Ep. 198 - Losing Is Really Winning!
Episode Stats
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Summary
Last night, Republicans won a hotly contested special election in Ohio, putting a full 5 out of 5 candidates whom President Trump endorsed over the finish line. Meanwhile, Democratic superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strikes out, losing 4 out of 6 endorsed races. But don t worry, don't worry, it's okay. Democrats and the mainstream media will explain to us how losing is really winning. Then, Professor Edward Fazer joins to rebuff Pope Francis' recent creativity with Catholic doctrine and the death penalty. The Oscars finally recognizes movies that people see, and CNN humiliates itself.
Transcript
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Last night, Republicans won a hotly contested special election in Ohio,
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putting a full five out of five candidates whom Trump endorsed over the finish line.
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Meanwhile, Democrat superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strikes out,
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Democrats and the mainstream media will explain to us how losing is really winning.
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Then, Professor Edward Fazer joins to rebuff Pope Francis' recent creativity with Catholic doctrine and the death penalty.
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The Oscars finally recognizes movies that people see, and CNN humiliates itself.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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So much to get to today, and we have to figure out.
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We need CNN to tell us how losing is winning, and war is peace, and up is down.
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Anyway, I rolled into my apartment a little late last night.
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Late enough to see the results of that hotly contested primary election in,
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or the hotly contested special election in Ohio.
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The main headline on Apple News, you know, takes up the whole screen and then a couple
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Quote, too close to call, too close for comfort.
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Trump's candidate appeared to eke out a razor thin win in Ohio, but signs of a widening Democratic
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Republicans now realize how hard they'll have to fight in dozens of similar races to regain
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And so I'm thinking, gosh, geez, that sounds like terrible news for, oh, no, it means that
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I know that would be confusing because every single word they used was designed to make
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Republican Troy Balderson beat Democrat Danny O'Connor.
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The Democrats always run certain that they're going to win.
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They've been pumping it up in the last few days.
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But, you know, there was this candidate in Georgia and the Democrats said, like, John
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And the other guy, the other guy's going to Congress.
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So, what they're doing now, they can't figure out how to really spin it that the Democrat won.
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So, they're blaming the Green Party candidate for losing.
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There's this Green Party candidate in this race, Joe Manchik.
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And they're saying he got almost enough votes to spur a recount, an automatic recount.
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He didn't get enough votes to spur an automatic recount.
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And then I'll explain Democrats' bad strategy here.
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Joe Manchik, Green Party candidate in Ohio, is from Hell, Michigan.
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My distant relatives originally came to planet Earth from a planet orbiting a star in the Pleiades star cluster located in the constellation of Taurus.
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But his ancestors may have been illegal aliens from outer space.
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He says that he speaks 19 languages, including Spanglish and sheet music.
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I don't even know that those are the two craziest.
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And I'm a Green Party candidate running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio's 12th Congressional District.
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This is the second time I'm running for a seat in the U.S. House in the 12th District in Ohio.
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To donate to your campaign or volunteer, do you have a website?
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There's a link for the donate page at the top of the website.
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And it'll take you over to where you can use a credit card or a PayPal account or another kind of card.
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I don't have one of those, so I can't remember what it was.
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There's an address there where you can just drop a check in the mail.
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We don't take corporate money, and if you send us any corporate money, we'll send it right back.
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Nobody in the Green Party will take corporate money.
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So, you know, if you want to support my campaign, please send me a check from a personal account, and I'll gladly accept that.
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So the best part of this, Joe Manchik, is the Democrats are complaining now because they're calling him a spoiler.
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All of the mainstream media are calling him a spoiler, you know, and that's the press wing of the Democrat Party.
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The Democrat operatives themselves are calling Joe Manchik a spoiler.
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They're saying that all the votes that this guy got would have gone to the Democrat.
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That's more of a confession, really, than an accusation.
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What you're saying is that the guys who vote for the outer space alien who doesn't have a debit card, can't remember his campaign website.
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That guy wearing, you probably couldn't see it, but a sort of ratty t-shirt with a peace sign on it.
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I would probably, that's not a great long-term strategy.
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I would say, no, he was a, no, they would have all voted for the Republican.
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The other headline, the true headline that you could see in a few outlets today is, quote,
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Democrat Party's liberal insurgency hits a wall.
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I do want to say that, and I want to take credit for it.
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I did tell you this would happen, and I used that exact metaphor.
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I don't remember if it was on this show or on another show that I was appearing on.
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But I did point out that the Democrats, if they double down on this far-left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strategy, they are running right into a wall in the midterms.
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Democrats could win in the midterms, but these socialista candidates ain't going to happen.
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And the mainstream media seem to be picking up on that.
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Here's what happened among the really far-left candidates.
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For Michigan governor, that was a race up last night.
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Former state senator Gritchin Whitmer beat Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim socialist who is a doctor.
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He lost that race, the socialist Bernie-backed guy, by 20 points.
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St. Louis Congressional, Congressman William Lacey Clay beat out a socialist Black Lives Matter activist, Cori Bush.
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Cori Bush was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, beat Cori Bush handily.
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Ocasio-Cortez struck out broadly over the night.
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Ocasio-Cortez endorsed six candidates going into these races.
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She's been flying all over the country for candidates.
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And she struck out four out of those six candidates lost and turned out pretty well, pretty badly.
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El-Sayed coming out fourth out of fifth, fourth out of five.
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Rashida Tlaib could be the first Muslim congresswoman.
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She is known exclusively for heckling Trump at an event once.
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That is her only qualification to enter the U.S. Senate.
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She was one of the more radical candidates who won last night.
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If you look at her wiki page, it says early life in education.
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It's just early life straight into hackery politics.
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Then there was another headline, another sort of exciting, unseen before candidate, unconventional.
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The headline was, quote, possible first gay Native American woman in Congress wins, which is really a shocking headline because I had no idea that Elizabeth Warren was gay.
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It never occurred to me that she, I don't know, she was married to a guy at one time.
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Congratulations to you, Senator Liawatha Warren, for coming out.
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No, I guess suppose there was another Native American woman who's actually Native American named Sharice Davids.
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She was a White House fellow under the Obama administration.
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She was endorsed, she was not endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Brent Welder in that race and she won.
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So that'll be another area where identity politics are, they're pouring that down your throats.
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They're going to try to do something about that.
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And in particular, the left wing of the Democrat Party lost last night.
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They're spinning it and saying that, okay, sure, they lost the races, but their turnout was excellent.
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Their turnout was way, way better, especially in Michigan.
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So in Michigan, the GOP turnout was, turnout overall, by the way, was up.
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But GOP turnout was up 24% and Democrat turnout was up 84%, something like that.
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GOP, the reason for this is that the GOP infighting is not like the Democrat infighting right now.
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Right now, everything is going great for the country and the Republican Party is leading the country.
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So everything is going great for the Republican Party.
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The economy, foreign affairs, domestic policy, it's all going great, other than our crazy spending.
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But other than that, it's going very, very well.
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We just have to fight to hold it in the general election.
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The Democrats are fighting for the soul of their party.
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They're still furious because Hillary stole that nomination from Bernie Sanders.
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But they certainly played very unfairly with him.
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The progressive wing of the party versus the more centrist types.
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They are actually doing battle in their primaries.
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The Republicans really aren't doing battle in their primaries.
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So it doesn't, they're using this random statistic.
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They just use a random statistic to try to prove their point, even when all the other facts disprove their point.
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But we should get to the crazy Ocasio-Cortez of it all.
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Although I might bring, do we have Professor Fazer on?
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Then we'll start talking about Ocasio-Cortez first.
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The Ocasio-Cortez of it all is why the lefty Democrats are running up against the wall.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the future of the Democrat Party, according to Tom Perez, doesn't know anything.
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She's crazy, she's crazy-eyed, and she doesn't know anything.
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You know, you've got to remember, when you're talking about these races, four out of six losing last night, Tom Perez, the head of the DNC, said she is the future of the party.
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Well, if she's the future of the party, the future of the party looks bleak.
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Because what's the future of the Republican Party?
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But I don't know, perhaps the Democrats should consider a new future because Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to be a winner.
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I'm going to get to her interview with Pod Save America in a second.
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But first, I want to bring on Professor Edward Fazer.
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Professor Fazer is the author of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.
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He is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College.
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He's called by National Review one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy.
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I'm sure you've read his columns before he's written about a zillion books.
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Professor Fazer, we have talked a little bit this week on this show about Pope Francis' recent statements on the death penalty.
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How, first of all, before we even talk about this, what does Pope Francis' statement on the death penalty look like compared to 2,000 years of Catholic tradition?
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Well, at the very least, it has to be said that the revision of the catechism that the Pope introduced last week is ambiguous.
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On the one hand, there is the affirmation in the cover letter that accompanied the revision of the catechism issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which claimed that there's no contradiction with past teaching.
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But on the other hand, when you look at the actual text of the catechism, and the Pope uses language to the effect that the death penalty is what he calls an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,
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that certainly sounds like it's claiming that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, that it's wrong of its very nature.
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And that would manifestly be in conflict with the traditional teaching of the Church, since you see precisely the opposite of that thesis,
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affirmed consistently throughout Scripture, affirmed by Pope after Pope for 2,000 years,
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affirmed in previous Church documents of a high level of authority, such as the Roman catechism issued by Pope St. Pius V,
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and the two previous versions of the catechism issued by John Paul II, who, despite his own personal opposition to capital punishment and his personal hope that it be abolished,
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consistently affirmed that it can be legitimate in principle and applied in practice, at least in very rare cases.
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So Pope Francis's view seems to radically go beyond anything any previous pope has said, including Pope John Paul II.
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Now, it would be nice to have some clarification of how what's being said now can be made consistent.
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There's a claim that there's no contradiction, but as I've noted elsewhere, just to say there's no contradiction
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doesn't explain how P and not P, or what seems to be P and not P, can be made consistent.
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Of course. And you see this not just in the statements of popes and in other high level Church documents.
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You'll see it from the writings of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, all affirming the legitimacy of the death penalty.
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And now we have something different. And correct me if I'm wrong.
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Didn't Pope Francis elsewhere, in a more casual setting, say that the death penalty is contrary to the gospel?
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He did. In fact, the statement you're thinking of was in a speech from last October,
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where he first raised the possibility of revising the catechism.
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And the language he used then was that capital punishment was, quote, per se, contrary to the gospel, unquote,
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which certainly does seem to say that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong,
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that it's intrinsically contrary to Christian morality.
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Now, fortunately, the pope didn't use that sort of language in the catechism.
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What you see in the revision, as I've said, it does seem to be very problematic,
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but it's not quite as blatant or extreme as that remark that he made in October.
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And if I can comment on that remark from October, some people have suggested,
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well, maybe if you said that capital punishment is per se contrary to the gospel,
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maybe you could make that consistent with the idea that it's not contrary to natural law.
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Okay, so we could say that natural law allows it, but the higher demands of the gospel rule it out.
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Well, I'm sorry, that won't work either, because pope after pope,
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from Pope Innocent I, to Pope Innocent III, to Pius V, to Pius X, to John Paul II and herself,
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they were all addressing specifically Christian audiences.
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And in contexts like catechisms that were supposed to guide Christians,
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they were supposed to guide Catholics, explicitly said that capital punishment can sometimes be used.
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So even if you were to say that capital punishment was just contrary to Christian morality,
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specifically to the higher demands of the gospel,
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that would also be a contradiction with tradition, not merely a development.
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Of course, and even the language used here in this revision to the catechism,
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an attack on the inviolability of the dignity of the person,
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it is very hard to read that and not conclude that the present pope believes
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that the church has been teaching in error for two millennia.
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My practical question then is, for Catholics who have a legitimate disagreement about capital punishment,
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or who support capital punishment, or who read these statements from the pope
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and say this doesn't seem to jive very well, how should Catholics react?
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I'm always so loath to openly criticize the pope,
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but certain things seem to breed total confusion or to be an error.
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Yeah. Well, some Catholics who are well-meaning have a deep misunderstanding
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of what the church says about the authority of a pope.
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It's fairly well known that not everything a pope says is infallible.
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So a lot of people realize that, but they still think that even when the pope doesn't teach something infallibly,
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that you must, under absolutely every circumstance, go along with that.
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That's not actually correct, and the church very recently, about 20 years ago,
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under Pope John Paul II, made it clear in a document known as Donum Veritatis,
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it allowed that a church document could be deficient in different ways,
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and that Catholic theologians had the right and sometimes even the duty
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to respectfully raise criticisms, to point out problems.
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Now, there couldn't be any clearer problem with a document.
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There couldn't be any clearer case of a deficiency than a magisterial document,
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a church document, seeming to contradict 2,000 years of past teaching,
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because after all, the church has repeatedly said that popes have no authority to introduce new doctrines.
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When the First Vatican Council declared the infallibility of the pope,
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it explicitly said this, that the pope has no authority to make up something new,
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but only to preserve and safeguard what has been passed on.
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And you can refine what's been passed on, you can draw out implications from it,
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but you can't reverse it, you can't contradict it.
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And Pope Benedict XVI famously reaffirmed this and argued for what he called a hermeneutic of continuity,
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always interpreting present teaching in light of the past, in consistency with the past.
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So the church allows, when a pope or anyone else says something that appears to be in actual contradiction with tradition,
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the church allows theologians to raise respectful criticisms,
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and to ask the church to reaffirm continuity with tradition.
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You know, I'm reminded, I think Chesterton said that heresy is not the promotion of vice over virtue,
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it's the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of the others, you know,
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mercy to the exclusion of prudence or justice, for instance, in this case, perhaps.
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Very broadly, for people who are unaware or who are divided over the death penalty,
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I know Catholics who are quite personally opposed to the death penalty,
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Conservatives who are opposed to the death penalty because they believe that the state shouldn't have the power to kill people.
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What do you see, if you can give a 30,000-foot view,
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as the support for the death penalty and the support for what the pope seems to be saying now from scripture or tradition?
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Yeah. Well, what you find in scripture and tradition,
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and my co-author Joseph Bissett and I in our book,
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By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, which is a Catholic defense of capital punishment,
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what we demonstrate is that you find in the tradition of the church
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On the one extreme is the claim that capital punishment is of its very nature intrinsically evil.
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The church has definitively ruled that out consistently.
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On the other extreme would be the view that you must always, absolutely always,
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inflict on someone the penalty that he or she deserves, including death.
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Well, the church has always rejected that as well.
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There may be cases where someone deserves a punishment, even capital punishment,
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but there might nevertheless be reasons why you should refrain from giving the person what he deserves.
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It might even be moral reasons why you might do that.
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So the church has never insisted that you must always inflict capital punishment on someone who deserves it.
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But between those two extreme positions, the church has always allowed Catholics freely to discuss this issue.
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And at some points in church history, the tendency has been to advocate for rarely, if ever, using capital punishment.
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That was true in the earliest centuries of the church and in recent decades.
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For most of the history of the church, the tendency was to think that capital punishment could be used in a fairly wide variety of cases.
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Now, I think that what's happened, I think this is especially true of Pope St. John Paul II,
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is that some 20th century governments have been so brutal, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union come to mind,
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or communist China under Mao Zedong, for example, were so brutal.
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And the Pope John Paul II, of course, had direct experience of those regimes,
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that I think there was a tendency to want to pull away from an emphasis on retributive justice
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and focus instead on rehabilitation and so forth.
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But one of the things we argue in our book is that it's possible to go too far in that direction.
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And if you go too far and you start condemning capital punishment in these extreme terms,
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describing it as a violation of human dignity and so forth,
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then you start to lose the other side of the tradition.
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And indeed, you start to lose sight of the very idea that there's such a thing as getting one's just desserts,
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that there is a cosmic moral order that's upset when we don't let the punishment fit the crime.
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We don't let it ever fit the crime and so forth.
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And of course, there's also this danger in the Catholic context of seeming to sever the tradition entirely from its origins,
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Well, I was just going to add, what often gets lost in this discussion also is that
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Catholics who discuss this issue and who oppose capital punishment routinely speak as if it were uncontroversial,
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that we could take it for granted that capital punishment has no deterrence effect
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or that it's not important for protecting individuals from aggressors.
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And we argue in the book that's simply not the case.
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For one thing, if you're going to say that modern prison systems are sufficient to keep people safe from the most dangerous criminals and so forth,
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well, at best, you could say that's true in developed countries, in Europe and the United States and Canada and places like that.
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There are a lot of undeveloped areas of the world, third world countries, where that's not the case,
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where you don't have adequate prison systems to keep people safe.
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You've got, for example, the famous escapes of El Chapo in the Mexican drug law.
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Obviously, the prison system there was not sufficient to keep people safe from this murderous person.
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But, of course, even in developed countries, a murderer who's in prison for life can still pose a danger to prison guards.
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Prison guards sometimes get murdered by these people.
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Other prisoners, sometimes an organized crime figure, might call in an assassination from within prison to outside prison walls.
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We argue that there's considerable evidence that capital punishment has deterrence value.
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So if you get rid of it, you're risking innocent lives.
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And it also provides an important tool for prosecutors in plea bargaining.
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You might get someone who's on trial who doesn't want to give information about his accomplices or information about other crimes.
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And if you tell him, look, we could seek the death penalty for you, but we won't if you play ball and give us information about these other things,
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Whereas if you take the death penalty off the books, you no longer have that option.
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And once again, innocent lives will be in danger.
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So we really care about protecting the innocent.
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We can't just dismiss capital punishment cavalierly on the basis of vague slogans about human dignity and so forth that that would also contradict the tradition of the church in any case.
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We are awash these days in politics in vague slogans from at least one side of politics.
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And it's really upsetting because it seems to me that the people who are rallying most and most vociferously to get rid of capital punishment couldn't possibly tell you why we have capital punishment to begin with.
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They couldn't defend it, which is usually a good sign that they don't know what they're talking about.
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An excellent book, though, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.
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Professor Fazer, I'll have to let you go, but we will have to have you come back because it is a great relief as a conservative and certainly as a Catholic to have a little clarity in these days when there is so much confusion going around.
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We've got to get back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:28:42.760
Do I have time to go through Cortez before I sign off Facebook?
00:28:54.300
So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this is just too good to miss.
00:29:00.680
You know, that's the one where all those soy swallowing, you know, they're just devouring soy products during their podcast.
00:29:10.460
They're the ex-Obama bros who do this show where their take on politics is to say the F word in a really whiny voice.
00:29:17.460
And that's somehow political analysis and insight.
00:29:19.620
Anyway, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez goes on Pod Save America, and you don't need Ali Stuckey for this.
00:30:02.860
I put Ocasio-Cortez's interview on in the original Russian, but I should do the English translation.
00:30:12.380
Do we have the English version of Ocasio-Cortez?
00:30:17.620
We're about to hit a trillion dollars in debt because of the corporate tax cuts.
00:30:20.860
Yet, when we talk about pre-K, health care, college, suddenly it's unrealistic because of costs.
00:30:25.680
And it's not just bad faith Republicans that make that argument.
00:30:33.020
It's that we, you know, they say, how are you going to pay for it?
00:30:38.120
As though they haven't used these same ways to pay for unlimited wars, to pay for trillion dollar tax cuts and tax cut extensions.
00:30:46.780
They use these mechanisms to pay for these things all the time.
00:30:53.280
It just seems like their pockets are only empty when we're talking about education and investing in human capital in the United States.
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Education, health care, housing, and investing in the middle class.
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Did you catch that phrase she used, human capital?
00:31:13.960
Start sweating a little bit when a socialist starts talking about human capital.
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We're going to use your human capital in a different way.
00:31:30.220
The left talks about people like they're animals or commodities or just masses of flesh to be used however they see fit.
00:31:37.960
They say, okay, doctors, you're going to do what we tell you to do.
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Okay, you workers, you're going to do what we tell you to do.
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It's another turn of phrase that the left uses all the time, which is really terrifying and wicked.
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For me, I think it belies a lack of moral priority.
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But I also think a lot of these folks, especially those, I think, perhaps on the Democratic side, perhaps they don't even see it.
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I don't know if that's a generous interpretation or not.
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But I legitimately think that they start kind of buying into conservative talking points.
00:32:22.380
They get dragged into their court all the time.
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And I think it is because there's this really myopic and also just misunderstanding of politics as this flat, two-dimensional left-right thing.
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And so they always feel like, okay, the right says this thing.
00:32:53.600
The question was, how are you going to pay for it?
00:32:59.760
So let's just go through her stream of consciousness.
00:33:05.840
I had French toast for breakfast this morning with maple syrup.
00:33:08.520
And maple syrup comes from Vermont, which is in the northeast of America.
00:33:11.700
And when you cross the Atlantic Ocean, you get to Britain.
00:33:18.940
So the question she's asked, how are you going to pay for your crazy socialist programs?
00:33:26.660
I'll try to clean it up a little bit from the ums and the ahs and the I don't knows.
00:33:29.720
She says, the same mechanisms as we use to pay for unlimited wars and tax cuts.
00:33:37.900
So I think when she's talking about unlimited wars, I think she's talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have gone on for 17 years.
00:33:43.560
According to the CBO, the total costs of those wars over 17 years, $2.4 trillion.
00:33:55.140
What is the cost of her Medicare for all plan, her socialist health care plan?
00:34:02.120
$3.2 trillion per year versus $141 billion per year.
00:34:06.560
So her program, just that one program, by the way, not all of her programs, just that one, will cost 22.7 times more than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
00:34:18.460
In fact, it'll cost significantly more per year than the entire cost of both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:34:32.260
It's just letting people keep more of their money.
00:34:38.380
It's not taking as much of the money as you previously had taken.
00:34:43.680
So, okay, 22.7 times more expensive than Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
00:34:50.660
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she's not the expert on math or anything else.
00:34:57.080
She just says, she uses the word scarcity in, she juxtaposes it next to other words.
00:35:03.720
She then says America has a lack of moral priority, which is unfortunate.
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She then uses the word folks, so you know that she's a Democrat.
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She says, folks, Democrat folks, they don't see it.
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Then she says Democrats buy conservative talking points.
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She says there's a flat understanding of politics.
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And that's why Republicans win and Democrats don't have a strong message.
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Not once did she even attempt to answer the question.
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At no point did she attempt to answer the question, how are you going to pay?
00:35:55.140
There's no way to pay for all this crazy stuff unless you become just a full-on socialist country,
00:36:00.980
And even then, the money is certainly going to dry up because in socialism,
00:36:03.940
eventually you run out of other people's money.
00:36:07.180
I want to talk a little bit more about her and the Oscars change.
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Before I do that, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
00:36:17.420
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, thank you very much.
00:36:19.540
And I really thank you to Facebook and YouTube for not censoring us yet.
00:36:45.220
It tastes like Democrats saying that they secretly won, but they didn't.
00:36:52.820
It tastes like five out of five Trump-endorsed candidates winning
00:36:55.100
and four out of six Alexandria Ocasio-endorsed candidates losing.
00:37:00.200
And you're going to need it because there are more elections around the corner.
00:37:04.160
Okay, and our final moments together here today,
00:37:17.780
I do want to talk about the change to the Oscars.
00:37:20.820
So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
00:37:23.420
has finally realized that people don't like them very much
00:37:27.380
and don't watch the awards shows and really don't watch the movies.
00:37:29.940
So they've announced some major changes to the awards show.
00:37:32.780
Last year, the Oscars telecast was down 19% in views.
00:37:42.240
And that was down over the previous year, which was a nine-year low.
00:37:53.820
They're going to take some of the awards for like assistant deputy sound editing pogo stick jumper.
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And they're going to put that during the commercial breaks
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and then truncate it for the end because no one watches those awards.
00:38:09.160
The guilds are going to be very upset about that.
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The new category is for outstanding achievement in popular film.
00:38:20.380
Now you might be asking, well, there's an award for best motion picture, right?
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But now we know, per the Andrew Klavan theory of art forms, that movies are done.
00:38:33.540
Drew can talk about it more on his show, but his basic theory is that when art diverges
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and you've got two categories, when you've got the categories that the critics and the artists like
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and the category that the people like, then it's dead.
00:38:50.180
I mean, it's so spitting in the face of these popular filmmakers and of their audience.
00:38:55.720
They're saying, oh, well, not everybody will watch Moonlight because they're so stupid.
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So, okay, we'll give one to Star Wars or something.
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And they're just, they're separating this category.
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It means it's dead because there is now a categorical distinction between movies that people watch
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They're considered great movies that absolutely nobody watches.
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Not the last Star Wars, but the other Star Wars.
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And then the other movies, they're like Moonlight.
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You know, they're the ones about like, it's always about like lesbian cowboys or something
00:39:40.800
Here is Tracy Jordan making his Oscar bait movie, the movie that wins best picture, hard to watch.
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I'll go to jail in Deshaun's place because he's my brother.
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Even when the wrong thing is a whole lot easier.
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Now let's just have one last happy dinner together.
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That is every best picture winner probably since Lord of the Rings Return of the King.
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Nobody's going to watch this movie, but it's hard to watch.
00:40:58.980
I guess it's good that popular movies now will be shown at the Oscars, but it's too little too late.
00:41:04.120
You're admitting that the people who watch the Oscars and the people who go to movies,
00:41:08.540
those few people who still go to tentpole movies, they're just different.
00:41:13.760
They're trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
00:41:20.960
Before we go, I've got to talk about Alex Jones again.
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They're still, they haven't even, we need a little conversion therapy for those frogs.
00:41:30.300
That's going to, that's what this is really all about.
00:41:32.040
So, there is a piece in CNN titled, We Need to Talk About Alex Jones.
00:41:40.580
They, there is some unbelievable stuff in here.
00:41:43.240
The first writer, it's just a series of columnists giving their opinion of Alex Jones.
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And, you know, should people be censored for having unpopular or wacky points of view?
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The answer, if you're an American, is the latter.
00:42:05.600
The stripping of Infowars from Facebook, Apple, and other platforms is an important step in the recognition of nativist, nationalist, and white supremacist hate speech as a form of terrorism.
00:42:17.360
So, first of all, I didn't know that Alex Jones, the shirtless vitamin salesman, is a white supremacist.
00:42:25.460
But, they just throw these words around, right?
00:42:27.480
I mean, you had those, those little white girls the other day shouting through a bullhorn at Candace Owens, a black woman, and saying, F white supremacy.
00:42:35.000
White, white girls telling a black woman what to do and yelling at her for not behaving.
00:42:40.380
That's white, that's fighting white supremacy, right?
00:42:47.700
They use the word hate speech, the phrase hate speech, which doesn't mean anything.
00:42:56.480
There's no constitutional provision against hate speech.
00:43:00.000
They just hate speech is, for the left, speech that they disagree with.
00:43:03.240
But then they're saying that speech is a form of terrorism.
00:43:08.080
If it's terrorism, man, they can waterboard you to stop you from talking, right?
00:43:14.280
You are not, your speech is no longer protected by the Geneva Convention.
00:43:20.880
She's saying, shut up or we're going to waterboard you.
00:43:23.060
We're going to bring you to Gitmo and torture you.
00:43:30.820
Josh McWhorter, writing in that same CNN article, says,
00:43:35.880
In our advanced conception of a nation, the idea that anyone should be able to air any thought they have.
00:43:47.900
It's a singular, it's not a plural word, right?
00:43:58.740
Did you, did this guy, did Josh McWhorter fail, or rather, John McWhorter fail the second grade?
00:44:04.940
So, whether they have, whether real insight or not, has a gut level appeal.
00:44:11.100
A hundred years ago, an Alex Jones could only have reached most people via quiet printed pages written in formal prose.
00:44:21.720
They always say, we're in the advanced stage now.
00:44:26.380
This is not the old stuff that we did in the old nation.
00:44:37.740
He's not, this is not, there's no, but they always say it's so advanced now.
00:44:40.440
All the things that have always been true throughout human history, they're not true anymore.
00:44:45.360
They do this when they want to redistribute wealth, when they want to change the nature of business,
00:44:49.220
when they want to change the relationship of the state to the individual.
00:44:56.780
The other point where he's just not quite right is the idea that in the old days,
00:45:03.400
You know, the Protestant Revolution began because of the printing press.
00:45:06.480
Martin Luther wrote a little note, and it spread like wildfire throughout all of Europe,
00:45:13.040
The Lincoln-Douglas debates, you know, the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have crowds of 15,000 people at them.
00:45:19.980
That's not just a quiet little essay or something like that.
00:45:22.940
William Jennings Bryan would give, you know, the populist Democrat, he would give speeches to 15,000 people with regularity.
00:45:32.660
I know you think that everything was invented yesterday, nothing before you ever existed.
00:45:51.900
But I'm really pleased that now the star of CNN, Jim Acosta, is admitting this.
00:45:58.040
Here, I present to you for your consideration for best motion picture, best short film of all time, Jim Acosta.
00:46:11.640
But I'll say that the press is the enemy of the people.
00:46:15.500
And, you know, I don't understand simple sentences.
00:46:23.540
You know, maybe we should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue.
00:46:25.900
Like these folks who chant CNN s***s and fake news.
00:46:29.800
Maybe we should go out, all journalists should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue and chant CNN s***s and the enemy of the people.
00:46:50.640
At the very least, I think we should all be able to agree on one thing.
00:46:55.960
And that is that CNN's fake news and CNN sucks and CNN's lost sight of that here at this White House.
00:47:07.940
I mean, they deserve, for best popular movie, for that new Oscar category, whoever made that clip certainly deserves to win it.
00:47:15.760
Get your mailbag questions in so we can answer them tomorrow.
00:47:21.880
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
00:47:46.240
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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