The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 2083 - Crowd STUNNED: Elon Musk Shows Off Flying Car ft. Matt Walsh

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Elon Musk makes a flying car, President Trump cancels an execution livestream, and Tucker Carlson weighs in on the attractiveness of horses. Ep. 2083 - - - Today's Sponsors: Cardiff - America’s favorite small business lender, provides the liquidity to move at the speed of business with same-day funding up to $500,000. Apply in under 3 minutes with zero credit impact. Apply now at https://cardiff.co/knowles One Nation America - Making your voice heard is easier than ever. You can get election reminders, look up your polling location, and pick a date to vote early. Go to https://GOPVotes.org today. Paid for by SLF PAC. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Policygenius - Head to https://policygenius.com/KNOWLES to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. PreBorn! - For just $28, PreBorn can provide one free ultrasound and help equip a new generation of parents to choose life and build strong families. To donate, dial #250 and say "BABY" or visit https://Preborn.com/knowles PureTalk - Visit https://PureTalk.com/KNOWLES to get unlimited Talk, Text and UNLIMITED DATA with a thirty-gig hotspot for just $29.95 a month... FOR LIFE!  - - - DailyWire: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dailywire.com/subscribe 🇺🇸 Get 3-Months of DailyWire for just $17.76 📜 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 🍿 Watch Run Hide Fight: Infidels https://www.dailywire.com/videos/run-hide-fight-infidels 📘 My book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/Speechless 📗 My book "Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/ReasonsToVoteForDemocrats 🕯️ Get your Michael Knowles candles: https://thecandleclub.com/collections/michael-knowles 👕 Don’t dress like a squish. Shop my merch here: https://dwplus.shop/MichaelKnowlesMerch - - - Socials: YouTube — https://youtube.com/@MichaelKnowles Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/michaelknowlesshow Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/michaeljknowles TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@notmichaelknowles X — https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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America's favorite small business lender with over 12 billion funded since 2004, applying under three minutes for same-day funding up to 500,000 at Cardiff. C-O-S-N-W-L-A-S. since we were kids, we all thought the future would bring us flying cars. And then every year, instead of getting more advanced, we seem to get dumber and dumber to the point that we can no longer tell the difference between men and women. Well, that dynamic, unfortunately, is still playing out. We're seeing it on full display in the midterm elections.

But Elon finally gave us a flying car. And it's awesome. It's even cooler than you thought it would be. It's really amazing. We'll get to it. Then President Trump cancels a live streamed execution. The execution is still going to go on. It's still going to be public, but no longer live streamed.

James Tallerico tries to walk back some of his craziest policies. And Tucker Carlson weighs in on the attractiveness of horses. And he actually has a point. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. Welcome back to this show. Speaking of new products, it's not just Elon with the flying car. Apple has some new device.

some new product for your home. And I've watched a commercial now a couple of times. I have no idea what the product is, really, but I do know that they're trying to sell us the absolute worst vision of society I think I've ever seen. And so to help me weigh in on these visions of society, you know, we're kind of feeling a little down in the dumps. And I want someone to just brighten my day. I want to bring on a nice chipper, optimistic personality for Friend Friday. help me see the glasses half full, you know. And who better to do that than my friend Matt Walsh? Matt, thank you for waking up early, coming on the show, brightening me up a little bit. Before we get into the Apple commercial, I want to talk about this public execution.

Because I know I can always rely on you for a nice sober, moderated, temperate take on any political issue. President Trump has just announced, Nidal Malik Hassan, former U.S. Army major turned traitor, is a very bad and evil man who killed 13 people, including a pregnant soldier who died along with her unborn son and injured very seriously 32 more innocent people. Barack Hussein Obama's FBI intercepted electronic communications between him and a radical Yemeni cleric.

When reviewed by his FBI terrorism task force, investigators concluded Hassan's emails were not a threat. So he kind of goes on about how much he hates Obama and like a bunch of other, a lot of other issues he has with other people. people. Then he says, look, we're still going to execute him in accordance with justice. Worst attack on an American military base ever, at least a worst terrorist attack. But we're not going to live stream it. Your tape. I think this is one of the sloppiest and most ridiculous things I can remember seeing out of, certainly out of this White House or maybe any ever.

It really is, I know it doesn't actually matter because nothing matters anymore and everyone will about this by, you know, by approximately three o'clock this afternoon. But still, I mean, here's what I put aside the issue of whether or not you should live stream the execution, because I think that there are arguments for it against it. Certainly the execution should happen. I'm very happy that this guy's going to be executed. It should have happened a long time ago. That's my only complaint about that. But yes, he deserves to be executed. Whether or not you think that he should be publicly executed, my question is how, how do you end up here where the president via social media has to announce that, okay, actually we're not going to kill him publicly.

Because so what happened? Like there are two scenarios here that I can imagine. One is that the secretary of war, Pete Exeth, just kind of off the cuff on his own with no authorization, sort of floated the idea that, hey, maybe we'll kill him publicly. And then later the president had to backtrack on that. If that's what happened, then Pete Hexeth said, should be immediately fired because that would be a ridiculous thing for a cabinet secretary to just announce that we're going to maybe do a public execution. Live streamed. Not just public.

It'll stay public. But yeah, live stream it for all the world to see. Live stream. Little kids. Yeah. So, so, right. But I don't think that's what happened. So I can assume that they must have, that must, he must have had authorization to announce

that. And so they must have had some kind of discussion behind the scenes where they talked about doing this. And so then you would know, you could anticipate that of course there's going to be some backlash. I mean, nothing that happened between the announcement of the public execution and right now was at all surprising. So did they sit around and come up with this idea and everybody assumed that, oh yeah, this is going to get unanimous approval. Everyone is going to love this. This is going to be the most popular thing we ever did. And then when it turns out that a lot of people are upset, they're like, well, I had no idea. People would be upset. I guess we're

We have to backtrack. I just don't get it. I mean, if you're going to do something like this, you have to be thoughtful going into it before you announce it, be very thoughtful, be very decisive, and have thought through all of the very obvious backlash that's going to come and be prepared for that and be ready to see it through to the end in spite of it. And so this just makes it seem like it was, like they didn't really even talk about it that much. No, it was kind of hazard. I don't get that. Can we pull up the post again from President Trump? So I think you're right. I mean, the people who are saying, oh, this was all Pete Hegseth's fault. It was all off the cuff. I think that's ridiculous. They're trying to scapegoat Hegseth. No, there's no way that the Secretary of War made this announcement without some conversation with somebody else at the White House. But Trump actually kind of cops to that in the post, I think. He says, where is it? With all of that being said, I think streaming the execution for All to See might have been a strong deterrent for the world to witness how America deals with terrorists and scum like Hassan, but many very good and well-meaning people would rather not

watch him die through streaming or through any other visual device. He will die as scheduled by firing squad, but the event will not be streamed. So in the post, and I see very few people talking about this, Trump does take some ownership of this. He says, look, I want it to be streamed. I was convinced by the arguments that it would be better to stream it. But very many, many, Many very good people came up afterward and they basically persuaded me, okay, maybe we can tone down the streaming. So Trump himself is saying, no, it's not just a Hexeth thing. I was all for it, but whatever, I'll back it off a little bit. Did they not know that? Did they not anticipate that clearly a lot of people are going to be

against a public execution? Were they surprised by that? That's what I don't understand. How could you be surprised by that? I don't get it. My guess is they knew the the left would hate it, and that's great. We love whenever the left hates everything. I suspect they strongly underestimated how many conservatives and Christians would oppose the live streaming aspect, especially for the fact that once something's on the internet, it's there forever, a bunch of kids can see it. You know, if it's for just a public execution in the town square, if you want to bring your kids, you can. If you don't want to, you know, you can leave little Johnny at home. And then the guy hangs or gets shot, and then it's,

all over. So I don't, I think he basically made the right decision here. On the, on the actual matter, should it have been live streamed or no? I think, look, I think there could be a place for public executions. My, you know, I'm going to, here's how I break it down. If you're going to do a public execution, this was my first thought when I heard about this. If you're going to do it, I think there's a place for it. However, you have to approach it with serious. and dignity. This cannot turn into some kind of spectacle. It can't just be content because even though this guy is a total scumbag and deserves to die, this is a serious thing. You are taking a man's life. And not just for his sake, but for the public's sake, for the sake of the people

that are carrying out this act, for all of those reasons, it needs to be approached with a certain solemnity. You have to, a certain gravity, correct? And so if you can approach it that, way, then I think there could be a place for it. My concern was that I'm not sure I have confidence that it will be approached that way. And so, you know, I guess my answer is it depends. Yeah, no, this is such a great point because you have all of these Catholics now arguing over the death penalty. The Catholic Church for roughly 2,000 years really didn't even question the death penalty. And many doctors of the church, church fathers, evangelists, you know, writers of the New Testaments defended the death penalty. Various popes carried out the death penalty, including

Blessed Pius the 9th. But the argument from the recent popes is, you know, the death penalty is wrong, both as a prudential matter and then increasingly since Francis, they say it's inadmissible because it is contrary to human dignity and the gospel per se. And you say, okay, this will be debated for decades, if not a century. But I see the argument at least is the death. The death. penalty reduces man in some way and it encourages bloodlust and it encourages private vengeance or whatever. Okay. The argument against that is no, no, no. The civil authority executing someone is in defense of human dignity. Man has made the image and likeness of God. That is why whosoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed. So actually, this is a really

somber, sober thing for the good of the condemned and for the good of society. But if you turn it into pure content, you actually are kind of giving an argument to the people who are opposed to the death penalty. So I think they made the right decision here. But yeah, if you're going to do it, you can't have popcorn while you're watching the guy get his head blown off. You got to, you got to at least pretend to put a frown on your face and treat it seriously. I want to, before I let you go, I want to get to that Apple commercial because I don't know if you saw it. I don't know if you saw it and sent like 10 billion tweets out about it and like pulled your hair out about it. For the for those who haven't seen it yet, Apple comes out with a new product. This is how they present it.

If you're just, if you're just listening, I'll narrate it. It's introducing Apple Home View. Okay, mom is getting ready in the morning. She's dressed for work. Dad is running around the kitchen. making pancakes or something. With a link to a French toast recipe from Taste of Home. Gross. Bet you didn't know that French toast isn't actually French. Yeah, right.

And why is it called French? Genius. Fine. Live in ignorance. Hold, please. Series. French toast French. No, French toast is not originally from France. What was that?

It's literally in the name. Whatever, Bruno. Okay, so you got the little, the siblings arguing. Hey, who can't have a friend. The boy is an idiot. The girl is smart. The mom is put together. What?

Sorry. Something I threw up. Hello. It's not more of your time? Dad, we're a bit busy now. What's with the beard? We don't like the beer. Never did.

Okay, the dad, I guess, dad is like a very full beard. He looks like a member of Al Qaeda, so I guess he hasn't spoken to his parents in about two and a half years. He's too busy to talk about it because he's got to make breakfast for his professional wife. Okay, don't say a word. Okay, the boy is doing like whippets or something. He's just a complete idiot. Not like that smart girl or that professional mom. Okay, the girl is promiscuous.

She's texting her boyfriend. Okay. She's putting on lipstick to go. I can't. I know it. What? Becca, we're late. Come right here.

Mom, breeze. So good. Okay. I can't. Who's at the door? Wait a second. Oh, it's the boyfriend. He has body odor.

He's a person. Sort of ethnically ambiguous, smelly boyfriend. She goes off parents. I don't even know if you know that guy. Okay, I can't take anymore. I can't take anymore. The wife goes off to work and the idiot husband probably sits on the couch and eats bonbons.

Before we get into what this all means, before we get into what this product is, I want to tell you about GOP votes. There's a lot more to say. first they'll go to gopvotes.org, the Democratic Socialists of America won primaries across the country. Next, they're coming for Congress and they're coming for you. If they win the midterms, they'll defund the police, reopen our border, and force men into women's sports. You are the last line of defense, and GOPvotes.org is your partner in the fight. Go to gopvotes.org

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Matt, first question, what is the product? What is Apple selling? I have no idea. I mean, I think that that is, in some ways, that's in some ways the most important commercial that's ever been made. I think that everyone should watch that commercial very carefully, take careful notes, and then make sure that your own home life is exactly the opposite of that in every single respect.

Starting with, before we even get to the fact that, yeah, like every male in this family is a total slob moron and the women are all much smarter and the wife is going to her important business job and the meetings and everything and the dad's like spending his time, making waffles or French toast or something. But even aside from that, the, I mean, of course, this is what they're advertising. Like, the entire family is structured around this screen, like literally revolving. The family revolves around this one screen and refers to the screen for everything, which is, of course, which is the vision of the future that these big tech freaks have for us.

And the actual product itself, I don't know exactly, but it's, this is what Apple has been doing as far as I can tell for the last 20 years where they're just like taking they're taking the iPhone like this product we already have they're taking the iPhone and then just taking that exact thing and putting it into slightly different sizes and shapes and so you have the iPhone that you carry in your pocket you have the one you can it's a little smaller and you have on your wrist you have one that you can put on the wall you have one that's on the counter it's the same damn product over and over it doesn't do anything none of those individual products do anything that the other versions of it don't also do.

So it's totally pointless. But there are slightly different sizes. I don't know if you remember when the iPad came out. I think it was the Onion or one of those websites. The news coverage of it was Steve Jobs pulls an all-nighter duct taping nine iPhones to a clipboard and says here's our new product. So it's all, yes, it's all basically the same thing. What I'm struck by, though, is that in the commercial itself, you basically have no idea

what the product is other than it's a screen on the counter. But you do know their vision of your family. They do know their vision of society. In other words, it seems that for the ad makers, leftism and social dysfunction is much more important to sell than whatever the gizmo is, whatever the doodad is. So when are you going to place your order? Well, here's the other thing, though. I think that some people get a little bit wrong about this, because it's actually, it's not just that the people that make this ad, the people at Apple are trying to sort of promote this chaotic, uh, ridiculous, disordered family environment.

Not just trying to, it's not, it's not, it's not that they're trying to promote it. It's that they honestly assume that this is all, that this is what a family is. Like they don't, they, they, I believe that they earnestly tried to make an ad portraying a normal American family. And to them, that's what this is. Like any other version of a family doesn't even exist. And so this is just the reality that they've already assumed for us, which in some ways is worse, I think, than them kind of knowingly doing something subversive. I think the subversive thing is now just for them a default, I think.

Yeah, you know, this actually, I'll get to the story a little later in the show. Tucker is talking about how horses can sometimes seem attractive. He was going off on bestiality. and everyone's dunking on him, and I'm going to, I'm going to face a firing squad because I actually think he has a point. But the point he's making is about memetic desire. And I suspect you have a point, Matt, which is for the last 30, 40 years, the vision that we have seen of home life from the Simpsons, from everybody loves Raymond, from whatever, like every single TV Joe and movie is that dad is a big fat dufus who sits at home and doesn't really do anything. And the wife is way smarter and is the only reason that the family has. and totally spiraled into oblivion.

Boys are just selfish slabs. Little girls are so much smarter and put together. And so when that's the vision of family life that you see from fictional stories, you start to enact that. Like you start to, when you talk to a lib and you describe your conservative life, they'll look at you like you have three heads. It's like, oh, what are you going to do? It's going to be like the 1950s.

Like what? Dad goes to work and what? mom stays home with the kids and like cooks dinner and keeps a house and like what you guys are going to like what pray together and go to church and like what are you just you look at and you say yeah pretty much that's is yeah it's great do you not did you not know that was possible i did yeah exactly i mean that yeah that's i think that's exactly if they looked at like in my i mean my you know no family is perfect everyone has their own issues but in my family like we with six kids none of them have phones, none of them like play video games.

We have one screen in the house and we don't have any of this other stuff and the mornings don't work like that at all. But they would look at that and they would say that first of all, they would doubt that it even exists. I don't think that they even understand that families like that exist in the first place. And if you could convince them that, no, no, no, yeah, like this is actually how my family works. They would see that as the subversive thing. Like they would, they would see that as kind of the intrusion, this weird fringe arrangement that is intruding on what to them is the natural

default state. And, you know, increasingly in a sense, like culturally, they're right. I mean, as they just kind of assume that this disordered family life is the correct default state, it increasingly becomes not the correct state, but the default state for a lot of people. And so it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way, which is how it's, how it's intended. It's weird because if you presented that commercial to someone from even the 80s, they would look at you like you had gone out of your way to present a completely inverted version of society at, you know, totally upending standards and norms. But now that is the normative version. If you just drop a normie who goes to a normal school, who grows up in a normal kind of suburban

area, they will think that's acute or something. They will think that's the way to go. will take it as a matter of course that men are like that, women are like that, kids should react to their parents that way, everything should be chaos, everything. And it's really sad, actually, because people base their lives and their behaviors off of norms. And that is the norm. And we're the weirdos. We're the total weirdos. Before I let you go, I actually will let you go this time, but before I let you go, I do want to get to a different vision of the future, which is flying cars. First, though, I'm going to tell you about PolicyGenius. There's a lot more to say, first, though, go to PolicyGenius.com slash Knowles. Every year, the holiday shopping season begins

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Their license team explains coverage amounts, prices, and terms, answers questions, handles the paperwork, and advocates for you throughout the process. Take care of the important protection before the holiday rush begins. Go to policygenius.com slash Knowles, KnaWLES. With policy genius, you can get 20-year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. Head to policygenius.com slash nolls, CanadaWLAS, to compare life insurance quotes from top companies, see how much you can save. That is policygenius.com slash Noles, K&WLES. The inflatable reindeer can wait. We were told that in the future we would have flying cars. And then we got transgenderism and infanticide and squalor and decay.

Now, Elon has given us a flying car. This is the Tesla Roadster. It's a big, crazy loop. The car goes up the loop, and it just sticks to the road. It just sticks, and it drives upside down. It drives upside down, it sticks upside down, and then it flies off. lands with jet packs. Keep it rolling in the background. Well, I get Matt, is there you've been a little down. You've been uncharacteristically down this morning. Is this, is this cause for hope? Well, no. I'll tell you why, because it is, it's very cool. I think it's awesome. I think it's really, I mean, a flying car does a, there we go, does the flip. Very, very cool. I love it. I want one for myself. My only issue is that, like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I have been on the roads in this country, really all across the country, I've driven in many different states. And I can tell you that almost everyone in the country is a terrible driver. I think there are about five or six good drivers, and I am one of them. That only leaves about five other openings.

Yeah. I look at the average driver. I cannot trust that. The average driver struggle, still has not figured out how to merge onto the highway. We're going to trust them now with a flying car. We're going to trust them with a car that does, I could do back flips and stick to the wall.

Okay, the average driver cannot be entrusted with this technology. I can be. So I think that I should get one. And then we have to be very, very careful about who else we give this stuff to. That's my only. There's hope for you. There's hope for you. Because you could presumably when these just horrific drivers can't figure out how to go left,

you could fly over them. Or you could, when they kind of veer into your lane, you could tip the car and yeah, yeah, yeah. But everybody else, it would be disaster. Yes, when I'm driving on the highway and there's some moron in front of me who's like about to miss his exit, so he slams on his brakes so he doesn't miss his exit rather than just taking the next exit and turning around. You know, and then it almost kills me. Now, in a situation like that, I could just hit on the jet packs, fly over that car and go about my merry way. So I think it's great.

That's my point. it's great for me. It's an awesome tool for me to use and nobody else. That's kind of hopeful, you know? I mean, yeah, okay, I'll take that because it finally feels like we're advancing again. People are arguing they're saying there's no practical application for this technology or whatever. Like, I don't know, we'll make a practical application. Matt's already thinking about it right now. By the way, the cars are really heavy. So even if the jetpack doesn't take you all the way over, you would just land on the other car, flatten him into a pancake and then just keep driving. The last time we had a big era like this was roughly in the

16th century when Europe came and conquered the new world. And I believe you have a new real history episode out about this very fact. We do. It's coming out or I think it's coming out. I don't think it's already out. It's coming out at some point. I don't even know when. I think it's next week at some point. Did you film it? So stay tuned for that. Can you even written it? It's done. I mean, it's it's film. We did film it. We filmed to like a month ago. So this is about, you know, we've done a lot of interesting subject. This one is probably the episode I had in mind when we started this series of real history. It's probably my favorite, one of my, not my absolute, one of my favorite stories from history,

one of the most important stories from history. We're covering the Spanish conquisadors, Cortez in particular. And the story, of course, of Cortez arriving in modern-day Mexico and conquering the human sacrificing Aztecs. Hold on, hold on. Don't you mean the Spaniards show up into Avatar land and there are like rainbows and everyone's singing the colors of the wind and there's no property, you know, everyone just kind of helps each other out with the nature spirits.

And he comes and imposes oppression on them. That's what you mean. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a total utopia. They're talking to the trees, you know, prancing through fields of daffodils or whatever. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, of course, the version we get from the left. But in reality, the, what he stumbled into is like, it's impossible for us. And maybe in some ways we can't imagine it because we have our own version of human sacrificing here. But just imagine finding yourself in this alien wilderness. And you've basically, this is what people don't really understand about Europeans when they came to. the New World. For all intensive purposes, they went back in time. I mean, they went back 5,000 years in the past. They're back in the Stone Age because these are all basically Stone Age people. The Aztecs were one of the most advanced civilizations in the New World. And they had

just reached the level of making pyramids, which is what, you know, the Egyptians had figured that out 3,000 years before that. And so they're back in time in this like Stone Age, nightmarish dystopia. And with a kind of rag-tag bunch of a few hundred Spanish and some of their Indian allies who came along to help them, they conquered this entire civilization. It's an amazing story, incredible story. And a lot of people don't know about it because they don't teach much about it in school. So you should watch the episode to find out. You need to watch Real History of Matt Walsh. Whenever it comes out, or if it has already come out, you should also go watch it at Dailywire.com.

slash subscribe. Watch it while you're driving. It doesn't matter because Matt will soon be able to fly over you in his car or kill you with his many, many ton vehicle. Matt, excellent to see you. I look forward to watching the episode and I look forward to driving in the car. Good to see you, Mike. See you next time.

Okay. I do want to get to why Tucker might have a point on bestiality. Before we get to that story, though, I got to get a little. a little bit to James Talleyco. James Talleyco, we covered the debate. It was really a town hall. They borrowed this line from Stephen Crowder, changed my mind, so Crowder might end up suing some of the people hosting these debates. But it went off very well where Tala Rico's talking to ordinary voters, and he's trying to walk back all of his craziest opinions. So one of those was on abortion, and Tala Rico's answer opens him up, to a big, big problem.

How would you convince me as a Catholic voter? I can trust you that you would protect the most innocent among this. I'm so grateful that you brought that question. I actually think there's common ground we can find here. We may come to different moral and ethical conclusions when it comes to the question of should abortion be legal or not?

It sounds like you and I do come to a different conclusion. That's okay. We're both Christians and the Bible is silent on the issue, of abortion. It means you and I both have to look at different scriptures to try to come to a conclusion. But what I think we can do is actually come together on reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and the number of abortions. Because if we treat this issue as a public health problem and not a culture war problem, then we can actually make progress together. Okay. So this is not

James Tala Rico, shout your abortion. Abortion is great. It's women's rights. It's women's health. Let's go, girl. This is Tala RICO backtracking to an older Democrat position, which is that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. He says, well, look, I think, I think the Bible's totally silent on abortion. It's not, by the way. It's in the Ten Commandments. And the Christian Church has been explicitly opposed to abortion since the very first catechism, the D-Dade. But, okay, put that aside. He says, you know, I just think, I think one thing we can, we can all agree on, find common ground on is that we need to reduce the number of abortions. Why? That would have been the follow-up question. I'm sorry that the interlocutor here didn't hit him with it right away,

but that's what everyone should be asking Tala Rico. Okay, so you've changed your view. It's no longer shout your abortion. It's that we all need to, we need legal abortion, but we need to reduce the number of abortions. Okay. Why? What's wrong with abortion? What's wrong with abortion? I don't know what their answer is. I don't mean to straw man them. I don't mean, I just wanted what they'll say, I had Democrats responding to me last night on this. They say, oh, come on, Michael, don't be stupid. Don't be obtuse. Nobody thinks abortion is a good thing. First of all, there are many women and Democrat politicians out in the street saying we need to shout our abortion, celebrate our abortion. So there are people who say it's a good thing. But okay, Tala Rica is not one of those people anymore. All right. So what's wrong with abortion? Is it just that it's uncomfortable? Is it just that it's a medical procedure? And we don't want unnecessary medical procedures. Okay, well, are we going to ban facelifts? Are we going to ban Botox? Are we going to ban teeth cleanings? I don't know. There are lots of medical procedures. We don't say that we need to reduce all medical procedures. Is it?

No, no, no, there's something wrong about abortions specifically. That's what you're implying. Okay, that's what you're stating. So what's wrong with it? The thing that's wrong with it that they don't want to say is that abortion murders a baby. But of course, if abortion murders a baby, it shouldn't be legal. And if abortion doesn't murder a baby, there's no reason to reduce the number of abortions. We don't say, we need to reduce the number of appendectomies. We, you know what we really need. need to reduce in America. We need to reduce the number of tonsil removals. No, we don't. We don't know. If you need your tonsils removed, take them out. It doesn't matter. You can do it if you want, not do it if you want. But we do say we need to reduce a number of abortions. Why? They can never answer the why question because the minute they tell you why, they completely lose

their justification to say that it should be legal at all. Okay, I will get to why Tucker has a point on bestiality. First, though, it's just too good a segue to miss. I want to tell you about preborn. There's a lot more to say first. They're going to preborn.com slash Knowles, KNAW-L-E-S. Through the ministry of pre-born, more than 50,000 babies have been saved this year alone. More than 5,100 people have made commitments to Christ. These are extraordinary numbers. The reason this ministry works is simple. Here is Dan Steiner, the president of Preborn. Quote, because of you, we can invite mothers considering abortion into a Preborn Network Clinic to meet their baby, and when she has that close encounter of the best kind in her womb,

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Baby. That is pound 250, keyword baby, or donate securely at preborn.com slash Knowles, K&WLES. That is preborn.com slash Knowles, K&WLES. All gifts are tax deductible. Tucker Carlson has gone viral for appearing to sympathize or empathize with bestiality. the nature of war results in the deaths of innocence. And if you look at that enough on a screen, it's like if you look at pornography enough or bestiality videos all day, after a while, like, it's kind of an attractive horse.

I get it. I'm not into it personally, but it's not crazy. Like, we are shaped by the worlds around us, of course. Okay, so everyone is dunking on Tucker for this and inferring that Tucker has a thing for horses and other animals. and, okay, I know that Tucker has said lots of objectionable things. I know, I know that Tucker is now a major enemy of the Trump administration and is kind

of practically a Democrat. I know, I know. All the litany of, okay, whatever. I just want to put all of that aside for a second. Can we just put all of that aside? Can I be the lone voice crying out in the wilderness? Tucker actually has a point about the bestiality thing. Not that he's not saying horses are attractive, okay?

The point he is making is about human nature and memetic desire. And he's tying this to a point about war. And I'm not even, I'm not like an anti-war activist by any stretch of the imagination. But the argument he's making is that the more that war is normalized on TV, the more that people are exposed to images of war and arguments in favor of war and propaganda for war, the more likely they are to support war, much as if you watch a lot of pornography, the more likely you are to find your will and your desires shaped by that pornography, even up to it including one of the most horrific kinds of pornography, which is bestiality, the relations between men and

animals. I thought we weren't going to talk about the Cornell case today, so I thought we were out of the woods when it comes to weird sex stuff, but now, here we, now it's actually somehow even worse. But that's the point. Really, he says it in this crazy, bizarre way because he knows it's going to get attention and go viral and it totally works because Tucker's very, very good at media. But the point he's making basically comes from René Girard, who I've mentioned on this show a number of times, which is that we shape our behaviors and even our desires based on the behaviors and desires of other people because man is a social creature. So it's that old line about how you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And that is true. And that is contrary to the liberal view of human desire.

The liberal view of human desire is this blow-off steam view. The liberal view of human desire says, oh, we should support pornography. We should support a bunch of weird sex stuff. We should support a bunch of other aberrant behaviors like your wrath or pride or whatever because you blow off a little steam. So, okay, you engage in some vicious behavior just to kind of blow off a little steam and then you can go back to your virtuous behavior. In other words, indulging in vice sometimes actually makes you more virtuous. And the worst thing that we could do is repress our vicious desires because then it's going to blow up and make us even worse. And that's the liberal view.

The classically conservative view or the Aristotelian view is that no, no, no, no, no. There's no blowing off a little steam. Every time you commit vice, you become more vicious. you desire vice even more. I have an interview with Chris Hansen. Take a seat over there. You see how this looks, right? I have an interview with Chris Hansen coming out this Sunday on Michael and.

And I asked Chris, a little preview. I said, how many of these guys that you meet, these perps and pedophiles, how many of them do you think are just hardwired that way versus the number of guys who just kind of developed this horrible desire over time? And he said, oh, it's about a third. He said, I think a third of them were pretty hardwired that way, and I think the rest of them just kind of fell into it. In other words, the majority of them didn't start out with this most horrific attraction. They started out probably looking at normal pornography.

They started out, I don't know, looking at the leering at the lady walking down the street. They started out indulging bad thoughts and desires, and then the sin ran away from them. They thought they could play footsie with sin and it would just, it would be okay. But actually, no, eventually the sin takes hold of you and it debavers. you and you become this monster who's sitting opposite of Chris Hansen or who's, you know, looking at animals doing weird stuff or whatever. I know, I know everybody hates Tucker now and I know he says all sorts of terrible things and he's anti-conservative and, okay, whatever. I just put, just put that aside for a second. It is kind of funny that the bit that everyone is going after him

for right now that he said in this very evocative graphic way is a deeply conservative observation about human nature. It is. It is. I know, I don't know. I'm not going to get dressed. I I've never, hand up in the air, I have never been attracted to an animal in my life. I don't even want to have a pet dog. I don't like animals, period. I'm a people person. But, memetic desire is like a real thing. Okay, I want to get to the mailbag first.

So my favorite comment yesterday is from Aspy Devotions, 6392. Speaking of one of Tucker's hobby horses of late, the comment says, once again, Mamdanistan and Jew York City are at war for who owns the promised land. I know that is part of what the showdown in New York is all about. It's part of what makes it so gripping is that New York is a very Jewish city. I'm a New York. I've spent the majority of my life in and around New York. And everybody is either Italian or Jewish. That's like the whole city. And so you get this most Jewish city in the world other than possibly Tel Aviv. And then you get this quasi-jihadi mayor who comes up and gets elected because of mass migration. And so it just

distills down these national trends, these national ideological fault lines into Manhattan Island, really, really densely populated area, totally, totally preposterous. And so you see Democrats absolutely collapsing in support among Jewish voters. That's great. Love that. Come on over to the right. The water is warm. But probably not enough. Probably not enough. So the Republicans are saying, Texas is looking shaky. Ohio's looking shaky. Maine is looking shaky, but don't worry. We might even win in New York. I don't think so. I would not hold my breath for that.

Finally, finally, we arrive at my favorite time of the week. The mailbag. It's sponsored by Pure Talk. Go to Peartock.com.com slash Knowles, KnaWLAS for Pure Talk's Best Unlimited plan for just $295 a month for life. Take it away. Hey, Michael. This is Nick. It's sad to see many modern-day conservatives accuse the symphony, theater, traditional styles of dance like Ball and Tap, or just the arts in general, as being inherently gay, when in fact many of these hobbies have very Christian and conservative roots.

As someone who's done many musicals and dozens of tap dance routines over the years, how can we convince the conservatives to try to take back the arts from the liberals who have had a chokehold on them for so many years now? If you ever want to do a tap dance routine together, just let me know and we can make something work. Also, imagine your baseball team losing to the third lowest payroll and all the MLB. Anyways, thanks for everything you do and for the show. You really took me on a journey with that question. You really, there were highs, there were lows. It was like a great dramatic performance. why is it that conservatives have failed to recapture the arts?

Why is it that we consider the arts liberal or gay, but I repeat myself? Why is that? It's true that there are conservative artists going back to ancient Greece. You did have some serious, like Escalis, you know, you did have some serious conservative bona fides when it comes to the arts, going all the way back to antiquity. But I don't think it's quite as simple as you say. in other words, I think there is something about the arts that tends to attract libs and weirdos and people who are a little bit deviant. There is a reason that for most of history, actors were lumped among prostitutes and criminals in society. It was considered a kind of

lower class thing. And I trained as an actor. I worked as an actor professionally. I trained in the modern style of acting, which is organic acting. And I've I'm like the only guy in history ever got cured of the acting bug, in part because I do think it's morally compromising. This actually gets to exactly what we were talking about with memetic desire and how our wills can be shaped by what we consume, what we see, the air that we walk through. When you're acting, especially in the modern organic style of acting,

method acting, or the Stanislavski system, or the Meisner technique, or anything that come out of the group theater, when you're doing that, what they teach you to do in acting 101 is, okay, if you are in love with the woman in the play or in the movie, you have to really fall in love with her. If you want to kill somebody, you need to really cultivate the desire to kill somebody. You have to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances. Sanford Meisner writes about this in his acting book when he talks about the Italian actress Eleanor Doza. And something that really shocked, he was Bernard Shaw went to see the play, was that Dusa, when she was, uh, embarrassed on stage, she literally blushed. Her cheeks actually flushed a little bit at that moment.

It didn't happen every night, but it did happen some nights, which clued in the audience to say, wow, something is really going on in her inner life. And so if you do that professionally, and you play all sorts of characters, you're surrendering your will. You're surrendering a real important part of your soul on stage. That's a little less so in writing, perhaps. No, maybe not. Drew talks about how you have to picket wounds and scabs to be a novelist. Music, music, Plato tells us in the Republic. Music is the art form that bypasses the reason most directly. It goes right to the irrational soul.

And so these things are kind of dangerous. And if you want to live an orderly moral life, you have a, you have a tensor relationship to the arts. And that's in part how the libs dominate. That's why it's also not so simple as to say, we're just going to start a conservative of Hollywood. You can't quite do that. There was an intrinsic tension that it goes to the very nature of the thing. Okay, next question. Hey, Smoky Mike. Come on, man, here. And I actually just finished reading the screw tape letters for the first time. And as I was reading, I was thinking, as correct as C.S. Lewis is, why do we give him the sort of validity that we do? I noticed that

you and Clavin like to do this with C.S. Lewis, but also people like Thomas Aquinas or Shakespeare. When you talk about our society and what their commentary is, it seems like you mention it in the context of them speaking as if it's absolute truth. And so my question is, why do we give these kinds of historical figures that kind of credibility in the first place? How do we know that they should be considered knowledgeable or reliable when what they've said is hundreds of years old? I think what it comes down to is what gives these people the authority that we give them other than the fact that they've been considered important for, really long time. Anyways, I'm curious how you would explain that. Thanks. Yeah, good question. What gives anybody authority? Your question really isn't about C.S. Lewis or Thomas Aquinas or Shakespeare. Your question is about the nature of authority.

And so you say, why do we give these people such authority? We don't give them authority. We infer that they have authority. And so how do we infer that they have authority? You say, what, just because people for a long time have thought that they do? And the answer is kind of, yeah, basically. And we tested ourselves. So when we read C.S. Lewis or Thomas Aquinas or Shakespeare, the things that they say ring true. When it comes to C.S. Lewis, he's an eminently clear, modern writer that conveys longstanding truths in a way that it's easy for a 20th century, 21st century reader to understand. With Thomas Aquinas, he's the common doctor of the church. He's just right about everything, basically. And when it comes to Shakespeare, Peter Thiel made a

recent point recently. Sorry, made a good point recently, which is that Shakespeare is sort of the king of the great books. But the great books as an endeavor really emerges after the Enlightenment as a way to replace the great book, namely the Bible. So as we sought to suppress and minimize the role of religion and the Christian tradition and Christian authority in our society, we tried to replace it in these secular ways. And so Shakespeare is really important for that, and he's also kind of the literary patron of England. And he tells you truths about human nature. You read King Lear, you read Hamlet, and you say, wow, that's me, for real, for real, wow, he sees me.

Get out of my head, Shakespeare, with probably less ultimate authority than someone like a Thomas Aquinas or perhaps even a C.S. Louis. But that's why. That's why. And you say, well, why do we trust these things? people. Why do we trust the reputation that someone has earned over decades or centuries? I'd say, I don't know, because we're not that smart, because we don't have that much time, because we can't recreate the world from the beginning. It is a distinctly modern and liberal premise to say that we need to figure everything out totally on our own, that we should not take anything as received wisdom, that we should not trust our prejudices, that we should not listen to our elders. It's a very modern, revolutionary, radical view that says that we should distrust authority.

So we do it now because much of what passes for modern conservatism is really libertarianism or just an older form of liberalism. But we take things on authority because authority exists in the world. We trust our elders and we have a little less faith in our own ability to figure every single thing out. Okay, next question. What's up, Michael Knowles? I have a question and a statement. First, how long do you think it's going to be before America has its first openly atheist president? I know we have politicians like Joe Biden or James Telerico who claim to be Christian, but they subvert all of its morality. But how long before we have a president who unequivocally says there is no God and is still elected? Secondly, news or noise, log in, log off, whatever you're

calling it. It's here to stay, baby. The people love it. It's the best segment you have besides T.E. Tuesday. Thank you. Mr. Davies, what AI program did you use to throw your voice so that you could just defend in the mouth of another news or noise, which I guess we have to bring back for another week. In terms of an openly atheist president, I don't think we're going to get that anytime soon. 10, 15 years ago, Obama era beginning of millennial, progressive, proto-wokeness. We thought, oh, man, all the fuddy-duddy stuff is over. We're in a brand new world.

And you know what? Presidents can be unpatriotic, and everyone's going to be gay. And we're not going to have borders anymore. And we did it. We've reached the revolution. Took us a long time. after the 1960s, but we finally made it. And then what happened? Then we got Trump. Then we got the most

retrograde, regressive president. Pendulum totally swung back. Look at Tala Rico. I mean, Tala RICO is practically speaking, not just an atheist. He's like an antichrist. He uses scripture to contradict the Christian tradition to mock God and to mock the mother of God. And, you know, he's just as bad as they come. But yeah, he's not an atheist. He doesn't call himself an atheist. You could see a presidential nominee AOC that kind of blithely ignorant socialist. You could see her maybe presenting herself as an atheist, but probably not. She's not thoughtful enough.

She'd say, I believe in something. I believe in a higher power. You know, even as religion has declined, you know most Americans think they've seen a ghost. Did you know that? There's no... The moment that we could have gotten the openly atheist president, the moment that seemed most likely, was the peak of the new atheism in the mid-2000s,

right around that early Obama era. Now Richard Dawkins is yearning for a cultural Christianity, and Christopher Hitchens is dead, and new atheism is over. So it's done. It's not going to happen. I'm happy to say that. Nietzsche says God is dead. God says Nietzsche is dead. I know we're running late. I don't care. Last question.

Hi, I have a question about political parties. I'm a freshman in college and in my federal government class, my professor is a big fan of the way some European countries have many parties, rather than how in the U.S. it really comes down to Republicans and Democrats. My classmates were talking about how they like the idea of copying Europe and having more options, like a green party, for example, as well as differentiating parties more clearly between far right, center right, and far left, center left. I'm wondering if this is a good idea for America, especially because don't all disagreements spoil down to conservative or liberal dispositions? Thank you. So, oh, I love that bit you have there at the end where you say, hold on. Ultimately, aren't all of these policy debates just down to two broad inclinations, dispositions, desires the conservative view and the liberal view. Yeah, conservatives, sometimes we like tariffs, sometimes we hate tariffs. Sometimes we want more migration, sometimes we want less migration. Sometimes we want more awards. Sometimes we want fewer wars. But you can still hold all of those policy views and be a conservative. Why is that? Because conservatism is much more a disposition. And leftism is much more a disposition. They disagree on all sorts of issues too. Really, depending on what Trump thinks, they will just think the opposite. But it boils down to a disposition, which is hating their dads. So that seems to answer your question, which is, no, the two parties are a much better system. the European parliamentary parties where radical minorities can end up dominating, where very little gets done. There's much more chaos. The European governments fall much more quickly than American governments do. So, no, I think our system is good. This is another unpopular view, but whatever.

I'm here to tell you the truth. I'm not here to flatter you. The two-party system is terrible and awful and the worst thing ever, except for all of the other systems in modern republics. I'm entirely in favor of the two-party system. The two-party system. The two-party system is terrible. parties actually basically cohere. They actually basically make sense. It makes sense that someone who does not respect the right to life for an innocent little baby also will not respect the property rights of someone in the middle class. Also will not respect the political rights of citizens who want to control their borders. That it actually does make sense. There's a kind of a logic to it. It's not, these aren't pure philosophical endeavors. You know, it's politics is the art of the practical and

possible. But generally speaking, no, we have a pretty good system. All right, the rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become Member Use Code NolskineWLAS. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. You sit there and shake because you're dependent on drink. Your sick is all over you. Have you ever seen a child starve to death, professor? No.