The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 445 - The Cult of Self-Love

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Bad news, fellas: Emma Watson is “self-partnered.” That’s the new PC term for single. We will examine the Left’s cult of self-love. Then, Kentucky goes blue, according to the MSM! The real election results are more complicated, so don’t expect to hear about them in the press. Date: 11-06-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bad news, boys. Emma Watson is self-partnered. That's the new PC term for single. We will examine the left's cult of self-love. Then Kentucky goes blue, sort of, maybe, according to the mainstream media. The real election results are more complicated, so don't expect to hear about them in the press. We will analyze what they mean for 2020. Rand Paul sheds light on impeachment. A new study shows how politicized scholarship makes bad public policy. And ABC News covers us. up, it's cover up of the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, who, by the way, didn't kill himself. All that and more. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles show. So much to get to today when the mainstream media are covering up the cover up of their own

coverups, when the mainstream media are lying about politics. I just want to tell them, hey, guys, go partner yourself. You know, just go go somewhere and go partner yourself. That is the new PC term, self-partnership. That's what Emma Watson is described. as the new way to be single. You're not single. You're not alone. You are the partner of yourself. I don't mean to make fun of Emma Watson for this. Emma Watson was asked the question in Vogue magazine. She's approaching 30 years old now. She's not married, doesn't have kids, doesn't have a house in the suburbs, doesn't seem settled down. And so they say, how do you feel? And she says, she feels fine. She's not single. she's self-partnered. She said initially, when she turned 29, she felt stressed and anxious due to the

bloody influx of subliminal messaging. Quote, if you've not built a home, if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby and you are turning 30, and you're not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career, or you're still figuring things out, there's just this incredible amount of anxiety. I was like, this is what she's saying. I'm not saying I was like. She says, I was like, this whole thing about being happy and being single, this is totally spiel. It took me a long time, but I'm very happy being signal. I call it being self-partnered. I call it being delusional. We will examine where Emma Watson goes wrong here and where, it's not just Emma Watson, but where the whole culture goes wrong on this cult of self-love.

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First of all, I'm not saying marriages for everyone. some of the happiest people on earth are unmarried. There was a survey that went around of the happiest jobs. I think this was in 2007 out of the University of Chicago. The happiest people in the world, the most job satisfied and fulfilled people, are actually celibate Catholic priests. So marriage is not for everybody. There are plenty of religious people who are unmarried, who are very happy.

And for people who just happen to be single, they happen to be unmarried. there are ways to promote long-term happiness. There was another study out of Harvard. It's one of the longest studies of adult life ever conducted. It showed that relationships with your family, relationships with friends, relationships with a local community can seriously promote long-term happiness, even if you're unmarried or you've never been married or you're divorced or you're a widow. The difference between all of those things and being self-partnered

is the object of your relationships because priest's, are not self-partnered. Priests are in a relationship with God. People who have long-term happiness and they're unmarried are not self-partnered. They have strong bonds to their communities, their family, to their friends, to go in a church, to going to the local PTA, going to the local Lions Club, whatever. Marrying yourself, self-partnership, all different. I mean, we've seen self-marriage crop up in recent years, not just Dennis Rodman. I mean, Dennis Rodman probably start. started this trend in the 1990s when he declared himself bisexual, put on a wedding dress and said he was going to marry himself. When Dennis Rodman did that, we all laughed about it. We all joked. This was kind of a ridiculous stunt.

Now, years later, it's actually happening. Two years ago in 2017, a woman named Adriana Lima married herself. Other women have done this. There are stories about this crop up all the time. They call it sologamy. 13 years ago. So after Rodman, but before Adriana Lima, a woman named Gill wed herself. and she said, quote, you're the one constant. Your parents will die. Your children will grow up and your friends will move, but you're always there. I'm not looking for the one. I am the one. This is a recipe for misery. It's not just in self-partnership. It's not just in self-marriage. You also see this in sex robots, especially if you read the Drudge report every day, because I don't know what Matt Drudge is interested in on the internet, but I do know that every day there's a

new story about sex robots. And it's not just Matt Drudge. They're all over the mainstream media because AI has permitted sex robot technology to get really, really advanced. So there are now sex robot brothels. There are now sex robots that don't just move their arms and do whatever sort of things you want a sex robot to do. They actually have chest cavities that can breathe. They're actually simulating human beings. They're really close. I mean, Mashable did a report on this the other day. They said that the robots are just as good as people, but they're not people. They're just hunks of metal and plastic. But people are, I think, mistakenly doing all of these things. These women who are marrying themselves or people who are buying sex robots or people who are saying, I'm partnered with myself. I don't need anybody. Forget the feminist line from the 70s. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. We can now say, I need anybody else like a fish needs a bicycle. I don't need anybody.

I need me. All I need is myself. I am perfectly sufficient. Emma Watson had that feminist campaign a few years ago called he for she. It's now becoming me for me. And the idea here, I understand the idea. There's a loneliness epidemic that's going around this country and around the West generally. Loneliness is way, way up.

There was a study came out of Vicerland. It surveyed young people. It found out that millennials are more afraid of being lonely than they are of losing a job or losing a house. That survey showed that 42% of millennial women are more afraid of loneliness than they are of cancer. Stress, anxiety, depression, all up in recent years, antidepressant pills, all up. People feeling very isolated. And so they turn to these comforts, what they think are going to be comfortable. sex robots or the idea of self-sufficiency or internet porn, which is just the same thing as

sex robots, it's just you can't touch it. It's not as tangible, but it's the same idea. And then ironically, when people turn to these things to alleviate their loneliness, they become more isolated. They become more withdrawn. Why? The reason is this culture of self-love, which you see all the time in leftist publications, you see it in Emma Watson talking to Vogue magazine. the cult of self-love has deluded people into confusing the virtue of endurance with the sin of pride. Everybody is going to be lonely sometimes. It happens to every single person multiple times throughout their lives for sometimes extended periods of time. It is a virtue to be able to endure that loneliness.

And what we try to do is mitigate the effects of that loneliness by engaging with our community and by praying to God and by involving ourselves in the same. the whole world. Very different from the sin of pride, which tells us that we are sufficient unto ourselves. I don't need a partner. I don't need it. But we're not. Human beings are not self-sufficient. It's even, I think sometimes conservatives want to lean a little too much in this direction of self-reliance and I don't need anybody else. I'll just go it alone. But you actually can't. Human beings are meant to be in society together. There is no such thing as the state of nature where I'm a single individual atom just floating out in the universe. I'm born into a family,

in a town, in a society, with customs and traditions. Human beings are social animals. We are meant to be together. We're the political animal. What is the political animal? Politics is living together with other people and determining how you're going to live and how you're going to govern yourself. We feel that and so we try to replace those social bonds with virtual social bonds. Digital, virtual, like partnering with myself or marrying myself or looking at internet porn or buying a sex robot. That, I understand the suffering that comes with it. I think the people who are saying these things are really trying hard to make the best of a bad situation, but denial is not going to help anything. It's not compassionate to deny reality. And if we actually want to mitigate this

loneliness crisis that is affecting everybody, we have to stop pretending that everything is okay. we have to stop pretending that it's fine to isolate yourself from society and to take yourself away from social bonds. It's not fine. You're not self-sufficient. You're not perfect. That's just the way human nature is. And one way to mitigate that is to work together and to recognize that romantic love is not the only way to do this, but you need to involve yourself. You are not going to suffice. Not even a Hollywood starlet like a, Emma Watson. In Emma Watson's defense, by the way, she's a celebrity. She's a millennial, and she's a former child star. The fact that she's not completely off her rocker means she's

turned out pretty well. She was dealt a very hard spiritual hand here. But it's a lesson for all of us because we're all millennials here, right? We're all living in 2019. We're all celebrities because we all have social media. The problems that are being faced at the pop culture level are problems that are bleeding down into the rest of us because we've had this huge leveling out of celebrity. We've had this huge leveling out of fame. In 2006, the Time Magazine person of the year was you because of YouTube. That's one of the defining features of the era that we're in. And we need to make sure that we don't fall into the same pitfalls of celebrity, which unfortunately, it seems that we are doing. You know, the cult of self doesn't just show itself

in how we interact with ourselves. It even creeps out into the scientific literature. You know, there is a group of 11,000 scientists right now who've signed a petition demanding population control, demanding that we stop having babies, that we curb population growth for allegedly scientific reasons. We've seen this before. It comes from that same cult of self. We'll get to that in a second. Then we'll get to election night 2019. But first, I've got to thank our friends over at Wise Foods. During an emergency, it is very important to be prepared. You know, just as I was leaving my apartment this morning, the power went out because we've had power outages over L.A. pretty frequently. The recent fires were another example. I got

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Economic and population growth are among the most important drivers of increases in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Therefore, we need bold and drastic transformations regarding economic and population policies. Still, increasing by roughly 80 million people per year or more than 200,000 per day, the world population must be stabilized and ideally gradually reduced within a framework that it ensures social,

integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family planning services available to all people. It goes on. You get the point. Stop having babies, start using condoms and maybe abortion too. To stop the weather or something. This isn't the first time we heard this. In 1970, Paul Erlich, who was a good, who was a lot of is currently a professor at Stanford predicted that within 10 years you would see mass starvation unless we curbed the population. And this was this was going to be caused by not just the changing climate, but by the earth not being able to sustain all those people. He said within 10

years we'll have 100 to 200 million people dying regularly starving to death because of overpopulation. Therefore, you need to cut your population. In 1970, the population was 3.7 billion on Earth. The population today is twice that. We are better fed. We are healthier than ever before. It just didn't happen. Was there any consequence to this leading scientist at Stanford University? No, of course not. The scientists also in 1970 were predicting global cooling. They said our warm epoch is undoubtedly over. There was a scientific consensus about this. Then the consensus was wrong. One thing I notice about All these disparate political issues, and these are political issues, by the way, is that they come together to thwart human flourishing. Have fewer babies. Kill the babies that you've got. Don't drive this. Don't fly here. Don't build that. Don't do anything. Stop flourishing for no reason. They put it in the name of science, but they're using science as though it were religion. and like many religions, it's had many false prophecies and false prophets, even on this issue. That's a pretty wicked religion that tells you to stop having babies, to kill the babies that you have to stop flourishing.

When you examine religions, whenever you see that, that's just a little mark that tells you, hmm, maybe this is not the way to go. It's part of that same cult of self that says we need to prioritize us. We can't pass life along. I know that we received life as a gift, but we can't pass it along because the weather gods will be really angry. So let's just live for us right now and nobody else. That is a pathway to misery. You will not be happy if you live only for yourself. You will be much happier if you live for someone else. I'm very skeptical of the social science of happiness, but all the surveys, all the studies we've got say that that is the case. There was one study that tried to refute it said that single childless women are the happiest people on earth. This was immediately debunked when the

story came out this year. There's really no evidence of that. We are happy when we involve ourselves, when we encourage life, when we encourage flourishing. And don't believe anybody who tells you otherwise, whether it's a Hollywood celebrity or a politician masquerading as a scientist. Speaking of politicians, let's get to election night 2019. Kentucky goes blue, sort of maybe. The Democratic candidate for governor of Kentucky is declaring victory. Here he is. Tonight, voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear. It's a message that says our elections don't have to be about right versus left. They are still about right versus wrong.

That our values and how we treat each other is still more important than our party. That what unites us as Kentuckians is still stronger than any national divisions. That is Andy Bashir, who's declared victory as the governor of Kentucky. apparently doing the worst impression of a politician I've ever seen. Did that guy say anything that could not just be in a cartoon of a politician? Our politics is not about right versus left, but right versus wrong. Am I right? Do you get it?

We need to prioritize principles, not party. Am I right? We need to speak in platitudes, not serious statements. I mean, just the most empty suit impression of a politician I've ever seen. The guy makes Mitt Romney look like Winston Churchill. Goodness, gracious me. He's declaring victory now. The mainstream media, of course, are declaring him the victor.

The Republican is not conceding. Why? Because at last count, the two candidates were separated by between 5,000 and 10,000 votes. So, so close. That's with 99% of precincts reporting. You have Bishar leading with about 49.4%. Bevin, Matt Bevin, who was the Republican governor, has 48.7%. So very, very close election, and Bevin is going to try to hold on. This is being reported on as a major loss for Trump.

Kentucky, of all places, goes blue. Turnout in this election was higher than expected. It's estimated to have been around 1.4 million, so that's roughly 400,000 more than the last governor's race in 2015. There are some lessons here for 2020. The silver lining is that Matt Bevin, the current governor of Kentucky, is one of the least popular governors in the country. That was according to a morning consult poll. This is in part because of his history of incendiary comments and big fights over public teacher unions and health care.

The bad news for Trump is, because Bevan was such an unpopular governor, they called in the president to try to help him eke out an election victory the night before the election and it looks like he's still lost. So this is reflecting very poorly on President Trump. Trump predicted it. He said, don't let me lose tomorrow. Don't let Bevin lose. And then the media is going to say it's a big loss for the Trump administration.

Now, obviously, both sides are going to spin this. Democrats are going to say this is a bellwether. This is showing a blue wave for 2020. The Republicans are going to say Bevin was a terribly unpopular governor. That's why Trump had to come out in the first place. And there's still going to be debating who won the election anyway. That's going to go on for weeks. The good news here is.

is the Republican Daniel Cameron was elected the Attorney General. He's also Kentucky's first black attorney general. So he's a much better politician. He looks better. He talks better. He's got a lot less baggage. So that's some good news. It shows it's not a blue wave in Kentucky or anything like that.

Cameron is a 33-year-old first-time candidate. He's from Louisville. He got 57% of the vote when the AP first called the race in his favor. He beat the Democrat Greg Stumbo. Outside of Kentucky, if you look at Virginia, bad news for the GOP in Virginia, the GOP lost the Virginia state senate. So the GOP was holding the state senate by one vote. Then the Democrats flipped the state senate. Still, there's some good news in Virginia as well. Nick Freetas, who is a member of the Virginia House of Delicates, he won his election as a right-in candidate. So he withdrew

from the election formally in July because he failed to submit the required paperwork. And then he ran a write-in campaign, and as a right-in campaign, he beat the Democrat by 14 percentage points at the last count. So this brings up a question. Was it a good night or bad night for Republicans? Was a good night, bad night for Trump? Should Trump have laid off? It was Trump a political asset or a political liability in this election? You're going to hear over the next few days a lot of people say Trump was a huge liability. He dragged down the Kentucky governor's race. I think that's BS. I think the Kentucky governor was headed for a defeat and Trump went in to try to stop the bleeding. But fair question. When Trump involves himself in races, does that help or hurt the candidates?

You've heard both sides. I think, generally speaking, Trump is an asset in these races. I'll tell you why in a second. But first, we've got to thank our friends over at Brickhouse. Have you ever wondered why so many Americans are sick, unhealthy, and overweight. I'll tell you why I'm frequently sick is because I travel all the time and I never sleep. Another reason why Americans generally are unhealthy is because of the food supply and because of a sedentary lifestyle. It leaves Americans in the worst shape they've ever been in. That's why the team of on-staff physicians at Brickhouse nutrition created Field of Greens. Field of Greens is an easy way for you to add fruits and vegetables to your daily routine without spending hours in the produce section or without

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wisdom, the wisdom that we hear from the prognosticators on TV, who almost always get their predictions wrong, who were completely wrong about the 2016 election, the wisdom they espouse that President Trump needs to just shut up and stop interfering in politics, that they're But that's all BS because the people feel a personal connection to their president. Here's Scott Adams. The funny thing about it is when he first started tweeting, during, you know, when he was running for president, people said, ah, it's too much tweeting, too much tweeting, you'll never get,

okay, you've got elected president. But now you need to stop. And then he just increases his tweeting. And I think historians are going to say, okay, that tweeting was a really good idea. It bonded the public to him without the middleman. And I think even the typos end up working in his favor. Because you know he wrote it. That makes it feel personal.

You feel connected to your leader in a way we never have before. Yeah, it's being reported that some of his staff wanted to restrain him. They wanted to read the tweets before. 15 minutes, 15 minutes away. Exactly, exactly. That would have ruined everything. Because I think you could tell a massaged tweet versus an original. You look at it, go, oh, yeah, he wrote that one.

So Scott Adams has, who was one of the few people who predicted the Trump, victory in 2016. And he predicted it by, not because he's this rock-ribbed conservative, but because he's spent a lot of his life studying the art of persuasion and he felt that Trump was doing a good job at persuading people. I love the point he's making here, as I hear this all the time, especially from the really smart people who wear suits and ties and go on television and predict politics and who usually get politics wrong, but who still get invited on and predict more about politics. These are people who said Trump was going to lose, who said his candidacy was awful, who said he'd never connect with voters, and then he won. And he won by being Donald Trump

and by tweeting and by talking and by being who he is. And then the people who were completely wrong about the elections say, okay, yeah, we're wrong and he won, but now he's got to do what we say. I know that he won the presidency by not doing what we say he should do. And other candidates have lost the presidency by doing what we say that he should do. But now, because he's got to, we're smart and we wear suits and ties, he's got to do what we say. No, I don't think so. This whole idea that Trump is some bumbling, fumbling idiot who's never done anything right, who just happenstance was able to succeed in every single thing he's ever tried is so presumptuous. It's such an arrogant point of view. Here's my view of Trump. And here's my view looking at the 2020

election. Maybe the guy who became a billionaire real estate developer who's been famous since the 1980s, who's been at the top of the pop culture since the 1980s, who branded his name on everything in the world, who was a casino mogul, who was a merchandising mogul, who became the number one star of network television for 15 years, and who became the leader of the free world, elected president of the United States on his first actual run for political office. maybe that guy has some idea what he's doing. That's it. That's my, in my humble opinion, that's my modest suggestion here.

Maybe he knows what he's doing. And maybe all these other people who are wrong all the time, maybe they're not quite as certain as they seem to be. Maybe they aren't all that much smarter than the president. That's what 2020 looks like to me. I think election night 2019 tells us very little. Republicans won some things, Democrats won some things. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship. That's bad. That's too bad. Kentucky's a conservative state. But the governor or candidate was a really weak candidate. That's why he had to call in the president of the United States Day before the election in the first place. I don't think it tells us very much. And so much is going to change as we move forward into 2020. One big thing is impeachment. Not just impeachment, but the IG report. The John Durham investigation.

Questions about interference in the 2016 election and collusion between Democrats, the federal bureaucracy, and foreign intelligence sources. So many more questions are going to come up. And the people who are saying President Trump, shut up, don't interfere, don't speak, I think they're missing an essential point, which is that the mainstream media are the problem. The leftist establishment are the problem. And if Trump hadn't spoken up and cut through all that, they would. would have succeeded in rigging the 2016 election. I think that's got to be our guiding light here.

Not these little races in Kentucky or Virginia and the Republicans win some and Democrats win some in 2019, but the 2016 presidential election, that's going to be the guiding light for the 2020 election. So how should Trump run it? Is he going to run it as Mitt Romney? Is he going to run it as a quiet, mild-mannered candidate? No, of course not. He would never get elected that way. And we've run candidates like that before and they've lost. He's got to run for better or worse as Donald Trump. That's the guy who got elected. That's the guy he is. He's not going to be anybody else. And I think it's going to bring people along. The idea that it just turns off everybody that he's brash and that he says crude things and then he makes crude remarks about women sometimes is, I think, myopic. It

doesn't give enough respect to the American people. I mean, even people who personally really don't like Trump are defending him. right now. You see this in punditry, you see this in politics, you see this, even with family members, I bet. Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul, no love lost, is now defending President Trump more than just about anybody. We'll get to that in a second. We'll get to what it means. We'll also get to what faulty politicized science does to our politics. And finally, the journalistic standards of ABC in the cover up of the cover up of the cover up of the Jeffrey Epstein's story, Jeffrey Epstein, by the way, he's that guy who definitely didn't kill himself. You'll get all of that,

but you've got to go to DailyWire.com. Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew Claven Show, you get the Mount Walsh, you get the Ben Shapiro show. Did I say that one? You get backstage. You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up tomorrow, so get your questions in. You get another kingdom. The third and final season, and it's my favorite season yet. I really, really enjoy it. You guys, I think, are going to love it, too. Most importantly, you get the Leftist Tears Tumbler. Delicious, as always. Head on over to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more. So you've got impeachment is the backdrop to the 2020 presidential election.

Nobody really understands why Trump is being impeached in the first place. Nobody really, it's not Russia, it's not Stormy Daniels, it's not the taxes. I guess it's Ukraine. What did he do in Ukraine? They're accusing him of engaging in a quid pro quo because he asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, who's the leading Democrat, former vice president, who apparently engaged in a quid pro quo. quo to get his son off the hook for corruption because he was being paid $600,000 a year with no experience whatsoever to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, which was a major talking point at the State Department. We just saw in leaked emails. Wow, that's pretty complicated. We need to impeach Trump because he did what Vice President Biden did. Biden, who's now the

leading Democratic candidate for president. That doesn't hold up very well. Rand Paul is cutting through all of the BS because at the bottom of this impeachment inquiry is a whistleblower, a so-called whistleblower, who is creating the pretext for impeachment in the first place. And Rand Paul is demanding that we find out the identity of this whistleblower, we bring it into the light of public discourse, and we see if there are any political motivations behind the very root cause of impeachment in the first place. The whistleblower laws, though, they protect a whistleblower. You know it's illegal to out a whistleblower.

Actually, you see, you got that wrong, too. I mean, you should work on the facts. Here's the thing is the whistleblower statute protects the whistleblower from having his name revealed by the inspector general. Even the New York Times admits that no one else is under any legal obligation. The other point, and you need to be very careful if you really are interested in the news, is that the whistleblower actually is a material witness completely separate from being the whistleblower. because he worked for Joe Biden. He worked for Joe Biden at the same time Hunter Biden was receiving $50,000 a month. So the investigation into the corruption of Hunter Biden involves this whistleblower because he was

there at the time. Did he bring up the conflict of interest? Was there discussion of this? What was his involvement with the relationship between Joe Biden and the prosecutor? There's a lot of questions the whistleblower needs to answer. Boom. Even if they don't totally unmasked the whistleblower, Rand Paul has just unmasked the key feature here, which is that the whistleblower who, I think he's a 2008 Yale grad named

Eric Charimella, and he worked for John Brennan, who hates Trump, he worked for the CIA, and crucially, he worked for Joe Biden at the time that all these shenanigans were going on in the Ukraine. Not only is he not a whistleblower, not only is he obviously a Democrat hack. This was not just my conclusion. It was the conclusion of the Inspector General for the intelligence community, who found three pieces of evidence that he was biased against President Trump. But he actually would be a witness in the case here. What he's doing is he's blowing the whistle on President Trump for trying to investigate potential crimes that Joe Biden engaged in, a quid pro quo in Ukraine. So he's actually participating in this at the same time. Of course his identity should be

revealed. Of course he should be called to account. Of course President Trump should be able to face his accuser. This is from Rand Paul. Ran Paul is not some guy who carries water for Donald Trump. Rand Paul personally, it would seem, despises Donald Trump. They had an incredibly acrimonious relationship during the 2016 campaign. Just to refresh your memory. Here is a, I think, a second GOP primary debate in 2016 when Donald Trump insulted Rand Paul's face. First of all, Rand Paul shouldn't even be on this stage. He's number 11. He's got one percent. in the polls and how he got up here. There's far too many people.

Anyway, as far as temperament, and we all know that. I kind of have to laugh when I think, hmm, sounds like a non-secretor. He was asked whether or not he would be capable and it would be in good hands to be in charge of the nuclear weapons and all of a sudden there's a sideways attack at me. I think that really goes to really the judgment.

Do we want some with that kind of character, that kind of careless language, to be negotiating with Putin? Do we want someone like that to be negotiating with Iran? I think really there's a sophomore quality that is entertaining about Mr. Trump. But I am worried. I'm very concerned about having him in charge of the nuclear weapons because I think his response,

his visceral response to attack people on their appearance, short, tall, fat, ugly. My goodness, that happened in junior high. Are we not way above that? And would we not all be worried to have someone like that in charge of the nuclear arsenal? Mr. Trump. I never attacked him on his look. And believe me, there's plenty of subject matter right there. That I can tell you.

All right. He opens up his statement in 2016 and he says, Rand Paul shouldn't even be on this stage. Rain Paul says, what are you attacking me for? He goes, well, at least I'm not attacking how ugly you are. These are guys who don't have a great personal relationship necessarily. And even Rand Paul is defending him because the deck is so absurdly stacked against Trump right now from the federal bureaucracy, from the Obama administration,

from the left-wing media. All of these guys are stacking the deck against Trump. So you're going to hear a lot of think pieces, ironically named think pieces. They're not very thoughtful in the next few days about how the election night 2019 is evidence of a blue wave. I just wouldn't believe it. I don't think it's evidence that Trump is going to win either. I don't think it's evidence of very much at all.

It's going to come down to Trump. It's going to come down to Trump himself, not some guy in Kentucky, not some guy in Virginia. It's going to come down to do people like how Trump is governing. Are people willing to ignore some of the personal flaws that they find in the guy? He's not going to win by pretending to be somebody else. He's not going to win by not being himself. It's going to be an election about Donald Trump. And I just think as a little bit of evidence that people are going to come around on him,

that people are more nuanced in their thinking than a lot of pundits give them credit for. I hear it not just from Rand Paul, who more or less says I don't really like the guy, but he's getting a raw deal and he's a good president. I hear it from members of my family. I hear it from friends who say, yeah, the tweets, you know, great, whatever, the way he talks, but he's doing a good job. I hear it from Uber drivers. I hear from people on the street.

I suspect that's going to be the calculus in 2020. And it's not going to come down to Kentucky, and it's not going to come down to what the mainstream media tell you. There is, and we talked about this a little bit yesterday. This is switching gears from the national to the local level, back to La La Land, where I live in Tent City, USA. The mayor of Los Angeles said yesterday, or we played the clip yesterday, said it a few days earlier. With a straight face, he said that Los Angeles is the model city for dealing with homelessness, which is absurd. Homelessness increased in LA County 13% from 2017 to 2018, increased in L.A. city, 16%. The homeless are everywhere here. They're on the street. There are whole tense, like actual tent cities cropping up all around Los Angeles, which are full of drugs, which are full of violence, which are full of sexual assault. They're just hideous, hideous awful places that no one should be permitted to live in and no one should be expected to live in. How did we get here? The way we got here in many ways was because of the closing of the insane asylums.

huge numbers of these homeless people have mental health problems or drug addiction or both, and they're dealing with the mental health problems with drug addiction. A lot of this came because we closed the mental hospitals. There's actually a new study, a study of a study that came out just last week, which shows that the science behind closing the mental health hospitals was bunk, was garbage. 1973, David Rosenhan, psychologist, published a paper called On Being Sane in Insane Places. This was in the prestigious journal Science, and it made a huge splash. The study showed eight healthy volunteers going undercover as fake patients in 12 psychiatric hospitals around the country,

and it showed the awful conditions that they were in, and it showed how easy it was for sane people to be locked up, and it helped push along this idea that we need to close all the mental hospitals. hospitals. People blame Ronald Reagan for this, because Reagan was the governor of California. And Reagan did help this along, but this was a liberal policy. This was always a left-wing policy that Reagan encouraged. I mean, Reagan also made no-fault divorce easier and liberalized abortion laws while he was governor of California. Nobody considers those conservative policies. Now it turns out that the study that led to the closing of these mental hospitals was just BS. It turns out that a lot of Rosenhan's work was falsified, that he misrepresented and outright lied

about some of what he did, that he actually kind of masqueraded as a patient himself and covered up all of the other symptoms that these guys were describing to the doctors of these mental hospitals to get themselves admitted to it. It was bunk. Now we close the mental hospitals and now we have a major homelessness problem. This, too, gets back to the cult of self-love. No serious society, no respectable society should permit 60,000 people on the streets of L.A. to live in squalor and addiction and filth and crime. It is barbarous. It is completely uncivilized. How do you stop that? The way you stop it is by dragging homeless people to homeless shelters. more than half of the homeless shelters in L.A. are not filled every single night. There's a study about that just recently. Well over half of them, not filled. The homeless shelters in L.A. are supposed to be at 90% capacity. They're at average 78% capacity. They're not being filled. For the homeless people who won't go to the shelters, they should be dragged to either addiction recovery places or they should be dragged to insane asylums.

and they should be committed involuntarily. It's very hard to do that now because of the laws, but they should. And they should have that happen because that's much more compassionate than letting people live on the street. By the way, if they won't do any of those things, they should be thrown in jail. Because even that is more compassionate than letting people live in squalor and filth on the street and crime and allow crime to spread throughout the city and filth and ugliness. The way that we came to the conclusion that it was more compassionate to let people live on the street is because we atomized ourselves.

It actually gets back to that cult of self-love. We thought, hmm, people should just be allowed to do whatever they want. Not my problem. I feel icky forcing addicts and unwell people into these insane asylum. So we'll just let them out. And not my problem, it's their problem. I'll look away when I see them on the street. I don't need to give them money.

Look, I pay my taxes. I don't need to give them charity. And that's fine. It's not fine. It's not compassionate. It's only considered compassionate in this highly individualized, highly atomistic society that says, I'm an island unto myself. I am not my brother's keeper.

But of course we are. We are social beings. We live with one another. We cannot tolerate this to persist. There's nothing conservative. There's nothing compassionate. There's nothing liberal about letting that happen. We need to take a much more serious understanding of compassion, of love, of love.

of self-care, of all of these things, that is the only way that we are going to move ahead. It's the only way that we are going to ameliorate our situation, not just for the people who are on the street, but for ourselves as well. The only way that we're going to mitigate this loneliness epidemic, the stress epidemic, the depression, the anxiety, the only way we're going to turn this around is by thinking, not less of ourselves, but thinking of ourselves less, to quote, C.S. Lewis. That's going to be a real way to engage in self-love and self-care. And it's through not selfishness, but selflessness.

Before we go, I just have to point out. We talked about the Jeffrey Epstein story yesterday. Jeffrey Epstein is a financier and a sex criminal who definitely didn't kill himself. So there was that bombshell video from James O'Keefe, which showed that ABC News buried the Jeffrey Epstein story for three years, would not let any of it be reported for three years. Once this undercover video came out, ABC released a statement. He said, at the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we never stopped

investigating. Ever since we've had a team on this investigation and substantial resources dedicated to it, didn't meet our journalistic standards. This is ABC News, which aired baseless smears based on nothing against Brett Kavanaugh. This is ABC News, which ran footage from a 2017 Kentucky gun show and pretended that it was currently occurring in Syria from the Turkish forces against the Kurds. That happened just a few weeks ago. ABC News, which has no journalistic standards whatsoever,

is trying to cover up their cover up of Jeffrey Epstein by saying the Epstein story didn't meet their journalistic standards. B.S. Call them out for it. They didn't air any word about this on their ABC evening news. They're trying to cover it up again. The only way you cut through that is through the memes. It's through the new media.

It's through that internet culture. That's the way to do it. And you've got to try to keep this story alive about Jeffrey Epstein, who is not alive because he didn't kill himself, but was obviously killed intentionally. That's the meme. That's the show. Go engage in a little self-love, but not by self-partnering. Go engage in a little self-love by involving yourself in the world. And then come back and I'll see you tomorrow. Get your mailback questions in. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. If you enjoyed this episode and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.

And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Andrew Claven Show, and the Matt Wall Show. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner. Executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer, is Austin Stevens. Assistant Director Pavel Weidowski, edited by Danny Domeco.

Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera, and our production assistant is Nick Sheehan. The Michael Knoll Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019. Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klaven, host of the Andrew Klaven show. I had a near riot at my Boston speech last night, and I was watching what the left does to our women and our children. I think we've got to get them off the leftist sinking ship and build an arc of our own. I'll talk about it on the Andrew Claven show. I'm Andrew Claven.