Transcript
Michael Knowles (0:00)
Mark this date. Monday, July 28th. Wokeness is officially dead. It has been murdered by the clothing company American Eagle. American Eagle's weapon of choice was Sydney Sweeney's body. And as we all celebrate the nostalgic return of normal arousal in advertising, some on the right are facing a nagging moral question. Is gawking at half naked hot blondes really conservative? I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. A Cincinnati jazz festival has turned violent and gone viral as a gang of black teens attacks older white people. I have many more pearls of wisdom to give you. First though, you gotta go to bolenbranch.com knowles. You know that feeling when you invest in something truly well made? Like those leather boots that only get more comfortable with each wear or that solid wood table that'll outlast three apartments? That is exactly what I discovered with Bowlen branch sheets. They're crafted with that same philosophy of lasting quality. 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Limited time only exclusions apply. She did it. It's not she. They did it. They did it, folks. American Eagle with Sydney Sweeney. They ended Wokeness. There have been a lot of moments where he said, is wokeness dead? With the end of the 2024 election, Trump wins with the popular vote. Was that the end of wokeness was. I don't know. The canceling of Bud Light. Was that the end of wokeness was. I think this is as good a date as any. For those of you have not seen it yet. I'll pick one of the more wholesome of the American Eagle advertisements. Sydney Sweeney working on a classic muscle car selling jeans. For those who are only listening right now, Sydney Sweeney, she's fully clothed and she just then walks away, kind of rubs the back of her jeans, gets in a sweet looking Mustang, says American Eagle. She drives away. That's it. She's got a tank top on. She's not showing too much cleavage. She's got the most, the most skin she's showing really is her shoulders and her feet. I mean, it is not. She's got baggy jeans on. It's not even that tight. But it shows some of Sydney Sweeney's assets. That's how she's selling the clothes. This commercial, even down to the car, even down to the presence of the Mustang in it, is the polar opposite of one of the other most prominent commercials of this year. That one for Jaguar, which showed a bunch of gender bending eunuchs trying to sell old lady British cars. Remember this one got a bunch of people of dubious sex, weird looking Martian kind of people in frilly costumes. Live vivid. Delete ordinary. It's a key phrase. Delete ordinary. Break molds. It's a bunch of like drag queen type looking. Not even drag queen, just androgynous people on some weird purple planet. Copy nothing Jaguar. So this is the opposite. If the Jaguar commercial was the apotheosis of liberalism, the Sydney Sweeney commercial just looking good in a pair of jeans is the end of it. There's good news and bad news about this commercial. The good news is it's not 2020 anymore. 2020, culturally, politically, probably peak wokeness. The good news is that's done. We're past that. The bad news is we have apparently gone back to 1998. That's it. We haven't gone back to the 1950s, we haven't gone back to the 1600s, we haven't gone back to the 1320s. We're back in about 1998. What passes for conservatism now is mainstream 90s liberalism. Bill Clintonism. Is there anything more? Bill Clinton, hey, honey, I love those jeans. Love American Eagle. That's what we get. And yet I think this is still broadly a good thing, even though it's not perfect. The first question you have to grapple with is why is Sydney Sweeney the it girl of today? She's a very good looking lady, but is she the hottest chick that ever walked on a screen ever? I don't know. People seem to think so today. Why? I think the reason why is Cuz she looks normal, like a really, really good version of normal. At a time, especially in 2025, when every prominent woman seems to have Ozempic face and those giant clown lips and has made themselves into a hyperreal caricature of a woman, it's as if the men decided to turn themselves into caricatures of women through drag queenism and transgenderism, and then the women decided to try to look like the transgender men and it's just become this weird hyperreal caricature. Sydney Sweeney comes out and she looks natural and everything looks normal, albeit very good. And she looks like the hottest version of the girl next door. And I think that doesn't appeal in every age, but that appeals in our age. And she seems normal in that. At a time when all of the movie starlets and all the TV starlets and Instagram influencers are braying about politics and abortion and killing kids and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Sydney Sweeney is just kind of bubbly and nice and doesn't really get involved in all that and just does her job and smiles and looks good on camera. She's a pretty good actress and that's really refreshing. It's a return to how things were in the 90s. But what conservatives have to grapple with then is the 90s weren't all that great. We now think retrospectively that they were great because many of us were children in the 90s. And you always think the era that you were a kid during was the height of civilization, but there were a lot of problems. You had massive violence. You had relative highs of street violence, social solidarity was fraying. You had a real high point in the divorce rate. You had the peak of abortion activism or a peak of abortion activism. It was the decade of Bill Clinton, so it wasn't all that great. Should we be happy to be returning to that? Do we? Are conservatives really the party of just like gawking at blondes and arousing lusts? And is that it? I don't think so. But gawking at Sydney Sweeney is a lot better than gawking at some weird polyandrogynous trans eunuchs. The companies deciding to sell normal sex is better than companies deciding to sell weird sex. Do you understand why? The reason why is you don't want companies to sell sex generally because it's bad to arouse lusts. And really strong civilized societies don't do that. Don't prey on that. It's not just, you know, a civilization of guys like Wile E. Coyote, you know, Their jaw drops to the floor, the tongue unfurls, you know, constantly in a state of titillation. That's not. Not what you want. But it is better if you have to choose. It's better for a company to sell normal sex than to sell weird sex. Because selling normal sex plays on lust, which is a vice. But selling weird sex, like androgynous, LGBT bizarro world polycule stuff, is not only sometimes playing on vice, but it's also contrary to nature. That's why not all. You know, traditionally in Christianity, sexual sins are considered pretty important. They're not the worst sins of all, but they're significant one because they're so widespread. And there are differing degrees of sexual sin. It's bad to fornicate, it's really bad to cheat on your wife, but there are some sins that are contrary to nature. And so what I think you're seeing with the Sydney Sweeney defeating wokeness is you are seeing nature healing. That's become kind of a meme. Nature is healing. Sydney Sweeney is showing off her cleavage. Nature is healing, but it is a return to nature. It's a return to how things. She's a pretty girl showing off her body in kind of normal ways and arousing men in normal ways to sell blue jeans. And we want grace to perfect nature. We want to overcome some of our more animal nature. But given how degraded a state our culture has found itself in, I say at least two cheers for Sydney Sweeney. I'm not willing to go. Three cheers for the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign because we wanna move into an even more civilized, wholesome kind of culture. But for now, given where we've been, two cheers. Two cheers for American Eagle. This good stuff. Sometimes when a culture is really decayed, you need a bridge. This is what Trump does. This is what Trump does is Trump. Russell Kirk is Trump. Edmund Burke is Trump some, I don't know, Cicero or something like that. Not quite. You know, he's a brash billionaire reality TV star, famously a playboy who's dated supermodel. So he's not this picture of tweety conservatism. But he is a bridge from where we were, radical leftism, back to a normal country. Make America great again. Bean, I'm with you. I want a normal, flourishing society. That's what he is. And I'll take it. I'll take it. I'm into it. Okay. Now, speaking of relations between the sexes, there is a major scandal involving a new app called the Tapp where women try to spread gossip about men and Then the women just got hacked, so gossip is being spread about them. And before we spill the tea, I want to tell you about oil and natural gas. That's why I want to tell you about Chevron. America is built on hard work and powered by American energy. Chevron has spent $44 billion with businesses across all 50 states since 2022, fueling infrastructure and communities, all while strengthening local economies. Last year, Chevron increased U.S. production nearly 20%, powering communities and businesses from the heartlands to the coasts. We're helping to fuel America's energy advantage, building a brighter future right here at home. Visit chevron.comamera to discover more. Are you ready for the tea? Are you ready for the tea? So there's a new app. I'm not on it. I'm very pleased to say that I missed online dating. Sweet little Elise and I, who had been high school sweethearts, really met in middle school. We got together just as online dating was taking off. So I've never really been on the apps. And there's the Tinder and there's if you're a Democrat, there's Grindr and there's Bumble and whatever, Hinge and all this. But there's now we're so far down the rabbit hole of online dating that there are now apps. About the apps. There are ancillary dating apps that allow you to warn other people about the people that you're gonna meet on the dating apps, one of which was called T. So the New York Times is reporting that there was a data breach with T. T was this app where girls and women could log on. They had to prove who they were. So they submitted their IDs or whatever, and then they said, hey, I went on a date with Johnny, and. And he's a creep. Or I went on a date with Bill and he didn't pick up the tab. It was basically Yelp for online dating reviews of men that other women could date. So before you go on, after you match with the guy, but before you go on the date with the guy, you can go to Guy Yelp and read reviews based on his past customers, the other women who've gone on dates with him. Well, now it seems that those gossipy women have been hoisted with their own petard because there was a data breach that exposed the photos and ID cards of the women who signed up for T, which was exploding in the App Store. It was getting a ton of downloads. So on Friday, T said hackers had breached a data storage system, exposing 72,000 images, including selfies and photo ID of the users. This app is not totally new, though. It was really exploding recently. But it was released in 2023, and it was even likened among its users as a Yelp service for women. So this, of course, raised a question for men. If women can have an app that allows them to warn each other about whether a guy is creepy or cheap or doesn't look like his pictures or something, can men have an app that warns other men of whether or not women are crazy? If the chief fear for the women is that the man is a creep, which is what this was ostensibly about, are these men dangerous? If the chief fear was that the women would put themselves in a bad situation going on a date with these men, well, the same could be true of men. I'm not saying that women are as physically strong as men, but sometimes they boil men's rabbits. Sometimes there are some crazy birds out there. And so can men have an app where we upload pictures of women and we say, oh, don't go on a date with this girl. She's a total lunatic? No, of course not. That would be totally reprehensible. But the whole thing is really reprehensible. And I think that's what this is exposing. This is one of these great news stories because everyone involved is getting exactly what he and she deserves, because they are treating dating like going shopping for a handbag. They are treating human beings as commodities to be rated and reviewed like a restaurant. And as a consequence, they themselves are being treated as commodities. Their identities are being leaked online. They're being shared around. They're being rated and reviewed and judged and subject to all of the public scrutiny that they were subjecting the men to. Everyone is getting exactly what he deserves. If you are treating men like restaurants, you are already doing it wrong. And I know what the answer's gonna be. The response is gonna be, well, Michael, what option do they have in the modern dating world? You know, these women just swipe men on the Internet. They have no idea who they are. They could be ax murderers. And then they show up and go on dates and have dinner with them. And, you know, often they'll end up back at their apartments two hours after they met. Right. You should not do that. That would be. If you recognize that there's something disordered about that, then don't do it. You should not be just randomly meeting strangers on the Internet. That's probably a bad idea. A lot of people date that way now. But there are at least ways to put some limits on it. And you could geocircumscribe it, you know, you say, okay, I'm only gonna meet men within this certain area where at least I'm a member of the community. So I might know this, oh, this person goes to this gym, goes to this church, attended this school. Maybe I know people who know that person. There are in fact apps based on mutual connections that way. That's one way to do it. Or you could do it the old fashioned way and say, hey sis, do you know any guys that I could date? Hey, even co worker, can you recommend someone that I could go on a date with, get set up on a blind date? You could meet someone through a more organic activity like school or church or work or something like that. If you though just treat dating like an open marketplace, well then you're going to be treated like a good that is bought and sold in the marketplace. This actually kind of relates to the Sydney Sweeney story in that we are now left and right going back at best to the 1990s. But the 1990s weren't all that great. The 1990s were in many ways the triumph of the free market. Above all, the supposedly free market above all. You even had a liberal like Bill Clinton come out and say, the era of big government is over. We're gonna privatize, we're gonna let the invisible hand of the market do its work. So you had the right talking about that for a couple of decades. And then even the left came around and it spread around the West. Not only in, you had Bill Clinton in the United States, you had Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, the new Democrats, new labor, this worship of market dynamics, a move toward privatization. But we realized there was a problem with that politically. The problem was we were then surrendering a lot of power to corporations who were even less accountable in many ways than the government was. And personally, we were commoditizing everything to the point that now we've commoditized even human babies. You can go to the baby store, you can purchase eggs, you can purchase sperm, you can make a baby like you would design a. Build a bear in a toy shop in the mall. And I think we're starting to recognize that's not really good. I mean, that is at a very, very basic level, a kind of idolatry, where you are treating, in the case of the advertising, you're treating these glittering images of a cute girl as a kind of a God or goddess that you're worshiping so persuasive that you're gonna go buy the blue Jeans. And in the case of the T app, you're treating human. You're conflating human beings with the glittering images on the screen and you're reviewing them in a way that is deeply inhuman. Not good. They're getting exactly what they deserve. But we're doing relationships wrong. Generally. There's a woman who's gone viral. Well, this was. This was sad chaos with Camille, I guess, is her handle. She went viral for explaining why she is divorcing her perfectly nice husband, whom she loves.