Maybe you
00:46:42.580
throw a couple episodes of the show into your sister's queue and she figures it out. I hope so.
00:46:48.220
Or you can just talk to her from Maria. Hey, Michael, first off, I would love to like to say I love
00:46:52.980
the show. Thank you. But for business at hand, I'm in a predicament. I've been with my boyfriend
00:46:57.300
for four years and counting. He's the person I want to marry and spend my life with. What is it
00:47:01.000
with this dating for four years? This is, I'm seeing a theme here. This is what millennials do,
00:47:04.560
I guess. I have certain fantasies and desires that I don't want to indulge in, but he wants to talk
00:47:11.140
with me about them. But I feel ashamed for having these thoughts and feelings to begin with.
00:47:16.260
Is this something I should open up to him about or should I keep this part of myself locked away?
00:47:21.120
Sincerely, a lady who wants to lead a virtuous life. Wow, great question. So what you're saying
00:47:26.060
is I have these presumably sexual desires that are disordered, that I don't, I want, at the lower
00:47:32.920
level of my will, I want to indulge in them. You've got some weird sort of kink or something. But at the
00:47:37.400
rational level, I don't want to indulge in them because they're weird and they're not virtuous and
00:47:40.820
so I don't want to do it. And he, who's a curious little chap, says, no, come on, tell me about all
00:47:46.620
your weird sexual desires. You're like, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to indulge in that.
00:47:49.760
I'd rather push it to the side. You are right and he is wrong. He is channeling the wisdom of our age,
00:47:59.120
which is you should never repress anything, especially not a sexual desire. But you are
00:48:02.840
right. You should. You should. First of all, virtue is a habit. So if you, the more you indulge these
00:48:08.280
things, the worse they get. And the more you practice the virtues, the easier it becomes to
00:48:12.300
practice the virtues. It's like anything, you know, the more you smoke cigarettes, the easier
00:48:18.280
it is to smoke cigarettes, the harder it is to stop smoking cigarettes. Okay. And the same thing
00:48:21.940
when you try to quit. The longer it's been since you quit, the easier it is to go without having a
00:48:26.300
cigarette. But this gets back to something we talked about a few questions ago, which is your
00:48:31.460
desires. You've got these disordered desires. We all do. It's a fallen world. Everybody's got
00:48:36.240
disordered desires. Disordered sexual desires, disordered political desires, disordered economic,
00:48:41.060
everybody's got disordered desires. The key to really overcoming something like this
00:48:46.440
or at least improving your situation is not to completely suppress desire, but to perfect desire,
00:48:57.340
to reorder it. So all desire is pointing towards something. All desire is evidence of something
00:49:06.040
good. It wants something good, but the aim sometimes gets a little bit off. Okay. And all
00:49:12.260
desire ultimately should lead back to God. So you see this with Dante. Dante has a crush on this girl,
00:49:18.900
Beatrice, that he met twice. And he's married to someone else, but he just has this crush on this
00:49:24.440
girl, Beatrice. And that's not necessarily evil and awful and adulterous. If Beatrice, as she does
00:49:29.920
in the Divine Comedy, leads Dante, channels his erotic love for her, channels that to bring him to
00:49:36.660
God. That's what you've got to do. It's a little bit pie in the sky. It's a little bit out there,
00:49:40.920
but I think it's also quite practical as well. Take those desires that you've got, even if they're a
00:49:45.440
little bit off, and turn them and work on turning them and allow grace to allow them to turn toward the
00:49:52.200
love that moves the sun and the other stars. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles
00:50:01.680
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the
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word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. We're available on Apple
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring. Our
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technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producer Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel
00:50:33.780
Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, associate producer Justine Turley, audio mixer
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Mike Coromina, and hair and makeup by Cherokee Heart. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production,
00:50:48.700
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. You know, some people are depressed
00:50:53.300
because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
00:50:58.260
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started. So come on over to The Andrew
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