Ep. 216 - The Virtue Of Nationalism
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
The left is going after Norm Macdonald before his new Netflix show even airs and they are already trying to get him. Why? Because he's not politically correct like they want him to be. And they don't like him.
Transcript
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The humorless left is now so trigger-happy, they are attacking things that have not even happened yet.
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We will analyze the hysteria that is ripping America apart.
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Yoram Hassani will then explain how to bring our nation back together in his book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
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Then a new poll shows Americans no longer care if political candidates are religious,
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while Pope Francis blames the devil for exposing the corruption of bishops.
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Hmm, I wonder if one has to do with the other one.
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All that and much more. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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The left is going after Norm Macdonald before Norm Macdonald's show even airs.
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We will talk about that and explain why, but first I need to thank a wonderful sponsor.
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You know, I've referred to Norm on this show before.
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I know he's the favorite comedian of a lot of people out there, too.
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And, you know, you can go down a YouTube wormhole of all the Norm clips.
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And the reason we're talking about Norm now is he's getting a show on Netflix
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I think it's airing either this week or next week.
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Now, Norm, it's not like he's some Brooks Brothers wearing conservative.
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It's not like, you know, he's this right-wing apologist or something.
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And he's a comedian who cares about actually making people laugh.
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Unlike people who, they go for claps and not laughs.
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And so they're so angry at him because he isn't politically correct.
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Because jokes about Trump are super duper lame.
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He did this interview yesterday or two days ago with The Hollywood Reporter
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where he was asked, what do you think about Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K.?
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Both of whom are friends of his going back decades, I believe.
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And he said, well, you know, they were really broken up about the whole thing.
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He said that the Me Too movement got a little bit crazy.
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You know, because of their, look, there are false accusations.
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Some of the people who were accusers are now being accused of sexual harassment themselves.
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Some of the people who were accusers, details have come out where they were in consensual relationships,
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So he's just pointing out that it maybe got a little out of hand.
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And he's glad that it's not as crazy as it was before.
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There were actually people tweeting who said, I hate his show.
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And all, look, I like Norm, so I want to defend his show.
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But what this is really about is all of the hysteria that is gripping all of America.
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For those of you who are not familiar with Norm, just to give you a little context,
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here is a joke he did on David Letterman's last show.
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I think you'll understand why he's such a favorite on this program here.
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The only country that really worries me is the country of Germany.
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I don't know if you guys are history buffs or not, but...
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In the early part of the previous century, Germany decided to go to war.
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And so you figure that would take about five seconds for the world to win.
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Then about 30 years pass, and Germany decides again to go to war.
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And this time, they have that guy, scrankly, scrankly, that guy.
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I'm not even going to dignify him by saying his name, but I think you know I'm done.
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But you'd think at that point, the world would go, listen, Germany, here's the deal.
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We've talked about similar things before on this show.
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With due respect to our German viewers and listeners.
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So anyway, the left is very upset because he's not being mean to Trump.
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He's actually telling jokes just that are funny, you know.
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And that you're not allowed to do that anymore.
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So Norm actually was booted from the Jimmy Kimmel show because of this non-troversy.
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This is the stupidest non-troversy since the Mark Duplass thing.
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Jimmy Kimmel goes up to Norm Macdonald and says, you can't come on the show because you said that you're still sort of like Roseanne Barr.
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My producers are crying because of your comments.
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By the way, I will actually give it to those millennial producers.
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They're undoubtedly millennial producers because they were able to negotiate in warm milk and pacifiers into their nightly contracts.
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I mean, that's the art of the deal right there.
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It's really sad because those two guys used to be different people.
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And now, unfortunately, it looks like Jimmy Fallon is falling into that left-wing claptrap, too.
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Producers shouldn't be crying because of a common-sense observation.
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People in show business is a horrible industry.
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And we know that this town is rife with emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
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And they're crying because a guy made a normal observation.
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This is, you know, I think this is all Trump's fault.
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Because when Trump was elected, everyone was told the world was going to go to hell in a handbasket.
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And then, he was president for two years now, and everything is going fine.
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Now, common sense, your gut instinct would tell you, this would make people change their mind.
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What actually happens when they're all, they're totally hysterical, they're expecting the worst,
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something good happens, they ignore the reality and double down on their prejudice.
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They double down, so they say, well, but Trump is president, so things can't be going well,
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And that's why they're getting crazier and crazier.
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As the economy improves, as the jobless numbers go down, as the world is at peace, relative peace,
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they're not getting happier, they're getting crazier.
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When a guy has a conspiracy theory, and then you point out the holes in his conspiracy theory,
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So you saw this morning Joe humiliated himself yesterday.
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For those of us still believing that Islamic extremists hate America because of the freedoms we guarantee to all people,
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the gravest threat Trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to America's image.
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As the New York Times' Roger Cohen wrote the month after Trump's election,
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Strip away freedom, human rights, democracy, the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world,
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America is gutted under Donald Trump, according to Morning Joe and some dumb-dumb over at the New York Times.
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America is a country founded in part on ideas and on a tradition,
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in a land at a particular time with particular people.
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It doesn't float in this rationalist, ethereal cloud.
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It's a nation, which we're going to be talking about in a little bit.
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But also, does anybody believe that Donald Trump has stripped America of freedom, human rights, democracy?
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No, the left wanted to strip America of democracy.
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They still want to overturn a presidential election.
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But Donald Trump has only increased the freedom experienced by Americans,
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deregulated the government, let Americans keep more of their money.
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But they can't admit this because they were so wrong in their predictions.
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Morning Joe called Trump a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America
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Worse than blowing up the harbor, killing all those Americans.
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Maybe he does, but what a morally idiotic fool, if that's what he really believes.
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Jeff Bennett at NBC, the White House correspondent, tweeted out, he said, quote,
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Trump in Shanksville talks to U.S. troops fighting the menace of radical Islamic terrorism,
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a controversial campaign catchphrase that he didn't use last year.
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Radical Islamic terrorism is a controversial catchphrase?
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But NBC can't admit the reality because for years and years, Barack Obama wouldn't use
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But it turns out the enemy that we're fighting are radical Islamic terrorists.
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That's just a basic description of who they are.
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But as we've seen this time and time again, 65 terrorist attacks in Europe in just the
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As we've seen it time and time again, a stabbing seems to be happening every month or so in
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We've had seven, I think it was seven, might have been nine terrorist attacks since 2001
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We can't, the more that we see the evidence, the more that we see who this is, the more
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the left is going to double down and pretend that it isn't happening.
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This is very important because this hysteria seems to be ripping the country apart.
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They referred to Ronald Reagan as a Nazi, as the election of Hitler.
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Everything they said about Trump, they said about Ronald Reagan.
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But now because of social media, this is sort of the downside of social media, it seems
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like it's so much louder that it's happening in a different way.
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It does appear to be tearing the country apart.
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Morning Joe talking about America being gutted.
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Fortunately, we have an expert, Yoram Hazani, who wrote this great book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
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But first, I need to invite you into my boudoir.
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Let me, I'll give you a little tour around what I'm sleeping on.
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I can certainly say that because I had a dinky little queen-sized mattress before.
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It is not like the memory foam that you are used to.
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It is unique because it's firm and soft at the same time.
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I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms.
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I, obviously, being of Sicilian descent, I pour sweat in the middle of the night.
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Right now, my listeners get a free purple pillow with the purchase of a mattress.
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That way you can think about me every time you lay your head on your pillow.
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You're going to think of me every time you lie down on your bed.
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I have told you already extensively how much I love this book.
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It is an argument that you don't see people make.
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We've heard in the conservative movement for years and years, even on the right, that nationalism is a bad word.
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I love patriotism, but I hate nationalism, as though there were some distinction between the two, which I can't figure out.
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What is the, you know, in five words or less, you know, in 20 seconds here, what is the argument for nationalism?
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The simplest argument is, is the world better off if it's governed by a diversity of independent nations, each one with its own different customs and traditions in constitutional and religious issues,
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is each one an experiment in what it is for human societies to live, is that better?
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Or should we go for some kind of centralized rules-based order that somebody is going to decide about and then impose on the rest of the world?
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Well, what is amazing in the book is it's a simple premise, which is that there are two orders of the world.
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You can have an imperial order, the order of empire, or you can have a national order.
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You trace that national order all the way back to the Bible, and you trace the imperial order all the way up to institutions that we don't even think of necessarily as imperial.
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The European Union, the United Nations, all of these supranational organizations.
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Why is it that the progressives seem to be advocating for empire, and how is the EU no different than the empires of antiquity?
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Well, as far as the progressives, don't forget that Marxism was a clearly imperial universalist ideology that sought to conquer the whole world
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and get everybody to live according to a single theory.
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So the fact that progressives continue to believe in something like that isn't terribly surprising.
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It's maybe a little bit more surprising to find people who are liberals or classical liberals,
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who are for a very long time allied with conservatism even today,
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also advocating some kind of let's tear down all the borders and impose a single regime.
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I think for me that's personally more surprising.
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Well, it's interesting too from your vantage in Israel, because Israel comes out, is born out of the Second World War,
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a nation for the Jewish people, and now, not shortly after the end of the Second World War,
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we saw that nationalism was being blamed for the Nazis.
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It was about nationalist expansion and nationalist hatred and nationalist fervor,
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and that's why we all decided we have to totally get rid of nationalism and become one big kumbaya community of people across the earth.
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You say that this argument and this common knowledge that we have is totally ridiculous. How so?
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Well, it's not totally ridiculous. It's just mostly wrong.
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I mean, look, if you read about the policies of somebody like Dwight Eisenhower,
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Dwight Eisenhower, his foreign policy was based on fighting imperialism and supporting nationalism
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because he believed in the self-determination of peoples.
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And you can name lots of others on the left and on the right.
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I mean, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt in his later years, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion.
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I mean, so many people who are revered heroic figures politically and intellectually
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subscribed to one version or another of a nationalist world order
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that it really takes just an extraordinary degree of ignorance to just blame all of that,
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And I just want to say that the people saying this obviously have,
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I mean, I don't recommend that people actually read Mein Kampf,
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but if you're going to talk about this, it's not fun to read,
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but if you're going to talk about the subject, it's worth actually looking at what the Nazis believed.
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The Nazis were, from the first moment, an imperialist movement whose goal was, as Hitler wrote,
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to make Germany the mistress of the globe and the lord of the earth.
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His goal was to overthrow the order of national states, which he viewed as corrupt and contemptuous.
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Well, I wonder when we look at these historical examples, even in our present time,
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why is it that the international community, the empire builders,
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the advocates of the European Union and the advocates of the United Nations or whatever,
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they seem to support nationalism for certain countries, but not other countries.
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They seem to support nationalism in other areas of the world, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa,
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but then they want to break down borders in Europe and the United States and in Israel.
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Why is that? Why do these different countries seem to be treated differently?
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And the answer is because this internationalist worldview in both its progressive and its liberal forms
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is descended from an Enlightenment theory of history, which goes, an excellent example is Kant,
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which says that first a society is tribal and barbaric and everybody's killing one another.
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Then tribes gather to unite under a law as a nation, as a national state, and then they only kill the other nations.
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That's what Kant calls it, moral maturity when you realize that you need to take down all the borders
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and unite in one international state to cover everything.
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And what's happening is that the progressives and liberals who support this kind of movement,
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they look at the third world or Islamic countries or Southeast Asia, the countries that you're naming,
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and they say, oh, those are just, you know, they're primitives, they're barbarians.
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They haven't reached the level of moral maturity that we've reached.
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But if anyone steps out of line among the descendants of European peoples, you know, that could be the UK with Brexit,
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or it could be Israel or the Trump movement in America or Poland or Italy.
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The moment you step out of line, if you're descended from, you know, some kind of European background,
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then you're attacked as a traitor, as a traitor to the moral maturity that Europeans are supposed to have reached.
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And one of the ironies that you explain in the book is truly one of the enduring historical lessons,
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And so within 50 years of the foundation of the Jewish state of Israel,
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you've got the people who helped found it say, okay, pish posh, let's drop those borders now.
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Let's be, oh, let's be nice. Let's have a nice international community or whatever.
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You know, in the, as you write about in the Bible, the Jews are called out to be a nation,
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And they get this nation state in the aftermath of the Second World War.
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But now all of a sudden, Israel is under attack on every college campus in America, all over the world.
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Well, there was a mistake that the Americans and the British after World War II,
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I think originally wanted to see a European Union because they were trying to build up
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a strong continental resistance to Soviet expansionism.
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But I think that that was just a terrible mistake.
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And what happened is that Adenauer and the other founders of the European community
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just unleashed this vision of claiming that independence of nations is the cause of warfare
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And that argument, I guess, had tremendous emotional traction after World War II among liberals and Marxists.
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And since, you know, as you know, the universities and the media are very, very sympathetic to these kinds of arguments.
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And so, I mean, they've been educating an entire, it's now two or three generations,
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first of Europeans and now of Americans, to the idea that national independence is actually the source of evil
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and that concentration of power in the hands of international bodies is the solution to it.
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I want to know, as we're talking about concentrations of power, and you make it pretty clear in the book,
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there seems to be a spectrum here between anarchy, chaos, you know, the kind of fever dream of libertarians,
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maybe in the American right, and empire, the imperial order.
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And then the nation, nationalism, is somewhere in the middle of that.
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We hear nationalism bandied about by everybody from good conservative Americans to wacko white supremacists.
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Where, what is the nation and what makes nationalism work?
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Well, the nation, when I use the term nation, I'm using it in a traditional way,
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according to the Anglo-American political tradition, which is rooted, as you say, in scripture, especially in the Hebrew Bible.
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So if you take, let's say, the King James Bible, and you look up the way the word nation is used in the King James Bible,
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then you'll get a really good idea of what it is that shaped the English, Scottish, Dutch, American conception of a nation.
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It's based on the diversity and unification of the ancient Israelite tribes in the Bible.
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But at the same time, it's not based on race in any way.
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And we know that because when the Israelites leave Egypt, we're told that Egyptians joined them and stood at the foot of Mount Sinai
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and received the Ten Commandments and joined the Jewish people.
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Or that Ruth the Moabite, even though she's a Moabite, she comes over to Israel and she embraces,
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she says, your people will be my people and your God will be my God.
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And when she adopts that mutual loyalty with the faith of the Jewish people and belief in its God,
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then she becomes a part of the Jewish people, right?
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So the biblical concept of a nation is not based on race at all.
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It's a unification of a number of tribes that are diverse internally,
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but at the same time, share some kind of basic cultural inheritance around which they can unite,
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which is usually a language, a religion, a legal system, and so on.
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Well, that is such a wonderful clarification because I'm reading it and I'm thinking,
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this is the best defense of nationalism I've heard.
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And yet, I wondered where these, you know, they call themselves white nationalists fit into it
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because I've always found their arguments to be weak, to put it charitably, to not be very compelling at all.
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And it's just a misunderstanding, it seems, by these various 20 racists who exist in America,
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a misunderstanding of what the nation is, what the nation has meant throughout history, throughout all of history.
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Well, white racism, white nationalism is an oxymoron.
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There's historically never been such a thing as a group of people who are the whites and they are a nation.
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So the whole argument, the biblical and Anglo-American argument is based on the assumption
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that nations are not some kind of fantasy that somebody came up.
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You can't just say, oh, people with blue eyes, they're a nation.
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There's an actual historical thing that is a nation.
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And you can argue on the margins about whether some group or another qualifies.
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But the fact that there are nations and that they're distinct from one another
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Now, the question that you asked before about why is this a good way to organize the political order?
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So the argument that I make in the book is that a national form of political organization
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where nations are independent, that it sits roughly halfway between conditions of anarchy
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where, you know, like every family or every clan is independent
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And at the other extreme, a universal vision where the goal is for the whole world
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as much as possible to be brought under a single legal and political regime.
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And what the idea of independent nations, what it does is it tries to strike a balance
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between the two, which is obviously difficult to maintain.
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But it tries at the same time both to embrace the value of particularity,
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of particularism, of diversity, that different nations are different from one another
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and the competition among nations is in fact what advances us towards innovation
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and advancement in politics and religion, science, the arts.
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On the other hand, the national state does resemble international empire
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in that what it does is it unifies a very large group of people
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So it creates an internal sphere of peace and prosperity.
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The difference between empire and national independence is that the nationalist,
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and actually sees it as a tremendous waste of resources
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to fight an unending war at the other side of the world
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to conquer all sorts of other peoples which you then don't know how to govern.
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This is something I've always loved about your writing, even beyond the book.
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I'll let you go because I know you're very busy in doing the book tour right now.
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But something I love about it is you make conservative arguments.
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You don't make liberal arguments as a conservative.
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You don't say, I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal.
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You make conservative arguments and it's not just pie in the sky.
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We're talking about real facts and things that are demonstrable in history
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and therefore demonstrable in the way that we should order our nations
00:31:28.260
I'm sorry, though, if you're on Facebook and YouTube.
00:31:30.920
How'd you manage to stay on and not get kicked off?
00:31:33.000
If you're not, if you're on dailywire.com, thank you very much.
00:31:35.540
You help us keep the lights on and covfefe in my Tumblr.
00:31:40.900
It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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You get me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, questions in the conversation,
00:31:47.760
questions in the mailbag that's coming up tomorrow.
00:31:57.280
I'm in a Twitter fight right now with Kathy Griffin because she always gets really angry with me.
00:32:03.120
And she said, like, F you, Michael Knowles, all you Daily Wire idiots don't know that comedy is subjective.
00:32:10.400
Which is very funny because then she's angry with us because we subjectively think she isn't funny.
00:32:16.280
Either way, it's led to an overflow of Kathy Griffin Tears.
00:32:18.880
Make sure you get your Tumblr or you're going to drown.
00:32:21.520
The only reason that this studio isn't underwater right now is because we have the Tumblr.
00:32:45.140
They're saying that the midterm generic ballot is terrible for Republicans.
00:32:50.760
They always say, oh, Republicans don't even go out to vote.
00:32:52.820
There's no reason for you even to go vote because you're going to do so bad.
00:32:59.540
Also because there's no such thing as a generic congressional candidate.
00:33:04.340
And when you talk about these national polls, giant blue states like California end up giving
00:33:09.020
the Democrats a disproportionate representation in these polls.
00:33:13.600
What I am concerned about is a poll that came out today from the Associated Press, which
00:33:17.560
is that only 25% of Americans think it is very important for their political candidates
00:33:28.360
Some more people think it's moderately important.
00:33:31.720
And it tells us a lot about the miseducation of millennials.
00:33:35.200
And it tells us a lot about the cracking up of institutions like mainstream, mainline
00:33:40.240
Protestantism, and I'm sorry to say Catholicism in America.
00:33:44.880
Because when you dig into this poll from the AP, you learn about the political views and
00:33:50.620
But there's another poll from Pew that came out a little while ago that shows that the lion's
00:33:54.880
share of millennials are religiously unaffiliated.
00:34:07.680
That's that number for their parents' generation.
00:34:10.180
And it's triple that of their grandparents' generation.
00:34:16.100
Well, John Adams said that the American Constitution was built for a moral and religious people and
00:34:21.520
that it's unfit for the governance of anyone else.
00:34:23.480
That's because it's a government that allows you to be free.
00:34:26.620
But the only way that you're allowed to be free, the only way that you can govern yourself
00:34:29.540
is if you have virtue, if you have discipline, if you have a religious foundation that inculcates
00:34:34.480
those virtues and that moral law into you and gives you a view of what the purpose of your
00:34:40.340
If you don't have that, you're just going to descend into libertine nonsense and not be
00:34:45.920
We look around and, you know, we've got a burning man culture, basically.
00:34:49.860
It's descended into chaos and it'll only get worse if you can't control yourself.
00:34:53.480
If you can't discipline yourself, the government is going to discipline you because you're
00:35:01.580
I don't totally blame millennials for this, though, because they've just been miseducated.
00:35:06.060
I don't think that the lion's share of millennials have tried Christianity and found it to be
00:35:12.080
I think they haven't learned anything about Christianity at all.
00:35:15.020
I think they haven't been raised with very much religion at all.
00:35:19.720
I mean, look, I was an atheist for 10 years and then it struck me.
00:35:28.860
The historical, the cultural, everything finally hit me and nobody's more enthusiastic than a
00:35:35.860
So this is a good opportunity, but it requires that we show millennials what they've been missing
00:35:41.300
This also shows the breakdown of institutions, of mainline Protestantism and of Catholicism.
00:35:47.900
Because when you dig into that AP poll, you'll see that among white evangelical Protestants,
00:35:53.860
the majority of them still believe it is extremely or very important that a candidate has strong
00:36:01.020
So it's still the majority of white evangelical Protestants.
00:36:02.980
And it's not a racial thing because even among non-white evangelical Protestants, almost 50%,
00:36:07.880
47% believe the same thing, that it's extremely or very important that candidates for public
00:36:15.240
When you get down to Catholics, that number drops in half to 25%.
00:36:19.060
When you get down to mainline Protestants, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, whatever,
00:36:27.160
It's because those institutions have been hollowed out from within in the United States,
00:36:33.260
We're seeing the crack up of the Catholic Church now in the U.S. where bishops have been
00:36:37.640
credibly accused of covering up abuse, not just abuse of kids, but abuse of seminarians,
00:36:44.000
abuse of priests, whole sexual networks within the clergy, and credible allegations from a major
00:36:49.360
archbishop, Archbishop Vigano, the former nuncio to the U.S., accusing Pope Francis of being
00:36:54.800
complicit in some of these cover-ups of priest and seminarian abuse.
00:36:58.800
This is a major issue, but that isn't the whole issue.
00:37:01.600
A lot of the issue is that a lot of churches in America, Catholic churches too, teach weak
00:37:08.820
There was a theologian in the 20th century, I forget his name, who said, I forget which
00:37:13.360
one it was, who said that most of the sermons that he heard on Sundays amounted to, I might
00:37:23.120
And the same thing, obviously it's much worse among the mainline Protestant churches, which
00:37:28.000
have totally, they fly PC transgender flags outside.
00:37:33.200
They've adopted the religion of political correctness and the religion of modern leftism.
00:37:39.220
But it's really bad because what you're going to end up with is what Richard Niebuhr, the
00:37:44.460
Christian ethicist, described as a god without wrath leading a people without sin into a kingdom
00:37:50.840
without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
00:37:57.800
And the pews are going to empty if they try to teach that religion.
00:38:01.660
The line is that if you marry yourself to the spirit of the age, you're going to find yourself
00:38:08.400
People thought in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, after the traditional liturgy was
00:38:12.920
nixed and they started inviting in all of the acoustic guitars and all of the liturgical
00:38:17.140
craziness, they thought that that would modernize the church, that now we're going to have a
00:38:23.320
And what I see from my own vantage as a Catholic is that the traditional liturgies, the Tridentine
00:38:27.540
Mass, the Latin services, those are the ones that are filled up.
00:38:31.200
And when you see it with families, you know, you know how the Catholics feel about babies.
00:38:35.340
You see like father, mother, kid, kid, kid, kid, kid, kid, kid.
00:38:42.480
Either the church is going to be the church or there won't be a church.
00:38:48.040
It's not going to become the leftist hippy-dippy happy hour.
00:38:52.420
That isn't going to compel people for very long.
00:38:56.260
And this is true if the Catholic Church does it.
00:39:01.660
And I've really got to give credit where credit is due to evangelical Protestants in America
00:39:07.140
who are still, in many cases, practicing what they preach.
00:39:11.500
There was a survey out of American Catholics, I think also from Pew, that showed that roughly
00:39:19.000
The church is clear about its teaching on abortion.
00:39:21.920
People should be clear about the teaching on abortion.
00:39:26.460
He says, whatever you do to whoever causes the littlest one to sin, it would be better
00:39:30.320
for that man if he had a millstone tied around his neck and were cast into the bottom of
00:39:35.920
Whoever harms the least of me, things aren't going to turn out very well for that person.
00:39:40.920
And yet half of American Catholics support abortion.
00:39:44.520
Clearly, they don't believe what they say that they believe.
00:39:48.120
And either those churches are going to be the church and authentically preach the gospel,
00:39:57.260
And you're going to get another generation of religiously unaffiliated, and then another
00:40:01.320
and another until the, to quote, I think it was Pope Benedict, the flames of Christianity
00:40:13.720
Don't try to, I don't think the rock star churches are going to do that.
00:40:17.260
I think you need to authentically preach the gospel, and then you'll get people who are
00:40:33.160
He knows that this country, which exalts freedom, which protects freedom, is only built for a moral
00:40:38.860
and religious people, even if you don't consider yourself religious.
00:40:44.180
I remember when I was an atheist in college, Ann Coulter, or I would have called myself
00:40:49.440
I actually don't believe atheists really even exist.
00:40:51.960
You know, if I don't believe in unicorns, I don't spend all of my life talking about
00:40:55.200
unicorns, so I don't really even believe they exist.
00:41:00.780
She said, if all you care about is low taxes, and you've got one guy who's pro-life and one
00:41:06.140
guy who's pro-choice, one guy who's religious, one guy who's irreligious, vote for the guy
00:41:10.460
who's religious, who's pro-life, who has those cultural aspects to his conservatism, he will
00:41:20.400
It's okay if you consider yourself atheist and you want to lower taxes.
00:41:26.140
But there is a coherence to that thought that you've got to understand.
00:41:29.400
And we get a lot of this out of the framers and the founders of the country.
00:41:34.460
Now, to attack the Catholic Church even more, not really to attack the Church, but to attack
00:41:41.160
people who are abusing the Church and to attack corruption in the Church, we have heard from
00:41:45.000
Pope Francis, Pope Francis who said, I will not say one word about this scandal.
00:41:49.580
I will not say one word about the accusations credibly made against me.
00:41:57.260
He is now blaming the exposure of this corruption in the bishops and in the clergy, not on the
00:42:12.860
He's blaming the fact that we now can see it, that light has been shed on this.
00:42:18.260
He said, quote, in these times it seems like the great accuser has been unchained and is
00:42:24.980
He tries to uncover the sins so they are visible in order to scandalize the people.
00:42:30.400
The great accuser, as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the book of Job, roams
00:42:37.780
A bishop's strength against the great accuser is prayer, that of Jesus and his own, and the
00:42:41.980
humility of being chosen and remaining close to the people of God without seeking an aristocratic
00:42:47.580
Let us pray today for our bishops, for me, for those who are here, and for all the bishops
00:42:51.340
throughout the world, every response has been so totally tone deaf, has so totally missed
00:43:02.340
The trouble with the church right now is not that there's too much shame, that there are
00:43:11.000
The trouble with the church is that there are rotten, corrupt bishops who are covering up
00:43:15.480
for sex abuse for decades, and they're lying through their teeth, and they need to be rooted
00:43:27.320
This is a really, really tone deaf response, and we've heard this before.
00:43:33.860
The last time that Pope Francis responded, after he said he wasn't going to respond, he
00:43:38.520
said that people who are talking about these things should be silent and pray.
00:43:43.240
Yes, people should pray, but he told them to shut up.
00:43:46.580
This is not the right response, and you're going to see those numbers, those religiously
00:43:50.300
unaffiliated go up and up and up as long as this sort of corruption is being tolerated
00:43:56.280
by the Vatican or by bishops in the United States.
00:44:05.060
Okay, well, we've got a lot more to talk about, and Attorney General candidate in New
00:44:11.900
She's violated the only rule that matters to the left, which if they didn't have double
00:44:21.140
There was a video that came out yesterday on the anniversary of 9-11.
00:44:25.080
It is perhaps the most American thing I've ever seen.
00:44:37.880
I want to show you what's going on here on the bridge.
00:44:59.440
While we're doing the 9-11 memorial, phenomenal.
00:45:07.640
It does make you think about the role of providence in America from the founding of the country,
00:45:13.960
There does seem to be a providential hand, even as the religiously unaffiliated increase
00:45:30.040
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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