The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 190 - Have We Ever Had It So Good?

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

Crises, crises everywhere! Sexbots, straws, and porn stars. We’ll analyze the most pressing crises facing our nation today and ask if we’ve ever had it so good? Then, comedian and commentator Chad Prather joins the show to discuss the political landscape. Finally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s brilliant media strategy, and the world’s first-ever test tube baby is born on This Day In History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Crises, crises everywhere. No, no, no, I'm not talking about starvation or war, genocide, civil unrest, rape, murder, or poverty. No, no, no. What I'm talking about is a tape in which a guy that we know pays off women that he's slept with talks about paying off women that he slept with. I'm talking about men copulating with rubber dolls. I'm talking about plastic straws, man, the real problems. We will analyze the most pressing crises facing our nation today. and we will ask if we've ever had it so good.

Then, comedian and commentator Chad Prather joins to discuss the electoral landscape. And finally, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's brilliant media strategy. I'm going to compliment her. She's played this very well. Plus, the world's first ever test tube baby born today on this day in history. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles show. A lot to get to so many crises. And the tape, the big tape, the big moment they got Trump.

They finally got him. Probably not. Before we get to that, we have to thank Black Rifle Coffee. A wonderful sponsor, Black Rifle Coffee. I use them all the time. It is delicious. Are you, do you ever find yourself wincing

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Black Riflecoffee.com slash co-fefefefefe, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, black rifle coffee. It is really good coffee. I use it all the time. Okay, let's get to the big stuff, the big topic today. We're talking about the tape. Michael Cohen, did he flip? Did Fredo flip? I know it was you, Michael, never take sides against the family again. Was it? Let's see. Let's listen to the bombshell tape that CNN got and that all the mainstream media outlets are reporting on what it means for Trump, what it means for the Mueller investigation, what it means for all of this and all of the terrible crises in our country. Here is the Michael Cohen super secret Donald Trump tape. I've spoken to Alan Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding.

Yes. And it's all the stuff. I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, so that I'm going to do that right away. I've actually come up and I spoke to me. So I'm all over that. And I spoke to Alan about it when it comes time for the first. financing, which will be...

What finance? We'll have to pay you. No, no, no, no, no. I got... No, no, no, no. Okay, there it is. And so you can hear... They're making a lot out of this. They say, okay, we got to pay, are we going to pay? And Trump, you can't hear it because it's all muffled. It says, no, no, no, no, cash. And Cohen says, no, no, no, we're going to pay. And Trump says check, right?

So what they're alleging, what Michael Cohen's lawyer is alleging, what the anti-Trump forces are alleging, is that Trump wanted to pay cash to pay off these girls that he had allegedly slept with, and Cohen said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but when you hear the tape, it's pretty clear, he's saying, no, no, no, with cash, don't pay with cash, is now what Trump's team is saying, and that seems plausible. Look, I will admit when President Trump is a twisting language a little bit, you know, in Helsinki, he said, I meant to say wouldn't, but I said would. This is not one of those cases. This is one. He's clearly saying something, no, no, no, no, no, I got. this check. It doesn't, don't, you're not going to pay with cash. No, no, no, you pay with check.

Right. Okay, so that's fine. Now, this is the big bombshell, right? It comes out. It actually tells us a lot about Trump's media strategy, but let's check in on the legality of all this. Does this constitute a crime? You know, there's a girl alleges that President Trump slept with her, and he's basically, before the election, he's just paying these people off to keep quiet. There are a couple of things that are pretty funny about this. One, it reminds me of that Mark Wahlberg movie, Four Brothers, where they say, I'll try to clean up the language. They say, you don't pay a hoe to sleep with you. You pay her to go home.

And that's where we're seeing her. Pretty interesting in this story, both with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the new Playboy Playmate that allegedly slept with Trump 10 years ago. They say that they, after their romantic trist, Trump offered to pay them. And both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, when they're talking to the media, they say, I was so offended by this. I'm not that kind of girl. I can't believe you would call me that kind of girl to pay me to sleep with me.

I can't believe you would allege that. But then they took all the money later. Isn't that interesting? They said, you know, they said, oh, don't hand me an envelope full of money. That makes me feel like a prostitute. I want you to hand me a lot, lot more money later on to keep quiet. Then I won't feel like a prostitute. It's pretty funny because, you know, I don't know.

What was Trump going to pay them to sleep with them? I can't imagine that much money. But then later on, they say, no, no, no, I don't want that money. I want $150,000 to keep quiet. So really, it's funny because there are all these tears on camera. Oh, I cried. I couldn't believe he thought that I would accept money because I had sex with him. I said, well, darling, didn't you accept $150,000?

Yeah, but that was different because that was a little later. Okay, fine. Was there a crime committed? That's the question. We talked to a wonderful, brilliant law professor, Alan Dershowitz on the show last week. Here's Alan Dershowitz weighing in on whether this demonstrates a crime. No, it sounds very plausible, especially since they did. seem to use the word plural, that perhaps what the president and Cohn were discussing is in the

run-up to the election, there were probably going to be lots of people who will come and demand cash in order not to embarrass the president just before the election. And they were discussing how to set up a corporation to make payments if necessary, to keep it from influencing the election. That happens all the time. That happens all the time. Dershowitz's point is this doesn't demonstrate a crime. Now, the one flip side, one argument that some of the anti-Trump people are making is that this is similar to John Edwards. You remember John Edwards, former senator, vice presidential candidate, Democrat.

He was paying off his mistress, and this was a campaign finance violation allegedly, and they really got him for it. But if that is the line that they're drawing, if that's the analogy here, this bodes very well for Donald Trump. the prosecution never got John Edwards. He was never convicted of anything. That's what that worked out just fine for him. And what really hurt John Edwards is he portrayed himself as this good Christian man, this upright citizen, this wonderful, you know, and then it turns out he was cheating with this mistress on his wife who was dying of cancer that really blew up his

entire career obviously. With Donald Trump, you don't have that problem. What's the new information? President Trump paid off women that alleged that he slept with them. President Trump has bragged about that. There's no new information conveyed. It's not going to destroy his political career, certainly. And what's the legal problem? If John Edwards wasn't convicted for these crimes, how are they going to get Donald Trump on this?

So have to side with Alan Dershowitz here. This can't be, this doesn't seem to present a really big issue for him. It doesn't seem to present any new information either. We know that he's slept with these women 10 years ago. We know that he likes Playboy Playmates. Okay, no new information. Now, this brings up the next question. Why did he allow this tape to come out?

Because the media aren't really reporting on this. President Trump has attorney-client privilege here. These were tapes. Michael Cohen recorded him. His lawyer recorded this conversation. Why did Trump waive attorney-client privilege? Trump allowed this tape to come out. Well, there are a few reasons.

Clearly, President Trump doesn't think that this is going to kill him. If he thought this was going to kill him, he wouldn't have waived attorney-client privilege. Trump is now coming out and playing this against Michael Cohen. So he tweeted out, he said, what kind of lawyer would tape a client? So sad. Is this a first? Never heard of it before. Why was the tape so abruptly terminated while I was presumably saying positive things?

I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped. Can this be so? Too bad. So he's insinuating that Michael Cohen is a bad lawyer. He's a crooked lawyer. There's something wrong with him. Fair enough. I don't know what kind of lawyer tapes his client like that

and would betray his benefactor. I mean, you know, Dante puts the people who betray their benefactors in the lowest circle of hell. This is a really bad thing. And Michael Cohen is apparently turning on Trump. He says the truth is going to come out. He's hired Lanny Davis. We're going after Donald Trump.

So it does raise questions about Cohen. It raises questions about his integrity. If he has any integrity, I don't know the people ever thought he had integrity. But the fact that he would tape Trump, the fact that he's turning against his benefactor really does raise those questions. And so I think that plays to Trump's advantage in all of this.

But doesn't everything else play to Trump's advantage here? There's public polling that shows that the vast majority of Americans do not care about the Stormy Daniels story. They don't care about it at all. There's also, there was a new poll out from Kwynipiac. It showed that 21% of the entire American electorate considers the mainstream media,

the enemy of the people. And they consider this story ginned up by the media. This is a media non-traversy. 21% of all voters and 18% of independence, so that number holds strong there. That seems pretty strong. You know, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh earlier, who is one of the best observers of politics, of course,

but he said without this sex stuff, the Stormy Daniels, all of the Mueller investigation, he thinks that President Trump's approval rating could be at 60%. It's already very high. It's already at 45%, but it could be at 60. I have to disagree with Rush here. I'm not sure about that.

I think if people weren't focused on the sex stuff, if people weren't focused on Russia, on the Mueller investigation, the witch hunt, they'd be focused on something else. They'd gin up some other crisis. They'd try to focus on the border, the people being ripped from their families at the border, or they'd focus on some company going out of business, even though we have a record low unemployment and a booming economy. They'd just focus on other real things. And for President Trump, this is manageable.

The sex stuff is manageable. It doesn't really hurt him. It's already hurt him. Whatever effect it's going to have on him, it's already. have. This Russia investigation, it doesn't hurt him. Public polling consistently shows the American people don't care about Russia, don't care about Stormy Daniels, don't care of it.

Or the new girl, Karen McDougal. I had to Google her name because I don't even, who cares? It's just kind of floating in the air. Not the worst thing in the world. So, I do, I do want to find out how intentional this is. Is this really the lawyer turning

on Trump and Trump turning on the lawyer and it's going to or is this more good TV. You know, everything with Donald Trump is, seems to be a manipulation of the media. I'm not saying he plays 4DHS. I'm not saying he's meternique or something. I'm saying that he's really good at the media. He has been for decades. And this could be another example of this. As long as the spotlight is on the sex and the Russia, it's not on other things. And President Trump gets to go on with his, with his very effective administration. You know, there's a reason that his approval rating is so high. It's a 45%. They seem to be doing something right here.

To help me analyze this, maybe I'm just looking at the, last half full here. Let's bring on Chad Prather. You know Chad Prather from his viral video. That's probably were your first song, unapologetically Southern. You might have seen him do a hit with me on Fox and Friends, and you might know him from the Chad Prather show, his podcast. He's got a comedy tour going on. Let's bring on Chad. You there? Hey, Michael, good to hear from you, man. Good to see you again. Chad. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. So you're on the road right now. Is that right? You're doing your comedy tour? I am, yeah. I'm in San Jose. So it's always great when you're a cisgender

white male walking around San Jose with a cowboy hat on. He gets some eyes, you know? I love seeing who gets triggered. Just all of them. Yeah, that's another good example of owning the lives, which I strongly encourage. I'm a big proponent of that. I want to know with this Trump stuff, you are torn around. You're on the road.

You're in places that constitute sometimes real America. How do you think this plays, the tape and the Michael Cohen and the Mueller investigation and the sex and the Russia and the blah, blah, blah. What is your sense? Do people care about this? Are they really worked up about this? How is Trump playing it? Not a bit. People are going to come to my shows, and it doesn't matter.

It's funny, Michael, because I've done shows now. I've got two shows tonight and tomorrow night in San Jose, California, obviously not a conservative bastion in America. I've had sold out shows in Portland, Oregon, Eugene, Medford, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, New York, New Jersey. You get my point. And people drive in to these places, and they sit down, and they enjoy a show and not a single person is distracted by these things.

Yeah, occasionally you might hear somebody who says, I wish the president wouldn't tweak that, you know, some ladies ringing her hands going, I just wish he wouldn't do that. But, oh, that's just, that's just Trump. And I think that's everybody's attitude, you know. The thing is, what we're facing, and you know this so well, it's just distractions. And if it wasn't this distraction, it would be another distraction.

And that's what the media and the left is continuing. parading out here is, can we put out another distraction? And I think at this point, really, and I've said this over and over again, it gets me in trouble. It's become white noise. People say, I can't believe you don't care more about this. No, it's just white noise. It's just a buzz. Caucasian noise, you mean? Caucasian, privilege noise. You know, it is. I do think it's all just noise out there. And I look at the other crises, the big crises of the day. One of them is straws. Apparently, people are using too many straws. is a big concern for people. People are having sex with rubber dolls. That's another one.

And I have to wonder, is this the most decadent time in the history of the world? Does anybody have any actual problem? It's pretty amazing. I mean, when they're saying that mankind, or as Trudeau would say, people kind, is going to be finished in 50 years if we don't stop using plastic straws, I'm like, are you really drumming up a problem? I mean, does anyone care that they are dismantling nuclear facilities in North Korea right now? I mean, are we really that threatened? I had a mentor of mine whose father-in-law passed away 20 years ago. And when they were developing this new development in my hometown, they were tearing down. They were cutting down all these trees to build. And he was so worried, just ringing his hands. He'd drive by, I said, what's going to happen? Well, we don't have any more

trees. And my mentor told him one day, he said, well, there will be enough wood to build a box to put you in it and put you in the ground. And sure enough, 25 years ago, that's what happened. And bless his art. So everybody, You know, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. It's absolutely ridiculous. And then Como comes out with this new tape and all that. And it's such a, you know, nothing. There's absolutely nothing there. There's nothing to it.

I think we're bored with it. That's what I think it is. I think all of this actually comes up because we're bored. If we had real problems, you wouldn't be worrying about the straws. You know, I had my priest father Rutler come on the other day. He said, when the barbarian invades, there are no safe spaces. You know, you can't worry about these little tiny things anymore. What is it? Have Americans grown soft? I'm reminded of Teddy Roosevelt saying Americans are soft. We need a war. We need some actual struggle to make people serious again. What is it? Is the country just gone too soft?

You know, if you go back to the idealism of, say, 1914, and right at the, as the precursor to World War I, everybody was looking in the mirror and saying to themselves over and over, and every day in every way, I'm getting better. And they have this idealic view of the world. World War I hit, and it was four devastating. years and everyone was affected by it, especially Europe, you know, 10 million men are dead in France and all of a sudden people come marching back for more and they see what real tragedy is like. And I think we're living in a day where we don't understand what real tragedy is anymore. We don't understand, yes, yes, we see the things because the bad news is constantly paraded in front of us 24-7. And like you said, it makes for, quote, good TV tragedy and bad things make for good TV. But people haven't faced anything that has toughened us up. So now, you know, you read a magazine a cover that says the rise of the beta male.

I mean, are you kidding me? This is what we're talking about. This is what we're discussing. It's not really a rise. It's more of like a slouching of the beta male, sort of like off the couch a little. It's kind of an ease into it. It's kind of an ease into it, you know. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Slay. Yes. You know, this reminds me, Stephen Pinker has this book out, Enlightenment now. And he talks about this. I saw him give a lecture on this in Orange County, which is that everything materially is better. Disease is down, war is down, life expectancy is up, infant mortality is down, poverty is down,

starvation is down, everything materially is getting better. And people are getting more depressed, they're getting more anxious, they're getting more neurotic, the suicide rate is going up. This doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to Stephen Pinker or to other people who are atheists or materialists, but it seems to me they're missing the cultural aspect. So materially, everything might be getting better. We're getting cheap t-shirts from China and, you know, we get a movie pass and get to see movies for free and like all of that is great. But in a cultural level, there does seem to be some decay. Are you seeing that? And do you think there is any way to

reverse that trend? I think people are disillusioned. I think they're disengaged from reality. And, you know, we live in a world where the statistic, one of the high, highest growing demographics in America today are people turning 100. I mean, people are living longer. They're doing, but yet, but yet you have an epidemic of opioid crisis and you have an epidemic of suicides amongst teenagers in these things because there is this sense of hopelessness. I always say, and I'll take all the heat for it, I think that there has to be a return to a foundation of faith, both faith in God, faith in yourself, faith in the people around you, faith in the culture, faith in the Constitution. We can list these things out. There's a reason

in America has done what it's done the last 250 years, even with the scars, even with the things we've done wrong, the things in our history that we need to mend, heal, and a race, we still have done a lot of things right. And we have to go back and have faith in that, faith in the process. And it's amazing to me, people who want to come along and they want to say, well, the only reason Trump won is because of the electoral college. Well, that's the only reason any president in history ever won, the presidency. That's the process. And then you want to say, well, you know, We're living in a day and age where, you know, maybe we need to look at democratic socialism. And that, you know, that's not an answer.

Why are you going to change a process that's worked so well and go embrace something that historically has proven itself to be tragic just so you can now be different? So is there hope for it? I think it's going to take a massive amount, a massive amount of coming back in together to dialogue and discuss. You know, and I've said this, the old adage, the example of a healthy bird has two healthy wings, and it flies in a direction. If you have one big wing on one side or the other, it's just going to fly in circles and not get anywhere. But I think the tendency is everybody wants to interpret one another as being out on the tips of the wings. We've got to get back into the vitality of the bird, if you will. Get back into where the heartbeat and the body and the muscle and the movement and the motion and the brain is.

And until people are willing to do that, because, you know, I say it all the time. I say, we live in this world where we don't know each other anymore. And we have a real world. You don't walk into the average restaurant. You know, I'm in L.A. all the time. I'm working on projects in L.A. I go to L.A. just like this, cowboy hat on, walking through Weho. And people give me the look.

But I can walk in a restaurant. We don't immediately start having a conversation or a debate about politics. Right. How are you good to see it? We don't do that. But yet we think we can go in at the end of the afternoon. We drive in our garage. The door goes down.

We go in. We pull out our device. and we think we can debate politics with a stranger from seven states away and that be effective. It's just not. We've lost the concept of being neighbors and we don't know each other anymore. And that's just a shame. That's what's got to change. That is so true.

This is actually why, ironically, I'm defending the, you know, owning the libs against some of the attacks on it. It's not because we need to be mean to our countrymen who see things wrongly, but it's because comedy is a great tool. comedy is the great tool to do this. You know, you do it. You can either yell at people and be really angry or whatever, but owning the libs is when you tell a joke. Owning the libs is when you smack down some stupid idea,

and it's funny. That creates some absurdity. It shows some incongruity, and that's fun. I'd much rather convince my fellow countryman to come over to my point of view by laughing and having a little joy. A little joy goes a long way. And you are literally doing that. I mean, you are taking comedy,

and you're going to Portland, and you're going to New Jersey. How is, one, how's the tour going? Where can people find you? And do you think that the left, which has been so humorless for a while, is going to get their sense of humor back? I think they're going to have to.

You know, we live in a day in an age where a guy who's as simple and ingenious as Jerry Seinfeld refuses to go on a college campus and do comedy anymore because he knows that everybody gets offended. That's a shame. But the tour's going great. You can find dates at watchchad.com.

And people are packing these things. It's really great all the way across the country. And it's been a lot of fun to watch because I am an equal opportunity offender. If I see something worth making fun of, I'm going to make fun of it. Whether it's making a joke about the worthlessness of Barack Obama giving a keynote speech at the NRA convention or the fact that Donald Trump is married to a supermodel because of his money. I get the groans from that. And I'm like, but come on, that woman never said, oh, Donald, I love your hair.

You know, trying to rub her fingers through it and the hair sprays pulling her fingers. You've got to be able to poke fun at that stuff and laugh at it. If you don't, you're going to wind up crying because I think that laughing is a great unifier. But, you know, the thing is we've lost a culture of comedy because of this culture of offendedness that we have. And people can't, you know, it's comedy for comedy's sake is okay. I even want to defend a lot of these things that we come out and we get on to people about. But it's being done in the vein of comedy. Yeah.

And let it go. Just let it go. Don't be so sensitive to it anymore. So I tell people, learn how to laugh. You've got to learn how to laugh. I think it was Horace Walpole said life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy is the man who feels. But facts don't care about your feelings, folks. So lighten up and laugh.

Chad. Go to watchchad.com. Check out the Chad Prather show. I got to let you go. You get back on the road and keep offending everybody out there in San Jose. Yeah, I will. Good to talk to you. We'll have to have you back on.

You too. See you soon, Michael. All right. See you, Chad. Bye. It's a good perspective. That's a good perspective. That's why, you know, guys, take yourself a little lightly every so often.

Chesterton said this. The reason that angels can fly is because they can take themselves lightly. If you're so heavy and weighed down all the time, you're not going to have a good life. And this brings us to our crises, all of the crises that we're in right now, like the straw crisis. If you can't laugh at the straw crisis, what are you doing? But they take it very seriously. The left right now is banning plastic drinking straws. Right now, in San Francisco, they've banned plastic drinking straws.

in Santa Barbara, not too far up from us, I was just up there a couple of weeks ago, they've banned waiters at restaurants from giving out plastic drinking straws. They're going to enforce this with a $1,000 fine or six months in jail. So if you go to a restaurant in Santa Barbara, you are given a plastic drinking straw. That waiter can go to jail for six months and or get a $1,000 fine, and it compounds on itself. It's not like that's the limit. If you go with your family, you sit down, it's a table of four, that guy gives you people straws in your water.

This guy could go to jail for two years. If you have a party in there, you know, you have a party you invite your big family, you know, you get a, let's say it's 40 people or something. That guy's doing 20 years in the clink because he gave out plastic drinking straws. That is some crazy stuff. Now, simultaneously, it's no longer a felony in California to knowingly give somebody AIDS. That's no longer a felony. That's not a crime. Give somebody AIDS.

That's fine. give them a plastic drinking straw so they can enjoy their drink like a civilized person, you go to jail and you pay money. In New York City, New York has decriminalized public urination. So you go to California, you can give somebody AIDS. Go to New York City, you can urinate in the middle of the street. That's okay. If you give somebody a plastic drinking straw, that is the crime.

These are really backwards priorities here. In California, they just tried to pass a bill to decriminalize heroin, to allow people to shoot up heroin in certain safe places, but you can't have drinking straws. This is a really backwards thing, and it's a culture that's obviously turned upside down. The way this whole thing started, by the way, is because of a nine-year-old kid.

I kid, a nine-year-old kid didn't like that people were using drinking straws. He thought that was wasteful. He had been indoctrinated into some environmentalist thing. So he called some restaurants and made up this number. He said, we use 500 million straws a day, in the United States. Maybe. I don't know if that's true. And now, as a result, there's this

major anti-straw movement. It's that urge among the left to just invent crises, to invent problems. It has to do with their politics. The way the left views politics, the way that rationalists view politics, is they just see it's problem after problem after problem.

And we always need a problem and you always need a solution. That's all politics is. Conservatives tend to take a nicer view of politics, a more broad view. Politics is a political traditional We're living through a political tradition. We can rely on institutions.

We can rely on traditions to get us through our politics. It's not the foremost thing in life. But when you have to rationalize everything in politics, like the left does in some elements of the right, then all of a sudden it's every little problem. And when things are going too well, when everything is tickety boo to quote Andrew Claven, then you have to make up problems,

like this problem of the drinking straws. And you become very hysterical. Case and point is one Senator Cory Booker. Cory Booker. Do I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube or can I get to Cory Booker? I'll get to Cory Booker. Okay, good. Here is Cory Booker, the cryingist senator in the United States. Here is Corey Booker talking about the danger of appointing Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Here he is. There is so much at stake here that this has nothing to do with politics. This is due with who we are as moral beings.

And so I want to call on everybody. I'm not here to tell folk just. what they should know. I'm here to call on folk to understand that in a moral moment, there is no neutral. In a moral moment, there is no bystanders. You are either complicit in the evil.

You are either contributing to the wrong or you are fighting against them. There's a saying from the Abraham Face in one of the Psalms that says, they don't we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. We are walking through the valley of shadow of death. But that doesn't say, though I sit in the valley of the shadow of death. It doesn't say that I'm watching on the sidelines in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

It says I am walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It says I am taking agency that I am going to make it through this crisis. And so I am calling on everyone right now who understands what's at stake, who understands who Kavanaugh is. answer who says that someone shows you who they are. Believe them the first time. He has shown us who he is. Corey Booker is really turning the hysteria up to 11. You know, there's a line on the internet, which is everybody I don't like is Hitler. That's how people engage in internet discourse. Corey Booker sees your everybody I don't like as Hitler and he raises you and everybody I don't

like is Satan. He is turning it up to Satan. You are evil. And what is the evil act if you are okay with a completely boring, you know, sort of Brooks Brothers tie wearing judge who went to Yale Law School. If you're okay with that guy being a judge, he's already a judge, he's been a judge for a long time. If you're okay with him being a judge, you're evil, you're Satan, you're evil. And it's so funny, in the background of this video,

I have Elizabeth Warren and a couple other 60-year-old women, white women standing there and just like, yeah, preach, amen, yeah. It's not a good look, ladies. Doesn't really look great. I'm not feeling electricity going through here. And Cory Booker, look, this is a very cynical move by Corey. He's trying to position himself for 2020.

And so he's turned up this emotion thing. I remember in one of the hearings, he said, I cried tears of rage. And he's all this yelling and emotionalism. He used to be a kind of normal guy, by the way. He used to be the guy who in 2012 was defending Mitt Romney. He said, oh, Mitt Romney's not that bad. This was the guy when they were.

were saying Mitt Romney was the devil the last time the Democrats had a devil. He said, oh, he's not that bad. He's okay. Let's come on everybody, take it down. But Corey is now thinking that his only ticket to the White House in 2020 is if he becomes one of these screeching, emotional, hysterical people. The schstick does not play well. He's just not good at it. Other politicians are good at that. Obama was pretty good about pulling on the heartstrings. Corey Booker is not. This is not his strength. If he wants to have a prayer at the White House, he's got to try something else. This is not going to work. But they have to have. to create this crisis. They've backed themselves into this corner where there is a crisis and

everything has to turn it up, turn it up, turn it up to 11. But nobody really believes that. Nobody thinks that Brett Kavanaugh is the devil. Nobody thinks that appointing a judge to a court is that's the end of, you know, that's Satan's victory over his eternal victory over the world. No, nobody thinks that. And so it doesn't ring true. I don't, I don't really see this strategy working well for, for Democrats in the future. But they're going to have to do it. The only person who's actually sort of pivoting and doing it pretty wisely is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We'll get to that a little bit later. Still a lot to get to.

The last important crisis is the sex bots. Sex-bots are taking over the world. They might turn us into an endangered species. That's a new report out today, that the Japanese might become an endangered race because of the prevalence of sex robots there. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about the first test two baby born on this day in history in 1978, what that gets to. and why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a brilliant media move

in turning on Ali Stucky or a friend of the show will explain how that happened. But you got to go to DailyWire.com. I'm sorry, what do you want me to do? Go to dailywire.com. We have a lot more to get to. It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.

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Sexbots. This is the last decadent crisis that we've got to deal with today before we get to the cultural aspect at the heart of all of this. Talk about a decadent crisis. The big crisis plaguing mankind right now is that we created robots

to have sex with and we're doing it too much. This is endangering the population of Japan. Always Japan. Those guys are always a little ahead of the curve, aren't they? They had VCRs or they produce all this technology, and now they're having sex with all of the technology that they've created. So this is the problem. Sex robots are now available to people. They're not totally widely used yet. But in Japan, they've really taken a liking to them. Japan has had a declining population for a long time now. They're below replacement rate. And for the first time in history now, for the first time in recent history, they're birth rate is below the million mark, and it's below replacement. So what's happening is in Japan, men prefer to have sex with silicone devices rather than with their wives. We've heard this for years, too. Men, public opinion polls show that men would prefer to look at pornography than to go out and

be with an actual woman. And this makes perfect sense. It actually does make perfect sense, because when you're with a woman, she's a person, you know, so she has desires, demands, rights, things. You know, you've got to kind of, you know, unless you're a total psychopath, you've got to kind of, do you, how do you feel? Do you like, is this okay? I don't know, you know, you got to buy them dinner. You don't have to buy a robot dinner. And it's this utter narcissism. I mean, there's this utter egotism and selfishness to, one, to just take pornography over a woman, but then certainly this robot. I mean, it is a really perverse thing. And we can joke about it. It's a ridiculous news story. But it is a real fear because if men can just have sex with robots, a good number of them are going to do it. You know, the robots, they're a little more flexible. I mean, you know, the list of potential advantages goes on and on and on. But it's a real worry, and it brings up bioethical concerns. Not a joke.

I mean, people say the libertarian point of view is, oh, let people do whatever they want. Let people, come on, just freedom. Just let people do whatever they want. That isn't freedom. And I don't think conservatives should advocate that kind of freedom. conservatives from the time of Edmund Burke, certainly onward, have advocated ordered liberty. That word ordered is important. Not libertinism, not just like sex, drugs and rock and roll, but a true liberty.

And Christ says the man who sins is a slave to sin. And there's this connection between sin and vice and your freedom. If you're addicted to some substance, then you're not really free, are you? Because that appetite is controlling you. The reason that you have a classical education is to instill virtues in you and to practice the virtues and to be able to not become a slave to sins like this. And that's the case with these sex robots. It's just another addiction. It's like heroin.

It's like meth. Pornography is an addiction. It's booze, whatever. Pick your poison. Those are addictions. And if you're addicted to something, then you're not really free. I don't know if there will be some law passed against this. I don't know. It probably will require a lot more than a law. Probably will require an education

and a moral education. But right now in the West, around the world, our moral sense is really decayed. It's really rotted. And the right is a little bit guilty of this too when we buy into that ridiculous libertarian notion of, oh, you know, man, whatever. If it doesn't hurt anyone else, just do it. No, that's not how you have a good society. John Adams said that the United States is only built for a moral and religious people. You can't have liberty if you're not going to govern yourself. Someone will instill order. Either you can order yourself and discipline yourself and carry yourself like an adult or the government's going to do it for you. But order will be preserved. We will not have chaos. Society will not tolerate that. So a little word of warning is I know

I know what you're thinking out there. You behind that computer screen, you, demographically speaking, most likely young male viewer of this program. You are thinking, oh, a sex robot. That doesn't sound so bad. Oh, well, I wonder if they could do, oh, they can do that thing. Oh, do-d-d-d-do-do. There are some real pitfalls here. It's a real a real worry. And we've had bioethical concerns like this before

that we haven't dealt with very seriously. And, you know, it's in those small things that the rot begins. This brings us to this day in history, because on this day in history, in 1978, the first test tube baby was conceived. This is

what was the baby's name? Louise Joy Brown. First baby conceived artificially. And people all wonder, they said, is this okay? Is this ethical? What do we do? Will there be problems? Will there be birth defects? Will they be sterile? Whatever? Now, in vitro fertilization exists all over the place. This is a mainstream procedure. People don't seem to have much of a problem with it. The Catholic Church still frowns on it. The Catholic Church still prohibits it. But a lot of, even other Protestant organizations, they say it's okay. And we haven't dealt with the ethical. implications of this. I mean, infertility is a multi-billion dollar industry. Just the business of egg donations is a multi-billion dollar industry to say nothing of all of the other procedures. Look, the

procedure itself, IVF is very expensive. It can cost $25,000 to create a child through this process. And there are some problems that come along with it. You know, there's twice the rate of birth defects, according to one study that was published in the New England

Medical Journal. But then there's the question of pro-life, because so frequently IVF involves the destruction of embryos, of little babies that have been conceived. And the pro-life movement doesn't talk about it a whole lot, but they should. There was a WAPO piece about this, and they said, how come the pro-lifers don't talk about in vitro fertilization? When you do in vitro fertilization, because it's so expensive, usually they'll fertilize four to eight eggs, and so you'll conceive four to eight little babies, and you'll

freeze some of them, and then you'll implant the others. So if you implant, let's say you implant four in the womb, then you see which ones take. Some of them, statistically speaking, won't take and they'll be destroyed. And then if they all take, what frequently happens is selective abortion. So then the parents will say, oh, no, well, we don't want four, so let's kill off three of them. And, oh, let's do it by, okay, we don't want them to have that disease, okay, because you've been screened for these things now. We don't want them to be that gender. We don't want them to, We don't want, you can make a designer baby. We're much further along to that as possible.

So much further along to that than we'd like to admit to ourselves. So you've got this situation where we're protesting against Planned Parenthood because they're killing babies in the womb. But we're not concerned about this process, IVF, because it's so nice. We only see the nice stories on the news. Oh, a couple that couldn't conceive now they can conceive a child and isn't that nice. I know people who are test two babies. You think, I like my friend, so I think this process should be allowed to continue.

But there is a cost to this. I mean, you are conceiving children and killing them, or donating them to medical research, or locking them away in a freezer forever. And if you really believe that life begins at conception, if you believe that some insolment happens at that point, then you're freezing them away forever. That is a pretty horrific thing. But we don't think through these easily enough.

We only think about the nice aspect or the frivolous aspect or the glib aspect. Oh, you know, it's a sex robot. cares, whatever. Let the guys in Japan have fun. There are implications. There were unintended consequences about this. And when you have a moral regime that is so insane, if you've got a moral structure that basically today in the West is, if it feels good, do it, then you're not going to be able to think through those things. And it could have really disastrous effects. All of the futurists that we talk to, all of these public intellectuals who come out and they say, I'm terrified about AI. I'm terrified about the extinction of the human species. I'm terrified

about this, I'm terrified about that. Perhaps we should start taking that seriously. Because otherwise we're going to end up in a position where you've got people blathering like Cory Booker about evil and the evil and the evil, but we don't see the evil right in front of our face, which is usually the case. All right, enough about IVF. I know I've got to go very soon before I go. I want to end on a happy note, which is the mainstream media meltdown over Ali Stucky's video making fun of Alexandria Ocas. Cortez. So the mainstream media went bonkers with this. Allie Stucky, we played the video yesterday. She did this obvious satire video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's stupid interview with

Margaret Hoover. You could tell obviously the satire was on a different set. She was wearing different clothing than the woman in the video. The other video, the first video, had gone completely viral. Everybody had already seen that. But what the mainstream media did is instead of saying, okay, you know, this parody, whatever, we'd like. liked it or we didn't like it or what have you. They decided to call it fake news. They played dumb. They were obtuse.

They said, this wasn't satire. This was a fake interview designed to deceive people. So the Washington Post ran the headline. They said, after a fake interview of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went viral, its maker said it was satire. She said it was satire in the first place. When they posted it, there was a little winky emoji. The Intercept, another website said, fake interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was

satire, not hoax, conservative pundit says. As though, you know, this is a big conspiracy, as though Allie Stucky, you know, is, was trying to deceive people, which obviously isn't the case. The Washington Times said, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls out Allie Stuckey for parody interview, and that's true. Ocasio-Cortez is calling her out for it, you know, The Verge. A million Facebook users watched a video that blurs the line between bad satire and fake news.

No, it was just funny satire. Blur any line. It wasn't bad. It was just, it wasn't fake news. And then, oh, the rap gets even better. They say, CRTV host of doctored Ocasio-Cortez video doubles down. Of doctored, what doctored video? It was satire. And then Ocasio-Cortez comes with her punch. And she landed it. This was a good punch. She said, Republicans are so scared of me that they're faking videos and presenting them as real on Facebook because they can't deal with reality. anymore. Here's one bona fide truth. Election Day is November

6th. Which I actually don't know if that's true this year. We should look that up. I would not put it past Ocasio Cortez to get the election day wrong in that. But okay, okay honey, all right, Ocasio-Cortez, we're not afraid of you. Here's my proof of that. You are welcome

on my show anytime. Please come on my show. It'll be live or live to tape. We won't doctor anything. We can just have a frank conversation. You and me. We come from very similar backgrounds, both poor, you know, grew up in poor neighborhoods in New York when we were little

babies and then before elementary school, moved to the suburbs. We grew up one town away from one another, Yorktown Heights and Bedford Hills, went to adjacent high schools. We have such a similar background. It'll be a fair fight. Just come on. Just do it. I mean, the difference is you lied about your upbringing and I didn't lie about mine. But just

come on, I won't be afraid. You won't be afraid of me. I won't be afraid of you. We'll have a discussion about Democratic Socialism. Come on the show. Do it, Alexandria will put it all behind us. Of course she won't do that. She won't come on the show. She saw this opportunity and so did the mainstream media to vindicate herself on that Margaret Hoover program. So what happened is she went on the Margaret Hoover show and she looked so foolish. She didn't know anything. She didn't know the answer to basic questions.

She appeared glib and giddy and utterly ignorant, proudly ignorant. And she said, Margaret Hoover asked her a basic question about Israel, and she said, oh, well, I'm not the expert on geopolitics, he-h-h-h-h-h-h-h, even though she has a degree in international relations from a private university that costs a quarter million dollars to attend. She looked so stupid. It could have destroyed her candidacy. It made Democrats look like idiots.

And then the media and the Democrats seized on this opportunity. When Ali Stuckey made a pretty funny satire video, they said, what we can do now is pretend that this satire video is real, is a real attempt at fake news. And then when people call Ocasio-Cortez an idiot, we'll blame it on Ali Stucky. We'll blame it on CRTV. We'll say, no, no, no, the Republicans just made her look like an idiot.

The conservatives just made her look like an idiot. No, no, she did it all herself. She did it just fine. But I got to hand it to the Democrats. This was a very slick political move. They're blurring the two. They're saying, oh, forget the Marwood Hoover thing. Forget about that.

We're talking about the Ali Stucky video. They did it. It was nefarious. don't go back and watch the original tape. She looked great on the original tape, but in that one, they made her look stupid. Really brilliant, good opportunity.

I can't knock him for it. I would have done the same thing if I were running a totally ignorant and radical and extreme candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Of course, I wouldn't do that because I'm a conservative, but well done, they took their dirty trick well. We'll see how it plays. I think they landed it. Alexandria, if you're really earnest about this,

If you're earnest about not being afraid, going, just speaking very frankly, come on the program. Please, hashtag, don't be afraid. I don't know. Get some campaign going. I really would love to speak with her. We can talk about democratic socialism, but I bet you won't do it. Okay, that's our show. Get your mailbag questions in for tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. I'll see you tomorrow. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Sennia Villa Real, executive producer Jeremy Boring, Senior producer Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover. And our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Jim Nickel.

Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. The Michael Knoll Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.