Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It's the Internet. People are always going to be saying
Speaker 1: crazy things for attention, but it does seem like the
Speaker 1: number of crazy things we hear ratchets up as we
Speaker 1: head towards a major election.
Speaker 2: This is a show.
Speaker 1: About living a better life, and you'll notice that a
Speaker 1: lot of my guests, who a lot of them are
Speaker 1: right there in the political arena whose job is to
Speaker 1: be in it, give the advice to people disconnect from
Speaker 1: the Internet as much as possible. I'm on so many
Speaker 1: group chats with these people, and I'll tell you that
Speaker 1: it's the advice we give each other when things get
Speaker 1: too heated online, or even if it's just a slide
Speaker 1: into the crazy, like arguing that Winston Churchill was actually
Speaker 1: the bad guy in World War two, or Trump is
Speaker 1: of course back to being a Russian spy just in
Speaker 1: time for November. It's easy to imagine that you have
Speaker 1: to stay on the internet.
Speaker 2: And have the fight.
Speaker 1: And look, I'm not saying don't ever, sometimes you do
Speaker 1: have to have the fight.
Speaker 2: It actually is important for saner voices to be heard.
Speaker 2: But if you find yourself driving your kid to baseball
Speaker 2: practice while forming arguments in your head for you to
Speaker 2: have an internet stranger's leader and believe me, I've done it.
Speaker 2: That's really when it's time for as we get closer
Speaker 2: to the election, have to preserve your mental health. You
Speaker 2: have to remember what's important. Spend more time with.
Speaker 1: The people in your actual life, not the people in
Speaker 1: your online life. Listen to the clear voices with opinions
Speaker 1: you trust, who aren't saying things for clicks and views
Speaker 1: to be outrageous.
Speaker 2: You know where those people are.
Speaker 1: Maintain your sanity be well. Coming up next and interview
Speaker 1: with Michael Knowles. Join us after the break.
Speaker 3: Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: My guest today is Michael Knowles. Michael is host of
Speaker 3: the Michael Knowles Show on the Daily Wire. So nice
Speaker 3: to have you on, Michael.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you so much for having me. Wonderful to
Speaker 4: be with you.
Speaker 3: So I was thinking about this interview and I realized,
Speaker 3: I don't know the Michael Knowles origin story. How did
Speaker 3: you get into this thing of ours?
Speaker 4: I think that I might be the only person in
Speaker 4: history to get a show for not writing a book.
Speaker 4: That's it. I really appreciate your using the New York
Speaker 4: Italian slang for you know this stilly in ours, of course,
Speaker 4: and I am of Italian extraction from New York. But
Speaker 4: I launched my show in twenty seventeen. I did it
Speaker 4: shortly after I published a blank book called Reasons to
Speaker 4: Vote for Democrats, a.
Speaker 3: Company I own that book.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: I appreciate your supporting my scholarship. I did it as
Speaker 4: a lark because I have worked in politics and in
Speaker 4: show business since I was probably nineteen professionally in show
Speaker 4: business even a little bit earlier than that, and I
Speaker 4: always liked it. I worked as an actor in plays,
Speaker 4: in film and TV, but I also worked in politics.
Speaker 4: My first congressional campaign, I was nineteen years old. It
Speaker 4: was a challenger race in the Hudson Valley, so swing
Speaker 4: district but kind of liberal, and we ended up winning,
Speaker 4: and I ended up playing a fairly prominent role in
Speaker 4: the campaign doing media things.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: We were running against a rock star who was an incumbent,
Speaker 4: John Hall, and I basically ripped off his song and
Speaker 4: rewrote it and made music videos the young voters for
Speaker 4: an Orleans reunion tour that was this old band and
Speaker 4: you know, so got a little bit of traction that way.
Speaker 4: Then was recruited to some other campaigns and had been
Speaker 4: doing that. I had been working in politics and in
Speaker 4: show business. I was out in Los Angeles doing both
Speaker 4: of those things, and my friend Jeremy Boring asked me
Speaker 4: to join the Daily Wire, which at that time had
Speaker 4: you know, five employees or something. And I was hesitant
Speaker 4: to do it because I thought I did not move
Speaker 4: to LA to have a real job. Nobody moved to
Speaker 4: LA to have a real job. And so, you know,
Speaker 4: he said, you idiot, you know why, just let me
Speaker 4: give you health insurances, so, you know, let me help
Speaker 4: you pal. And so I was working at the Daily Wire.
Speaker 4: I say that I was the pizza boy of the
Speaker 4: Daily Wire. Then my friend Andrew Claven brought me on
Speaker 4: his show as a cultural correspondent, and I had this
Speaker 4: idea for the fake book, which has been done many times.
Speaker 4: You know, there's everything men know about women. There is
Speaker 4: the wit and wisdom of the German people, all sorts
Speaker 4: of versions of it. And so I did mine. And
Speaker 4: it was one way to test well, not just providence,
Speaker 4: you know, it was an expression of providence, surely, but
Speaker 4: it was also one way to test the beginnings of
Speaker 4: the daily wire machine, right. And so I was sitting
Speaker 4: around having a cigar with Jeremy and we're watching this thing.
Speaker 4: It dropped and it all of a sudden, it's jumping
Speaker 4: up the charts on Amazon. It's number twenty five hundred.
Speaker 4: Now it's number two hundred and fifty. Eventually gets up
Speaker 4: to number six or something like that. I was then
Speaker 4: invited on Fox the Morning Show. I go on the
Speaker 4: morning show. By the time I start the morning show,
Speaker 4: it's four am. By the time I get back to
Speaker 4: the office and start my day, it hit number one
Speaker 4: in the country. Stayed there for it was crazy. Stayed
Speaker 4: there for about eleven days. Then I Simon and Schuster
Speaker 4: tried to buy it, and I thought, this is very funny.
Speaker 4: They want to buy nothing. So I asked my friend
Speaker 4: Ben Shapiro to help me out with the book deal,
Speaker 4: and so he introduced me to his literary agent who
Speaker 4: was negotiating nothing. So the Simon and Schuster offered five figures,
Speaker 4: which I thought was great. I'm in my twenties, I
Speaker 4: was about to get married. This was amazing. And Jeremy says, Michael,
Speaker 4: you can't take it. I will not allow you to
Speaker 4: take a five figure advance. He says, it's only funny
Speaker 4: if it's a six figure advance. And I said, Jeremy man,
Speaker 4: it's a come on, it's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Let's you know.
Speaker 4: You got to play it out all the way. And
Speaker 4: we did, and there was a bidding war between two publishers. Amazing,
Speaker 4: they give me six figures for nothing. It then started
Speaker 4: to decline a little because they killed the joke. They
Speaker 4: didn't want me to make fun of them for giving
Speaker 4: me all this money for a fake book. And so
Speaker 4: they said, well, how do we get the book up again?
Speaker 4: I said, I don't know, put me back on Fox maybe.
Speaker 4: So we go back on Fox. We'd already done the
Speaker 4: bit about the blank book. So they asked me what
Speaker 4: I thought about. I think it was Trump's policy in Syria,
Speaker 4: and I said he was doing a good job. And coincidentally, providentially,
Speaker 4: at that moment, our then President was watching from the
Speaker 4: White House and tweeted out his ringing endorsement.
Speaker 1: Of my book.
Speaker 4: So hit number one again and then I got a
Speaker 4: show out of that. And so it's a long winded
Speaker 4: answer to a short question. But the short answer is
Speaker 4: my origin story is I got my career for not
Speaker 4: writing a book.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I love that because it's so creative.
Speaker 3: I feel like our side lacks creativity sometimes, and daily
Speaker 3: Wire I feel it really brings it with the creativity.
Speaker 3: I think that all the projects you guys do, all
Speaker 3: the side stuff, you know, I got an email about
Speaker 3: Jeremy's chocolates today. It's just so much going on, and
Speaker 3: I really love that. I think that that's what we
Speaker 3: should be doing and appealing to people kind of on
Speaker 3: a larger scale, doing an empty book, you know, And
Speaker 3: I think I think creativity is where it's at, and
Speaker 3: I love that you guys are playing into it.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you so much. I'm just upset that you
Speaker 4: got the email about Jeremy's chocolates and not about my
Speaker 4: Mayflower cigars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't get the Mayflowers cigars for people listening.
Speaker 3: Michael just showed me his Mayflowers cigars. I want to
Speaker 3: see all the merch. Actually, what else we have there?
Speaker 4: We're now we're a merch company that has podcasts. I
Speaker 4: also have my Michael Nole's candles. I've become I basically
Speaker 4: only sell things that are flammable, you know. That the
Speaker 4: combustibles is my merch, but you know it's it serves
Speaker 4: a purpose beyond making a few bucks in merch, because
Speaker 4: you know, everybody sells T shirts or whatever. It's not
Speaker 4: really about that. Our philosophy is largely what you've just expressed.
Speaker 4: We want a little creativity, we want a little whimsy,
Speaker 4: and also we want to be in the real world.
Speaker 4: You know, the left controls the political order, not just
Speaker 4: because they have a lot of flax in government. They
Speaker 4: do have a lot of flax in government, and they
Speaker 4: have a lot of lobbyists and whatever, but it's because
Speaker 4: they control everything. So, to use a pressing example, Brittany Mahomes,
Speaker 4: the wife of Patrick Mahomes, the football player. She liked
Speaker 4: an Instagram comment supportive of Trump, and this became headline
Speaker 4: news and she was bullied into unliking the comment. The
Speaker 4: left controls everything, so where you know, she.
Speaker 3: Ended up on liking it. I thought she was like
Speaker 3: holding strong.
Speaker 4: I think she I could be getting the story wrong.
Speaker 4: I'm not the biggest football fan. I thought she unliked it,
Speaker 4: but then kind of doubled down. Nevertheless, on the substance
Speaker 4: of her So don't I don't really know exactly where
Speaker 4: it stands. But you do see the stakes. You see
Speaker 4: the stakes for not even just a mainstream pop culture figure.
Speaker 4: It's the wife of a mainstream pop culture figure in sports,
Speaker 4: which is manly and broadly conservative. So you know my view. Look,
Speaker 4: I've wanted a cigar company for fifteen years. I pitched
Speaker 4: this to the DW guys five years ago, spend a
Speaker 4: year building out Mayflower and the blends and everything like that.
Speaker 4: Also providential how that came to be. It's got you know,
Speaker 4: it has American historical resonances and all that stuff. But
Speaker 4: the other reason why I want to have the cigars
Speaker 4: and the candles and the tumblers and the razors and
Speaker 4: the chocolates and all this stuff is because we are
Speaker 4: incarnate creatures and we move through time and space, and
Speaker 4: we are bodies as well as souls. And if we
Speaker 4: want to transform the culture, we can't just be reaching
Speaker 4: people in their earbuds. We can't just have one point
Speaker 4: of contact. It's got to be we have to be
Speaker 4: contacting people, not just the choir. We got to be
Speaker 4: contacting all sorts of people everywhere.
Speaker 3: They are absolutely you know, my kids always make fun
Speaker 3: of like the commercials on TV will just be like
Speaker 3: we believe, and it's always from the left. It's always
Speaker 3: we believe and some random leftist value, you know. And
Speaker 3: so I love that idea of like products and tangible
Speaker 3: things that the rest of us can be into, the
Speaker 3: rest of us can can have and hold. I think
Speaker 3: that's just a great idea, and I love that Dailly
Speaker 3: Wire does it. So do you feel like you've made
Speaker 3: it after the story that you've told us.
Speaker 4: The closest I've felt is probably getting the cigar company,
Speaker 4: you know, and this was a real childhood dream.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 4: I feel happy with my station in life, and I
Speaker 4: feel that I'm permitted to do good work, and I'm
Speaker 4: glad that I have some influence in politics and I
Speaker 4: can maybe steer certain conversations, you know. As a result
Speaker 4: of my blank book, I was offered the opportunity to
Speaker 4: write what the publisher is called another book. Now, I
Speaker 4: pointed out this, I had not at that point done
Speaker 4: anything that could reasonably lead them to conclude that I
Speaker 4: could write an actual book with words. But I got
Speaker 4: a book deal out of it, and I wrote a
Speaker 4: book about free speech called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,
Speaker 4: It came out a few years ago, and I'm a
Speaker 4: little slow to publish because conservatives in media have a
Speaker 4: book out every single year and it's always you know
Speaker 4: how to own the Libs and so can you, and
Speaker 4: it's got a smirk on the cover and everything, and
Speaker 4: I'm not really into that. I don't think i'd be
Speaker 4: good at writing that kind of book, and it's writing
Speaker 4: a book is too much effort with words to not
Speaker 4: make it something that I think could have some influence.
Speaker 4: So I wrote a book. At the moment that free
Speaker 4: speech was such a powerful issue on the right, I
Speaker 4: decided to write a book questioning our support for free speech.
Speaker 4: I felt that the right was going too far in
Speaker 4: its defense of free speech absolutism, and was inadvertently taking
Speaker 4: the bait that the liberals had laid out for them,
Speaker 4: and that we were actually ceding political power that we
Speaker 4: shouldn't have seeded. So when that book came out, I'm
Speaker 4: happy to say it hit number one on the publisher's
Speaker 4: weekly list, number one national bestseller, which of course means
Speaker 4: that New York Times wouldn't even acknowledge it, completely totally
Speaker 4: ignored it. Brutal snubbing. But it is a badge of honor. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean you know it. Many conservative authors know this,
Speaker 4: and it's annoying because it does affect book sales. But still,
Speaker 4: you know, you can look at the numbers and say, okay, no,
Speaker 4: we actually did sell more than the New York Times
Speaker 4: is number one and whatever. You know, Okay, they don't
Speaker 4: want to promote our book. Fine, But I do think
Speaker 4: that at that time the book helped, along with a
Speaker 4: number of other people and another of other works, to
Speaker 4: steer the conservative conversation back toward a place that I
Speaker 4: felt it should be, which is discussing free speech not
Speaker 4: as a matter of total freedom of speech versus total censorship,
Speaker 4: but rather as competing systems of norms and taboos. Which
Speaker 4: is how now you get into the debate over whether
Speaker 4: the left should put gay porn into elementary schools. Well,
Speaker 4: if we're free speech absolutists, you know there could be
Speaker 4: an argument to do that. But I think happily the
Speaker 4: conversation has been moved in a more conservative direction. Inasmuch
Speaker 4: as I played any role in that, I'm really pleased
Speaker 4: that I could do that. But then, ultimately, an answer
Speaker 4: to your question, no, there's a lot more story to go.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm happy. I'm not envious or avaricious, you know,
Speaker 4: beyond my own fallen human nature. I don't feel particularly
Speaker 4: that way, but I just feel there are many more
Speaker 4: things we can do. And so until the Libs throw
Speaker 4: us in the gulag or you know, I am struck
Speaker 4: down to take a dirt nap, We're going to try
Speaker 4: to keep growing.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a quick break and be right
Speaker 3: back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. I've really enjoyed recently
Speaker 3: your arguments kind of aimed at men on the right
Speaker 3: that they should get married. I think that there's a
Speaker 3: real hole in our just political discussion about that. And
Speaker 3: I love that you've been making that case because I
Speaker 3: think it's become very popular to say, like why should
Speaker 3: men get married, and it's better for them to stay single,
Speaker 3: not have families? Who needs it? And I have really
Speaker 3: enjoyed what you've been saying about it. What motivated you
Speaker 3: to get into that?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: Another big part of the whole story that I probably
Speaker 4: glossed over is that I was an atheist for about
Speaker 4: ten years, practicing atheist and even intellectually an atheist for
Speaker 4: most of that probably and then around the age of
Speaker 4: twenty three, I reverted to the Church, to Christianity, and
Speaker 4: kind of meandered through various iterations of that, but ultimately
Speaker 4: came back to the Catholic faith. And so that offers
Speaker 4: a simple answer to the question, which is, we believe
Speaker 4: as Christians that there are things you're supposed to do.
Speaker 4: We believe that we can come to some of those
Speaker 4: conclusions through a natural reason, that we can even come
Speaker 4: to know the existence of God through natural reason. That
Speaker 4: we don't we're not advocating kind of heretical fidaism that
Speaker 4: you have to put reason and science and logic aside.
Speaker 4: Not far from it. Actually, Saint Thomas Aquinas, to use
Speaker 4: just one example, is probably one of the most intelligent
Speaker 4: and logical men who's ever walked the face of the earth.
Speaker 4: So we come to certain conclusions using our reason, and
Speaker 4: then we also, through our reason, then come to see
Speaker 4: that there is such a thing as revelation. And then
Speaker 4: through revelation, you know, we come to the rest of
Speaker 4: the story. And so through natural arguments and with supernatural arguments,
Speaker 4: we come to see that man is supposed to be
Speaker 4: married because man is a political animal, not merely an
Speaker 4: individual floating and outer space, as our liberal and some
Speaker 4: of our libertarian friends think. But man is a social
Speaker 4: creature and we're a coupling creature. So you know, we
Speaker 4: boys like girls and girls like boys, and we deny
Speaker 4: that factor. Yeah, So, I mean, I know it's very
Speaker 4: controversial view now, but that's how it works, and we
Speaker 4: can actually know something about how we ought to behave
Speaker 4: from our own natures. That again is a controversial and
Speaker 4: liberal modernity, but good old uncle Aristotle had it right,
Speaker 4: and Saint Thomas Aquinas and other great thinkers throughout the
Speaker 4: Middle Ages and even into early modernity were and actually
Speaker 4: even up till today, there are still a number of
Speaker 4: thinkers who are advocating that view which had fallen out
Speaker 4: of favor. So I can come to the conclusion that
Speaker 4: it is right for me to get married, or perhaps
Speaker 4: to follow religious life, you know, or to have a
Speaker 4: kind of consecrated singlehood. I'm not saying that everyone has
Speaker 4: to get married, but it is natural for me to
Speaker 4: get married, and it is ordered toward my good And
Speaker 4: then furthermore, we can know something about what marriage is for.
Speaker 4: So now people, you know, don't know what the definition
Speaker 4: of marriage is. People seem to think sexual difference doesn't
Speaker 4: have anything to do with it, but of course it does.
Speaker 1: That is the.
Speaker 4: Distinguishing feature, because marriage is for the procreation of children
Speaker 4: and the education of children, and the mutual support of
Speaker 4: the spouses.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 4: You know, I've got a really good buddy. I got
Speaker 4: my best friend, and he and I smoke cigars together
Speaker 4: and we talk about books and we I don't know,
Speaker 4: you know, go watch a baseball game or something. Well,
Speaker 4: what I do with my friend is different from what
Speaker 4: I do with my wife, happily, and it's not possible,
Speaker 4: you know, to create a child, to educate a child,
Speaker 4: to do the things that marriage does in other cases.
Speaker 4: So to me, it's just clear as day that one,
Speaker 4: generally speaking, ought to be married. Usually we would be
Speaker 4: arguing with the left on that top right.
Speaker 3: Funny, and that's what I don't understand, like where the
Speaker 3: right has fallen into this trap. And I love that
Speaker 3: you're addressing it, well.
Speaker 4: Thank you. You know, it gets to even a broader
Speaker 4: issue than marriage, which is that today much of what
Speaker 4: passes for the right is just kind of the flip
Speaker 4: side of the left. So you know, many on the right,
Speaker 4: I think this is waning a little bit now, happily,
Speaker 4: But for many years, many on the right would say
Speaker 4: I'm on the right because I'm an individualist. First, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm on the right because I'm a true liberal or
Speaker 4: classical liberal. First, I'm on the right because and they
Speaker 4: would be articulating, it would be explaining why liberalism makes
Speaker 4: them conservative. But I don't call me old fashioned, call
Speaker 4: me stagy. I'm not really a liberal, you know, I'm
Speaker 4: a conservative, and there's a different kind of tradition for conservatives.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't appreciate that the right reacts only to the
Speaker 3: left instead of kind of going on their own and
Speaker 3: using you know, historical philosophies like like you were describing,
Speaker 3: to have our current positions.
Speaker 2: Right, right.
Speaker 4: I mean, I just think when when some of the
Speaker 4: supposedly right wing people come out and they say, listen, men,
Speaker 4: the left is totally wrong, and that's why we need
Speaker 4: to not get married. We need to fornicate, we need
Speaker 4: to you know, not have children, not be fruitful and multiply.
Speaker 4: We need to be vulgar all the time. We need
Speaker 4: to only pursue our individual interest and not recognize the
Speaker 4: common good. We need to not go to church. We
Speaker 4: need to just read Friedrik Nietzsche or something. I think, well,
Speaker 4: you know, with right wingers like this, who needs left wingers?
Speaker 4: I mean, this is silly.
Speaker 3: And what do you worry about, Like, what do you
Speaker 3: think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 4: Well, uh, not to sound to preachy here, but uh,
Speaker 4: you know, ignoring God or explicitly denying God is not
Speaker 4: going to work out well for his society. H And
Speaker 4: the reason for that is is because God is is
Speaker 4: you know, God is who he is. He's the unmoved mover,
Speaker 4: He's the uncaused cause, and we are constantly dependent on
Speaker 4: him at every moment of the day. So if you
Speaker 4: if you ignore that, you're you're ignoring the basis of reality.
Speaker 4: And for for listeners who are maybe more agnostic or
Speaker 4: or who don't you know, don't think about religion much,
Speaker 4: or even if they're atheists. There's a very good writer,
Speaker 4: a contemporary writer whose name escapes me at the moment,
Speaker 4: but he laid it out very well, which is that
Speaker 4: Let's say you just want to debate politics, you know,
Speaker 4: Kamala versus Trump or something, Well you're going to be debated. Well, actually,
Speaker 4: with Kamala you probably won't be debating policies, you'll be
Speaker 4: just debating vibes. But if you wanted to debate policies,
Speaker 4: you would have to in order to have a policy debate,
Speaker 4: you would have to have recourse to practical morality. Why
Speaker 4: this is good, why that is bad? And if you're
Speaker 4: gonna have recourse to practical morality, then you have to
Speaker 4: come back to the moral order. More broadly, if you're
Speaker 4: going to have debates about the moral order, which is
Speaker 4: not something I can touch and feel, right, you have
Speaker 4: to you have to use deduction and logic and philosophy.
Speaker 4: Then you have to come to certain conclusions about epistemology,
Speaker 4: which is how we can know anything at all. How
Speaker 4: can I know that this class is filled with Seltzer
Speaker 4: right now? Well, it's because I'm a millennial and millennials
Speaker 4: love fruity Seltzers. But but you know I.
Speaker 3: Can know because Seltzer should be I leegal gen x.
Speaker 4: Well there you go, exactly, this is that I could.
Speaker 4: I could know that with my reason exactly. But but
Speaker 4: then you have got a pistemology. Okay, well, then you
Speaker 4: have to have some recourse to anthropology. What is a human?
Speaker 2: Can?
Speaker 4: Does a human have faculties of reason that are reliable?
Speaker 4: How do I how do I know that the things
Speaker 4: I think can be trusted? It's an important question for
Speaker 4: self government too. Well, Well, if you're asking questions about anthropology,
Speaker 4: you know, what is a man? Then you got to
Speaker 4: ask questions about ontology, what is being? How do I
Speaker 4: know about anything that exists? And then ultimately, even if
Speaker 4: you're being dragged, kicking and screaming as an atheist, you've
Speaker 4: got to come to questions of theology. How does anything
Speaker 4: that is come to be? You know what undergirds all
Speaker 4: of that? And so whether whether you like it or not,
Speaker 4: you've got to come to those questions. And notice, now
Speaker 4: as the culture has kicked out God, especially in the
Speaker 4: middle of the twentieth century, by banning prayer in schools
Speaker 4: and the Bible in schools because we've got to put
Speaker 4: all that gay porn in the elementary school, so we
Speaker 4: can't have the Bible there. It's taken up too much
Speaker 4: classroom time. When they kick out God, then you get
Speaker 4: all these kind of crazy downstream conclusions from that. Some
Speaker 4: people will conclude that a man, well that a man
Speaker 4: might be a woman and a woman might be a man.
Speaker 4: That's kind of a weird anthropological conclusion. But if you're
Speaker 4: confused on your first principles, you're going to get confused there.
Speaker 4: Some people are going to conclude that we can't really
Speaker 4: know anything I think of You know, the writers who
Speaker 4: have influenced this thought dry daff Huc who kind of
Speaker 4: raised questions about what we can actually know, how much
Speaker 4: we can rather different than say, the scholastics of the
Speaker 4: Middle Ages. There are going to be people who say
Speaker 4: that there's no such morality. It's all socially constructed. You know,
Speaker 4: it's all just inasmuch as there's a moral order, it's
Speaker 4: just out of convenience. But that means that morality doesn't
Speaker 4: exist at all. And so now you're back at the
Speaker 4: political fight and you can't really say anything about politics
Speaker 4: because you're so confused about everything that undergirds politics. And
Speaker 4: that is right, I mean to bring it all back
Speaker 4: to where we started. That is how you get the
Speaker 4: vibe election, right, That's how today Kamala Harris on her
Speaker 4: campaign website doesn't have a platform link. There's no nowhere
Speaker 4: on the website. Trump does, it's the first link. Kamala doesn't,
Speaker 4: because you know, man, what's it all even mean?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 3: You know, Brad election.
Speaker 4: This could be a Brad election.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think that that's such a good point that without
Speaker 3: any foundation, you're kind of a drift. I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people feel that way and just don't know
Speaker 3: how to verbalize it. So I love talking to you.
Speaker 3: This has been way deeper than I thought. You know,
Speaker 3: I thought we're going to just like like conversation.
Speaker 4: I think after this.
Speaker 3: But leave us here with your best tip for my
Speaker 3: listeners on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 4: H Well, this really is you know, political and media
Speaker 4: podcast took a real religious turn. It really did how
Speaker 4: it goes. I would say, first thing you ought to
Speaker 4: do is open your mind to the possibility that God exists.
Speaker 4: If you've already done that, then you should act as
Speaker 4: though God exists, meaning don't do all those nasty things
Speaker 4: that you're doing that you know you're tempted to do,
Speaker 4: and do better things that are good for you, and
Speaker 4: pray and maybe go to church. Maybe if you're a
Speaker 4: macrorel snapping papist like me. Even if you're not, you
Speaker 4: might consider sacramental confession. I think is very helpful psychologically
Speaker 4: and also spiritually efficacious.
Speaker 2: And just.
Speaker 4: Begin with that standpoint of epistemological humility to think that,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe the great geniuses of history, like statistically
Speaker 4: every intelligent person ever going back to antiquity, maybe they
Speaker 4: had something right that we don't have right. And maybe
Speaker 4: as you see all of these scary sociological indicators that
Speaker 4: things are going wrong, you know, skyrocking rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality,
Speaker 4: the fact that virtually every woman in America is on
Speaker 4: some kind of depression drug. I mean, you know, cross
Speaker 4: this party lines, across the geographic lines that I'm not
Speaker 4: totally knocking any of these treatments, but that's not a
Speaker 4: good indicator. You know, some people are depressed. There's obviously
Speaker 4: something going wrong. The fact that you have skyrocking rates
Speaker 4: of people living alone, You've never really seen that in history,
Speaker 4: that the plumbing rates of marriage, plumbing rates of childbirth,
Speaker 4: skyrocking rates of abortion. You know, these are things it's
Speaker 4: hard to see what the good in all of that is.
Speaker 4: So then that leads you to say, okay, well, maybe
Speaker 4: some other people, at other eras, maybe they had things
Speaker 4: a little bit more right than we do, and maybe
Speaker 4: I will, in a true spirit of humility, accept the
Speaker 4: possibility that they were right about something, you know. Buckley
Speaker 4: and God and Man at Yale quotes a president of
Speaker 4: Yale who's a liberal, but who nonetheless points out he says,
Speaker 4: skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction, Meaning
Speaker 4: it's good to have an open mind, but you don't
Speaker 4: want your mind to be so open that your brain
Speaker 4: falls out. Eventually, you have to come to conclusions. You know,
Speaker 4: this is a finite world. We live in time and space,
Speaker 4: and so to the best of your ability come to
Speaker 4: those conclusions. Maybe pray for God's grace to come to
Speaker 4: better conclusions and get that in order. It's sort of
Speaker 4: like the marriage thing. You know, people say, don't get
Speaker 4: married until you've got ten maseratis and a great career
Speaker 4: and eight figures in your bank account. That's getting it backwards.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 4: Even if you do aspire to those things, being married
Speaker 4: and being a response consable man will help you become
Speaker 4: the kind of man who can be professionally successful. And
Speaker 4: that's even an earlier order of that, because marriage is
Speaker 4: a symbol of God's love, Christ's love for his church
Speaker 4: at an earlier level. If you get your spiritual life
Speaker 4: in order, if you get your moral life in order,
Speaker 4: if you're right now, if you're vicious, maybe try to
Speaker 4: just become incontinent. You know, if you're in continent, try
Speaker 4: to become continent. You know, the things that you that
Speaker 4: are bad, that are harming you, try not to do.
Speaker 4: Once you become continent, maybe try to actually desire those
Speaker 4: good things and become virtuous. It will it will make
Speaker 4: your life much better in every capacity. And if you
Speaker 4: really desire the maserati, it will even make you more
Speaker 4: likely to get the maserati.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I talk about that a lot on this show.
Speaker 3: I fully agree with that marriage leads to so many
Speaker 3: good things, and I've loved this conversation. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: He is Michael Knowles. Check out the Michael Knowles Show
Speaker 3: on Daily Wire buy all of his products, May Flowers,
Speaker 3: Cigars and all the rest of it. Thank you so much, Michael,
Speaker 3: Thank you Krole.
Speaker 4: Great to be with you.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for joining us on the can Marker
Speaker 2: which show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.