The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1409 - DeSantis Drops Out & Endorses Trump

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

DeSantis drops out, Ukraine imprisons and kills an American journalist, and only 19% of Millennials definitely want kids.   Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEl   Ep.1409   - - -    DailyWire+:   Unlock your Bentkey 14 day free trial here: https://bit.ly/3GSz8go   Get your Jeremy’s Razors products here: https://bit.ly/433ytRY   Get your Yes or No game here: https://bit.ly/3X6tlKY    - - -    Today’s Sponsors:   Hillsdale College - Enroll for FREE today at https://www.hillsdale.edu/knowles    - - -   Socials:   Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6   Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA   Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg   Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Florida Governor Ronda Santas has dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed President Coffefe. If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews, I would do it. But I can't ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don't have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign. I'm proud to have delivered on 100% of my promises, and I will not stop now.

It's clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. They watch his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance, and they see Democrats using lawfare this day to attack him. Why I've had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci, Trump is superior to the current incumbent Joe Biden. That is clear. I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge. He has my endorsement because we can't go back to the old Republican Guard of yesteryear, a repackage formed of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents. The days of putting Americans last, of cowtowing to large. corporations of caving to woke ideology are over.

This is the smart thing to do, and it was inevitable. To quote old Billy Shakespeare, there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is it to leave betimes? The primary was already over after Iowa. Now it's super over. Once Nikki Haley drops out, it will be super duper over, but this was always going to happen. No candidate could have changed a thing by campaigning differently. We have not seen a race with a former president running for a non-consecutive second term in over 100 years. Trump is effectively an incumbent. A mention old Billy Shakespeare's line here

as consolation to the supporters of the various vanquished candidates. Because I'm a big providence guy. I'm very pro-providence. I'm very anti-wining about things that you can't change. And that's what the sparrow in that line refers to, God's providence, specifically Matthew 10, verse 29. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your father's care? If you're a Christian, you believe that God protects an orders all things to his ends. We can, and do, constantly screw things up, but God is sovereign and makes use of his creatures. As a friend of mine from the Bronx once put it, we do our best and

God does the rest. DeSantis is out. Haley has no path. The primary is over. Everyone ran the best race that he could. Whether you like him or not, Trump is the presumptive nominee. He is better in every regard than Joe Biden. There's no use worrying. There's no use whining. There's no use in wasting your time wondering what if that will drive you crazy. Only one question remains. Can we conservatives unite, beat Joe Biden, and put the Republican nominee in the White House? I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Nulls show. Welcome back to the show. Do you have a girlfriend? Well, if you don't, there's a robot who is more than happy to pretend to be a human and your girlfriend and makes $30,000 a month doing it. We will get to the end

of civilization in a moment. First, though, don't want to totally move on just yet from the primary. I thought this was a really classy move from DeSantis. He had to do it. The donors weren't going to give any more money. There was no path. He didn't have to endorse Trump. I thought that was smart. I think probably here he's learned from other vanquished candidates, especially in 2016, that if you're going to do it, do it. You know, there's an old Yiddish expression. I forget how to pronounce it in Yiddish, but the expression is if you're going to eat pork, do it until your mouth drips. If you're going to drop out of the race, and if Trump is obviously the nominee, and you want to remain in the Republican Party, you want to remain a conservative, you want to advocate for

conservative goals at the national level, then you got to endorse the guy. He's the man. You know, he's the man for the time. You might not have wished that were the case, but that's how it is. did that. It was very well stated. He's been an excellent governor. I felt he ran as good a race as he could. There were problems with this campaign. But as I've said before, I think those were mostly circumstantial problems, the problem of a campaign that is attractive because of how Trumpy it is, you know, Trump without the baggage. But a campaign that naturally is going to attract a lot of people who are extremely establishment or who might be neoconservative or who might be a little bit squishy and they just hate Donald Trump,

so they're going to the guy that they thought could beat him, even if Ron DeSantis' chief pitches, hey, man, I'm even more conservative than Trump. I'm even more right-wing. That was always going to be a problem. The one criticism I will make of his campaign on the way out is he closed his speech, Ron DeSantis, with this line. He said something to the effect of success is never final.

Failure is never fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts, some version of that. And he attributed that quote to Winston Churchill. And as with 90% of quotes attributed to Winston Churchill, Churchill never said it. There's no evidence that he did. That quote is sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln. It actually comes from a Budweiser ad campaign from the 1930s. The fact that it's from Budweiser, which is the woke corporation par excellence these days, is ironic and sort of amusing.

Very few people are going to catch it. It's just a word to the political consultants and the speechwriters out there. If you are ever going to quote Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Google the quote, just make sure it's actually something they said because at least seven times out of ten, it's not. And it can kind of be embarrassing when people look it up. But all in all, classy stuff, good stuff from Ron DeSantis. And I hope he has a bright political career because he's done great, great stuff in Florida. Some people now are still wondering about Nikki Haley. Okay, DeSantis is out. The chrysons is not going to happen. The croissants are done. Christy's out. Aza Hutchinson is out. He was still in the race as of just a week or two ago. But Asa Hutchinson has not endorsed Donald Trump. He's endorsed Nikki Haley. Before Marrakinsaw governor, best known for insisting that the state be allowed to trans the kids, or the state allowed parents to trans the kids, has tweeted out, quote,

who believes Donald Trump will unite this country has been asleep over the last eight years. Trump intentionally tries to divide America and will continue to do so. Go Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. Hashtag first in the nation. Frankly, this is bad for Nikki Haley. And this was already built into her lane in the race and her campaign, which in recent months has really been to lean into the fact that she is the anti-Trump candidate. She's going to attract the moderates. She's going to attract the centrists.

she's going to attract disaffected liberals in some cases. She's going to attract Wall Street. She's going to attract the Coke Network. She's leaned into that part. And so now she's going to attract the squishiest Republicans in the whole country, including Asa Hutchinson. I think what Nikki Haley is thinking here is I'm going to be the runner up to Trump. Everyone else is out.

But because I picked the anti-Trump lane and I did it the best, because I actually had a coherent political strategy, even if it won't be successful. then I could be the next person, you know, or if, if, God forbid, something happened to Donald Trump, then I'd be the person with the next most delegates, and then I would be the nominee. I don't think that's really going to happen here. I think the endorsement of squishes like Asa Hutchinson is going to make very, very clear to not only the Trump voters, but the DeSantis voters and the Vivek voters and all of the conservatives, it's going to make clear that she is fully siding against their interests.

interests. And so let's say, God forbid, something happened to Trump. Probably at the convention, they would just pick someone else. They would take Trump's delegates and pick, I don't know, Tucker or somebody. They'd pick someone not even running, not even associated with the race. That's the hazard of making yourself out to be the anti-Trump. Is you think maybe you could get a unity ticket like Reagan Bush. Maybe you could position yourself as number two if Trump really goes down in flames in a general election. But I don't see any world if Nikki is attracting the support of Asa Hutchinson's. I don't see any world in which there's somehow a coup at the convention and she gets the nomination this time. Also because Trump has done very well among moderates.

The way that the media present Trump, he's the far right extremist neo-Nazi skinhead fringe or something, you know, and the normal, respectable Republicans, they want nothing to do with him. But that's not really true. All of the early endorsements for Trump in this race have been from moderates. Actually, I mean, you're looking at Washington, D.C. It's guys like Kevin McCarthy, who's relatively more conservative than some of the Beltway crew, but Steve Scalise, he's quite moderate. He endorsed Donald Trump. It's a lot of those guys have been endorsing him. And now we're seeing not only the unveiling of more moderate endorsements for Trump, but we're seeing them come specifically from South Carolina.

So the senators from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, are relatively centrist. They both just endorsed Trump ahead of the primary in South Carolina in Nikki Haley's home state. We need a president today who will stop

the crime and recklessness in the streets. We need a president who will restore law and order. We need Donald Trump. Oh, we need a president who will lower our taxes and not raise our taxes. We need a president like Donald Trump. We need a president who understands the American people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

We need... We need a president. We need a president. that our foreign adversaries are afraid of and our allies respect. We need. First time I met Tim Scott, I was introduced to him and told that had Senator Scott not become a politician, he would have been a preacher. And I couldn't quite tell. He's a really wholesome, sweet guy. And, you know, he appears not to have any vices whatsoever. So that's kind of what I thought that was meant by that. But now I hear him speak. I say, oh, I see it. You know,

We need Donald Trump. And this is emphatic. It's a clear endorsement. Lindsay Graham gave him a clear endorsement. Other South Carolinians did, too. Governor Henry McMaster, three of the state's Republican members of the House did. And Nikki Haley, in her own state,

only has one congressional endorsement that is from Representative Ralph Norman. So what's this about? This is supposed to be a death blow to the Haley campaign. Will it be? We'll find out in one second. We will learn the answer to that question. First, though, when you want to learn, you've got to check out Hillsdale.

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Hillsdale.edu slash Knowles, Ken at WLAS to enroll, Hillsdale.edu slash Knowles. Will South Carolina be the death blow to Nikki Haley's campaign? Probably it will be. It depends a little bit on what's going on in New Hampshire. So we're in the run up to New Hampshire. The polls are disagreeing with one another a little bit. Some show that Nikki Haley is surging.

Some show that Trump still has a substantial. lead. If I were a gambling man, especially with Ron DeSantis dropping out, I would say that Trump wins New Hampshire. But I will tell you, I've campaigned up in New Hampshire. New Hampshire Republicans, they're a little bit weird. They buck the national trends sometimes. On the one hand, they're Uber, libertarian. You know, they won't wear helmets when they ride on motorcycles and they have a billion guns apiece. On the other hand, they elect guys like Chris Sununu, and they favor moderate candidates sometimes. So we'll see what happens there. I would still put my money on Trump. Either way, Trump is now up by something like 30, 40 points in South Carolina, Nevada. Nicky Haley's

not even on the ballot. So all in all, it would appear that we pour one out for the other candidates because the race is over. Now, speaking of people expecting Trump to be the nominee, a lot of world leaders outside of our own country are expecting Trump to be the nominee, including Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who is very, very concerned that Donald Trump wants to bring that war to an end. He's very worried. He finds that rhetoric, quote, very dangerous and a little scary. And that rhetoric about winding down the war in Ukraine is making him a little bit stressed. in Zelensky's own words, Trump is going to make decisions on his own

without, I'm not even talking about Russia, but without both sides, without us. If he says this publicly, that's a little scary. I've seen a lot, a lot of victims, but that's really making me a bit stressed. Okay, I think that the United States has every right to make whatever foreign policy decision that we want to make on our own

without consulting Vladmir Zelensky, especially since we've been the ones funding this war from day one. And if we stopped funding it, the war would be over in two seconds. I think we've given Ukraine enough money, enough arms. I think it's quite clear. There is no way for Ukraine to have a total victory over Russia, the Biden administration, even, which had been very bullish on Ukraine,

has already signaled that they're not going to push for total victory here. The libs in all of the big liberal establishment papers are saying, you know, actually, Ukraine does. doesn't need all of its territory to beat Putin. Actually, we can give Russia a little bit. So the negotiated peace that gives Russia parts of eastern Ukraine, which is what some of us who are more realistic in foreign policy had been calling for from day one, and we were all pilloried as Putin stooges for that, that appears now to be the consensus view among both political parties in the United States, the inevitable view. And Zelensky is really upset about that. Well, what will

what will have been achieved? Had, you know, in this case, I really hate to say I told you so, had the geniuses of grand strategy listened to the realists from day one, this war would be ending in exactly the same way it is now, almost three years later, except 30,000 Ukrainians would still be alive. Maybe more. It depends. Who knows if you can even believe those numbers? Meanwhile, after we've been told for years that Ukraine is the vanguard of democracy, Vladimir Zelensky is the Winston Churchill of our times. He probably makes a lot of quotes from Budweiser advertisements too. He, this is the man, you know, he's mobilized the Ukrainian language and sent it into war.

He's the great defender of freedom. Well, there's a story that basically no one is talking about, which is that an American journalist was imprisoned and killed in a Ukrainian prison simply for voicing his opinion. That journalist is Gonzalo Lira. I'm totally unfamiliar with his work. I've never watched a video of his. I take it that he's popular on YouTube and in some of the manosphere and the red pill circles, bit eccentric. And he was over in Ukraine and he was arrested for voicing his opinion on that war. and not sufficiently supporting the Zelensky regime. And so they arrested him.

They imprisoned him. His health started to fail. The Ukrainians didn't lift a finger, it seems, to help him. The U.S. State Department didn't lift a finger, it seems, to help him. And then he died. How are more people not talking about this? All we ever hear about, especially from the left-wing press in America, is how those journalists, they're the fourth estate,

the intrepid defenders of democracy. We need to stop all those autocratic regimes from silencing the press, killing the press in this case. Oh, unless it's Zelensky. Unless it's our guys doing. Unless it's the liberal preferred autocrats, then they can kill journalists.

They can kill American citizens. They can kill American journalists. Doesn't matter. As long as it's them. It's not that evil Putin. When was the last time Putin killed an American journalist? When was the last time Xi Jinping killed an American journalist? Huh?

I think, what have we given Ukraine so far? $2 billion? No, more than that, much more than that. I'm sorry, we're missing $1.7 billion in military equipment. I think that's enough. I think we've given enough. And I think even if it makes Zelensky a little uneasy, I think that the plan to wind down the war in Ukraine advocated by the presumptive Republican nominee for president,

just fine by me. Speaking of U.S. involvement overseas, a really, really scary story, a genuinely scary story over the weekend. Several U.S. troops have suffered potential traumatic brain injuries after Iran attacked an Iraqi airbase that had U.S. troops on it. We don't know exactly if the U.S. troops have the traumatic brain injuries and we don't know the extent of them. You know, a traumatic brain injury could mean anything from a concussion, which, you know, is unpleasant, but it happens if you play hockey in middle school. or something much, much more severe. We don't know.

So we should obviously pray for the U.S. troops. And what this shows you, though, is the risk to the U.S. interests of this ongoing war in the Middle East. You've seen Iranian-backed militants for the whole duration of this war, including, obviously, Hamas, which is backed by Iran. You're seeing the Houthis in Yemen, who are now firing on U.S. ships, and then we're firing on the Houthis. you're now seeing Iran backed militants firing on U.S. bases in Iraq, where the U.S. is. All of this brings me back to a point articulated very well by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. And it's called Lindy's Law. Lindy's Law refers to a Delhi in New York.

And it was not first articulated by Mandelbrot, who is best known as a mathematician focused specifically on fractals. It was articulated earlier by some other academic, but he was articulated earlier by some other academic, His version of it wasn't that good. Mandelbrot really, really zeroed in on it. And Mandelbrot's idea was, however long a person's past collected works, it will, on average, continue for an equal additional amount. And whenever it eventually stops, it breaks off at precisely half of its promise. So the idea being, the reason it refers to this deli, Lindy's deli, is a lot of comedians would talk about how long a comedian's career. would go on. Sometimes you hear this story as people debating how long a Broadway show would continue to perform. I think the author Nassim Nicholas Talib put it that way. And the way you can predict how long

a Broadway show, according to Talib, would go on, is how long it has already been playing for. The longer the Broadway show has been playing, the more likely it is to continue playing for a long time, an equally long time. Lindy's law. This applies to all sorts of non-perishable items and people and things, and it applies here to war. This war in the Holy Land has been going on for well over a hundred days now. We think it's only a week or two. It's not. It's been well over a hundred days. And the longer this thing goes on, the longer it is more likely to continue to go on. and that is very much opposed to the U.S. interest. We'll get into why in just a second.

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Use the code unlock at bentkey.com and you will get 14 days of unlimited access to Benkees' world of adventure. Go to Benkee.com, use code unlock at sign up to start your free trial today. What is the United States doing in Iraq that can attract the attention of Iranian militants that can then potentially injure U.S. soldiers? What are we doing? Well, we're the global hegemon is what we're doing. We are still today, even with a rising China, we are the undisputed world superpower. And we have bases everywhere, and we are the world police, and we've got a global empire,

and that's just how it goes. And Americans don't actually want to give that up. We don't want to fight forever wars in the Middle East, but we don't want to give up global hegemony. Because global hegemony comes with all sorts of nice perks. It comes from the dominance of the U.S. dollar. It comes with the ability. to travel wherever we want in the whole world and not really have to worry about it. Comes with the ability to do business anywhere in the world.

There's some good stuff that goes along with it. It comes with a world order that is protected by the United States. So we like it, but we don't want to pay a lot for it. In money and certainly not in the blood of U.S. soldiers. The war in the Middle East, the war that Hamas launched on Israel and Israel has responded with, and now it's gone on for over 100 days, that threatens U.S. positions because everyone knows that the United States is the dominant power in the world, and Israel would not be permitted to do much of anything at all

if the U.S. did not back Israel. So Iran, wanting to attack Israel, is going to attack the United States, and they're going to hit our ships through the Houthis in Yemen, and they're going to hit our troops in Iraq, and they're going to keep hitting everybody. And that's going to happen for as long as this war continues. There are all of these unpredictable, complex events,

that can occur. So from the very beginning, I've said, the U.S. interest in the war is to contain it, not to allow the war to spread. I think virtually every even semi-reasonable person in the world believes that after the October 7th massacre by Hamas, Israel has the right to defend its people, defend its territorial integrity, and take out Hamas, which is an unacceptable security risk. but this can't go on forever. And the fear here, going back to the Lindy effect, is the longer this war drags on, the longer it's going to continue to drag on. This is probably in the interest of the state of Israel.

If I were Benjamin Netanyahu, this is exactly what I would have done. Some people were arguing right after the October 7th massacre that Israel should just go in, basically flatten all of Gaza, be in and out while they still had international support. I think what Netanyahu did is actually much smarter, which is if you just keep it going, you kind of drag it out, maybe there's a little truce, there's a little ceasefire, then you keep dragging it out. You're going to fall into the Lindy effect here, and you're going to be able to continue a much, much longer war, which is going to allow you to continue to shell Hamas, continue to pummel Gaza and not risk a repeat of what happened in October and not have to pull out entirely. I think that's very much in the Israeli interest. I'm not convinced that's in the U.S. interest. So what do we do? What do we do?

The other thing we could do is just give up our global empire and pull our troops out of all of the bases all around the world and just come home. But then you lose dollar dominance. You lose the world order. You lose American hegemony. You lose a lot. So we're not going to do that.

That is why, through good diplomacy, you've got to try to wind this thing down. That's why the Trump campaign has been on peace. That's why the Trump campaign, going back to 2015, 2016, has been on pulling back from foreign entanglements, but not in just a radical isolationist way, in a way where every so often we kill the Tom Perani in general, and every so often we drop the Moab, and every so often we just completely destroy ISIS. But we only do that every now and again to be unpredictable, to show you that we can, to show you that we're willing to sometimes, and most of the time we're going

to pull back. That seems like a good foreign policy. In fact, if we'd had that foreign policy, for the past three years, probably we would not be in this position in the first place. Speaking of the future of America, we're already kind of up the creek without a paddle. You know, we're all planning for the future, especially presidential elections, always make us really think about the future. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Hope is a virtue and a demand, but optimism is not. And we're already pretty well into the problem.

And here's my evidence. 19% of millennials definitely want kids. 19% of millennials definitely want kids. 81% of millennials either do not want kids or not sure if they want kids. Four and five, young millennials, especially if they dwell on climate change concerns are considering not having any kids.

Study conducted by the University of Southampton and the Generations and Gender Program, 30%, other than the 19% of younger millennials who have a definite desire to have children, a 30% lean toward probably wanting children among older millennials, that's millennials between 36 and 41, 36% are certain they will not have children, 36% certain they will not have children, 20% leaning toward not having them. the majority of these millennials, 56%, probably not having kids. And you might say, I was tempted to say, because I'm always trying to look on the bright side, I was tempted to say, well, you know, they're young.

These millennials, they're young, they'll come around, but they're not young. They're not young. 36 to 41. They've made their decision. Time's up at that point. It's not like totally up if you're really, really, really, folks. focused on having a kid at age 36 and maybe you go through some doctors and you're very intentional about it. Maybe you can. But most of the time, no, if you're still, I don't know,

maybe I'll get married, maybe I'll have a kid. Or leaning toward no, you won't do that. Then you're just not going to have kids. They're basically too old to turn it around. Even the younger millennials. How old are the younger millennials? 24 now? I think millennial cutoff is the year 2000. So 24, again, you know, there's time to change your mind, but they're not 17 anymore. When you're 17, you're so, I don't know if I want kids. You know, I want to go out and just party and have fun and sleep around. 24, I don't know, you're supposed to be a little bit more of an adult at that point.

And this is very sad for the country because if you don't have any kids, then your country dies. It's simple as that. Forget about the ideology. Forget about who wins some election. If you don't have any kids, your country dies. That's the whole story. But also, there is something severely wrong with you if you definitely don't want kids. I'm not saying that everyone is called to literal biological parenthood.

That isn't true. Religious vocations are not called to have actual biological children, though they are called to have spiritual children. Some people can't have children. This is a great pain for them. It's an infertility, terrible, terrible suffering goes along with that. It's a great, great cross to bear, but they want and they desire the kids. Here, we're not talking about even that. We're talking about people who just say, no, I'd rather go to brunch.

And, you know, for a for a dumb 22-year-old to say that, you think, okay, well, you'll grow up. But a 41-year-old, you know, there's no growing up. There's no growing up. And so if you don't have any kids, your society is dead. But also, if your society never matures, your society is dead. Because you've got a society of children, and then the adults are going to come in and take over. Okay. A society of children certainly can't govern itself. Well, point of self-government is that we're virtuous and we've been well-educated and we are able, we are so sophisticated and we have,

we have built and habituated such virtue that we don't need some king to govern us. But we're past that. We're clearly past that. Not, you know, I hate to, I feel like I'm doing the Ben Shapiro show today. I'm so negative on these things. But this is just reality. something has gone severely wrong with a culture that does not want kids at these numbers. It just means we don't want a future. And so we won't have a future because people tend to get what they want. So instead of having kids, what are people doing? Well, some people are dating robots. There is, according to the New York Post, a new AI model, Lexi Love, not the sort of gal you probably intend to introduce to your mother, a creation of the UK-based Foxy AI that has been

specifically designed to communicate with lonely men. And the business has proven pretty profitable, just as a single AI model is already generating 30 grand a month by embodying the perfect girlfriend with flawless features and, you know, she's super hot. And more importantly, she speaks to this audience that is very lonely, exploits that loneliness, and gets them to pay her a lot of money. Now, the simple commentary on this is, these guys are a bunch of perves and they need to stop being such losers and go outside and touch grass or something. That's not exactly my view. Desire is good.

Okay, sometimes we conservatives, we get a little too puritanical about desire. Desire is a good thing. Desire is what leads us to God. but our desires can become perverted. And when our desires become perverted, the very desires that could have been our great aid in bringing us all the way up to heaven can actually send us down to hell.

Hell on earth or hell after earth. When we take shortcuts, those desires, those drives can kill us, actually. You think about hunger. Hunger is a good urge. It's a good drive. Because if you didn't feel hunger, then you wouldn't eat and then you would starve and die.

but sometimes our hunger can fall into perversions, into gluttony, into a desire for junk, you know, just eating junk food all the time. And then that's going to kill you too. It's going to make you really big and fat and block up your arteries and kill you. You think about when you're sleepy, that's a good urge. That's a good desire. I'm so sleepy. Because then you need sleep, and that's how your body repairs itself, and that's how you get rested,

and that's how you can go out and conquer the world. But you can short-circuit that by, you know, taking a little bit of that Hunter-Biden-Bugger sugar, all right? you can go have a little bit, you know, of that 1980s nose candy, and then you won't sleep, but then your heart will explode because you'd just be staying up all the time and you're perverting that urge. Certainly you see this with sex and porn. Sex is a great desire. It's a great urge that you have.

It's what keeps the species going. That's what keeps a family going, a country going, and the species going. But if you short-circuit that and you pervert that desire with something like an AI girlfriend, and porn, which is really all that is, then that'll kill you. It'll make you depressed. It will certainly kill the species. You know, it'll kill your family line and your country and your whole human race. The problem is not that we think too much about desire.

You know, I think some conservatives might think we're thinking too much about sexual desires. No, no, no. The problem is we're thinking too little about desire. We're thinking too little about why we have these desires and where they're supposed to go. And in part that's because we've adopted this silly neutral libertinism that says, you know, do whatever you want, just don't bother me about it. But no, it affects all of us. If people aren't having kids, that affects me because that means my country's going to collapse.

It's the most extreme version in the left and the libertarians. They always say, well, you know, get out of people's bedrooms. It actually matters what people are doing in their bedrooms to all of us, because if no one has any kids anymore, then we're either going to have to have mass migration to keep the economy afloat, or the country is just going to collapse overnight. And both of those things affect me. All of these private behaviors affect all of us because we're social creatures, and we live in society, and we have some right to set the standards and norms of that society. And to tell dudes to stop giving their money and to stop simping for blonde AI robots that are destroying our society. My favorite comment yesterday is from apathetically concerned 6574, who says,

when Jordan Peterson walks into that gulag, he should announce, I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me. I agree, totally agree. I can't wait. I hope there's some way. I hope there's a security camera in the room. I can't even imagine.

I actually almost feel bad for the bureaucrats who are running the Jordan Peterson re-education seminar. Because that man is going to make their life a living hell. It is going to be really, really funny. So, turning back to weird sex stuff, United Airlines is really, really pushing DEI. All the airlines are, all the companies are. But United in particular, the CEO, Scott Kirby,

has announced that he's going to stop caring so much about whether his pilots can actually fly planes and he's going to care a lot more about whether they're, you know, black midget pygmy lesbians. So, right? So is it, can a midget be a pygmy or advice for a, I don't know, I'll think about this later? You might recall, I think we played the clip on the show last week or the week before, this guy has a radical left-wing vision for his airline. How is diversity and diversity targets working into the Aviate Academy?

We have committed that 50% of the classes will be, women or people of color. Today, only 19% of our pilots at United Airlines are women or people of color. And by the way, from all the data I've seen, that's the highest of any airline in the country. White males don't just dominate in the cockpits. Also in the C-suite at United Airlines. Well, look, at United, I'm proud of the diversity that we actually have in our C-suite. I think if you look around corporate America. Correct me if I'm saying, though, so this is just based off your website, the people you list as executives, but out of 11 people, three are women, I believe one is a person of color. That's correct.

But, you know, in corporate America, I think, you know. That's a low bar. How do you raise your own bar? Well, a lot of this is, you know, focusing on it. We have programs to, one of the things we do is for every job when we do an interview, we require women and people of color to be involved in the interview process, bringing people in early in their careers as well, and giving them those opportunities and creating a stronger bench. Okay, that's it.

I also mentioned last week, DEI in your restaurant means you care about diversity more than your dinner. DEI in your school means you care about diversity more than your education. DEI in the cockpit means you care about diversity more than your life. I could not possibly care less if United Airlines ever hires a single additional black lesbian gender studies major to fly an airplane. I'm skeptical that diversity quotas will help anyone fly. The only thing I care about in the cockpit is whether people are good at flying airplanes and won't kill me and 200 other people. That's all I care about. Don't care about how they look.

Don't care about even what they think about a lot of things. Can you fly an airplane? All right. Why on earth would United Airlines, chief among all of the airlines, be pushing this kind of leftist craziness? Well, our friends over at lives of TikTok have suggested one explanation, which is, it turns out this guy is reportedly a drag queen. And there are these videos of him doing weird drag shows and all sorts of other pictures of him doing drag shows that I won't post. I hesitated even to cover this story because I don't have any desire to personally humiliate anybody. Now, this guy obviously allowed himself to be videotaped.

He's doing this sort of stuff publicly. so I don't feel that I'm uncovering any private sins exactly. But it is humiliating. The whole thing is humiliating. The minute he put on the stilettos, that's a humiliating act. And I guess the guy's into cross-dressing or whatever. Okay. Do you think that might have anything to do with his embrace of radical leftist politics?

I think it does. I think the lesson here for conservatives is personal vices create political problems. You can't neatly compartmentalize these two things. A lot of people, lowercase L liberals, classical liberals, libertarians, they want to compartmentalize life. So you say, well, what I do in private is nobody's business. It has nothing to do with anybody. And I can totally neatly separate my personal views and behavior from my public and political views. But you can't.

You're a person. You're not two people, even though today people use the plural pronoun to refer to themselves. I am they and they are me and I'm the walrus gugu-gu-gu-gu-gujub. But you're not really two people. Some others say, my name is Legion for We Are Many. You're not really many. You might have other spiritual problems going on, but you're a person. And so to give credit, actually, to the feminists of the 1970s,

when they said the personal is the political, they were right. Actually, the proof that they were right is that they totally remade politics. They were completely politically successful. by obliterating that distinction between the personal and the private. We all want to have some reasonable privacy. We don't want the public to intrude on our private lives and our families and everything, of course. But that position becomes less and less tenable, the weirder you are personally. The more depraved you become personally, the more vices that you accrue, the more bizarre your family situation becomes.

the less able you are to have a private life, because that is going to so clearly encroach on the public sector. I mean, the moment that you say, yeah, family isn't real, and I'm going to live in a thruple polycule with three dudes and a billy goat, and you're going to call us all husbands and wives, and we're going to adopt children, and we're going to, all of a sudden, now, you're in the, you've very quickly left the bedroom. You're in the realm of major public and political questions. And if we have a country of a bunch of cross-dressing porn-addled weirdos, then you're not going to have a virtuous polity. You're not going to neatly separate the private life from the political life. The more you act like a radical leftist in your private life, the more radically leftist the politics of the country are going to become. Because a country is made up of people.

That's what politics is about. It's about people. a lot of technocrats and extreme ideologues, they want to pretend that people don't matter. People are just statistics. People are just automaton. They're just the masses to be let on. No, no, we've got the ideology.

We wrote it in five bullet points on the back of a napkin. We don't need to care about it. Nope, it's people, man. That's it. That's what it comes down to. No, but we have the Constitution. Constitution without people who can actually put it into effect. And a buck 50 will get you a cup of coffee under Trump,

Under Biden, it takes like $4.50 because of inflation. A constitution, a letters on a piece of paper, doesn't mean anything without people to actually put it into effect. Laws, courts of justice, it means nothing without people who have self-control and a deep enough education, intellectual and habitual, to actually live that out. A nation of sex freaks is not going to be a virtuous nation. Again, that's where we have to start talking about the bedroom. Okay. I don't want to talk about anyone's bedroom, but it's bleeding out into the streets, and it's weird, and it's making our country worse. Now, speaking of the importance of people, this is going to be a little tease.

You know I'm a tease. Dana White, who's the head of USC, just completely destroyed a reporter on the issue of free speech. And the point he made was really, really good. but conservatives are learning all the wrong lessons from the point because the point that you've got to learn from Dana White is not just what he says when he schools this reporter and owns him with facts and logic. It's about what he did at the UFC.

So I will give my great praise to the UFC tomorrow because today's music Monday and the rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use Code Knowles, KnaW, LAS, a checkout for two months free on all annual plans.