Why Are Millennials So Miserable?

thank you very much thank you so much for coming out it's a pleasure to be here I want to thank ya for hosting I want to thank Michigan State obviously for having me and this is our I think sixth or seventh stop on the coffe FA on campus store the khofifah on campus tour rolls along and it this couldn't have come at a better time because I had to get out of my studio I had to escape the news cycle right now all of those recounts in Florida you saw the the Democrat candidate for governor he lost and then he conceded and then he unconsidered because they found provisional ballots in a car somewhere at the airport in some Democrats private vehicle and so he unconsidered by the way provisional ballot is when Republican wins an election and then you have the provision to undo the election by finding more ballots this is my fault I did this I didn't mean to do this I sent out a tweet about a week ago that said Republicans don't forget to vote on Tuesday and Democrats don't forget to vote on Wednesday this is a little joke it's kind of an old joke I got banned from Twitter for this indefinitely until I agreed to waive my right to an appeal take down the joke neela so I said okay finally I'll do that but the trouble is that the Democrats took my advice the Republicans voted on Tuesday and then you know the Republican candidates won and then the Democrats showed up on Wednesday and they voted they voted they turned up on Thursday and they voted I think they turned up this previous Wednesday they voted again they're still voting today they're gonna vote they're gonna keep voting until they shuen their guys into office so I'm very sorry it's if if unfortunately this election is stolen in Florida for by the Democrats I'm very sorry that this was my mistake I promise Rick Scott I will make it up to you so we've talked about a lot of topics on the khofifah and campus tour we've talked about the simple joys of being right we've talked about how to write nothing and sell a hundred thousand copies we've talked about how to be a man when you look like a Maddow I won't explain the it's you'll I disagree with the premise but anyway and now we are here because it is my mission to spread Kofi to college campuses across the country because they need it what is Co FFA you ask cough FAA is like pornography you can't quite define it you know it when you see it it's something of an exuberance it's something of a joy it's something of this excitement that the right feels right now and college kids really need it Millennials really need it I'm speaking mostly about left wingers but Millennials are mostly left-wing so that writes itself they really need it because they're so miserable now they they're so unhappy they're shrieking and they're complaining and they're yelling and they're screaming at Mitch McConnell and restaurants pour a little cocaine Mitch he's just sitting there trying to enjoy a nice plate of cocaine and they come up to him they come up to his wife and they start screaming at him and the guy if you saw it it's an older millennial guy still a millennial you know and he says why don't you get out of here why don't you get out of this whole country I don't want you here Wow and obviously all of the people in the restaurant say shut up sit down go away he's so upset though he can't get over it this is true at my own dear alma mater of Yale I feel another personal responsibility I feel Yale really kicked off all this campus craziness a few years ago when they had the shrieking girl there would you remember this girl it was around Halloween time and a Yale professor had the audacity to suggest that a 22 year old Yale student could select his own Halloween costume and this created an uproar the girl screamed at her professor she said you know this is not an intellectual space this is about creating a place of comfort and home for me so that was embarrassing Yale Law School isn't any better during the confirmation battle of Brett Kavanaugh where they dug up 35-year old nothing completely contradictory made-up allegations that he did something at a party somewhere at some time with somebody there was a letter that Yale law students wrote it was written by law students alumni and professors it said that if Brett Kavanaugh a milquetoast federal judge is confirmed to the Supreme Court quote many people will die they'll die now he was confirmed to the Supreme Court he's now been on the court for a few weeks at least how are you feeling do you feel okay are you feeling are you feeling healthy safe for you okay nobody's died that's me I'm very pleased to see I'm embarrassed to I know a number of the people who signs that letter I can tell you they're not the happiest people they're not they're a little angry they're a little miserable I do they don't they don't have the bet why is that we remember the girl they call tree Glee puff at the University of Massachusetts she was so worked up because a conservative was voicing an opinion with which she disagreed or with which she thought she disagreed she probably couldn't even tell you what the opinion was Millennials are catching a lot of flak rightly so they're catching a lot of flak and rightly so because Millennials broadly but especially the left-wing ones are coddled undisciplined uneducated uncultured ungrateful overgrown children this is not entirely their fault it's actually not therefore it's largely their fault but not entirely because they have very little context from which to draw they have very little cultural inheritance it's not their fault that they're poorly educated it's their fault that they don't choose to educate themselves now but they were poorly educated in school it's not their fault that they were that they're uncultured it's not their fault that they were not disciplined as children it's not their fault that they weren't taught gratitude that they weren't given a firm foundation most importantly though for tonight they are miserable they're absolutely miserable you don't need to just take my word for it you don't need to accuse me of choosing isolated incidents of wacky Yale students who get excited about Halloween this is proven out by social scientific data there was a study that recently came out from Arizona State University it showed that 25 percent of American college students are suffering symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from the 2016 election post-traumatic stress disorder now are they faking it no this is borne out in these social scientific data by showing that they are suffering clinically high levels of stress they are suffering levels of stress that are similar to a witness of a mass shooting incident seven months after the incident that is that is real stress that they're feeling it's bizarre it's absurd the reason that they're feeling that stress is because a Republican defeated a Democrat in an election that's what happened so obviously I mean I'll willing to grant he's sort of a boorish Republican he's a little bit vulgar he's a little bit of an uncommon Republican but nevertheless a Republican wins an election a quarter of young Americans start suffering from PTSD something is clearly terribly wrong and we need to fix it as an act of charity for their sake I'm not here just to make fun of them I'm that's about 50% of what I want to do I want to help them as well and it's worth pointing out so Trump is a maybe a little bit more boorish than other politicians not more than Bill Clinton but for more boorish than some he's also very successful when you look around the economy is doing very well a joblessness basically does not exist there are more open jobs than people looking for jobs there's relative peace abroad we're defending our allies we're attacking our enemies we're preserving peace in the Korean Peninsula seems to be improving obviously the North Koreans are cheaters but same things seem to be improving there we've pulled out of the disastrous Iran deal things are going very well around the world and it's not just Donald Trump things were going rather well even before Donald Trump we are living it perhaps the most prosperous time certainly the most prosperous time and it seems also the most equitable and just time in all of human history and yet Millennials are hysterical they're so upset they're angrier than ever and the misery is real it is not a joke the PTSD is real the levels of stress are real they're not just imagined now of course if you imagine that you're miserable you probably are miserable I don't know what the distinction really would be but it's borne out even in the diagnosis Millennials have been diagnosed at twice the rate of the average adult with depression and anxiety the diagnosis of depression and anxiety is up 47 percent among Millennials in recent years their record high number of Americans on antidepressant drugs that one in six Americans is on an antidepressant this includes one in 12 Americans who are between the ages of 12 and 19 people who are prepubescent pubescent just post-pubescent one in twenty of them are on antidepressant happy drugs the majority of people who are on these drugs stay hooked on them for more than two years they remain on those drugs the New York Times even the New York Times which I rarely cite in any earnest way declared in an op-ed that Millennials are the antidepressant generation the drugs are not curing the problem they've been taking the drugs for a long time they're still extraordinarily angry and they shriek and they yell so they they're paralyzed by fear over trivial things why is this their trivialized they're paralyzed by fear over trivial things that adults are supposed to do they've come up with a term for this which is adulting have you heard the term adulting this is one of my favorite least favorite terms adulting apparently from what I can gather it's not in any dictionary that I've seen adulting is when a millennial adult doesn't behave like a child which is to say the the expectation is the millennial will behave like a child but now they're going to occasionally pick up a tab for dinner or something or maybe pay their rent I don't know there's an entire period now of post adolescents typically when people were adults and they're not in their 20s which is now called emerging adulthood there are you know they're emerging they're evolving into it when our grandparents were emerging into adulthood they were storming the beaches of Normandy now we are occasionally paying for a month of rent and that's emerged you know it's emerging take your time you'll get there eventually but probably not they're not getting there right now so why is this where is where is this coming from materially American Millennials are the best off generation in human history they have a magical device just to you just use an obvious example they have this magical device that where you can talk to someone on the other side of the world you can see them I think you can make a sandwich you can check your email you can watch a movie you can type in Michigan State U and you just takes you there somehow and we're so well off this is so convenient that when it glitches for two seconds we start to yell at it I do this myself I say you magical device why aren't you doing all those things I need you to do and giving me the sum total of human knowledge now you don't want to wait a second for that that's how good we've got it now normal people can catch themselves and say you know this is not a real problem I shouldn't really be yelling at my magical device its magical after all and doing a lot of things that I like but Millennials aren't able to do this and this point is true broadly the Millennials who are shrieking and howling and wearing hats in the shape of genitals on their heads and moaning about Donald Trump or whatever they do they need to look around and get a little bit of perspective and say gosh you know things are going pretty well my life is pretty good everybody's life is pretty good I can calm down but they don't have that perspective why is it there are a few reasons one is education Millennials are very poorly educated they don't know anything they've been in through high school and in college broadly they have had their education replaced by an ideological indoctrination this is true in the study of civics most obviously this is true in history this is true in the arts people just don't know very much and traditional disciplines have been replaced by ideological disciplines like gender studies and ethnicity race and migration studies you know whenever you see the studies at the end of a major you can usually guess that it's not worth very much what's kind of ironic too by the way is that for all of the Studies majors they they always really like the thing that they're studying so like Women's and Gender Studies really it's all about how great women are and you know this studies and that studies except for American Studies they hate American Studies is the study of how terrible America is but it's all ideology the reason why that's true is it is all about ideology this breeds a lot of ignorance so just to throw out a few statistics that should terrify you one third of American Millennials believe that President George W Bush killed more people than Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin it's a real number two-thirds of American Millennials have never heard of Auschwitz 22 percent of American Millennials have never heard of the Holocaust the majority of American Millennials like socialism that's the bad news the good news is that only 32 percent of Millennials can define socialism which means there's a discrepancy there that's that sounds about more to me I'm I was a little doubtful that they that many people knew what it was this is where you get people like Alexandria occasional cortex as my friend Steve Hayward calls her Alexandria Cassio Cortes where she says we're going to pass medicare-for-all and she's asked for months and months on the campaign trail how are you going to pay for that she's asked by hostile reporters by friendly reporters and she didn't have an answer her first answer was that she's not the expert and then she came up with a few as she said well you know it'll be okay and then Jorge Ramos a very left-wing journalist asked her how are you gonna pay and she said you know what a silly question well just and then she rambled for about five seconds and then she said you know and we'll just do it we'll just pay we'll just pay that is this sort of education we've gotten I know this by the way I know the quality of education that a socialist like Alexandria Ocasio Cortes received because I grew up in the town right next to where she grew up I know that she now pretends to be Jenny from the block but she actually grew up in a very affluent suburb she grew up in the richer town over from where I grew up which was also a very nice place and she didn't learn very much this also breeds a lot of confusion so right now of the majority of American Millennials or roughly half believe that there are more than two genders now there are more than two Facebook believes that there are 56 well they used to believe that there were 56 they change a few years ago you could select one of 56 genders on Facebook and then they got rid of that oh I said okay good people are coming to their senses they got rid of it because it was too few there are now more than 56 genders I wonder how many there are I would ask the people who believe that there are more than two genders how many if they could give me a precise number maybe we'll get to that in the Q&A later on but in any case they've erased it now you can fill in the blank this breeds a lot of confusion because according to one study 12 percent of American Millennials identify as transgender or gender non-conforming I suppose by that latter definition I could be gender non-conforming given my Rachel Maddow glasses you know my relatively spelt physique what does it mean exactly it means that Millennials are very confused because by all accounts the number of Americans who suffer from gender confusion trans gender ISM gender dysphoria who are men who think that their women are women who think that their men is 0.2% to 0.4% of the population at the high end it's point four and yet 12% of Millennials think this why because it's a fad and because they're confused where does this come from it comes from the tyranny of relativism it comes from what the English writer says Lewis called the poison of subjectivism and what Pope Benedict brilliantly described as the dictatorship of relativism he wrote that modern life is ruled by a quote dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of satisfying the desires of one's ego this is of course right this is all about ego that's what it all boils down to you see this most clearly in the identity politics so right now the reason the left I think it's so angry at conservatives why study after study shows that left wingers are more likely to unfriend conservatives on social media than conservatives are is because left wingers cannot separate the idea from the person who is thinking the idea they identify themselves strictly with their ideas they and they also do not have a barrier between the personal the private and the political this was a major slogan that was brought in to the left during the 1960's the personal is the political there is no separation between the two if I don't like the way that you voted on proposition 72 then you're dead to me you're not my friend get off of my Facebook I hate you you're a wicked evil mean bad person there is a study that came out recently as well which shows that the vast majority of Democrats believe that Republicans are racist sexist and bigoted that number was half for Republicans considering Democrats it seems that the majority now of Democrats attribute bad intentions evil to the people on the other side I think it's because they don't understand what they're saying this tyranny of subjectivism this tyranny of the ego is so comes out in their language a lot so you'll hear they frequently talk about my truth my truth versus the D truth your not allowed now to talk about the truth that's so icky and assertive you shouldn't be asserting anything how dare you you can only talk about my truth they do it in language too you'll find that they don't assert things they're militant they go they knock down Tucker Carlson's door they harass cat Tim at bars in Brooklyn they and their elected leaders tell them do they encourage them through they say go out get at them in the street go where they sleep that's what Maxine Waters said but the the reason that they do this is because they want to hide it behind all of this language so they'll say they won't say I think the sky is blue they won't say I believe the sky is blue what they'll say is I feel like the sky oh I feel isn't that you can't disprove that because when you make a statement when you make an assertion when you state something as a fact or as a thought or is a belief you have to defend that it can be refuted it can be disagreed with but when you say I feel like well there's no disagreeing how could you guide on't know how you feel you don't know how I feel and they say like a lot they infect all of their sentences with like like like like like like this is going on for a long time the reason they do it it's not just a random verbal tic though it is a verbal tic it's just separate the person from what the person is saying so if you went to a party last night and it was cool that's a statement if you go to a party last night and it was like really cool that separates you it's it removes a level of seriousness even in the in their voices this is true across across left-wingers I've noticed they speak more regularly in vocal fry' vocal fry' it it's like when you talk like this you know and it's you just had a smoke of something and I don't know man yeah and they talk like this it's it's also the way that typically young white girls are parodied is speaking like you know I mean it's totally cool and they do this because there is an apathy there is an unwillingness to assert anything that you're talking about all of this is in the name of relativism all of this is in the name of multiculturalism all of this is in the name of tolerance but of course it leads to intolerance because that sort of wicked relativism is itself in ideology the ideology says there is no truth now of course that is a statement it's a self-defeating statement if you say there is no truth then you can't then you can't say that there is no truth because the state would undermine itself I think what the problem is for these young left-wing Millennials is they don't understand that there is any thought outside of secular relativism they don't realize that people might disagree with them this is why they're always prattling on about tolerance and then the minute you disagree with them they stand up and they shout and they scream and they try to get you kicked off campus so there are political and religious consequences to this sort of nonsense because they don't know what they're rejecting I think the reason why the majority of Democrats think that Republicans are racist why left wingers are more likely to kick out - to unfriend right-wingers on social media is because they have no idea what they're talking about they can this was actually backed up by some social science as well John Hite showed a few years ago that right wingers understand left wingers much better than left wingers understand right wingers which makes sense that they would have that sort of reaction they talk about tolerance but they have no idea that there are views that they must tolerate they talk about diversity they have no idea that people might disagree with them in a perfectly legitimate way this is drivel religion as well and I think this I think this actually gets down to the heart of why they're so miserable and why they're shrieking and yelling and wearing genitals on their head as the Pew Research Center's showed right now about one-third of American Millennials claim to have no religion a little higher about 36% there they're some of the nuns religiously unaffiliated this number is way up in 2007 the number of Americans who had no religious affiliation was 16% that number among Millennials is now well more than double that during that time it's active the number it's even worse because during that time there's been a huge increase in the category of spiritual but not religious and this is my favorite category spiritual but not this spiritual but not religious means that you find yourself very interesting but you don't really care about metaphysical reality but you know man you're really deep you know you're at a bar with a girl and you're just really deep so maybe that's too harsh I don't think so it on the bright side what that means for those Millennials is that they understand that there is a spiritual dimension of the world this is obviously true but it's become unfashionable in uneducated circles these days the world is much more than material obviously it is we're speaking right now we're using words which are immaterial we have numbers which are immaterial we have morality we have emotions we have love we have beauty these are not material things these are immaterial metaphysical concepts and so there is something beyond the physical but the spiritual but not religious religiously unaffiliated coddled why nice creamy uneducated Millennials don't know about it so should they do they identify as irreligious because they've studied their religions and have rejected them no of course not a growing number of them have been raised without any religion at all and for those who were raised nominally with a religion very often it was akin to cafeteria Catholicism you know you have a nice meal every now and again but you don't really take anything too seriously because nobody believes that sort of stuff anymore the trouble is that your religiosity makes people very very miserable there's also a lack of biblical literacy I'll point that out just as a simple matter the the Bible is essentially the foundation of our entire civilization all of our literature our history our politics comes from these from these biblical Christian and Jewish foundations and people don't read it anymore they actually are not brought up in an environment where they can read the Bible and quote it and be familiar with it which is why they don't know much about anything else when you're irreligious you are less likely to be civically engaged you're less likely to get involved in your community you're much more likely to feel socially isolated you're much less happy and you're much more likely to be left-wing that might be the worst one of them all and you are much less likely to engage in behavior that will make you happy the sort of behaviors that we keep putting off and off like finding a spouse and getting married and being married to one person for the course of your life or to settling down into a job and rooting yourself in an environment these these things are anathema to Millennials but then there's the big one I suppose it ties in with not having a spouse though not all the time there was a major story that came out today in the Atlantic that shows that Millennials who have all of these other problems they're yelling they're upset they're uneducated they don't believe in God they think they're gonna turn to worm food when they die they've really got a lot of problems and they're not even having sex they are not even well there is a to quote the Atlantic sex recession going on in the United States the title of the article is why are young people having so little sex you would think with 56 genders it would be so easy logistically to find a partner with whom you could share a night of passion and romance apparently not you would think with social mores so relaxed with birth control abundantly available birth control when I was in college in every entry way they had a bag of condoms it's available anywhere anybody can get it all the time you would think that that would be easy and in a world where we have abortion virtually on-demand everywhere subsidized by taxpayers you would think that this would be possible in a world where Teen Vogue gives tips on how to engage in sodomy that is a true story you can look up the article I don't recommend you look up the article but you can you would think that people would be bumping uglies a little bit more but they're not why on earth is that according to the Centers for Disease Control between 1991 and 2017 the percentage of high school students who'd had sex dropped from 54% to 40% now I would say this is good in a sort of moral except they're not even religious they're not even doing it out of a moral sense I think they're doing it because they can't people in their 20s are two and a half times as likely today to be abstinent as people in Generation X the average adult between 1990 and 2014 saw the number of times that they had sex per year dropped dramatically in 1990 it was 62 times per year not bad down to 54 times per year in 2014 this is not just true in the United States this is true across the Western world it's true in the United Kingdom Finland the Netherlands and Sweden it's especially true in Japan which is an Eastern country but it's been westernized and we've heard of this for years that in Japan there has been a sex recession fertility rates were extraordinarily low huge numbers of millennial Japanese men would rather look at pornography than date an actual woman and it's become a national crisis because there's the birth rate is so low over there they're they're well under replacement so what's to blame there are a few culprits that we could name obviously the the usual suspects porn the hookup culture and tinder porn is the cause I suppose in Japan the hookup culture is one where you are not incentivized in any way to have a long-standing relationship and tinder is there because you can always swipe right the trouble with all three of those is that they're all a fantasy obviously porn is a fantasy the reality of porn what you're doing is you're lowering the shades you know locking the door and you're sitting alone with yourself and pleasuring yourself not very manly not something you'd write home to grandma bad so you'll never believe what I you're gonna be so proud of me what I did today I don't think so the hookup culture is another one the hook-up culture is so pervasive at this point the trouble with the hookup culture is it's also a fantasy because even if you've you know dabbled in it you've enjoyed it when you think back you only remember the nights that went well but you don't remember the nights that didn't go well you don't remember the nights that you went home alone or you went home wishing that you had somebody with whom you could share not just tonight but more than a night maybe a life when there was a study that was ascertaining how prevalent the hook-up culture is and people didn't know how to define relationships so they didn't know if they could say well I'm going steady but I'm not his boyfriend or I'm not this or whatever and the question that got them was if you had the flu would your girlfriend bring you soup said oh no no absolutely not that was it maybe you'd want somebody who would bring you soup it's easy to blame those fantasies I think that that's true and obviously tinder is the one I kind of missed that I'm very glad that I missed a tinder because for my friends it sounds great right you're swiping meat and cute girls all the time that sounds fabulous except what it really is is a time suck and the people behind tinder and other online dating apps show that they actually don't result in a terribly high number of people shacking up or getting married or even meeting in real life they just swipe and they text and they swipe right again and if you do happen to meet a nice girl on tinder the the impulse to just swipe swipe swipe is all right there is a tempting fantasy and ultimately not very conducive toward happiness so beyond those fantasies I think the other major problem is that one-third of American adults under 35 live with their parents this is a big millennial problem they one-third of them that I know a number I'd hate to I hope they're not watching right now they'll feel like I'm making fun of them but that's very much not good 25% of fully employed Millennials receive financial help from their parents regularly fully employed not unemployed not down on their luck even though there's zero unemployment so they should be able to get a job not students fully employed Millennials one-quarter receive financial assistance from their parents this is horribly selfish all of those other things are to all of those other things that are totally ubiquitous in the culture porn hookup culture or tinder all of that it's all about selfishness it's all about this tyranny of relativism this gratifying only the ego you'll sometimes I'll hear this from millennial friends of mine who are living with their parents they'll say you know I'm just at my house right now it's not your house but your parents house I'm just at my parents house right now to save up money but you're not saving up money you're taking money from your parents in the form of rent and food and electricity and the internet and cable and whatever you're taking that money and you're keeping it for yourself there was no saving up a little bit of money into your 30s in the 1920s and 30s in America that was not a thing there has been a major cultural shift all of this gets back to overgrown children and adult does it come from Millennials have been protected from harsh realities this is true on sports fields it's true at school it's true at home it's true in finances it's true even at work that we've got the participation trophies we have rampant grade inflation undisciplined helicopter parents financial dependents and a low work ethic the trouble is that you can't stay a child forever this is a Peter Pan syndrome the the flower will either bloom or the flower will die if you if you try to stay a child forever you'll be Peter Pan or you'll wind up like Michael Jackson he was trying to be Peter Pan it's ugly it doesn't look good you probably don't want to do it and perhaps the most tragic cause of all is that I think these Millennials don't understand the value of suffering and my evidence for this one they've been protected against a lot of suffering but also because of the way that the left speaks in language today they they treat victimhood as though it were a badge of honor they create an intersectional hierarchy with special privileges the more that you can claim that you are a victim of some outside group you whine you moan you blame you excuse your own poor behavior and your own failures you believe that moral suffering rather is morally wicked that's suffering and people who are suffering deserve some sort of special treatment but none of this is true none of this is the case the reality of suffering is the exact opposite suffering can be a very good thing suffering has no moral quality everybody suffers it's a broken world we're out of the garden man is imperfect we're never getting to paradise in this age and so everybody's gonna suffer all that matters all that has a moral quality is how you react to suffering you can react like a little whiny whatever with a pink hat on and complain because your parents didn't pay enough of your rent this month or you can behave like an adult you can start adult and when you react to suffering in that way it makes you better it is a sanctifying experience it turns you into an adult cynical politicians fanned the flames of all of this you know Joe Biden in 2012 he accused Republicans of wanting to put black people back in Chains that's what he said because there wasn't enough suffering there wasn't enough actual victimhood so we had to invent it he had to say all those Republicans you know the Republicans who founded their party to free all the slaves and then they freed all the slaves and then they passed the first civil rights bill over the veto of the Democrat President and then they passed another six civil rights bills up to 1991 you know that Republican Party they want to put you all back in Chains the left makes a line they say without government programs you you won't be able to live you need us you need us come on suckle on the teat of government Kanye West pointed this out in the Oval Office in one of the most entertaining exchanges in modern politics when Donald Trump was able to sit across the desk from Donald Trump and you got to talk to each other and say gosh is this what I found like is this what I and and Kanye West was sitting there and he mocked the welfare state and he assailed liberals to use his word for breaking up the black family for getting people hooked on programs that would destroy their happiness the cynical left preys on these gullible impressionable Millennials these ignorant overgrown children because they want to keep them children the left wants to keep you a child and whining and giving excuses and pretending that your life is bad when you've got a really nice life around you this is the great achievement of the Trump era the end of a cultural malaise you know during the Obama administration we heard that you didn't build that there's no growth hey Brock Obama how come there's no growth oh well because there's never gonna be growth again hey Brock Obama how come your economic recovery hasn't produced any jobs oh there aren't going to be any more jobs that jobs were in the old way and now there's no more jet it's just natural that's out and now of course we have zero joblessness you know the best days were behind us they eat Barack Obama said to get used to terror attacks terror attacks are just sort of a normal thing they're just going to have we just have to get used to them not overreact get used to having less freedom the left has been saying this since at least Woodrow Wilson the left has been saying this for a sense oh the the presidency is too big for one man oh the modern world is too complicated to have any sort of freedom don't buy it it's total nonsense and the end of this cultural malaise that we're experiencing right now tells you we can win we can achieve we can defeat our enemies abroad we can grow we can to quote our president make America great again so when you're hysterical classmates whine and they tell you the sky is falling and everything is awful and there's oppression everywhere and look look out behind that door there's some oppression don't indulge it you should laugh at it you should correct it you should also help them out because they're like little children and you should you know try catch oh you wouldn't be mean to a child you just want to help them out and raise them up a little bit don't indulge them the inmates cannot run the asylum the children cannot run the nursery there must be an adult in the room you must be firm you must be assertive and you must behave like civilized people that is the only hope that we have of getting all the little overgrown kids to start adulting thank you very much thank you very much I think we're gonna open it up for some questions we have we certainly have plenty of time for for a few questions we have a rule at the Daily wire which I hate I despise this rule because I think it creates bad incentives but I don't write my own checks so you know we got to go with it if you disagree with me you can cut to the front of the line I will talk to you first who you know this isn't this is a dialogue we're here for free speech so if you disagree with me come to the front of the line and we can talk so Dinesh D'Souza's was here a couple weeks ago I asked him a similar question to the following do you think that with the amount of left-wing ideology is being propagated in an academia that the change that we eventually hope to see will come more from the students or the administration the administrators have lost their minds at certain universities like my own like Yale the administrators have been very good at other universities like Purdue or mitch Daniels as the president I think the real issue though is that the administrators and the professor's are not doing their jobs broadly the children can't raise themselves it's very hard for a child to raise himself you need a parent or a relative or a grandparent or just some adult to raise you and until we solve that problem then we're not going to correct this this issue of uneducated miserable millennial kids now there have been certain ways to solve this outside of the university there have been good programs and for during the summers they've been good fellowships there have been good extracurriculars that's all great you can bring speakers through the young America's Foundation there are some ways to help correct it but unfortunately to use Roger Kimball's phrase we have tenured radicals at the universities and as long as they are given free rein I don't see the situation improving I might go I actually have a disagreement I thought he did so I didn't cut yeah so I just thought like some of your effects might have been misrepresented for instance like you said like they're just like a lot of genders and like I felt like you tried to say like Millennials like I'll subscribe to like 57 plus genders and such but you just had like your basis for that was like how Facebook had that many genders listed but there weren't really any stats about like like people like Millennials we actually believed it like well there was one statistic which is that 12 percent of Millennials identify as transgender or gender non-conforming whatever that is to mean that is a very high number that's higher than that the number of transgender people we have in the country which is statistically 0.2 to 0.4% that is much much higher it seems like the confusion among Millennials is very widespread okay thanks yeah I have a very sonorous voice that sometimes lulls people to sleep you know it might be whatever man hello Michael thank you for speaking here today my question revolves around well I was a raised in Catholic school my entire life and yet I see many of my so-called Catholic friends turned to the left and be politically liberal and just generally not conservative and my question was why do you think that is why do you think we have so many people coming out of private schools turning far-left er than even some people out of public schools conservatives tend to be contrarians I've noticed this there's you would have to be a contrarian these days in order to be a conservative because the culture is so profoundly left-wing this is true of Catholic schools there is always a joke if somebody comes up to me and says I went to Catholic school I say oh you must be an atheist now because they had some bad experience with a nun when they were 10 and now they hate all of Catholicism and and because they're they're not aware of the perhaps intellectual or spiritual roots of their faith they didn't have a strong foundation to begin with and therefore they fell away this is also true in politics but people have to grow beyond that hopefully and I will simply point out though that the contrarian character of the broad conservative movement today is a great help because when you are in a culture where everybody agrees with you like a left-winger on a college campus you don't have to question any of your ideas they they are just like in the air it doesn't matter at all when you're a conservative you constantly have to defend everything you believe why did I cite so many statistics in my discussion tonight I don't even really buy social science I think most of its bunk and politicized but I'll have to cite it when it suits my purposes because you constantly need to be able to recite facts and depend defend what you believe this is a great help because it makes you reconsider what you think I've changed certain views I've moved to the right on certain views I've moved a little bit to the left on other views our friends on the Left don't have that advantage they don't get that privilege I think we should use it for everything it's worth I doing those so you touched on dating with Millennials and I found my my problem with this soul my other friends about finding women who have similar values as us so you touched on it but never really gave a whole lot of like advice on how to actually go about solving that issue I'll try to set you up I'll see you know bad we just say about 6-feet yeah this is a tough one because my opinions about the world have changed over time my wife's opinions about the world have changed over time we've been together for a long time I couldn't tell you the secret to love if I could I'd at least be a famous songwriter or something but I'm not one issue though is I think the difference between a disposition and an ideology so I know people who are left-wing in their ideology but they have a relatively conservative disposition they're not the shrieking people they don't go out and yell and attack politicians at restaurants they have a bit of a more conservative disposition those people can be reasoned with and I know right-wingers who have a radical disposition so I think you want to be able to find somebody who sees the world who's at least looking at the same thing that you are looking at might not see it exactly the same way might be looking at it from a slightly different angle I think that's important I missed the dating app so I don't know if the swiping is gonna help you very much there I can't imagine that they're good because in real life that's where you're gonna meet a person you're not gonna meet a person texting them you're not gonna get to know a person that way you're gonna get to know a person in real life so I would recommend the best advice I can give to you is start looking for them in real life and be open to it don't limit yourself sometimes I have people write in to me they say oh I really like this girl but you know she voted for Rand Paul and I voted for Marco Rubio so she's dead to me you think come on man lower your threshold a little bit I mean give people a little grace oh well she doesn't have exactly the religious views that I have and well that's fine then talk about it and maybe you'll come to the same conclusion maybe you won't but if you're a conservative guy on a college campus I bet you're persuasive enough to bring to bring a lady over to your way of thinking and I would approach things in that way be open you know the colporteur didn't write the song let's do it let's in a relationship he didn't do that he said let's do it let's fall in love and you want to be open to love and and deal in that way men tend to be more romantic capital or in their notions than women are and so you'd be a little bit romantic you don't need to be you don't need to be digging through apps to find a woman just look around the world there plenty a plenty of cute ladies walking around hey just want a brief preface this by saying I guess I'm your outlier because I met my girlfriend on tinder and we've been dating for over two years now so congratulations I actually I was just at a wedding of a friend a couple friend who met on tinder it does happen not all the time but it definitely does happen it's nice when it works out so you mentioned a lot about a lot of mental illnesses you talked a little bit about it of this is the antidepressant era deep and how like a lot of Millennials suffer from PTSD after Trump's election do you think that just the Millennial culture itself is mentally masochistic it might be it might have this marquis de sade ala t to it oh yeah Alec Donald Trump again yeah that feels good ouch ouch I don't know perhaps it could I suggest that it comes from a weakness and a narrow mindedness which is ironic because they call us a narrow-minded and yet we can tell them what they think and they can't tell us what we think it's from a real narrow mindedness and this happens at different points in life for various people I can remember distinct when my mind opened when I saw a new way of thinking when I realized I had been wrong about something I suspect for these kids they haven't seen that and especially because they don't have a religious foundation that explains the metaphysical foundations of the world that explains our fallen human nature that explains why we suffer that explains why it rains on the just and the unjust alike that in the face of suffering they are totally lost they are shocked they're horrified they have nothing to turn to nothing to explain it it's chaotic and it's fearful because they don't understand it this is the great error of raising children without any religion I'm not even saying you need to raise them in the right religion but you at least need to get them familiar with the questions that one can ask which are eternal questions that can help them face their broken human nature and if they're not going to start doing that then I fear we're only going to see the diagnosis of depression and the happy pills increase and yet nobody getting even one iota happier all right one more all right I like your cape thank you it's a flag what's the flag Soviet flag oh my gosh that's not good that's I take it back anyways so you claimed that the reason that there are more trends transgender people now is because they are more confused even today the hate crimes against transgender people are much higher than those against any other demographic so is it not more likely that there are more transgender people now because there are more hate crimes in the United States against transgender people or Jews I guess transgender but I am Not sure you you are certainly not sure that's right it's the answer is Jews okay it is a numbers thing but you cited a numbers thing so that I'm citing a different numbers well we're getting very confused with our numbers if you're saying it's point one percent of Americans are transgender we've also heard it's point two two point four percent and now we're hearing the twelve percent of American Millennials identify as transgender or gender non-conforming so what number is it I'm certainly confused and it seems to me that these people are very confused as well is it not the more likely that people are identifying as transgender now because of a decrease in the percentage of hate crimes as opposed to previous decades well the identification is part of the confusion because a man isn't a woman and a woman isn't a man that's the confusion I see you were confused by my apparently confusing statement but let me make it abundantly clear a man cannot be a woman and a woman cannot be a man there is sexual difference the sexes are not indistinguishable they're not indiscernible and there's a great confusion in our culture that men can be women but they can't all right as a self-proclaimed liberal leftist where did my education go wrong you know I've read like Hobbes I've read Locke I've read Smith it might be where my ha this might have been a good start I'm so finish your question I mean yeah but Hobbes is very like authoritarian like you know Kings like you wouldn't definitely love to not describe themselves as Hobbesian side Hobbes might have been the first proto okay I don't think my Reading Room's like the little vile Thawne said like yeah I love a king therefore I'm gonna go vote like a liberal like no I don't love this idea of like yeah we all need to get behind a leader and then like we don't question him because like okay we just came out of a civil war I just can't use word in my education go wrong that is where your education my stupid now I'm not saying that you're stupid but that is where your education went wrong because you just attempted to show me that you have read all of the great thinkers of political philosophy you've read Hobbes you've read Locke you've only read modern writers have you read Thomas Aquinas have you read Aristotle if you read Plato I read Aristotle me the ethics right now by Aristotle excellent you might enjoy it I'm not making the point on your own education I don't know about your education but broadly speaking we have narrowed our field of education to a very minor era which is the modern era which is liberalism which is the fruits of liberalism which are in these modern ideologies I would that more people read Locke and Rousseau and Hobbes and mill that would be wonderful that would go a long way toward fixing the problem if everybody read all the books that you've read that would go a long way toward fixing the problem but I fear they don't even read that I fear that in especially these ideological ideological disciplines they're not even reading great thinkers such as Hobbes they're reading very modern thinkers and they're being instilled and imbued with ideology the the way to break out of that is to read other people and to read other perspectives and to talk to other people as well whether they're going to do that I don't think so because all we see especially on social media is people further isolating themselves putting themselves into greater echo chambers so it's great that you're a liberal and you came out to watch this talk tonight how many other liberals are in the room not a ton a few we got a few that's great but not a ton it would it would be wonder if more of your friends came out and saw it but but at least you did you're giving us hope for the left well first of all I just want to thank you guys for coming out and being civil I know everybody here appreciates civil this course and Michael has had way worse people who have come and shouted them down before yeah that's yeah you guys great yeah this is a May I mean this is a wonderful thing we have left wingers coming at not shrieking not crying not yelling not interrupting the speech this is a this is a testament to your side of the political aisle I hope other I hope others are watching they're not all the ones are on YouTube now why weren't you yelling at him why didn't you start screaming that's very good I appreciate your being ER anyway but on a less serious note Christmas is 41 days away when is the appropriate time to start listening to Christmas music do you want the real answer I want the real answer after Christmas that's the real answer you want that's the real answer sometimes I break that in the old days I'm older than most of the people in this room there was a season called Advent which was coming up and you were you were waiting for the birth of Christ and this was this wonderful solemn period and you're awaiting the Incarnation this miraculous event in the world to redeem mankind and now on November 1st I was sitting in my Starbucks and they're playing that Mariah Carey song as though it were Christmas Day already that's the real answer though it is acceptable just and and this is what I do too because you know nobody's perfect just start listening the day after Thanksgiving that is the acceptable time at no time before that can anybody listen to any Christmas music I respectfully disagree but that's okay what's your answer November 1st November 4 it November this is a guy who would wear a shirt that says I fired Michael Knowles that's the kind of guy that this is it's good question yeah alright our last question so one of the specific things I like to read a lot and I read this book this summer and it was called the end of power and that shows the trends and how we are typically like in society as a world and a whole we're going more toward limited government and toward giving power to the people not only in politics but in the boardroom and all over the world and I I'm not seeing this trend as much in colleges but I also want to know do you see this trend happening more in colleges now and will further and do you see this trend continuing as we go on I see this trend happening in colleges if the people are utterly useless administrators and deputy assistant deputy Dean's of nothing and inclusion I see they I think they're getting a lot of power on campuses what I'm noticing though is that students aren't getting too much power the small groups of students that protest and ruin it for everybody else are getting a lot of power but the majority of students are being denied their right to an education that they're paying a lot of money for I'm seeing professors losing a lot of power as well also to those awful useless administrators who are wasting resources and ruining education and I'm seeing I'm seeing alumni have very little power at universities now as well because of the bureaucratization of of universities and because they've injected politics into all of it I think it's awful I can't wait if you make me president of the University my first day I will go with a bulldozer to whatever the deputy dean of deputy diversity and deputy inclusion or whatever it is and I will bulldoze that building to the ground and then we will restore power to the people who should have it at universities all right thank you very much it's so nice to be here thank you [Applause]

Channel: DailyWire+

Views: 254,004

Keywords: michael knowles, yaf, daily wire, podcast, tour, speech, conservative, politics, republican, trump, president, president trump, michael, knowles, snowflakes, Millennial, Michigan, State, Miserable, daily, wire, generation, dailywire

Id: pDNjuSucbZk

Length: 53min 14sec (3194 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 17 2018