Episode Transcript
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0:00
Late
0:00
last week, way out in the Nevada
0:02
Black Rock Desert, the high priests of
0:04
Burning Man ignited a 26-foot
0:07
tall, 13-foot wide altar,
0:10
which burned for 20 minutes before
0:12
collapsing to reveal a giant
0:14
steel idol of a phoenix, which,
0:17
according to aforementioned high priests,
0:20
supposedly had something to do with Ukraine.
0:23
Then, the entire place got
0:25
flooded.
0:26
An unexpected and highly unusual
0:29
storm appeared right over
0:31
the festival, dumping three
0:34
to four months worth of rain,
0:36
at least, on the desert. The
0:39
total rainfall is estimated
0:41
as having been between half an inch and
0:43
a full inch.
0:44
Doesn't necessarily sound like a lot, but we're talking
0:46
about the desert, so to put that in perspective,
0:49
just a fifth of an inch was
0:51
expected for the entire month
0:54
of September. As a result, 70,000
0:58
people
0:58
have been trapped in the mud for days,
1:01
with attendees being told to conserve food
1:03
and water, which are apparently in short
1:05
supply.
1:07
Now, I don't
1:09
want to read too much into it, but as
1:12
a general rule, it seems to
1:14
me that one should avoid traveling
1:17
to the desert for week-long bacchanalian
1:20
orgies that culminate in the worship of giant
1:22
burning idols.
1:25
It never turns out well.
1:27
Whatever the burning man people are seeking,
1:30
whether it be banal thrills like drugs
1:32
and weird sex, or the more esoteric
1:35
spiritual stuff to which those
1:38
sensual pleasures point,
1:40
is not going to make them happy.
1:42
They are not going to find what they
1:44
are looking for,
1:46
because eventually, the
1:47
music is going to end,
1:49
and the drugs are going to wear off, and
1:51
the sex is going to reach its climax, and
1:54
the people who place their hope in dead idols
1:57
are going to find themselves still unsatisfied.
2:00
Hungry, thirsty, and covered in filth.
2:04
I'm Michael Knowles, this is the Michael Knowles Show.
2:21
Welcome
2:26
back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Good
2:28
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2:42
The libs are gonna do COVID again. They're
2:45
already in the process of doing COVID
2:47
again. The last COVID was begun
2:50
in the year before the 2020 presidential election.
2:53
Now we're the year before the 2024 presidential election
2:55
and they are doing COVID. But
2:58
it's a little different this time and
3:00
Dr. Fauci is facing some heat. We'll get to it in a second. First though,
3:02
speaking of looking for happiness in all the wrong places,
3:04
there's a woman who's gone totally viral and
3:07
she's just a random woman. No one's ever heard
3:09
of her before. She posts a lot
3:11
of content on social media so she clearly wants
3:14
to be a public person. But until this weekend,
3:16
she had been a private person. And I think it was Walsh
3:18
actually. I think it was Matt who
3:20
discovered this woman's TikTok and made
3:22
her go viral. She's gone
3:24
viral for explaining how
3:27
happy she is not to be married
3:29
and not to have children
3:31
because she gets to sleep in late and drink
3:33
too much and go to concerts and things like that. And
3:35
she's gone viral because while her words
3:38
say that she's very happy, her eyes
3:41
and her demeanor and the tone of her voice tell
3:43
a different story.
3:45
It's 10.45 a.m. on a Saturday.
3:48
I'm 29 and single and I don't have kids yet. Here's
3:50
what your Saturday morning looks like when you're
3:52
single at 29 and you don't have a kid
3:55
running around the house. I didn't rise
3:57
from my bed until 10.15. Every time
3:59
I thought.
3:59
I should probably get up and do something. I thought, why?
4:02
Nobody's making me. I'm not missing out on anything.
4:05
I went to Beyonce last night and I didn't get home
4:07
until 1 a.m. and I danced and drank my
4:09
little heart out and I didn't pay a babysitter to
4:11
watch my kids as I did that. And I woke up a tad
4:13
hungover this morning, which is probably why I was in
4:15
bed for so long. And I was just scrolling on my
4:17
phone and I saw a picture of Shakshuka and I
4:19
thought, you know what sounds really good?
4:21
Maybe I'm gonna learn how to make Shakshuka today.
4:24
Cause I have no plan. Can
4:26
I put a pause here? This woman had my total
4:28
sympathy. A lot of conservatives watched
4:31
this and reacted with scorn and derision. She
4:33
had my total sympathy until she mentioned
4:35
Shakshuka,
4:37
which is disgusting. Shakshuka is
4:39
this breakfast dish where
4:41
you poach eggs in
4:43
a spaghetti sauce and it's just gross.
4:46
And poached eggs are fine. I like poached eggs
4:48
and spaghetti sauce I like very much, of course,
4:50
and all sorts of
4:52
different dishes. But you put those two things together,
4:55
it's gross. I like veal salt in boca. I
4:57
like green jolly ranchers. I don't wanna put them together.
4:59
So anyway, that's where she really started to lose
5:01
me and her monologue
5:03
went downhill from there.
5:05
Cause I have no plans and I don't have kids and
5:07
I don't have a husband and I don't have errands
5:09
to run. I can go to the grocery store and
5:12
learn how to make Shakshuka. So that's on my agenda
5:14
today. Also on my agenda, probably a rewatch
5:16
of some Real Housewives of New York. I'm also doing
5:18
a rewatch of normal people on Hulu, which is really
5:21
spicy and I highly recommend. Weirdly I'm
5:23
into this documentary on Netflix about Blue Zone
5:25
countries. So I've got a pretty stacked day.
5:27
Anyway, I say all this to say,
5:30
never I'm hard on myself about why I'm not
5:32
married and I don't have kids and I should be further
5:34
along at 29, almost 30. I
5:36
wouldn't wanna do anything else this Saturday.
5:39
I know that you can do all these things when
5:41
you have kids and you're married and I
5:43
understand, but the effortlessness
5:46
and ease of my life, just kind
5:48
of focusing on myself and the Shakshuka
5:50
I wanna make or the Beyonce concert
5:52
I wanna go to really pays off
5:55
when I'm hard on myself for not being
5:57
where society tells me I should be in life.
5:59
Okay, I had even
6:02
putting the shakshuka aside, I have basically nothing
6:04
but sympathy for this woman because we
6:07
all have friends who are like this woman.
6:09
Some among us listening
6:11
right now might be in the same spot,
6:14
which is,
6:15
you got duped by society, our entire
6:17
culture told you to put off getting married,
6:20
don't have kids, just focus on your
6:22
career, get an endless series of degrees,
6:25
don't go to church, don't believe in anything
6:27
above yourself, life is about nothing more than
6:29
binging Netflix and traveling around the
6:31
world and having fun experiences and going to brunch.
6:33
That's what our culture tells people from
6:36
the age of,
6:38
I don't know, I guess from in the womb, all
6:41
the way up until the music
6:43
stops, all the way up until the
6:45
brunches stop being quite so tasty and
6:48
the
6:49
Real Housewives reruns stop being
6:51
so interesting, and the shakshuka stops
6:54
being so satisfying to make.
6:57
So I have total sympathy for her. And
6:59
if she were merely trying to say that
7:04
while
7:04
her eyes and the tone of her voice and
7:07
the very fact that she's pleading for attention on social
7:09
media shows that she's obviously
7:11
not totally happy and she does
7:13
wish that she were married and she does wish she
7:15
had kids, but it hasn't happened yet. And so she's
7:17
gonna bear her difficulties with resignation
7:20
until
7:21
things turn around, I wouldn't
7:24
even bring it up.
7:25
The problem here is that she
7:28
is exalting the very things that
7:30
make people miserable. And it's because of
7:32
a misunderstanding of joy and
7:35
a misunderstanding of earthly
7:37
happiness, which we'll get to in one
7:39
second. They say that money can't
7:41
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7:46
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8:58
George Bernard Shaw had a very
9:00
good line, which is that
9:03
hell is the
9:05
place where you have nothing to do but amuse
9:07
yourself.
9:09
George Bernard Shaw was a socialist, atheist
9:11
playwright and he was wrong about a great many things. But
9:13
even when he was wrong, he would have these piercing
9:16
moments of insight in a lot of his plays. G.K.
9:18
Chesterton, the great conservative Catholic
9:20
author, he was friends with Shaw. And
9:23
this is one of my favorite lines from Shaw. And
9:26
even the whole context of this line is
9:28
even better than
9:30
the single phrase itself. It comes from
9:33
an act of a play called Don Juan in
9:35
Hell.
9:39
And the play is Man and Superman. And
9:41
a
9:42
woman, Anna says, "'These devils
9:44
are mocking me, I had better pray.' And
9:46
the statue consoling her says, "'No, no, no,
9:48
my child, do not pray. If you do, you
9:51
will throw away the main advantage of this place,
9:53
they're in hell.' Written over the
9:55
gate here are the words, leave every hope
9:57
behind ye who enter, which is a line to me."
10:00
and Shaw borrowed from Dante. Only
10:02
think what a relief that is for what
10:04
is hope, a form of moral responsibility.
10:07
Here in hell, there is no hope and
10:09
consequently no duty, no work,
10:11
nothing to be gained by praying, nothing
10:14
to be lost by doing what you like. Hell
10:16
in short is a place where you have
10:18
nothing to do but amuse yourself.
10:21
At this moment, Don Juan sighs deeply.
10:26
This is why
10:27
people who retire
10:30
often don't live very long.
10:32
Some people have a great retirement but the
10:34
people I've noticed who have a great
10:36
retirement are the people who
10:39
find a purpose in retirement. Maybe
10:41
the purpose is to manage their
10:43
family. Maybe the purpose is to
10:45
get involved politically. Maybe the purpose is to take
10:48
up a new hobby or
10:50
to join a group or to
10:52
write your memoir or to investigate
10:55
genealogy or to plan the family reunion.
10:57
But the people who just in retirement
11:00
go out and decide they're gonna
11:02
hang out,
11:03
they often don't make it very long. They drink too much,
11:06
they get depressed. We all get depressed, why?
11:08
Because happiness is not
11:11
just receiving passive pleasures. Happiness,
11:14
our good buddy, Uncle Aristotle noted about 2400
11:16
years ago, is excellent rational
11:18
activity in accordance with virtue.
11:21
So happiness involves activity and
11:24
it's activity done very well and it's
11:26
that activity that is rational. It's
11:28
not totally irrational activity like going out and I don't know, doing
11:31
a bunch of drugs and making
11:33
a nuisance of yourself and worshiping idols in the desert is
11:35
rational activity that is in accordance
11:38
with
11:38
virtue.
11:40
That's what's going to make us happy. What that
11:42
woman is describing is broadly
11:44
true. When you don't have kids, you get to wake up late,
11:47
you get to watch whatever TV shows you want, you
11:49
get to
11:50
make shakshuka
11:52
if that is something that one would want to
11:54
do. You get to go out and drink too much, you
11:57
get to go to whatever concert you want to
11:59
go to.
11:59
that will make you
12:02
depressed. And this is why there are skyrocketing
12:04
rates of depression and anxiety. It's no coincidence
12:06
that as marriage rates plummet, as childbirth
12:09
rates plummet, the rates of anxiety
12:11
and depression are increasing because brunch
12:13
is not actually that fun.
12:16
It's not fun for a long time. So I don't mean
12:18
to just scold this woman. I don't mean to mock her
12:20
in any way, but it
12:24
is very dangerous for
12:26
people who as a self-defense
12:28
mechanism or a coping mechanism, decide
12:30
that they're going to exalt the behaviors that
12:32
make everybody miserable. That's a dangerous
12:35
thing. The first step to fixing
12:37
the problem and individuals and society broadly
12:39
have a lot of problems right now. The first step is
12:41
admitting that you have a problem. And
12:44
in this case, the problem is that
12:46
the Beyonce concert and
12:49
staying out too late and drinking and staying in your bed all
12:51
day and even eating shakshuka
12:54
as your raison d'etre, those are not the
12:56
activities of happy, joyful people. Those
12:59
are the kinds of things that depressives do. Depressives
13:01
drink too much and they stay in bed all day and
13:03
they're listless and they kind of wander around and
13:06
they're
13:07
just not full of joy. So
13:10
if we want to turn that around, you've got
13:12
to
13:13
put that bad advice aside, stop coping,
13:15
recognize there's a problem and then fix it. You can fix
13:18
it, man. Or you don't need to stay
13:20
in bed all day and listen to Beyonce and eat shakshuka. Speaking
13:22
of social bonds, Truth
13:25
Social might be going the way of
13:27
the dodo. Truth Social is Trump's alternative
13:29
to Twitter and Truth Social
13:33
was begun back in October of 2021 and
13:36
now it might collapse within
13:38
days. And it might collapse because Trump
13:41
Media and Technology Group,
13:44
which is the parent company for Truth Social
13:46
was going to merge with Digital World Acquisition
13:49
Corporation, which is a Miami-based company. And
13:52
they were then going to go public via a SPAC.
13:55
A SPAC is a special purpose acquisition
13:58
company. And anyway, this is all sort of.
14:00
sort of bunch of background business, blah, blah, blah.
14:02
But the upshot is the two companies had between 12 and 18
14:05
months to complete the merger. The deadline
14:07
has been extended at least five times. It's now scheduled
14:09
for September 5th. Shareholder
14:11
meeting is scheduled. I suspect Trump doesn't
14:14
want to keep True Social around anymore because
14:16
I think Trump wants to go back to Twitter, now known
14:18
as X, because that's
14:20
the way that he's gonna reach the most people. But
14:23
what happens then? What happens if True Social
14:25
collapses? Is this good for Trump? Is
14:27
this bad for Trump? I
14:29
think basically it would be good for Trump. And I think
14:31
it would be good for Trump because one, he
14:34
can now save face
14:36
since Elon bought Twitter.
14:38
The point of True Social was to give
14:40
conservatives an alternative in social media. The
14:42
libs controlled all of social media. So here's an alternative.
14:45
Well, then Elon Musk spent 44 billion bucks and
14:47
bought Twitter and has made Twitter much
14:49
more amenable to conservatives and
14:52
has defended the right of conservatives to speak on Twitter
14:54
and is now potentially even suing left-wing
14:57
activist groups that are trying to pressure
14:59
advertisers to defund Twitter. He's
15:02
really put his money where our mouths are.
15:04
So Trump can save face and say, look, the thing that I
15:06
wanted to accomplish with True Social
15:08
has now been accomplished through Elon Musk.
15:10
So I'm going back
15:12
to Twitter. I mean, the basic reason
15:14
that Trump started True Social was that he was deplatformed.
15:17
He was kicked off of all these services, even
15:19
when he was the sitting president of the United States. Well, now he's
15:21
been invited back on and that is largely thanks
15:23
to Elon Musk. So he can say, look, mission accomplished,
15:25
right? But
15:27
what about the black
15:30
mark on his record here? Trump
15:32
is going to be called a failure because
15:35
True Social was a failure. I
15:38
don't think that matters. And I especially don't think that
15:40
matters to Trump. Trump has
15:43
failed at many, many things.
15:45
And I say this with love and admiration. He
15:47
failed at the vodka, he failed at the stakes,
15:50
he failed at the airplanes. He
15:52
failed at a lot, man. I'm not even getting
15:54
into what happened when he was president.
15:57
Trump is also one of the most successful people
16:00
on planet earth.
16:02
That's undeniable. I know the Trump haters want to deny
16:04
that. This man is extremely successful. If
16:06
you fly around in a gigantic
16:08
jumbo jet for your entire adult life, you're
16:10
a success. If you get yourself elected
16:13
president the first time that you really officially
16:15
try it, you're a big success. If
16:17
you manage to arouse the ire
16:19
of America's enemies abroad and
16:22
the enemies within the deep
16:24
state apparatchiks who consistently tried to undermine
16:26
his campaign and his presidency, you're a success
16:28
man. You've actually done something.
16:30
Are these in opposition? No, not at all.
16:34
The most successful people I know
16:37
have also failed more
16:40
than just about anybody I know. And
16:43
this is a really important lesson. If you ever want
16:45
to succeed in life,
16:47
successful people tend
16:49
to fail at more things than
16:52
their critics ever even try.
16:55
And pride, which is
16:57
the queen of vice and the deadliest of the
16:59
seven deadly sins. Pride talks
17:02
in our ear and says, hey, don't
17:04
do this thing, you might fail at it. So
17:06
don't even try. Just, it'll be so humiliating.
17:09
If you, it'll be such a wound to your pride
17:12
if you
17:13
try and fail at something. Successful
17:15
people just ignore that voice and just
17:18
try things. And they often will throw spaghetti
17:20
at the wall. Think about
17:22
how many companies Trump has failed
17:25
at or Elon Musk has failed at, or
17:28
I don't know any of the successful people on planet
17:30
earth, if you go military
17:33
leaders, the failed military campaigns,
17:35
for goodness sakes, Winston Churchill, had he died before
17:37
the second world war, would have died a colossal failure,
17:40
but he just kept going. This is true
17:42
of every great statesman throughout history and
17:44
business leader and just anybody who's ever
17:46
done anything.
17:49
Really important lesson to take away. It's one of the
17:51
best lessons from Trump's public life.
17:53
And look, maybe he's gonna fail in the 2024 race. I
17:56
don't know.
17:57
But the one thing I'm damn sure of going
18:00
to try. And the only way that
18:02
he's possibly going to be successful, the only way that you
18:04
or any of us is possibly going to be successful at anything
18:07
is if we risk
18:08
failure. Don't worry about failure.
18:11
Successful people are going to fail more than
18:14
the losers ever even try. Speaking
18:16
of not trying,
18:17
Joe Biden is not even trying to
18:20
go visit East Palestine, Ohio. Do you
18:22
remember, this was some months ago now, our new cycles
18:24
fast, our memories, our attention
18:27
spans are that of a fruit fly. There was that
18:29
major train derailment and chemical
18:32
spill that poisoned this town in Ohio.
18:34
And Biden barely even wanted to mention
18:37
it. Trump shows up there, JD
18:39
Vance, the senator from Ohio, conservative
18:41
shows up there. Demands says, why
18:43
won't Joe Biden show up here?
18:45
And Joe Biden finally came out and promised, he said, okay, I'm
18:47
going to go to East Palestine, Ohio.
18:50
Well, now here we are months and months later. Joe still
18:53
hasn't shown up. Here's his excuse. I
18:56
said in March that you would go to East Palestine,
18:59
Ohio, you can hear how come you haven't gone
19:01
to East Palestine yet? Well, I haven't
19:03
had the occasion to go to East Palestine.
19:05
There's a lot going on here and
19:07
I just haven't been able to break. I was thinking
19:09
whether I'd go to East Palestine this
19:12
week, but I then was reminded I've got to
19:14
go literally around the world. I'm
19:16
going from from Washington
19:19
to India to Vietnam to
19:21
and so on. It's going to
19:23
be wild, but we're
19:26
making sure that East Palestine has
19:28
what they need materially in order
19:31
to deal with their problems.
19:33
His excuse as to why he hasn't visited
19:36
this troubled American town
19:38
that was the site of a major
19:42
corporate and government crime, let's
19:44
call it what it is, just an absolute
19:47
negligence and incompetence, at least so egregious
19:50
that it poison this whole town and his excuses.
19:52
Well, I can't go there because
19:54
I got to go literally everywhere else
19:56
on earth before I go there. I've
19:58
got to go.
19:59
anywhere else, anywhere and everywhere
20:02
else than this town in America. Joe
20:05
Biden cares so little about East Palestine, Ohio,
20:08
that in the months since that spill, he
20:11
hasn't even learned how to pronounce the name of the
20:13
town. He's
20:15
made plenty of time to go visit Kiev. He
20:18
can go visit Kiev just fine, and Vietnam,
20:21
and this place, and that place. He
20:25
just can't visit this troubled American town. Joe
20:28
Biden can spend 382 days on vacation.
20:30
Joe Biden has spent 40%, 40% of
20:34
his presidency on vacation, just doesn't have
20:36
that time to
20:37
visit East Palestine.
20:40
A more perfect example
20:42
of how little our ruling class cares
20:45
about America, I
20:47
have not seen. A widening
20:50
of the gulf between the elites and the
20:52
actual American people,
20:55
and a promise that populism
20:58
will continue. From the ruling class,
21:01
the beatings will continue until morale improves.
21:03
And from the now mostly the Republican
21:06
Party, but a little bit on the left too, the
21:09
populism is going to continue as our
21:11
political order becomes so decadent, decays
21:13
so much. And the
21:15
social bonds just collapse between
21:17
the rulers and the ruled. Now, one little
21:20
luxury here that all
21:21
of us, no matter how put upon we
21:24
are by our liberal elites, can enjoy
21:26
is delicious Good Ranchers. Right
21:28
now go to goodranchers.com, use code Knowles.
21:31
I don't know about you, but this summer
21:33
heat in Nashville felt hotter than
21:35
a $2 pistol, and that's because of the
21:37
inflation. We're feeling that heat in more ways than
21:39
one these days. The thing that I'm not sweating
21:42
though, is my meat price. Thanks to Good Ranchers,
21:44
my price is locked in for two years. And you might
21:46
be thinking a price lock guarantee
21:49
on meat. Yeah, it's amazing.
21:49
I don't know how they do it. It doesn't make any sense
21:52
with inflation and everything, and especially
21:54
that their price is already quite low for meat that
21:57
is much higher quality than anything you're getting
21:59
at the grocery store. or any other service right now. It's
22:01
just the greatest. Their hamburgers
22:03
are the best I've ever had. The steaks are
22:06
absolutely out of this world. The
22:08
New York strip in particular, I love. The ribeye
22:10
is excellent, I just had the other day. They've
22:12
got pork now, they got chicken, they've got
22:14
everything. I couldn't possibly recommend this
22:16
company enough. Their
22:19
meat is all 100% American. Steakhouse
22:21
quality, just amazing. GoodRanchers.com
22:24
right now. Use code Knolls for 30 bucks off
22:26
any box. Promo code Knolls, K-N-O-W-L-L-L-S
22:28
at GoodRanchers.com. GoodRanchers.com,
22:31
American meat
22:32
delivered.
22:33
Speaking of foreign places, France
22:35
has just prepared to enforce a ban on
22:38
Muslim dress in schools. So
22:41
this would be the abaya on women, you know, where
22:43
you can barely see any of the women. And
22:46
this would be the,
22:47
I forget the name of the dress for the Muslim men, but
22:49
that too, kaput, not allowed
22:51
to wear that in French schools anymore.
22:54
And this is a really good idea. Not because
22:56
I don't like the Muslims. I like the Muslims
22:59
very much. I have a great deal of respect for
23:01
the Muslims, but because France is France and France
23:03
should be allowed to be France. France doesn't need
23:05
to be
23:06
Saudi Arabia and Italy
23:08
doesn't need to be Eritrea
23:10
and America doesn't
23:13
need to be Guatemala.
23:14
Countries should be allowed to have their own
23:16
national identity and culture. And
23:18
people ought to be able to define
23:21
what that is and engage in their own
23:23
traditional practices. I read this book
23:26
over the weekend,
23:27
made a little bit of a splash. And
23:30
it was a book in Italian. It hasn't been translated yet
23:32
into English. And I thought, you know, there are
23:34
so few books in Italian that ever really seemed to
23:36
make the news. Dante,
23:38
Petrarch, Boccaccio,
23:41
is pretty much it, you know, there's
23:43
not a ton of Italian
23:46
literature that tends to make it up. One of these books
23:48
that did is by this Italian general, Roberto
23:51
Vannacci.
23:52
And it's called Il Mondo al Contrario,
23:54
the World Upside Down. The
23:57
point of this book is
23:59
that.
23:59
that we're living in, obviously in an upside down world
24:03
where people are losing their sovereignty
24:06
and traditional practices are being called hateful
24:08
and evil and being kicked out of society. And bizarre
24:10
eccentricities are being placed at the center of society.
24:13
And the tiny little minorities of
24:15
people, not even just racial minorities, but like
24:17
the minority of this imagined
24:20
identity group or that bizarrely
24:23
inclined psychosexual identity
24:25
group, they
24:28
get to dominate and they get to set all of
24:30
the rules for all of society. And that this is completely upside
24:32
down. This is
24:33
a book that became one of the best selling books
24:35
in Italy over the last year, and
24:38
it had to be self published.
24:40
And that tells you so much.
24:44
It's a very good thing that self publishing is now
24:46
advanced enough that anybody with a manuscript can
24:49
upload it to Amazon and have it mailed
24:51
out in physical form and it can become a best
24:53
seller. That's great. But
24:55
it's a very bad thing that many
24:57
books that are common sensical, that would
24:59
become best sellers have to be
25:01
self published because no publisher would ever
25:03
take it on. Because this book
25:06
by General Venace, sorry, former General
25:08
Venace, he just got fired for publishing the book. This
25:11
book by former General Venace was called racist,
25:14
sexist, homophobic, this is thatist.
25:16
That's how you know it's gonna be a good book. These days
25:19
when the liberal media says racist, sexist, phobic,
25:22
this kind of hateful, that kind of hateful, you
25:24
know it's probably gonna be a pretty interesting book.
25:27
And his firing for alleged
25:29
homophobia proves his point. We're now
25:31
in the world upside down.
25:33
That you can't extol a traditional
25:36
normal Christian,
25:38
just classical conception of family
25:40
life
25:41
without being called a hateful bigot and losing your
25:43
job for it. Even if your job is to go
25:45
kill your enemies, even if your job is a really
25:48
old school manly kind of job, you're
25:50
gonna lose it for that. The point
25:52
of the book that I found the most interesting is
25:55
when he focuses on what he calls the dictatorship
25:57
of minorities.
25:59
Maybe minorities of immigrant groups, maybe
26:02
sexual minorities of groups who identify
26:05
as whatever sort of
26:07
identities I'm not allowed to talk about on YouTube. I think you
26:09
catch the drift.
26:11
Maybe it's a religious minority,
26:14
maybe it's a cultural minority, but the
26:16
notion that even
26:18
a group that comprises three people can
26:23
upend the standards for everybody. Italy
26:27
is a Catholic country. It's about as
26:29
Catholic a country as you could possibly get. And
26:31
yet increasingly, Italy is told
26:33
from the secular authorities, from the
26:36
European Union, that they can't have
26:39
Christmas displays and celebrations
26:42
in public because some
26:45
people don't celebrate Christmas. The
26:49
vast majority of people in Italy celebrate Christmas,
26:51
the vast, vast overwhelming majority celebrate
26:53
Christmas.
26:54
So why can't they have their Christmas celebrations?
26:57
Well, because
26:59
of the rights of the minorities. And
27:02
so you see, and Vanachi never refers
27:04
to this in the book, but what you're seeing is
27:06
an increasing
27:09
tension between democracy
27:12
and liberalism, which
27:15
we use interchangeably today, but
27:17
they're actually opposed to one another.
27:20
The liberals actually changed the Wikipedia page for
27:23
democracy to say that democracy is a form
27:25
of liberalism.
27:26
Liberalism came about a few hundred years ago. Democracy
27:28
has been around for millennia, okay? But liberalism
27:31
is so totalitarian, it just consumes
27:33
everything and brings it into itself. And
27:36
if you oppose it, then you have to be anti-democratic,
27:39
but that doesn't make any sense. Democracy
27:41
is ruled by the majority. Liberalism,
27:44
at its very best, is supposed
27:46
to be the protection of rights of minorities,
27:50
which is a fine thing. You do wanna protect the
27:53
legitimate rights of minorities, but as liberalism
27:56
has advanced, everything has been called
27:58
a right.
27:59
Things that are not right. rights at all have been called rights.
28:01
Things that we're not allowed to talk about on YouTube, you know,
28:03
like
28:05
men wearing dresses in public or
28:08
pride parades or all the other
28:11
sorts of things that are definitely gonna get bleeped out on YouTube. Those
28:13
are not rights, those are wrongs. Wrong things
28:15
cannot be rights. And how do we understand rights? We
28:17
understand rights by examining abstract
28:21
principles of justice, by examining the natural
28:23
law, by using our faculties of
28:25
reason and our moral conscience to deduce
28:28
conclusions about the good,
28:31
the true, and the beautiful. We
28:33
can't do that anymore because we live in a radical skepticism.
28:36
So the radical skepticism
28:38
is impelled by liberalism,
28:41
which says everybody has the right to do whatever the hell they want at
28:43
any given time. And so it becomes this tyranny
28:45
of subjectivism, this tyranny
28:47
of relativism
28:50
that now is overwhelming the right
28:52
of sovereign states to be their own people,
28:54
to determine who comes in, who
28:57
gets the rights of citizens and how
28:59
people live.
29:01
Very, very troubling
29:03
because left
29:05
to its own devices, liberalism will
29:07
just erase these cultures. They'll erase
29:09
the people, they'll erase the customs, they'll
29:11
erase the religions, it'll erase everything.
29:16
And because nature abhors a vacuum, something else is
29:18
going to come in, in
29:19
its place, because everybody's got to serve somebody.
29:22
So this is also why you're seeing increasing
29:25
populism. This is why fashionable,
29:27
squishy Republican types used to make fun of the
29:29
notion of the war on Christmas. Oh, those
29:32
bitter-clinging deplorable idiots, they
29:34
care about Christmas. Who cares? It's
29:36
no big deal. Just say happy holidays or whatever. No.
29:42
If we give up Christmas, what
29:46
are we as a country? Oh,
29:48
those deplorable idiots, they care about immigration.
29:50
No, stop it. Just stop being so racist
29:53
and xenophobic. If we give up
29:55
borders, what is our country?
29:58
If we give up...
30:00
If we give up our practices, the people
30:02
who make up the nation, what we
30:05
believe in, now
30:07
increasingly our right to self-government,
30:10
what are we? We're nothing.
30:13
We just become individual consumers.
30:17
We're just here. We end up exactly
30:19
where that poor woman who was pretending
30:22
that she's really happy, childless and husbandless
30:24
at 29, we end up right where she is, which
30:26
is, yeah, okay, we don't have any social
30:28
bonds. We don't have any purpose in life.
30:31
We don't have anything that we're aiming at. We don't
30:33
have anything that really gets us out of the bed in the morning,
30:35
but we do have a bunch of cheap crap. But
30:39
GDP went up a little bit.
30:41
We are an economic
30:44
zone. Well, who cares?
30:46
How stupid do we have to be to find out
30:49
that money doesn't actually buy you happiness and
30:51
that we shouldn't worship
30:53
mammon?
30:55
People are so desperate for meaning that
30:57
they're going to the desert right now to
30:59
take a bunch of drugs and have a bunch of orgies and worship
31:02
actual fire idols
31:04
and then be washed out in a flood because of that. But again,
31:08
I don't want to read too deeply into it, but that's how desperate
31:10
people are for meaning. Okay, so that's
31:14
the word that is the world upside down.
31:16
And you can expect rates of anxiety
31:18
to go up, prescription drugs
31:21
for depression pills to go up. You expect
31:23
the life expectancy to continue to decline
31:25
because of deaths of despair. You can expect marriage
31:27
rates to continue to plummet. You can expect birth rates to continue
31:29
to plummet until we flip that world back
31:32
right side up.
31:33
Now, speaking of confused people and
31:36
things I can't talk about on YouTube, another
31:40
young lady went viral sobbing
31:42
crying because she was called
31:45
a lady. Honestly,
31:47
I don't know what to do, but like there
31:51
was like a
31:53
really bad experience.
31:55
Basically, I was just getting a drink
31:57
at the bar and they called both.
31:59
and I ladies. After
32:02
they were done drinking the drink, I went
32:05
up and I was like, some people don't
32:07
refer to themselves as ladies, but it's okay
32:09
that you didn't know. And the gay bar,
32:12
so I should be safe. So
32:14
then turned it around. They
32:16
got so mad at me, and
32:19
they took the drink away from
32:21
my wife and I. He hit the
32:23
bar, like, because he was like,
32:26
are you serious? You're doing the same thing to
32:28
me. How?
32:29
And then they kicked us out.
32:32
I didn't think that was gonna happen.
32:34
Like, how am I supposed to feel? This is the first time
32:37
that I'd like to hold somebody I felt brave enough
32:39
to tell somebody my identity.
32:42
I just wanted to let him know, and I told him
32:44
it's okay that you didn't know. He
32:46
was still mad at me
32:48
for being myself, and
32:51
for my wife being themself.
32:53
Just her. And
32:56
for my wife being themself. That's
32:59
a, I don't know if I believe this video.
33:02
The performance doesn't seem very persuasive
33:04
to me.
33:06
So it's probably just a ploy for attention
33:09
and kind of some kind of troll on social media, but let's
33:11
say it's not. Let's be really charitable about it and
33:13
say that this woman's really upset because
33:16
she went to a bar with her wife,
33:20
as though that were possible. And
33:22
they went up into this bar and the
33:24
bartender said, hey ladies, what can I get you?
33:27
And they broke down sobbing because
33:30
this was such an attack on their identities.
33:34
One, it shows you that they
33:37
know that they're not really men. It
33:40
shows you that
33:42
their confidence and their true identity
33:44
is a little bit weak. If someone called me a woman,
33:47
I'd probably just laugh or say,
33:49
hey, who are you calling a woman? And move
33:51
on with my life, and I wouldn't sob into a camera. But
33:54
even beyond that,
33:58
she says, well, it was a gay bar. but it was just
34:00
these gay men. And they
34:02
should accept me because we're queer too, or whatever, you
34:04
think, listen, if you are, it's hard
34:06
to tell these days, but let's say you are two women,
34:09
but you say you're men or whatever, you're two women,
34:12
and you think it's really smart for us two women
34:14
to go to a gay men's bar. They'll
34:17
accept us there. There is no
34:20
group of people that the gay men
34:22
bar attendees are less interested
34:24
in seeing than two women. And you can dress
34:27
up and you can pretend to be something other
34:29
than you are, but
34:30
the gay guys aren't interested in you.
34:33
And you shouldn't be interested in them. And
34:35
you shouldn't whine and cry when places that
34:37
are not for you are not, they
34:40
actually are fairly welcoming to you, but
34:42
are still like somehow almost a
34:44
little bit tethered to reality. But
34:46
then
34:47
this raises a question.
34:49
How are we supposed to think about the weird sex stuff?
34:52
Because we live in the world upside
34:54
down now, and the weird sex stuff dominates the headlines
34:56
all the time, and we can't avoid it. You can't just
34:59
say, well, just put it out of your
35:01
mind, stop thinking about it so much. It's everywhere. It's
35:03
in our schools, it's in our businesses, it's in the streets,
35:05
it's in the seven pride months that
35:08
we celebrate now, the pride year, and that's
35:10
just a full pride year, and it's
35:12
everywhere. So what are we supposed to do
35:14
about it? And Vanachi, the guy who wrote
35:17
The World Upside Down,
35:18
he makes a good point. He says, look, now the
35:21
gay stuff is everywhere.
35:23
In the middle ages, it was suppressed because
35:25
that was when the church was at the height of its power, and
35:28
all the weird sex stuff is contrary to church
35:30
teaching, and
35:32
scripture and sacred tradition, and so they kind
35:34
of tamped that stuff down. But way
35:37
back in antiquity, there were
35:39
prevalent homosexual acts. You read about
35:42
it in Plato, and the symposium is a
35:44
book about a big gay dinner party, kind of.
35:47
We know there's that old line about the difference
35:49
between the Greeks and the Romans.
35:51
They were arguing over who had
35:53
the better civilization. The Greeks say, we invented
35:56
Suflaki, the Romans say, we invented pizza.
35:59
The Greeks say, we have the...
35:59
the Parthenon,
36:01
the Romans say, we built the Colosseum.
36:03
Greeks say, okay, well, we've got you here because
36:05
we invented sex. And the Romans
36:08
say, yes, but we introduced it to women. So
36:10
we know that for a long time, there's been kind
36:12
of weird sort of gay stuff in
36:14
antiquity, and they looked on it
36:17
without total moral pro-room. Well, Venocchi
36:19
makes this good point. He says, they're
36:22
not the same thing.
36:23
The way the ancient Greeks looked at weird sex stuff and
36:26
the way that modern gay rights people do, totally
36:28
different things. Because for the ancients,
36:32
the weird sex stuff was simply a matter of sensual
36:35
pleasure,
36:37
a way for these
36:39
guys who had these inclinations to
36:41
just
36:43
have a bit of fun and amuse themselves.
36:45
It never
36:47
infringed upon the family.
36:50
Men didn't get gay married
36:52
in ancient Athens. Men
36:54
didn't
36:55
try to adopt children
36:57
in ancient Athens together or to have surrogates
37:00
pay some woman to rent her womb and
37:02
then implant a zygote
37:04
or an embryo
37:06
into, they
37:09
didn't do any of that weird stuff. They just, they
37:11
did their weird sex stuff and then they were normal
37:13
in public. And
37:15
that's what's going on now. And so Venocchi says,
37:18
if we just
37:20
went back to that understanding of things,
37:24
if the LGBT people would just,
37:26
they could go have their fun in the
37:29
privacy of their own homes, we're not gonna be sending the
37:31
purity police around. But
37:34
when you insist on upending the most
37:36
basic political institutions, when you insist
37:38
on upending the family, that's the fundamental unit
37:41
of society, then that's a problem. And
37:43
then we've got to talk about it and we've got to have an opinion.
37:45
And we can either allow that to happen and allow the complete
37:48
destruction of our politics and our entire sense of
37:50
reality. Or we
37:52
can come in and say, no, guys,
37:55
sorry. Sorry lady, you're
37:57
actually a lady, you're not a man. Sorry.
38:00
same-sex couple, you might be very close
38:02
to one another and you might have a lovely relationship,
38:04
but you're not the same thing as marriage. Sorry,
38:08
people in all sorts of disordered backgrounds, you
38:11
don't get to just buy a child and you don't get
38:13
to just make one in a laboratory and commoditize
38:15
human beings. No, the answer is no.
38:18
Because if we don't say no, we're gonna be living completely upside
38:20
down with our feet in the air and our heads on the ground. You
38:23
know, we have a very exciting offer coming
38:26
up for all of our Daily Wire members. Early
38:28
access to a first look at the highly anticipated
38:31
10-part original series, Candace Owens, convicting
38:33
a murderer. Early access
38:36
to view this series is September 7th,
38:38
only on Daily Wire Plus. Take a look
38:40
at this teaser. Coming
38:42
up on convicting a murderer. Part of me don't
38:44
wanna believe that he did this. The blood that
38:46
was on that back area was indicative
38:49
of the head wound.
38:50
My brother likes to push a lot of people
38:52
around. I don't give a f*** about anything.
38:54
I ain't gotta listen to nobody. How were these
38:56
filmmakers able to convince so many
38:59
people that a man like Stephen Avery
39:01
is innocent? How many times did he stab her? Once.
39:06
And show me where? Right here. They
39:09
gave him power. They're trying to get everything on
39:11
here that they can. It's not good for an Avery
39:13
to have power. I told you all along,
39:15
keep your f*** about, Chef.
39:17
That can hurt Stephen. I'm not
39:19
gonna lie for him no more, I can't do it. Watch
39:21
convicting a murderer, a new 10-part series
39:24
on Daily Wire Plus.
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Now, early access to watch convicting
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a murderer will be available for Daily Wire Plus members
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on September 7th. The official premiere
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for convicting a murderer will take place on X,
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that platform formerly known as Twitter, on
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September 8th at 9 p.m. Eastern. Candace will be live
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chatting with special guests at the X event at 5 p.m. So
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head on over to X to join the conversation. Full
39:45
series will be available only on Daily Wire Plus.
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look. Look, it's everywhere, okay? Candace
39:59
is...
39:59
take on this series is really interesting
40:02
so do not
40:03
miss out and subscribe today. My
40:05
favorite comment on Friday
40:07
is from Junior3170 who says, My
40:10
late father told me about the 70s. He
40:13
said it was hell. Everything was garbage
40:15
from the cars to the music. I couldn't even get
40:18
normal genes by the end. Fair enough.
40:21
And this will impact the presidential race
40:23
of course because we are living
40:25
in the 1970s. The same
40:28
sort of economic problems, energy
40:30
crises, massive inflation,
40:33
social breakdown. A
40:36
DC grocery store, giant
40:39
grocery store, is a Southeast
40:41
DC has removed name brands from
40:45
the store. It's got generic brands but no more name
40:47
brands. Advil, Colgate, Tide, it's gone.
40:50
It's gone because people keep stealing.
40:53
And the shop owner, he says, I don't want
40:55
to do this. I'd like to sell the name brand products. But
40:57
the reality is that Tide is not a profitable
41:00
item in this store because
41:01
it keeps getting stolen. In many instances,
41:03
people stock the product and within two hours it's gone.
41:06
So it's not on the shelf anyway. He's
41:08
seen theft rise tenfold
41:10
in the last five years.
41:14
This is
41:16
literally why we can't have nice things.
41:21
Just even material things we can't have.
41:23
We sell out all of the social capital
41:26
so that we can have cheap consumer
41:28
goods. And the irony of it is we end up
41:30
without even the nice consumer goods because
41:32
people
41:33
are stealing so much that they can't even put them on the shelves.
41:37
If we cease to be a coherent society,
41:40
as increasingly is happening, and we simply become
41:43
individual economic units just
41:46
sharing the same space, which is the
41:48
vision the left has for us, and frankly
41:50
it's the vision that a lot of the right has for us too.
41:53
We're just out there, we just care about cutting our taxes
41:55
and just making our money and leave me alone and
41:57
forget about those social questions. Well, okay, if
41:59
we're all just...
41:59
individuals living in the same space, then
42:02
you know what's gonna happen? All
42:04
the things that keep us behaving, community,
42:08
shame, a sense of
42:11
a fear of divine retribution, concern
42:13
for our souls and our reputation in the
42:15
community, even the law, that's all gonna
42:17
go away. And so what's gonna happen is first,
42:20
there's gonna be disorder as we're seeing now.
42:23
And then almost maybe even worse than
42:25
the disorder, there's going to be
42:27
a miserable kind of order imposed on
42:29
us.
42:30
Because this is a point I've made a
42:32
number of times before, there will be
42:34
order. There will
42:36
be order. The
42:38
state will
42:41
protect itself. So either
42:43
we can behave ourselves and
42:46
act in accordance with virtue and religion
42:48
and morality, or the state is gonna
42:50
come in and impose that. But there
42:53
will be order eventually. And
42:55
the kind of order that's gonna be imposed
42:58
on us is gonna be a miserable
43:00
one. Because it's gonna be an order
43:03
without
43:04
the uplift and the inspiration of religion,
43:07
without the natural bonds of family, which
43:10
disappear. I mean, they disappear in the sense that people
43:12
just stop having family. They stop getting married, they
43:14
stop having kids. It's gonna be one without tradition.
43:17
We'll have gotten rid of those traditions. It's going to be
43:19
one without a sense of loyalty to the nation
43:21
and a bond of kinship to the people. It's just gonna
43:24
be
43:25
a heavy-handed order of
43:30
sticks and carrots. The stick is going
43:32
to be increasing punishments
43:34
from the government, like locking people up for ordinary
43:37
basic political dissent,
43:39
as we're seeing all around us. And the carrot is
43:41
gonna be drugs and promiscuous sex
43:43
and
43:45
Netflix and staying
43:47
out late and drinking and going to Beyonce concerts
43:50
and not getting out of your bed until 10 in the morning. One
43:54
of them is George Orwell. One of them is Aldous Huxley.
43:56
One of them is 1984. One of them is Brave New World.
43:59
And it's not gonna be one of the-
43:59
you're gonna get them both at the same
44:02
time. Do you want that to be your society?
44:04
No, well then we've
44:08
gotta have the other stuff, the tradition
44:11
and the coherence among the people and
44:14
the religion and the being
44:16
normal. That's
44:21
what we're going to have to have. Now I teased
44:23
you, I teased you earlier. I
44:25
said that we were going to get to
44:27
COVID and Fauci. I'm
44:30
gonna leave this as a little bit of a tease for tomorrow. But
44:33
all I'll say for now is you've seen
44:35
the masks start to come back in Hollywood. Lionsgate
44:37
instituted a mask mandate. Morris
44:40
Brown College in Atlanta, Rutgers
44:42
University, bringing the masks back. Oh, just
44:44
a couple of weeks to slow the spread. You're seeing
44:47
New York saying if you're in public, maybe now start to
44:49
wear the masks. Jill Biden's apparently come
44:51
down with COVID. How she knows, I don't know, why people still
44:53
test for this ridiculous
44:55
ailment, I don't
44:58
know. Well, I do know it's because of the 2024
45:00
election. But Fauci
45:03
is starting to come back on TV, but the twist here
45:05
is CNN is
45:08
taking Dr. Fauci to
45:10
task for being wrong. Why
45:13
is that? What's going on? What
45:16
do the libs have up their sleeves? We'll
45:18
get to that tomorrow because right now we've got to get to the member block.
45:21
The rest of the show continues now. I know it's Tuesday,
45:24
but we didn't have Music Monday
45:27
because that was Labor Day. So what
45:30
Professor Jacob has said in his dubious
45:33
wisdom is that today
45:35
we're not going to have Tranny
45:37
Tuesday. We're going to have
45:40
Music Monday on Tuesday.
45:43
And then tomorrow for Woke Wednesday, we're gonna
45:45
lump in Trans Tuesday and Woke Wednesday
45:48
together in one day and
45:50
then Theology Thursday and then Fake
45:52
Headline Friday. My head is spinning
45:54
just thinking about it. The rest of the show continues
45:56
now. You do not wanna miss it. Become a member, use code
45:58
NOLS, canadwlas at check.
45:59
for two months free
46:01
on all annual plans.
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