The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1484 - Shots Fired At Trump, Tom Brady, And The Trad Wife
Episode Date: May 7, 2024Judge Merchan in New York threatens to send President Trump to jail, celebrities gather to roast Tom Brady on Netflix, and the trad life gathers new disciples. Click here to join the member excl...usive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEl Ep.1484 - - - DailyWire+: Don’t miss out on the premiere of Mr. Birchum this Sunday, May 12th at 9 PM ET on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/4akO7wC Watch the latest episode of Judged by Matt Walsh premiering TONIGHT at 8 PM ET only on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/3TNB3sD Get 25% off your DailyWire+ Membership here: https://bit.ly/4akO7wC Get your own Yes or No game here: https://bit.ly/3X6tlKY - - - Today’s Sponsors: Birch Gold - Text "KNOWLES" to 989898, or go to https://birchgold.com/Knowles, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit. Good Ranchers - Secure your price shield until 2026 and get an extra 10% off with promo code KNOWLES at https://www.goodranchers.com - - - 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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President Trump moved one step closer to an orange jumpsuit on Monday when New York County Judge Juan Mershahn ruled for a second time that Trump violated his gag order.
Judge Mershahn held Trump in criminal contempt for the 10th time so far.
He has fined Trump before $1,000 for a single violation.
Now he says that he might send Trump to jail if the former president does it again.
In Mershon's words, quote, this court,
will have to consider a jail sanction.
At the end of the day, the judge says,
I have a job to do.
Part of that job is to protect the dignity of the justice system.
Because, to Judge Mershon,
Trump's refusal to shut up while his enemies try to imprison him
while he's running for president constitutes,
quote, a direct attack on the rule of law
that Mershahn cannot allow to continue.
I do not know for certain what President Trump
is thinking about the latest development, but if I were him, I would be thinking, go ahead, make my day.
A liberal Democrat judge jailing the most popular presidential candidate in the country just months before an election is the best press President Trump could possibly hope for.
because the real direct attack on the rule of law is not President Trump speaking out.
The real threat to the rule of law is the trial.
It's unprecedented.
It threatens our democratic order.
And according to polls, most people, even people who don't like Trump, know it.
Send Trump to jail and, barring some massive fraud, you might as well send him straight to the White House.
I'm Michael Knowles. It's the Michael Knowles show.
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Speaking of Trump supporters,
Tom Brady was roasted by a bunch of celebs on Netflix.
This was a live roast.
It was probably one of the biggest cultural events of the year.
It's really because we don't have any common culture anymore
that these one-off events bring people together.
And this was a huge one.
Really big get for Netflix.
I won't go through the whole thing.
There were some pretty brutal jokes at Tom Brayette.
Brady's expense. Tony Hinchcliff was one of the most prolific and on the money comedians of the night.
Tom is afraid of the Giants, which is why Kevin Hart is hosting tonight. All night, he's been
using the stool that Aaron Hernandez kicked out from under himself. Kevin is so small that when
his ancestors picked cotton, they called it deadlifting. Tom Brady is a patriot, which is surprising,
considering he looks like a Confederate f***. Clearly your ex-wife takes after you. I hear you. I
she's out there draining
right now.
The appearance
from the great
Ron Burgundy,
huh?
A whale's vagina,
which reminds me,
Kim Kardashian's here.
She's had a lot
of black men
celebrate in her end zone.
Kim, word of advice.
Close your legs.
You have more public beef
than Kendrick and Drake.
Thank you guys.
Thank you, Tom.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thank you Netflix.
So I say that
Tony Hinchcliff
was one of the most
on the money
and rapid fire comedians of the night because it's true.
It's not exactly my flavor of comedy.
Some of his jokes were pretty funny.
A lot of it was just vulgar.
It was just really, really vulgar,
which is what these roasts have become increasingly in recent years.
So relative to the other comedians, he was kind of on the money,
it was just a lot of that, basically, throughout the night.
Jeff Ross, who's kind of the grand pooh-bah of these roasts,
he had slightly elevated material.
But even he got in trouble with the honoree.
Tom Brady was the only time all night.
People had these vicious attacks, not mean-spirited attacks, but vicious jokes on Tom Brady all night.
He took it.
He laughed.
He was a perfect roast honoree.
But then Jeff Ross made a joke about Robert Kraft that sent Tom Brady up from his chair.
That scrawny rookie famously walked into the owner Robert Kraft's office and said,
I'm the best decision your organization has ever made.
Would you like a massage?
I love Robert Kraft.
I love a shit again.
You can see, look, it was a good joke.
This is one of the better jokes of the night, actually.
And Jeff Ross is a very talented roaster.
But Tom Brady said, look, you make jokes about me, but don't you make any jokes about Robert Kraft?
And he didn't.
Jeff Ross is sort of saying, okay, all right, I'll move on.
nobody else, sorry, Tom.
But then I went off with a lot more vulgarity and all kinds of raunchy jokes.
I guess not at craft's expense so much, but at everyone else.
And it was perfectly fine.
It was a perfectly fine.
It was as good as any modern roast.
But it made me think about the greatest moment at any of these Comedy Central Friars Club,
now Netflix roasts in the last 20, 30 years.
And the undisputed best moment.
There were some good ones. There was the roast of Donald Trump. That was hilarious.
There were a lot of good. Greg Gerald was pretty funny.
All these guys. The best one by far was when the late great Norm McDonald, of course, gets up there at the roast of Bob Sagitt.
And everyone else is doing material just like that kind of material. You know, your genitals are so big that they're, you know, there's all this kind of disgusting bodily humor.
And then Norm gets up there and does this.
John Stamos.
I want to start with John Stamos, our esteemed roastmaster, John.
Well, John has a reputation for being a bit of a swinger.
Did you know instead of an umbilical cord John was born with a bungee cord?
John likes the ladies.
It's true.
He has a one-track mine, and the traffic on it is pretty light.
Norm is just totally straight-faced.
Does not crack for a second.
You know, John Stamos, it only takes one drink to get him drunk.
but he's not sure if it's the ninth or 10th or 11th.
And Cloris Leachman is here.
Cloris, if people say you're over the hill, don't believe them.
Why, you'll never be over the hill, not in the car you drive.
That's the one.
That's the one for me.
Whenever I think about this set, it was all jokes like this.
It was all jokes from the Dean Martin roasts, you know, jokes from the 70s.
So why did he do it?
In the room, if you listen to the tape in the crowd,
you couldn't tell, did they think Norm was bomb?
You look at the comedians on stage, they're all dying.
I mean, I thought it was just hilarious.
Well, what was he doing?
Norm explained himself one time.
He was asked, what were you doing at the Bob Sagitt roast?
He said, oh, well, they told me to be shocking.
And so that's how I was shocking.
That's the only way I knew how to be shocking.
And it was legitimately shocking.
It was totally different from all the other performances at all the other roasts in recent years,
up to and including this most recent one.
for Tom Brady. And that, I'm not just mentioning all of this because I like stand-up comedy and
the roast jokes are funny. I'm mentioning all of this because it has real political implications.
If you want to stand out in comedy, in show business, and in politics, you need to subvert
expectations. If you just give the people exactly what they expect and you play within the
perfectly well-defined rules that have been established for, I don't know, since the last time someone
upended the rules, you're not going to do very much. You're not going to get the biggest
laughs of the night. You're not going to, you're not going to leave any impression. You're not
going to advance the whatever your object is, be it in show business or politics, as, as you
might like to. So how do we be shocking now in politics? How do we subvert expectations in politics?
What does that mean politically today? To me, I think I have an answer to it.
Because I don't think left and right quite works anymore. You're really seeing this with the protests, the campus in Teffada.
It's coded basically left and right. The pro-Palestine people are on the left. The pro-Israel people are on the right.
But it's a little confusing. There are some pro-Israel left-wingers. There are some,
radically anti-Israel right-wingers. It's kind of a fringe, statistically. But especially when you get
to the younger conservatives and leftists, it gets a little bit more jumbled up. And it's not just true.
I mean, that's one war and one political issue, but it's true across a lot of other things.
You're seeing a lot of young conservatives upend Republican Party orthodoxy for the last two or three
decades when it comes to things like trade, when it comes to things like drugs and porn and government
regulation even. So what are we looking at now? You know, there was
It wasn't always just the left and the right for American history.
In the early days of American history, it was the Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans.
It was John Adams versus Thomas Jefferson.
And those debates kind of map onto modern left and right, but they're actually a little bit different.
Then in the 19th century, it was north and south.
Then it became, I don't know, in the 20th century, it became capitalists versus communists in the height of the Cold War.
You know, capitalist and that informed how the right talked about money and talked about freedom and talked about social issues. And the left was always kind of calmy, sympathetic, even if they didn't want to admit it. That informed how they viewed Russia. In the 20th century, the left loved Russia. Now the left hates Russia because the circumstances have changed. Now we talk about left versus right. But that's kind of breaking down, too. Some people are saying Tucker Carlson's economics are left wing. He's talking more like a leftist than a right winger. Or, you know, the
I don't know, the integralists, the common good conservatives, the populists. I guess populism is a good
term for this. You saw this especially in 2016 when the breakdown seemed to be the people versus
the establishment. Or I don't know. When you look at the campus in defada, I guess it's the Muslims
versus the Jews or some people. On the extreme fringes of the left or on the right, they'd probably
like it to be the Christians versus the Jews or something. I don't know. I don't think that one's
kind of been tried before. I don't know if that's going to totally, you know,
The people versus the Jews. I don't know if that's totally going to work, but there are people calling for all sorts of a new split in a new political order.
Even the close, of all the ones I just mentioned, the closest that probably would have some cachet that might sell is the people versus the elites, you know, the establishment that's increasingly unresponsive to the people.
But even that is limited because at a certain point, you hope that.
that your side gets some political power, and then what? Then you become part of the elite. Then you
become part of the establishment. You can't just be defined by your position outside of the political
order because then it doesn't give you any room to gain power in the political order and do stuff.
So you need something even beyond just the feeling of populism. What is it? What is it? I think
I have the answer. There's so much more to say, first though, go to good ranchers.com
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I think the answer to where the political alignment goes,
that is shocking, that has cachet, that wins people over,
that is a broad movement, you know,
it doesn't have the narrowness of, I don't know,
the very online right or the campus intifada or these kind of tiny things is another major topic of political debate these days in the commentary.
And that is the trads, trad life, trad wives, that tradition, the trads versus the radicals.
I think that is getting closer to where the real political divide is right now.
Because what does it even mean to be trad?
I don't, does it mean, you know, you go around larping?
You know, does it mean that you, I don't know, you adopt some anachronistic costume or political?
No, I think to betrad me, I mean, there are all sorts of implications.
There are implications that are anthropological.
You think that men and women are different rather than the same and rather than thinking men can become women.
that would be an anthropological aspect of being a traditional person.
I guess a generational aspect of it would be that you have children.
You're not closed off to the possibility of life.
A, I don't know, a financial aspect to it, it might be that you save your money.
You're not profligate.
You don't just spend your money on total nonsense.
A liturgical aspect of it might be that you go to church, first of all,
and that you go to churches that are more traditional, that have more liturgy to it, that have a little more smells and bells.
I mean, the reason I think this plays is because all these things are happening.
You're seeing younger people having less sex outside of marriage.
You're seeing younger people returning to, not only to religion, but to more traditional forms of religion.
It's just a social fact right now.
a lot of people are converting to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy to some degree.
And even among non-Christians, you're seeing Jews who had been largely secular for many, many decades,
they're becoming a little bit more orthodox, more conservative and a little bit more orthodox.
Even people who were total atheists, they're at least beginning to accept that God exists.
You're kind of seeing those movements.
People recognize that family kinds of matters, a new awareness that maybe we need to start having
kids. I mean, the fact that trad wives have become a kind of internet meme, that the trad life
is even a topic of discussion now really matters. So we can go through all this highfalutin,
you know, kind of abstract discussion about what it means to be trad. But the reason I think
this plays politically has nothing to do with any of that, which is maybe interesting for
the commentators and academics and people who are nerds.
But the reason it plays politically is because what it pretty much all boils down to this trad
life is just being normal, just being a normal person and not chopping yourself up and dyeing
your hair all sorts of crazy colors and shrieking at your dad and living in a communist polycule and
you know, choosing not to have children and all the stuff that modern people do that's really
weird and disordered. It's kind of just being normal. And being normal is really attractive.
and it's really great. I'll just speak from personal experience here. Not that, you know, we're all a little eccentric, a little quirky. I certainly have my quirks. But I endeavor to live in a way that is normal. And normal has two meanings. Normal means according to the norms of a society. So that part is a little bit relative and kind of changes over time. And also normal refers to objective standards like moral norms, ethical norms, things that are permanently true. It turns.
things. And ideally, we like to bring the former into line with the latter. We want our society's
norms and standards and taboos to accord with eternal truths, because then we're really going to
flourish, because the primary purpose of statecraft is do good and avoid evil and allow human
beings to flourish in community together. And I endeavor to do that. I'm from New York,
very liberal place. I went to a very radical left-wing school, and then I lived in L.A. and I
I worked in show business. I've worked in politics and show business my whole life.
I've been a professional actor, done all sorts of crazy parts in TV and film and theater.
I've worked on all sorts of crazy political campaigns. And I was single throughout most of my 20s.
But I've, you know, it occurred to me.
Living a traditional life is kind of nice. So I, you know, I get married, have kids as I've been, well, I don't have the kids.
You know, I'm not, I guess some modern men think they can get birth. I don't think I can get.
My wife has had the kids.
So we've been open to life, settle down, you know, try to live like a normal, go to work,
you know, come home, eat dinner, occasionally even watch a baseball game, read books, smoke
cigars, do normal things.
And it's really great, man.
And probably most important of this, have a great church, great community there,
see my friends, see my family, you know, when I can, even the ones that, you know,
when they live kind of far away.
And so I know that I'm not giving you a statistical read here.
okay this I'm just giving you an anecdote but my friends who live the trad life are happier than the ones who don't
I got a lot of friends who don't told you I lived in New York and L.A., went to crazy school.
My friends who are endeavoring to live that trad life, they are uniformly happier than the ones who
rejected and what's even wilder is the trader my friends are the happier they are.
And I know it's just an anecdote but but guess what? The plural of anecdote is data.
There seems to be something to this.
It's my own recommendation to you.
Try to be normal.
Try to live according to tradition,
which is not some old dusty thing,
but it's really vibrant.
It's the sort of thing that endures throughout history
and is really strong and vibrant.
It's survived the vicissitudes and craziness of time
where impermanent things just go away.
I'm telling you that personally it's really good,
but I'm also making perhaps the more
urgent observation, at least for our political order, which is that politically this stuff sells,
if you can be on the side of the American way of life, if that's what we're defending,
we're defending the American way of life. I like the good old American way of life.
That's what, that's what we're, the left wants to take that away from you.
And they want to trans your kids and they want to make you now all wear like Keffi is or something.
Muslim headscarves is the latest iteration of this
and they want to upend your economy and your family
and abolish marriage and kill your babies
and they just want
to take away your way of life
and we want to preserve your way of life.
That's the divide between the trads and the radicals
and radicals can't succeed
if they can't hold the common sense.
That was an observation of the Italian communist
Antonio Gramsci.
If we just hold on to that common sense
that trad radical
divide. I think that is the bestseller. I know people have their own pet ideologies or they hate
some particular group or they, I don't know, they're obsessed with some philosophical or ideological
idea. That stuff's not going to, you need to have currency, social currency. You need to be able to
play coast to coast and in the middle of the country. You need to have a grasp of the common sense.
And you're already seeing a social movement toward, hey, let's, can we all try being normal again?
that is shocking. A candidate getting on stage and saying, hey, I'm here so that we can all be normal again.
That, I strongly believe, plays. Now, speaking of people who don't want to be normal at all,
the leftists who protest me when I go to universities, sometimes I'm able to sit down with them
after the speech, as occurred at the University of Utah, which is the subject of our latest episode of
crossing the line.
Is it a safe place for your conservative students?
Of course.
How would they know that coming in here
when there's a sign that literally says they are not welcome?
Now, why on earth would conservative students
not feel welcome on a public university campus?
What does your sign say?
So respect existence or expect resistance.
The protesters were nearly all students in the College of Social War.
It seems very few of them had ever listened to a word that I've said.
From what I know about him, he has promoted the n-hilation of trans people.
I don't want to say that for sure.
When my producer, Mr. Davies, gave them the chance to discuss their views with me, pretty much all of them declined.
Personally, I have a really hard time staying cool, calm, and collected when talking to someone like that.
So I think I'm going to take the high road, not even go there.
However, after the TikToks were posted, and the mob felt that it's objective.
was complete, one student decided to peek his head in. Like most students, Daniel had never actually
listened to my show or to any of my speeches. He simply came to protest because his friends said he
should because they said the speaker was a bad guy. Happily, Daniel decided to investigate the
matter himself and crossed the picket line to hear what I had to say. That's right. Our latest episode
of Cross the Line is out right now. You can check it out on my YouTube.
channel. It's the Michael Knowles
YouTube channel, which I think still shows up if you
search for it. I don't know, big tech, you know,
sometimes they get all spicy, which is why you can
follow us on Spotify. Some
people are not content with the rise
of trad life. They don't like it.
One of whom is my friend, Lauren
Southern. Lauren Southern just has this
really interesting interview,
this exchange in unheard
written by Mary Harrington.
And it's about how
she tried the Trad Life and it didn't really work for her.
It's worth reading.
Here's just a little snippet.
Lauren talks about how she got married within four months of knowing a guy at the age of 22.
She writes, there were warning signs from early on.
If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity, he'd just disappear for days at a time.
I remember there were nights where he'd call me worthless and pathetic than get in his car and leave,
which is obviously awful, awful stuff.
What kind of man speaks to a woman that way?
But she didn't see them thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she'd absorbed and promoted.
Lauren says, I had this delusional view of relationships
that only women could be the ones that make or break them
and men can do no wrong.
So she didn't spot the red flags, even as they became more extreme.
He'd lock me out of the house.
I remember having to knock on the neighbor's door on rainy nights
because he'd get upset and drive off without unlocking the house.
It was very strange to go from being this public figure on stage
with people clapping to the girl crying,
knocking on someone's door with no home to get into being abandoned with a baby.
But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest,
when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the
birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind, but he used the political
and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree.
Whenever I wouldn't do something, he would say, I'm going to divorce you. So feeling she had no other
option, she assented. Okay, so that's not it, right? That's not the kind of thing that we want.
One feels very bad for Lauren. We haven't heard this guy's side of the story, but he's not around,
so I guess that kind of proves her side of the story. This ain't it. No, but,
wants this. And this is being presented as the dark side of trad life. The title of the essays,
Lauren Southern, how my trad life turned toxic. But it isn't trad. Right. I mean, even to say,
whenever I would say, I don't want to do something, he would say, I'm going to divorce you.
And that was the religious, you know, aspect of marriage. No, in our culture, at least,
in the West, a culture that used to be called Christendom, divorce was not.
permitted. It wasn't certainly not a traditional aspect of our culture. But we had, you know,
the Henry VIII basically rent his kingdom asunder because he wanted to get a divorce. He ripped
Christendom, you know, in half. That's very radical to do. He says, I'll divorce you. Or, you know,
he'd leave, go away for days at a time. I mean, that's not, that's, so what, so then you got to be
a little bit more specific. I mean, probably the, the weirdos at the university,
campus is wearing the keffias calling for a Palestinian state or something, they might appeal to
tradition. Hamas, in a way, appeals to a kind of tradition, but it's not our tradition.
So even that, maybe the most shocking part of the trad life is you can't distill it down into an essay
on Substack. You can't distill it down into a tweet thread. You can't write a book about it.
I mean, you can write a book about it, but that won't encapsulate everything. One of the great
more traditionalist political philosophers who did write a book on this subject, Michael Oakeshot,
points this out in rationalism and politics, that an exaltation of tradition is kind of an anti-ideology.
You don't write it in three bullet points on the back of a nap,
There's some things you learn from book learning. There's some things you learn just by doing them. And so you've got to put it into your whole body. And it's particular to your place. The tradition in Djibouti looks different than tradition in America. So what is our tradition? And then even deeper, because America is a young country, what tradition is that based on? And then, I guess, the Anglo tradition. What tradition is that based on? It goes back to the animating spirit of our culture, which is Christianity, which did not spring up.
300 or 400 years ago. It sprung up 2,000 years ago when our Lord walked the earth and instituted
a visible church with, you know, secular history redeemed in it, invisible successors.
And how does that express itself in different particular places? You got to, it's about real people.
I mean, even the fact Lauren writes here that she married some foreigner. Well, yeah, then it's hard,
it's hard to live the trad life when you're married to a foreign person who then takes you to a
country and largely a foreign tradition.
And no knock on Lauren. I mean, I really feel for all the stuff she went through. But it's just a
reminder. I think this is why this view of politics in life is really catching on now,
at least among young people, why it's attractive to a lot of people, because it's shocking.
It's like Norm MacDonald going up at the Bob Sagitt roast and doing old Dean Martin
jokes. It's just, it's totally different from the current left, right,
divide or Republican Democrat or communist capitalist or whatever people.
It's different and it's attractive and ultimately I think it's more durable.
Now, speaking of tradition, there's a great economic story out that shows that online shopping,
which we were once told was going to destroy brick and mortar shops, all the mom and pops
and even the big corporate shops, online shopping is actually saving the brick and mortar store.
We're not yet all just going to live in our pods and plug our brainstems.
into a computer and live in the metaverse, that actually people are going back into brick and
mortar shops in real communities, on real streets, and real buildings. Why is that?
According to this big piece, store owners, once viewed e-commerce as a mounting threat to their
survival, now more brick-and-mortar stores are thriving after integrating their properties with
the online shopping experience. So it's not that the brick-and-morters are opposed to online shopping.
the brick and mortars are becoming a part of online shopping,
and online shopping is relying increasingly on brick and mortars.
Shoppers browse in person to see touch or try on items before ordering them online.
They're picking up or returning purchases in stores,
and retailers are increasingly relying on their shops as fulfillment hubs,
shipping items ordered online from store stock rooms in addition to warehouses.
So, for instance, I could go in, let's say I want some nice new, you know, super trad,
Sigma, giga alpha male kind of sport code or something.
And I go in and I want to try the fit.
They don't have the exact sport code I want,
but I want to see how their suits are cut.
So I try the jacket on.
So, okay, this cuts gone.
All right, I guess I'm this size.
I'm a 40 in this or a 38 or a 42.
I don't know, whatever.
But I wanted to, so then I go online and I order the jacket online,
and then maybe it ships to the store.
And so you get this interaction in the world.
This is not just hypothetical.
According to these data,
nearly 42% of e-commerce orders last year
involved physical stores,
which is up from 27% in 2015.
So brick and mortars are exploding,
even after COVID,
even after we were all locked in
and had Amazon deliver everything
we wanted to our doors.
How is this?
Managing Director at Global Data,
which is the research firm here,
says there was a narrative
that as online grew,
stores would become less relevant,
but it hasn't worked out that way.
In many ways,
the store is still the heart
or hub of retail.
Now, I don't really care
that much about stores.
I do in the sense that I care about the economy and I want it to thrive.
And I don't want three mega corporations to have a total lock on our entire economy.
But the real reason I love this story is it backs up everything that we've just been talking about.
The incarnate world is vindicated yet again.
Undefeated the incarnate world.
We try to destroy it.
We try to flee it.
We try to abstract ourselves into little floating spirits.
we fall prey to Gnostic heresies all the time.
We try to upload our brains into the cloud and live in the metaverse and order everything from Jeff Bezos online.
And still, the incarnate world wins.
We try to separate our identity from our sexuality and our bodies.
We try to do everything online, have relationships online, date online.
We try to become people that are totally divorced from our bodies.
Your body says you're a man, but you say I'm a woman or I'm a woman.
furry or I'm an octopus or whatever you say you are. And still, the incarnate world is vindicated
because it's part of who we are. We are not just spirits imprisoned in bodies, as a lot of modern
Gnostic lives would tell you. We are not just a consciousness. We're not just our souls. We're soul
and body just mesh together in this world moving through time and space. And deep down, people know
that, they feel that at least. And so we're attracted to that stuff. We were told for years,
everyone's moving to the city. Everyone's going to move to the city. The country, the countryside is
going to empty out. We're all going to just live in some modern liberal, dystopian skyscraper-filled
totalitarian little metropolis. And then what happens? People start moving back out to the country.
That's what happens. We were told that we'd all just live digitally. We wouldn't even, you know,
we were forewarned in the matrix. We'd all basically just live our lives through avatars in some virtual reality. And what happens? People increasingly are trying to unplug and touch some grass. We were told that our bodies don't matter. Increasingly, people, they want to get married. They want to have more kids. They want physical contact. Even COVID was the big test of this. Does a society need to,
touch in order to function. Because in society, or elite said, yeah, you can't touch. You can't hug your
grandma. You can't see anyone in person. Every meeting is going to be online. Your graduation's going to be
online if you have it. Classes are going to, it's all just going to be from your pot. And people
hated it. They hated it because it's so inhuman. It's so disgusting. COVID radicalized a lot of
people. And it wasn't just because some doctor with a funny voice lied to us about a virus and about the
cures for a virus and the treatments for it. It's not.
not just because corrupt politicians shut down a lot of our society so that they could rig an
election. It's because they made us deny an essential aspect to our humanity, which is our bodies
and our social nature. The fact that we want to see people, and we want to shake their hands and
high-five them and give them hugs and see people in real life. Our bodies matter. The grass matters,
the land matters. Our real thriving, vibrant communities matter to a political order. That's the
dread life. That's it. The radicals, radical means root, right? They want to uproot you from the
things that ground you in society. That's the divide that we're in right now. And so we can dance around it
with also, you know, some of the really fringe radicals can, I don't know, they can go have their,
you know, Kefia-clad protests about whatever, like Palestine and Israel. And that's, I think we can
already see the protests aren't really about Palestine and Israel. It's about something that's why they got,
That's why people show up wearing American flag overalls, and you've got gender studies majors
yelling about straight white men in the patriarchy or whatever.
On the side of Hamas.
That's not it.
And even the more persuasive populism of the people versus the elite, even that's not quite it.
Our problem isn't that there are people who run the government.
There's always going to be people who run the government.
The question is, what are we after?
It's not just how it looks.
It's not just even the procedural.
norms. It's the substantive goods. What are we after? We're after normal life. That's what I'm after,
at least. Now, speaking of COVID and speaking of our elites, really turning us off, you got at probably
the lowest point for the Ivy League's reputation in recent memory. You have Harvard medical
students putting out a video
that almost left the cringe
permanently on my face. I was at real medical risk of a
cringe being permanently stuck to my face when Mark Hamill
took over the White House press briefing the other day
and called the President Jobi 1 Canobey. That almost
I had to really massage my face to get it. But then
these Harvard students, they
had the
one-two punch here, right? They followed up with that. And I
I think I've survived, but we'll see because I'm going to watch it again.
Now, we have a message before we get to that story from our friend, Meck and Kelly.
Ladies and gentlemen, the anticipation is finally over.
The moment we have all been waiting for is almost upon us.
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Yes, headshot!
Uh, Dad, my teammates can see your junk?
You're welcome, ladies.
The school means the bet is on.
First one of us to get in so...
They suck, Mr. Butt-Chunk!
Ah, deal got it.
Rule number one, no phones in the wood shop.
Pitch it out after class.
I found some really great school uniform options
to avoid misgendering.
Ooh, what about their allergies?
Maybe those theyes could be lactose intolerant.
No, we can't say intolerance.
We have a zero-tolerance policy for mentioning intolerance.
When I was a kid, men were men.
Now everyone's wrapped up and feeling.
Real men stuff, feelings down with red meat, cigarettes, and violence.
My name is Mr. Wolf. I solve problems.
You know what it takes? Balls.
Eyeballs.
He's going to say that. We're too young.
Well, actually, I was going to say you're too fat.
Keep my wife's name out of your damn mouth.
You and the geriatric girls' girls.
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In an hour
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Climate Change Biden Beach House,
who says,
Jar Jar Binks must have been booked.
I think so.
I actually heard Jar JAR Binks is on the alt-right.
I don't know.
I know Hans Solo, you know, Harrison Ford is a liberal,
but I think he's sort of checked out.
He just wants to fly his planes and smoke his pot.
James Earl Jones is a Republican, Darth Vader,
probably the most beloved of the actors
and the best actor from the Star Wars movies.
I think he's a Republican.
I know he's a Catholic.
Who else do you have?
Peter Cushing, he's dead, so he could vote for Biden.
And then Jar Jar, but I don't know.
I don't know what Jar Jar's sympathy is lied,
but I guess he was booked so they had to stick with Luke Skywalker.
Harvard Medical School.
Really, they said, hey,
the Ivy League still has one tiny modicum of respectability left we need to make sure we destroy that take it away
looking at my notes but my knowledge ain't feed in space repetition give me something to believe in pass all my tests but i just give him the re-in in the food chain we're the ones that eat you
Harvard med ain't no bottom feeder MD stands for my demeanor ask permission before i ever greet you does it radiate
does it come with strain scale one to ten can you rate the pain when i knock the door you ask who is i can check my coat it'll spell my name
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a billion.
Yeah, you're messing with some Harvard MDs.
Found my best friends for life from this Harvard MD,
giving everything we got for this Harvard MD.
Now from the top, make it drop.
Come get your Harvard MD.
You got your offer.
Now say yes to this Harvard MD.
We're talking doc, doc, doc.
That's a Harvard MD.
You deserve this spot you got future Harvard MD.
There's some docs in this house.
There's some dogs in this house.
There's some dogs in this house.
First question.
Does Harvard admit men anymore into its medical school?
Or is it just women?
Is it just perfectly, politically acceptable, multicultural rapping women?
Maybe it's that.
I'd like to spell this out now.
I don't know if I'll be able to put it in my will.
I don't have a living will.
But if I am ever, God forbid, I get these threats.
sometimes when I go speak at schools. And I was invited to Harvard, though, the administration under
that plagiarist president, Claudia and Gay, they shut down my speech last year. But, you know,
I go to these schools. I get these threats. If I ever, God forbid, I'm shot. Like bullets all through
me, like I'm Swiss cheese. And I am taken semi-conscious, or maybe I'm totally out, to a,
an operating room somewhere.
And one of those
rapping women comes out to operate on me.
I'm asking Ben Davies here
or Professor Jacob or any of my production team,
please drive me to another hospital.
I know you're going to say,
Michael, you're pouring blood.
You've got, I'd rather take the chance.
Drive me to a hospital.
Drive me to the bad hospital across town
where maybe the doctors
didn't go to Harvard Medical School,
but they also, they don't wrap like this.
I don't try, I don't know about you, I would not trust those people to operate on me.
Maybe they got good scores on their tests.
Maybe, maybe, I don't know.
I mean, at least for undergraduate, Yale and maybe Harvard stopped looking at the SAT for a few years.
I think they've recently reinstituted it because a bunch of, you know, let's say unqualified candidates made it in.
But I don't know, even if these kids did well on their tests, the thing that's really cringe about this and off-putting not only politically, but even as a matter of patients looking at prospective doctors, is how self-satisfied these people are.
This is the biggest problem with these schools.
Biggest problem with the Ivy League schools and especially the trade schools, the professional schools, like the medical schools and the law schools, but the undergraduates too.
they're so self-congratulatory. They think that because you were the valedictorian at your high school
and you got a perfect score on your SAT or a relatively high score on your SAT, or you were just an affirmative action case or something,
and because you, I don't know, you were the class president or something, that because of that, you're done.
You've won the lottery of life and you're the greatest thing ever and you never have to work again.
But that was part of the rap, right? I don't, I'm not studying from my tests, but I'm still doing well.
Yeah, right, because you can't, it's impossible to fail out of these schools.
It's still hard to get in, but it's pretty much impossible to fail out.
I remember when I was admitted into undergraduate, the alumnus who interviewed me, he said,
Michael, it's very hard to get in, but it pretty much requires an act of violence to be booted out of the school.
Very easy to graduate.
And now these days, you see acts of violence committed by the students, and even that might not kick them out.
This is a big problem.
And it's a big turnoff.
It's the self-congratulations, the self-satisfaction that really appears to be.
be unearned. I think this is what's leading to a lot of the anti-elitism, the populism or whatever,
is it's not that there is an elite. I like there being an elite. I like that there are people who are
smarter than me. The world would not be very well off if I were the smartest person in the world.
I like if I were the most knowledgeable person in the world. If I were the most capable person in the
world, you know, the society would crumble in two seconds. Okay. It's good. And even the fact that there are
hierarchies. So hierarchies just emerge out of nature. That's not a bad thing. The left says we need to all
be totally egalitarian and bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator and we're all living
as Harrison Bergeron, like we're in a Kurt Vonnegut story or something. But I don't mind that. I don't
mind that there are people who are richer than me. I don't mind that there are people who are more
powerful than me. I don't mind that certain people run the government. That's how governments work.
The problem is these people are not good at it. The problem is that our elites are not that smart and
they're not that educated and they're not very competent and they don't seem to have our best
interests at heart a lot of the time they don't give a damn about the common good a lot of the time
even as a matter of their own ideologies and they're just bad and they're so self-satisfied
i am quite confident that there were absolute divine right monarchs in western history
who were much less self-confident than these people are because at least the absolute
divine right monarchs knew they had to answer to
God. These people, half the time, more than half the time, probably, they don't even believe in God.
They view themselves as gods, which is always an undeserved and foolish view of oneself, but especially
now when our elites know much, much less and possess many fewer practical skills than their
forebears, whom they regularly denigrate. Now, speaking of bad education, there's a Girl Scout troop
in St. Louis. I think they've now broken away from the formal organization. They might have been
be an independent Girl Scout troop, but they're learning new chance. So they're out there,
they're protesting. Already, bad sign, red flag. I want my Girl Scouts to be selling me cookies.
I want my Girl Scouts maybe to be winning little merit badges for knitting socks or I don't know
what the Girl Scouts really do. But I like the cookies. I don't want them to be chanting with a
bullhorn. And then this is what they're chanting. Very weird.
That's my main, my main takeaway from it is not Palestine, Israel, whatever.
Very weird to have little girls, like six-year-old girls chanting this.
The full chant was, hey, Israel, nah, nah, no, boo-boo, my Cido or Sido, I guess that means
grandfather in some language, is older than you.
Like, we're, you know, the Palestinians had the land before the Jews or whatever.
I don't, weird.
It's weird, man.
I know Israel-Palestine is a complex issue, but I don't, maybe you're the biggest Israel supporter ever,
and you think we should wipe out all the Palestinians.
Maybe you're the biggest Palestine supporter ever.
You think we should wipe out all the Israelis.
Maybe you're a Muslim.
Maybe you're a Jew.
Maybe you hate the Muslims.
Maybe you hate the Jews.
And maybe you form your political thoughts other people have in the past over any of those topics.
You have to agree, I think, if you're even.
in any way tethered to reality, that is really weird.
That's really weird to have little Girl Scouts doing that.
That's off-putting.
I don't care how much you support Palestine or whatever.
That's off-putting to anyone.
No one wants that.
The vast majority of people don't want that.
I think running against that kind of thing,
it's the same reason why running against transing the kids
is a very powerful political campaign.
We just all know it's really weird
and totally out of keeping
with our tradition and with morality
and with normality.
It's just weird.
And don't, if we could just not,
if we just offer people a political option of,
hey, all the really weird stuff,
everything that's really screwed up,
we're against it.
And we're for like having a good life.
And we're for the good old American way of life
that you had until five seconds ago.
That's a great realignment, as far as I'm concerned.
Then we win, no matter how disconnected our political classes.
The rest of the show continues now.
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