Ep. 1698 - Michael Reviews "Snow White" (In 2 Minutes!)

President Trump officially ends the Department of Education.

The left turns to terrorism to stop Elon Musk.

And I watched Disney's live-action remake of Snow White, or as I call it, Sand Beige.

I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
welcome back to the show boy oh boy will we get to this snow white review i was among the first people to see snow white in theaters because the producers and the publicists made me do it.

I was one of the only people to see it in theaters, judging by the opening reviews. I will give you my review because there were profound things in Snow White.
There's so much more to say. First, though, as we continue to celebrate the victory of our 47th president, there's no better way than to introduce the 4547 Patriot Edition American whiskey produced by the team at Wise Spirits right here in our hometown of Nashville.
Their masterfully crafted American whiskey pays homage to the very essence of our great nation. Celebrating its rich history and vibrant culture, each batch is carefully selected from the finest barrels with each drop representing a testament to precision and quality.
Best part is, this whiskey is made by patriots, for patriots, and embodying the spirit of the American dream. I find, too, sometimes with whiskeys, I like to collect them, really special ones, like a whiskey from your town or something, or a whiskey from a special occasion.
I'll throw a bottle just in

the cupboard. This is one of those whiskeys, too.
So I would recommend you enjoy sipping the whiskey, but then maybe you also save a bottle. That's what I would do.
Experience the 4547 Patriot Edition whiskey, where every sip tells a powerful story of heritage, craftsmanship, and indomitable pride.

Please drink responsibly.

45-47 premium American whiskey,

46-47 premium American whiskey, 46% alcohol by volume, copyright 2025. Wise spirits, Nashville, Tennessee, must be 21 years or older.
President Trump has, oh, you know what? Before we get to this big story, I knew something smelled a little off in my room. We got to go to thecandleclub.com slash Michael, get that nice Smells and Bells candle.
Ah, much better. President Trump has directed his education secretary, Linda McMahon, to take, quote, all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states.
This is according to a White House summaryonger about this. I don't think it's going to work.
In terms of money, most of what the Department of Education does is facilitate all sorts of loans, Pell Grants, that sort of thing, to bolster our failing education system. I don't think people are going to miss that all that much.
It's been one of the biggest drivers of rising tuition in recent decades. Then of the thousands of employees at the Department of Education, it's hard to point out exactly what any of them do, other than, this is the third thing, harass ordinary Americans and try to push

leftism. In practice, most of the consequential political action that the Department of Education

takes is enforcing radically leftist interpretations of civil rights law, transing your kids,

and forcing parents no longer to have any say in their kids' education. That's it.
You know the one thing that we know for certain the Department of Education doesn't do? Improve kids' education. Because we measure kids' education, we have things called standardized tests.
Standardized, so they're not merely based on locales or for one demographic group or another, but they're standardized. We can measure and track results over time.
And since the Department of Education was founded in 1979, test scores have declined. That's all you have to say.
That's all you have to say to campaign against this thing. Republicans have been campaigning against the Department of Education since it was founded.
Carter starts it in 1979. Reagan comes out strong against it, and yet the Republicans never had the chutzpah to actually go in and abolish it.
Trump fulfills his campaign promise. If you explain it this way, you say, yeah, it was supposed to improve education.
Education failed. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.
The results from the Department of Education have been a disaster. Get rid of it.
If you want to improve Americans' education, as I do, I'm very pro-education. I know there are some people on the right who do not support formal education, discourage university education in principle, don't think we need teachers to do that.
That ain't me, man. I'm very pro-education.
I'm pro-liberal arts education. I'm all for people studying the humanities, becoming familiar with their culture.
That actually ties into another news story that we'll get to in a moment. But clearly, our education system, K through 12, and then certainly in the universities and graduate school, is not doing that.
So if you support education, as I do, then scrap the thing that has not been effective, and, if anything, has made education worse and try something new. That's all Trump's doing.
The American people are going to support him in that. Most voters voted for him.
He was campaigning on this. That's that.
Now, the one part of this story that will continue is this is a test of executive power. So this will obviously be challenged in court.

There will be big questions over whether or not the president can abolish the Department of Education.

Does he need the legislature to help him do so? If he does need the legislature, as it seems that he does, he's not going to get the requisite votes from Democrats in the Senate.

So it'll all be a big fight.

Good. Have this fight out in the open.

Make the liberals defend their record on education, on really any of the government departments that they hold so dear. Make them defend their record.
That's going to be a losing proposition in front of voters.

Now, speaking of the libs taking L's, because they just keep getting pummeled at the ballot box in Congress with these executive orders, in terms of eyeballs and cultural attention, you're seeing their news networks collapse. Because they're losing everything, the libs are turning to terrorism.
And I mean that totally, sincerely, without any hyperbole. There has been a growing campaign among radical leftists to commit terrorism, to torch people's cars, specifically Teslas, in protest of Elon Musk, because Elon Musk is sacrificing his private fortune and private interests, business interests, in order to help America and help President Trump to clean up the federal government.
Well, now the leftist terrorists are taking it a step further. There's a report out from the UK Independent about a website called DogeQuest.

DogeQuest doxes people who own Teslas nationwide.

I guess there's some database of Tesla owners.

DogeQuest reveals their names and their addresses.

The site reveals the names, addresses, phone numbers of Tesla owners on an interactive map, and the cursor on the map is a Molotov cocktail. In case you thought they were being a little too subtle.
It's very clear. They're revealing private information so that they can encourage people to commit violence against the Tesla owners.
The only way you can remove your information from the website is if you prove that you've sold your Tesla. Otherwise, your information is going to be out there and wackos are going to be encouraged to commit violence against you, maybe throw a Molotov cocktail at you.
This is not the first time we've seen the left do this. The last time that the left did this was in the 1960s.
And they did it. We had the weather underground, terrorists who killed all sorts of people and then went on to become mentors to Barack Obama like Bill Ayers did and to be revered and to be given cushy positions at universities by the left.
But they committed terrorism. And what is terrorism? People throw that word around.
Terrorism has a specific meaning. It's when you target civilians with violence to achieve political ends.
And that's what's happening here. Just ordinary people who buy nice cars.
There's an irony here, which is that a lot of Tesla owners are super liberal because Tesla being an electric car that's quite expensive, previously coded left. So you had a bunch of libs in blue cities who were buying them for climate change or whatever.
So it is kind of ironic that the left is doxing their own right now, but it's not good even if it is leftists who own it. Now they're just demanding that people sell them.
Okay, this is what the left did in the 60s. Conservatives shouldn't be complacent about this because eventually Americans got sick of the political violence and the tumult and they elected Richard Nixon and they reelect Richard Nixon in a landslide, and then the deep state had to do a coup d'etat on Richard Nixon because the people loved him so much.
But the left did get a lot of what it wanted. The left did get a lot.
I mean, that was a major cultural revolution in the 1960s. It upended our government.
It upended American society. It upended how we view ourselves and human identity.
We are experiencing another such cultural moment right now, and that's why the peaceful transfer of power has not been all that peaceful, and most of the violence, by the way, has come from the left. Now, speaking of violent criminals, the Libs are continuing to defend Tren de Aragua.
They are continuing to defend not only the illegal aliens who haven't committed any crimes since they crossed the border, and they're just sweet little abuelas who are cooking croquetas for their grandchildren, and who would want to deport them? The Libs are defending face-tattooed Satan-worshipping gangsters, and the White House has a response. There's so much more to say.
First, though, go to PragerU.com slash DW. I want to tell you about my friends at PragerU, the conservative nonprofit fighting to educate the next generation and win back the culture.
I have been with PragerU in some capacity or other for almost 10 years now, I think. Conservatives won really big in November, but the fight is far from over.
The left still controls our schools and is undermining faith, family, and freedom. One election will not fix that.
That's why PragerU is making real, lasting change. They're reaching young people like never before with pro-American, pro-Judeo-Christian content, nearly 2 billion views a year, with 65% of their audience under 35.
Now, PragerU is getting into classrooms. Nine states have already partnered with them to bring PragerU videos and books into schools with more states on the way, but they can't do it alone.
Right now, every dollar you give is triple-matched to help push back against radical indoctrination. Do not wait.
Go to prageru.com slash DW and make your donation today, which will be triple match. Together, we can keep the momentum going.
Stand strong for our values. Prageru.com slash dw.
Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff and an all around immigration deportation guru, very important advisor to President Trump, has just gone on television to defend the White House's use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport these violent criminals. Because many leftists are arguing that that's a very old law and the White House has no business invoking some law from the 18th century to actually deport criminals today.
Here's what Stephen Miller, on behalf of the White House, has to say. This is settled law, to use that common phrase, this is settled law.
Alien Enemies Act has been on the books and has been upheld for over 200 years. And by the way, the fact that it's a 200-year-old law makes it stronger.
This was adopted by the founding generation of our country. The people who wrote the Constitution wrote this law because they understood when America is being invaded by a hostile power, the president is at the height of his authorities to turn back that invasion.
So he's totally right on the point. But I want to just zoom in on that phrase, settled law, which Stephen Miller calls attention to.
He chose that phrase specifically because the left always uses that phrase, but they don't use that phrase to refer to truly enduring longstanding aspects of our law. They don't use that phrase to refer to our traditional constitutional protections.

What's more settled than the Constitution?

No, no, no.

They want to get rid of the Second Amendment.

They want to rewrite the First Amendment.

They want to rewrite the actual articles of the Constitution to change the way that the government works.

They don't respect the Constitution at all.

That's an outdated document.

But when it comes to something like the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, a completely frivolous decision, even understood as such by liberals at the time, then that's settled law, and we can never question settled law.
So Stephen Miller comes out. He says, all right, well, what's more settled than the Alien Enemies Act of 1798? It's been used by four different presidents.
It's been on the books for 125 years. I don't know.
It seems pretty settled to me. Sorry, not 125 years, 225 years.
Doesn't that seem pretty settled? This is a theme of MAGA and the Trump White House. The theme is hoisting the left with its own petard.
Non-Trump Republicans, pre-Trump Republicans didn't really do do that so much we would hear in the pre-trump republican era well you know we don't want to wield power when we're given power because then imagine what the left would do to us i sound like a broken record on that point but but in other ways too the republicans would say well we don't want to wield power and reward our friends and punish our enemies. That would make us no better than the left.
In other words, they say, look, the left encourages bad stuff and discourages good stuff. But if we encourage good stuff and discourage bad stuff, that would make us no different from the left, except it would make you very different from the left because good and bad are different.
Encouraging good is a lot different. It's actually the opposite of encouraging bad.
And so here, Trump is not saying, no, I'm not going to refer to settled law. I'm not going to wield the civil rights regime.
There's another good example. President Trump, when he's moving to defund Columbia University, because Columbia University is encouraging all kinds of radical leftist protests.
He is defunding Columbia on the basis of civil rights law. Civil rights law, civil rights regime was the left's wheelhouse.
Hold on, the civil rights regime is only supposed to be used by leftists to harm conservatives. What does Trump do? Well, Trump is hoisting the left with its own petard.
That's what they're doing here. They say, okay, the left comes out and rewrites the country, creates a new constitution with its civil rights regime, creates a new form of jurisprudence by referring to settled law in very specific and selective ways.
Okay. And Trump says, well, I'm going to do that too.
And I'm going to reward my friends and I'm going to punish my enemies. And I'm going to wield the state against bad corporations.
And I'm going to do the same kind of stuff you liberals do, except you do it for bad ends and I'm going to do it for good ends. You do it in an unjust way.
I'm going to do it in a just way. And the libs don't know how to respond to it.
Now, speaking of the libs hoisting themselves with their own petard, I saw Snow White. Disney has remade Snow White.
Snow White is the first American feature-length animated movie, 1937. It's one of the most beloved movies of all time.
Even if Disney had not fallen prey to wokeness and nonsense in recent years, even if Disney still had the most talented people in the world working with the best writers, with a good sense of narrative and the cultural moment, even if everything worked perfectly, it would have been almost impossible for this movie to succeed. Because you're comparing it to one of the most beloved films of all time and a truly groundbreaking movie.
And Disney was not sending its best. I sat through the whole thing.
I don't want to say it was the worst movie I've ever seen. It wasn't.
But every way that the movie changed the story from the original, the 1937 movie, or even from the original Grimm Brothers fairy tale, every way that Disney changed the story, it changed it for the worse. Now, people were already prepared for this movie to be far left, woke, terrible.
Because Rachel Zegler, the woman who plays Snow White, made these comments now, what, over a year ago? You said you were bringing a modern edge to it on stage. What do you mean by that? I just mean that it's no longer 1937.
And we absolutely wrote a Snow White. She's not going to be saved by the prince.
She's not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.
And so it's just a really incredible story for I think young people everywhere to see themselves in. Snow White is running for president.
I'm launching my campaign. I am.
That's actually really profound, running for president. She's supposed to be a princess, but it sounds like she's running for president.
That's really profound. But speaking of president, Rachel Zegler also posted F-Trump kinds of posts on social media.
She also said that she hoped that Trump supporters, quote, never know peace. So people were already gearing up, oh man, this is going to be a rough movie.
Disney responded by scaling back the premiere. I don't know if anyone really showed up to the premiere.
The Rotten Tomatoes reviews are looking pretty bad. And they did, it seems like they tried to tweak a few things, but this movie is bad.
And I'm not some curmudgeonly conservative that thinks every new movie is bad, okay? Don't forget, I liked Barbie. I actually really liked Barbie.
I'm pro-Greta Gerwig. I liked even, what was the movie? There was some movie about, was it Midsommar? Some movie that was a kind of environmentalist Christian movie that everyone hated that.
I so i'm i i liked it i'm kind of fair on these things this was really bad it was extremely leftist on every political dimension racial politics sexual politics class politics regime politics its its narrative was cowardly it was just awful so the obvious point am i don't even know am i allowed to say it she's not white but she should be snow white needs to be white i've been referring to this new movie as sand beige she is a vaguely brown lady i'm not white enough to be snow white i'm also brown lady. I'm not white enough to be snow white.
I'm also a fella, but I'm not white enough to be snow white either. She is snow white because of her skin color.
She's the fairest of them all. So you could even say, all right, the new movie, it's going to rewrite what snow white means.
And it's going to say that she's like snow because she's unique, like a snowflake or because there was a snowstorm or whatever. But they kept in the...
There's spoiler alerts, by the way. I should have said that earlier.
They kept in the movie the line, mirror, mirror on the wall. They changed it to magic mirror on the wall.
Who's the fairest of them all? And so you can try to abstract that again and say, well, she's really fair in that she's not unfair. You know, she's really fair minded, but it she's got to be white.
Okay. It's not, it'd be like Disney presents the autobiography of Malcolm X starring Tom Hanks.
It'd be weird. Disney makes the live action remake of Moana and the big fat Polynesian guy is going to be played by Seth Green.
It doesn't work. Acting is a visual medium.
Film is a visual medium. You have to look a certain way.
Not for every role, by the way. Denzel Washington, black guy, played Macbeth.
Macbeth, where some people objected to that. I actually felt colorblind casting in that kind of Shakespeare play was okay.
It was totally fine. Denzel Washington had a great performance.
But in a movie called Snow White, in a movie called The Whitest Lady Ever, Disney presents The Whitest Lady Ever starring a Latina. Not going to work.
Okay, so right off the bat, it doesn't work. The sexual politics of it were, as she said, it's not some great love story.
She's not a fair princess. In the animated movie, she shows up to the dwarf's house.
And then what does she do? She cleans the house, which is a mess, and she prepares a meal. But in the new movie, you can't have the lady cooking and cleaning all by herself, certainly not.
So what does she do in the new movie? She just takes a nap. That's the ideal of the modern woman.
She doesn't cook. She doesn't clean.
She just sits on the couch, veggies out, takes a nap. In the remake, in this new movie, she fights men physically, which is one of the most ridiculous conceits of the last 20 years of filmmaking, the last 10 to 15 years of filmmaking.
You have women, like in Star Wars, you have women physically fighting men, but women can't physically fight men, ever. Men are just physically stronger than women.
So that part is totally absurd. And who is she fighting with? She's fighting with this criminal gang because the prince, Prince Charming in the traditional fairy tale and in the 1937 movie, has been replaced by a common criminal.
There's so much more to say. First, though, something I'm very, very excited about.
You got to go to rabbitair.com. Have you heard about Rabbit Air's A3 purifier? It is pretty impressive.
They've won awards for their design that uses six stages of filtration to clean your air. It doesn't just catch particles floating around.
It actually removes odors and pollutants too, so your home feels genuinely fresh. Everything is super customizable.
You can change the faceplate whenever you want for a new look, mount it on a wall, set it on the floor, even choose specialized filters depending on what you need. They have options specifically for cigar smoke or those harmful VOCs.
I love it. I actually, it hasn't come yet in the mail.
I have a Rabidair currently running in my office 24-7. I totally believe in this product.
I've used it for years at this point. I'm now getting a custom Mayflower Cigars Rabidair, which is great.
I try not to smoke in my home. However, when you got Rabbit Air, which is very, very good at cleaning smoke out of the air, it's a whole new day.
The quality is phenomenal. Just go to rabbitair.com right now.
You can call anytime. They have consultants available 24-7 to answer questions and help you figure out what works best for your space, rabbitair.com.
My favorite comment yesterday is from NBGN7QS, and this was picked by the producers, I think by Professor Jacobs. So if this was a bad comment, I want no responsibility.
He says, Michael, click this JFK video. Click.
Can't believe you fell for it. You're so naive.
Ball. Yeah, that's true.
I did it again. I did it twice.
But at least yesterday, I talked about the JFK files, which will produce nothing, by the way. They will produce nothing.
I'm positive. So I'm not reading one page of the 65,000 pages or whatever.
You're free to. If you find anything juicy, please let me know.
I'm all ears. I can't wait.
But kind of seems like like the federal government is loosey with the football on this stuff. Yeah, no, no, no.
Our government's been lying to us for 60 years, but now they'll tell us the truth. Okay.
You've got crazy racial politics in the new Snow White movie. You've got crazy sexual politics in the new Snow White movie.
And when I say crazy, I don't just mean offensive or subjectively unpleasant. I mean untethered from reality.
Snow White isn't white. The lady, this beautiful, fair, beautiful princess, dainty, lovely princess, is physically fighting big, strong men in armor, just preposterous.
And then the prince is replaced by a common criminal. So there is a guy at least.
Another spoiler alert, there is a guy and he kisses her, but he's not a prince, which I think plays into, and this is where the badness of Snow White gets deeper than maybe even the writers understand. It plays into the prejudices of our leveling democratic age, lowercase d.
Where at least, you know, even with the Republican virtues that we've had in America for 250 years, at least we had an admiration for order. Even for hierarchy.
At least hierarchy in a kind of natural dignity. At least we supported normal, orderly things.
We aspire to be great. We aspire to be noble, at least noble of spirit, if not with a formal nobility.
Here, though, in this modern, leveling democratic age, we can't acknowledge nobility. Nobility is bad.
They grudgingly left the king and the queen and Princess Snow White in there, because they have to, because that's the whole story. But wherever they could, they diminished hierarchy, order, nobility, aristocracy.
At a really deep level, when you think of modern intellectual trends in politics, you've seen a turn on the right toward aristopopulism. That's a much joked about term.
But the notion that there is good that we should be seeking, a move toward the common good, toward a more classical conception of politics. And so the left has doubled down on this leveling kind of egalitarianism.
Now, the queen is motivated by envy. That's the one part of the story that they seem to have gotten, they've left all right, which is, you know, that your envious heart says the mirror to the queen.
And there's this notion that envy is the beginning of the trouble in the cities. You see this in Dante.
Dante makes that point almost exactly, I think, in Canto VI of Inferno.

So the envy is there.

I mean, that gets to a political reality. But the leveling of the political order is kind of silly, which reaches its climax in the final scene of the movie, penultimate scene of the movie, when Snow White leads an insurrection, basically.
For all the libs talking about how they hate insurrection, they have replaced the way that the queen dies in the original movie with a kind of an insurrection. So Snow White shows up.
She says, I'm back, and I'm here to take my rightful rule as the ruler of this kingdom. And the evil queen says, okay, here's a dagger.
Stab me if you want to take my throne. And Snow White says, well, I can't do it.
So then the queen says, all right, guards, kill her. And just as the guard's about to kill her, Snow White knows the guard's name and tells him his name and asks him how his wife and kids are doing.
And she remembers the other guard's name and she knows everyone's name. In other words, Snow White escapes certain death from the queen's guard because she's a good retail politician.
In other words, even though it is a kingdom and she's a princess, the political resolution of the movie is that democracy triumphs over monarchy. That is not present in the original movie.
That is not present in the grim fairy tale. That is a radical, liberal rewriting of the story.

As long as you're good at shaking hands and kissing babies, you'll be able to lead an insurrection against the queen. I'm not defending the queen.
She's an evil queen. But there is a profound political shift in that choice.
And then you have narrative cowardice. Because the way that the queen dies is she's yelling at her mirror

and she shatters her mirror and then she just gets sucked into the mirror. Somehow, whatever.
She like turns black and then gets sucked into the mirror. And so there's no, it's very unsatisfying.
It's not that it's, they don't go all the way far leftist where the people just chop her head off or something like it's the French Revolution and she's Marie Antoinette. The evil queen would deserve it.
Marie Antoinette didn't deserve a thing that happened to her. It's not that Snow White does it as a kind of girl power, you know, will, tyranny of the will, you know, triumph of the will kind of revolution.
It's not that the queen dies even from a deus ex machina, lightning strikes her.

It just gets sucked into the mirror, and it's supposed to be profound, but I don't know what the profundity would be. It was really bad.
It was really bad. The moments that were good, there were some good moments, like the dwarves were cute, and the dwarves were cute in no small apart because they were computerized?

It wasn't.

It'd be kind of funny if they'd made it all real live action and it were just a bunch of little people, you know, because I don't think you really want to, so I don't think that would work. I think they have to be these cute little kind of cherubic gnomic creatures.
And so that worked, but the parts of the movie that worked are the parts that they just kept the same. You know, whistle while we work.
That was good. But Disney, in as much as it's producing anything that's good these days, is just living on the fumes of its past glories.
And so in that way, this is my conclusion. In that way, this movie is very reflective of our cultural moment.

It's bad in all the ways our culture is bad.

It's not the worst movie ever.

We don't live in the worst culture ever.

But the ways in which the culture has changed in recent decades have been for the worse, pretty much uniformly.

And the changes that were made from the original Disney movie to this one are bad, uniformly, quite reflective of our age. Because we too feel, we feel in the popular culture, in our polities, that we're kind of living on the fumes of prior glories.
Even intellectually, even spiritually, we're living on the fumes of Christendom. And if we don't reestablish something sturdy to found the civilization on, to lean against, then it's going to collapse.
And Disney's going to collapse too. Okay, speaking of cultural changes, the Washington Post has noticed one, and it relates to our conversation earlier about education.
Namely, people don't have any hobbies anymore. Washington Post has a good piece by Jenny Singer.
We should be living in the golden age of hobbies. What happened? I'll just read a little bit from it.
It's worth reading the whole piece though. We're supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies.
Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labor. John Maynard Keynes in 1930 predicted 15-hour work weeks because of technology advancing.
What happened? The opposite happened. Now we work more basically than ever.
This would leave people the opportunity to, quote, cultivate into a fuller perfection the art of life itself. But what is a hobby, according to a professor that's quoted here? It's pursuits that are their own reward, part of a joyful life.
But the golden age that Keynes predicted has not come to pass. Though productivity has grown dramatically since Keynes' time, the most recent American Time Use survey found the full-time employees still work eight hours a day.
The same workday that the National Labor Union demanded in 1866 hasn't gone down one minute. Workers enjoyed just under four hours of leisure time.
And the bulk of that brief window is spent watching TV. And they're, why is this? Why can't they, why don't people have hobbies anymore? And they're going to blame the technology.
The libs are going to blame the technology. And even the more liberal Republicans and conservatives are going to blame technology.
They're going to say, oh, it's because our phones are just too addictive and we just love doom scrolling. And that's not a hobby.
Because we can stream any TV show that we want. There aren't any good TV shows being made anymore, practically, but we'll stream whatever we want.
We're so easily distracted. Or they'll say, well, we're all so tired from work and we want to veg out.
Hobbies seem like kind of effort, and they are an effort. The real problem here is education.
All the more reason to abolish the Department of Education. Forget about even just the standardized test scores dropping.
People no longer cultivate a love of learning. People no longer cultivate knowledge for its own sake, merely for the pursuit of truth, even as much as you have education reformers today.
They're all vocational education reformers, reformers rather. They're all people saying, we need to focus more on STEM, you know, and engineering and practical job skills that kids can use in the economy.
And, you know, if you take out student loans, the school should have to repay you if you don't get a good job because it's all about you got to pick your major for your job. That's not what education is supposed to be.
Education is supposed to, liberal education, liberal arts education is supposed to teach you how to make sense of your freedom. Liberal, that's why the word liberal is in there in the classical sense of the word, not the modern sense.
It's to make sense of your freedom for leisure. The purpose of education is not your eight-hour workday.
It is leisure so that you know what to do in your freedom with time that is not spent scraping by a subsistence. In that way, the real twin problems here are capitalism, not to sound like a big pinko, but it is capitalism.
It is the notion that we're just constantly trying to increase production and increase consumption and just tick up GDP at all costs. And hedonism.
So the left is promoting, or rather the right is promoting the capitalism, and the left is promoting hedonism, which is the other problem. The notion that we just live to feel pleasure, and not even the higher pleasures, but ever-diminishing pleasures, lower pleasures, drugs, porn, more drugs, food, stuff in our big fat bellies.
But none of that is a hobby. Some people say they're foodies.
Stuffing your face is not a hobby. Okay.
I love the ukulele. I don't even have that many hobbies.
You know, I love the ukulele though. I'm not that good at the ukulele.
I'm not, I'm not terrible at the ukulele, but I'm not that good at it. I don't care.
I just, it gives me joy to play it. I play it for its own sake.
It's game activates parts of my mind. Makes me, it uses certain faculties of reason, little mathematics, a little bit of music.
It's great. I love it.
I took up painting during COVID. I'm a really bad painter.
It didn't matter. Love it.
You need to have those things to have a full life. But neither side of the political aisle right now seems to understand that, which means that the dearth of hobbies, the dearth of cultivation, the dearth of serious education, the dearth of joy, D is a popular word from the Kamala Harris campaign, the declining happiness, all of that seems to be not a problem of one political side or the other, but a problem that goes a little bit deeper into modernity, into liberalism, the ideology that has taken over our entire political order.

Maybe we need to fix that.

Going online without ExpressVPN is like putting your passwords on a billboard for the world to see.

On public Wi-Fi, hackers can steal your passwords and credit card details with minimal effort,

then sell your data for up to $1,000 on the dark web.

That's why I use ExpressVPN.

Its encryption would take a billion years to crack, and it works on all devices with just one click. I never connect to hotel Wi-Fi without it.
Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash wire. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash wire to find out how you can get up to four extra months free.
Expressvpn.com slash wire today. Now I'm so pleased that I get to hear from you, all of your problems and all of your challenges in the mailbag sponsored by Pure Talk.
Switch to Pure Talk at puretalk.com slash Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S. Get a year of Daily Wire Plus for free with qualifying plan.
Take it away. Hello, Michael.
I'm in a conundrum I hope you can help me with. The comedian Louis C.K.
is coming to my hometown in a few months, and I would very much like to go. I had a feeling my wife would have some opinions on this, given his conduct that resulted in his cancellation, and so I asked her how she would feel if I went.
She proceeded to tell me I could not go and was shocked

and appalled that I would even consider it. This resulted in a pretty heated argument.

I respect her feelings, but at the same time, I don't believe my wife should be able to ban me

from going to a comedy show. Did I make a mistake in asking her? Should I honor her wishes and

abstain? Is she correct in her banning? I appreciate your advice. No, she's not correct at all.
And now, unfortunately, because you made a mistake in asking your wife's permission to go to a comedy show, now, unfortunately, you have to go, even if you don't want to. Absolute, completely unacceptable behavior from your wife.
You can't let that go. In fact, it is your responsibility as a husband to husband your wife, to lead your household, and demonstrate to her that that's not how things work.
Absolutely insane. It's not that I don't ever do things that my wife doesn't like.
It's not that I don't ever get my wife's opinion on me. I get my wife's opinion on most things.
But the notion that your wife is going to tell you what to do, that you as a husband ask your wife's permission. I ain't asking my wife's permission for anything, for anything.
You need to be a loving husband. You need to be good.
You need to consider her feelings. In this case, she's being quite irrational, telling you can't go to see one of the best living comedians, maybe the best living comedian.
Now that Norm Macdonald's dead, insane. Now, how could you have phrased it differently? Because a lot of men have this, they have this line, what's the line? Happy wife, happy life, which is completely absurd because they think you're going to make your wife happy by making yourself into her wife.
You're going to emasculate yourself. That's going to make your wife happy.
It's going to make your wife resent you. It's going to make your wife disrespect you as she is doing.
No way, man. The way to make your wife happy is to live in a rational way in accordance with virtue, recognizing your role in the marriage and her role in the marriage.
So the way you could have heard her opinion on this without asking permission, which is disordered, is you could have said, hey, honey, look, Louis C.K. is going to be in town.
I think I'm going to get tickets. Do you want to come or maybe just me and the guys? And then you phrased it totally differently.
If she wants to come, great. If she says, yeah, I can't believe you're going to see him.
Oh oh yeah I know he got in trouble a few years ago but whatever he's a funny comedian are you really going to go I really am going to go I certainly am now you have to go it's your duty I'm not even joking it's kind of funny but I'm not even joking you have to go next question hey Michael I'm a fan. I had a rough beginning of my week with some, just some bad personal dynamics with like the people around me, people close to me.
And I put on a pair of pants tonight. I came home from an event pretty frazzled.
I reached into my pocket and found one of those stamped pennies, you know, that you get at, like, the carnival.

And it has the Lord's Prayer on it.

And I saw it, and it gave me comfort.

And I was raised Episcopalian and became atheist and then agnostic and I've been feeling a calling and I just want to ask why Catholicism? What about it will bring me closer to God? Thanks much. Oh, really good question.
Kind of took a turn there at the end. I wasn't quite sure where you were going as I was listening to you.
But that's great. Those little coincidences.
Sometimes those big coincidences. You find the coin.
Just when you're feeling really low, you find the coin with the Lord's Prayer Boy. Isn't that great? So that's wonderful.
A lot of people, myself included, were raised in religion, went away, became an agnostic, atheist, all the rest, whatever. So, okay, you ask, why Catholicism? You know I'm a mackerel-snapping papist myself.
Why Catholicism? I think that the historical claims of the church are true, and I think they are demonstrably true. If you go back to the writings of the church fathers and so on through the ages, I think the theological claims of the church are true, also date back to the very, very early church.
And so I just think it's true. And it's, you know, our Lord says the gates of hell will not prevail against the church and he'll always be with the church.
So I think that the church really is who she says she is. But you asked a specific question.
You said, what about Catholicism will bring me closer to God? And there is a simple answer, many answers, but one that most quickly comes to mind, which is the Holy Eucharist. In the Catholic faith, we believe, correctly, that the host, the communion wafer, when consecrated, becomes the body, blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This is a sacrament, and there is a transubstantiation that occurs whereby we are in the presence, and we indeed consume our Lord. My flesh is true food.
My blood is true drink, he tells us. Whoever does not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood has no life in him, our Lord tells us in the Gospels.
So that's the basis of the transubstantiation. And we see this at the Lord's Supper when he says, this bread is my body.
Eat this in memory of me. This wine is my blood.
Eat this in memory of me.

This wine is my blood.

Drink this in memory of me.

So anyway, how do you get closer to God

than by actually being in his presence,

adoring him in the blessed sacrament

and indeed consuming him in a true holy communion,

a sacramental way?

Especially that all food, we take in food, I eat a hamburger or something. My body turns the hamburger into me in a really tangible way.
Like the food is broken down and then it is used to generate new cells for my body. The food becomes like me.
The Eucharist, however, is the bread from heaven,

the food that when I eat it, I become more like it because it is our Lord. And one becomes more like our Lord.
One receives wonderful graces. And so anyway, that's why.
That's a long-winded answer, but that's why. Next question.
Hello, Michael. I would just like to know, as you are, of course, the master of anything that you can set on fire, why there are not Mayflower incense? I'm very curious, and I would like to have one in my home.
A second question on the spiritual side, and forgive me if I don't know if this is an obvious answer,

because I have not been Christian long,

but did Adam and Eve, you think, go to hell for disobeying God before Christ came to save everyone? Just like to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you and good day.
Oh, good question. On the incense, we already have the smells and bells candle.
It's good enough. More trad anyway, less, you know, Eastern hippy-dippy.
On Adam and Eve, I don't think Adam and Eve are in hell. The church, I don't think, has spoken definitively on where Adam and Eve are, but I think Adam and Eve are in heaven.
And this is based on the promise of salvation for humans in Genesis. But also, just traditionally, Adam and Eve are depicted in heaven.
I'm thinking, I think of Dante. Dante presents or depicts Adam in paradise.
I think most artistic depictions place them in paradise. They're in the bosom of Abraham before Christ's crucifixion, and then Christ harrows hell.
And the just who die before the incarnation, before the crucifixion, are led up by our Lord into heaven. So yeah, they committed a terrible sin, but it would seem not very fitting for our first parents to be tortured forever in hell.
It just doesn't, again, the church hasn't spoken definitively, I don't think, on it, but I think all the artists for of Christian history, and some of the theologians, I think they were onto something when they put Adam and Eve in heaven. Okay, let's get at least to one written mailbag.
I always overlook the written mailbag. Question from Landon.
Michael, I have a relationship question. So many of those.
My girlfriend of one year, who treats me phenomenally and I love, has a sexual past with a few guys, including one I knew back in the day. While everything else in the relationship is great, I can't help but have intense, intrusive thoughts and retroactive jealousy.
Knowing someone else has been with my future wife intimately is crushing me. This issue alone is what has prevented me from proposing to her because it gets to me so much.
Any advice on overcoming this? Yeah, it's really annoying. I get you.
I'm not going to be one to say, you know, deny that natural reaction. The thought of, for any man, the thought of a girl that he even has a crush on, even looking at another man, is enough to drive one crazy.
So I'm not going to deny, and in your case, you're saying, I've been dating this girl, and she slept with a few guys, and so that's more than just looking at someone. That's more than kissing someone.
That's much further, and it's driving you nuts, the thoughts of it. However, I guess what I would say is, if I were in your shoes, I'd say, all right, have I ever done anything wrong, disreputable? Have I ever done anything that would compromise me as husband material, especially these days where the hookup culture is very common? Then I would say, all right, you think about your girlfriend now.
Is there any reason to believe that your girlfriend now would continue to be promiscuous or cheat on you or I don't know, do anything like that later on if you were married? If no, if you say, no, you know, she slept with a few guys and it really bothers me, but she doesn't do that anymore. And okay, maybe you can move on.
But I guess what I would ask you is whether you're going to say, you know, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation and we've all done bad things and everyone has a past and, you know, I'm going to get over it. Or if you say, sorry, I can't get over it.
It's going to drive me crazy. We got to break up.
I need to marry a virgin. Regardless of what you decide, do it fast.
Don't lead her on. You've been dating this girl for a year and that bothers you so much.
Maybe it's only bothering you because you're now really actively considering proposing. But I would say just figure it out.
If you said, look, it just bothers me too much that you've slept with other men, I don't think anyone would really blame you for that. But likewise, I think having a little bit of grace, recognizing that people have a past and, you know, it's, she's not like cheating on you now.
She hasn't cheated on you since your relationship. I don't know.
That to me seems more the norm. But either way, you've got to kind of man up and either man up and dump her or man up and quit whining about it and propose if you've been dating that long.
Either way, though, make a decision. Okay.
I cannot stick around from the member room segmentum today. It pains me more than it pains you, I promise you.
I have to catch a flight because I don't know who scheduled my March and April and February, I guess. I appear to be on an airplane three times a day, every day for these months.

So anyway, I'm very sorry.

We'll have to do extra robust member segmentums next week.

But until then, I'm Michael Knowles.

This is the Michael Knowles Show.