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