The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 104 - The Republican-American Heritage of Anti Racism

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00:00:37.900 That racist, horrible monster Attorney General Jeff Sessions said a perfectly innocuous thing

00:00:44.840 that people don't understand. So he's a terrible racist. We will analyze all of the hubbub and why

00:00:50.560 everything now, every single thing that you can possibly utter is racist, probably even what I

00:00:55.420 just said. And then we have a very special This Day in History today. We are going to talk about

00:01:00.480 Galileo. We are going to talk about St. Valentine. And speaking of racism and race relations,

00:01:06.080 we are going to talk not just about the Anglo-American history of law enforcement and the

00:01:11.100 sheriff's office, but the Republican-American history of anti-racism with Teddy Roosevelt and

00:01:16.280 Booker T. Washington. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:19.160 You might notice that I am not in my usual digs today. I am in this library of books and an office.

00:01:34.900 I kind of feel like Tai Lopez. I'm here with all my books. So right now I'm in Palm Beach. I am a

00:01:40.660 stone's throw from the president's winter White House, Mar-a-Lago. I have spoken to many people

00:01:46.580 today who regularly see the president down here. It's very nice. I was invited down to speak at the

00:01:51.920 Kudair Institute by Dale Kudair, and I'll be here with Ramesh Panaru and Mike Frank from the Hoover

00:01:58.260 Institution and Al Felsenberg, who just wrote a wonderful biography about Bill Buckley. We'll be

00:02:03.140 talking tonight about the future of conservatism in the age of Trump. I think I may be one of the few

00:02:08.840 defenders of our great leader, Armando Mussolini. So we'll tell you more about that tomorrow. Maybe

00:02:14.680 we'll try to get a video up as well. We have a lot to talk about today. This Jeff Sessions story

00:02:18.820 is so outrageous. It gets to so much of what we talk about on this show, about the light education

00:02:25.660 of our self-appointed elites and the ridiculous abuse of the English language. And we've got to

00:02:30.920 talk about all of that except providentially. Providentially. I'm here in Palm Beach. I'm a

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00:05:38.460 very nice. So that's that's Mar-a-Lago. That's the Winter White House. Now we've got to get back

00:05:45.660 to that racist Jeff Sessions. I don't I don't even know if I can say it. I don't even know if I can

00:05:50.740 say such a hateful statement that Jeff Sessions made. Let's let him say it himself. The office of

00:05:55.260 sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode

00:06:03.900 this historic office. The Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement is this is what this is what

00:06:12.420 we've been seeing for years. This is what Ferguson was about. The racist law enforcement is made for

00:06:17.920 the white man to defend the. Oh, no, that's not what it means at all. Brie Newsome, a professional

00:06:22.400 activist, she tweeted this out. She put the shock dyes next to it. Anglo-American heritage of, oh,

00:06:28.780 my goodness gracious, Twitter lost its mind. Matthew Iglesias, who more than anybody, he's one of the

00:06:35.040 writers at Vox dot com more than anybody, I think, or at least as much as anybody. This guy has

00:06:40.020 contributed to the dumbing down of public discourse. Matt Iglesias tweeted out. He said Sessions could

00:06:44.940 have avoided a lot of trouble this morning by either saying common law instead of Anglo-American

00:06:50.800 or not having a long record in public life as a racist. He's a racist. Matt Iglesias, by the way,

00:06:57.740 he's the guy when Andrew Breitbart died and left four children and a wife at the age of 43.

00:07:04.660 He tweeted out that the world is a better place because Andrew Breitbart is dead. That's the kind

00:07:08.000 of person he is. So he tweeted that out and he used this term common law. What exactly did Jeff

00:07:14.080 Sessions say? So it's he said that the sheriff is evidence and an important part of the Anglo-American

00:07:21.440 heritage of law enforcement. So let's just let's take a step back. Let's just go to the wiki page

00:07:27.400 for sheriff. What is a sheriff? We all know sheriffs. We have the local sheriff in town.

00:07:31.400 A sheriff is a government official, according to Wikipedia, with varying duties existing in some

00:07:36.440 countries with historical ties to England, where the office originated. That's it. That's what a

00:07:42.020 sheriff is. Sheriff is an officer initially responsible for the shire or county, the shire

00:07:48.160 sheriff. They're usually elected officials. So these are great in local elections. You always see the

00:07:54.620 sheriffs come out, but they don't have them everywhere in the world. They don't have sheriffs

00:07:58.100 in Italy. They don't have sheriffs in France. They don't have sheriffs in places that don't

00:08:02.900 have an Anglo heritage, such as our Anglo-American legal tradition. The full text of what he said,

00:08:08.620 he said, I want to thank every sheriff in America since our founding. The independently elected sheriff

00:08:14.060 has been the people's protector who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people

00:08:19.280 through the elected process. And this is an important aspect of the office. Why do we have a

00:08:23.980 sheriff? Why don't we just have a super captain of police? Why don't we have just higher ranking 0.79

00:08:28.660 police officers? Well, we have plenty of ranks of police officers, but the police work for the

00:08:34.100 government. They're not directly accountable to the people. But in our common English tradition,

00:08:39.800 we have more accountability to the people. So there's someone who is a legal officer who's over

00:08:45.980 law enforcement who is elected by us. And if law enforcement isn't doing a good job by us,

00:08:50.800 we can throw that sheriff out. This is why it is so disingenuous for people like Brie Newsome or 0.64

00:08:56.320 Matthew Iglesias or all of these other people who never even Googled the phrase and never even

00:09:02.460 looked on the Wikipedia, for goodness sake, before they drew their crazy conclusions. All those people

00:09:07.980 who are complaining that law enforcement is harsh on citizens or the police are being brutal or they're

00:09:13.480 targeting certain citizens or others, they should love the sheriff. They should applaud Jeff Sessions

00:09:18.380 and say, yes, we need more sheriffs, Jeff Sessions. We need more civilian oversight and more democratic

00:09:23.860 accountability for that office. But of course they don't do that because Jeff Sessions is a mean old

00:09:28.720 racist. Never mind that Jeff Sessions executed the head of the KKK in Alabama. Jeff Sessions is

00:09:34.420 responsible for the death by the civil authority of the head of the KKK in Alabama. Forget that. He's a

00:09:41.300 racist. Why is he a racist? Well, because he's got a Southern accent and he works for Donald Trump. And that

00:09:46.180 is enough. It is such a glib reaction. The Anglo-American law, another term for that is

00:09:52.460 the common law. We hear this all the time. Actually, so if you Google Anglo-American law

00:09:57.020 and Google Scholar, half a million results come up, about half a million results just in scholarly

00:10:02.160 papers. This is obviously a widely accepted term throughout case law. But in 2016, actually,

00:10:08.740 an Obama-era DOJ official, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer,

00:10:14.940 he referred to the Anglo-American common law during a speech in Beijing. That was an Obama-era

00:10:22.300 appointment. But of course, you won't hear about that. And it's because there's just this reflex now

00:10:27.740 to call people racist. And it's why the term has lost meaning. And it's really, they can't just use

00:10:33.220 this with immunity. We were talking a little bit yesterday about how you can't stretch these bounds

00:10:38.100 indefinitely, infinitely. There is a point at which they break. And here's the threat to that side.

00:10:43.920 If somebody calls a Republican a racist, that goes without saying. Ann Coulter once told me,

00:10:49.340 when a liberal calls you a racist, you know you've won the argument. If a lefty calls a

00:10:54.580 conservative a racist, well, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't say anything about your

00:10:57.880 character. That's just the tactic they use. But there are racists. There are racists in there.

00:11:03.340 There are people who judge others primarily based on the color of their skin. And that's not good.

00:11:09.500 That has no place in a civilization that comes out of Christianity. It doesn't make any sense in this 0.94

00:11:16.340 civilization. But the more that the left maligns conservatives as racists, the more cover they're

00:11:23.000 going to give to actual racists. The more that they malign good points and good oversight for law 0.63

00:11:27.960 enforcement, the more we'll say, well, okay, I suppose there can't be any oversight for law

00:11:32.680 enforcement. I guess this is the system we're in. It's a really stupid tactic. It's a penny wise,

00:11:39.600 but pound foolish. In the short term, they might get some electoral bonus points out of it. But in

00:11:44.180 the long term, it is going to really undercut their argument. It could lead to some nasty things.

00:11:47.880 Because if every right winger is a racist, then Richard Spencer is just the same as anybody else.

00:11:53.740 If every right winger is a racist, then David Duke is just the same as everybody else.

00:11:58.300 But they're not. They have different premises. They have different policy goals. They do different

00:12:03.060 things in politics and culture. A really, really bad idea to conflate those two things. But you

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00:15:01.120 there are a few other things. You know, now everything is called racist. That's just the

00:15:06.020 easy word to throw around. And there were even more ridiculous things than this. Some of the

00:15:12.920 other things in recent years, hoop earrings apparently are now racist. Some Vice magazine

00:15:17.020 writer named Ruby Pivot said that only Hispanics are allowed to wear hoop earrings. They're part of 0.54

00:15:23.080 the Hispanic culture. And if you wear hoop earrings, you're culturally appropriating, which in itself

00:15:29.060 doesn't really make any sense. Cause if you don't do it, then you're excluding the culture.

00:15:33.280 But if you do do it, then you're appropriating the culture. So you're kind of damned if you do

00:15:37.200 and damned if you don't. It's also historically illiterate, just like the reaction to Jeff

00:15:41.880 Sessions comment, ancient Egyptians wore hoop earrings. Hoop earrings have been around for a

00:15:46.220 very long time. The Hispanic race has only been around for 500 years. The Hispanic race was invented 1.00

00:15:51.460 by Christopher Columbus. It began with Christopher Columbus because of the connection between the old

00:15:56.040 world, Spain and the new people, the indigenous people of the new world coming together. And it

00:16:01.460 created a race of Latinos. So the ancient Egyptians came before them. Hoop earrings have been around a 1.00

00:16:06.380 lot longer than 500 years, but now that's racist. The movie Dunkirk, I kid you not, the USA Today

00:16:11.800 reviewer Brian Truitt said that viewers may find it troubling that the lead characters of Dunkirk were all

00:16:18.660 white. There were white men. There were white men too. So the lead characters of a movie about a

00:16:24.900 specific battle, a military battle where British soldiers fought off Nazi soldiers. The lead

00:16:33.600 characters were all white men. And what's racist about that, of course, is that British men are 0.99

00:16:38.340 British men. That's the trouble. That's what's now right. Reality is right. History is racist. Did you

00:16:42.740 know that? So this is really, obviously there are some political and moral and cultural hazards here,

00:16:49.460 but it's also, you just look so foolish when you say these things. I can't believe that the left

00:16:53.820 doesn't hesitate when they say these things now, because it's so demonstrably false when they say

00:16:59.640 them. You can just Google Anglo-American heritage and you come up with these things. Everybody should

00:17:04.480 take a break. When you have a strong impulse in politics, you have a real passion, you're really,

00:17:10.600 really angry. Nine times out of 10, that's going to be evidence that you don't really know that much.

00:17:15.640 You don't have all the facts before you. The people who are screaming and red in the face and

00:17:19.840 wearing the pussy hats and all of that, those aren't the people that really know the political

00:17:26.100 issues in the historical context. Usually it's the people who are a little calmer, who are speaking

00:17:30.340 a little more calmly and eloquently. Generally, those guys know a little bit more about what

00:17:35.820 they're thinking. So maybe a lesson in political humility, because political tribalism has replaced

00:17:40.940 all other divisions among society. It is now preeminent. Now, whenever you're about to yell

00:17:46.580 something from the rooftop, maybe a lesson in political humility that we can pass on to our

00:17:50.260 friends is just take a step, step back, search for the thing, maybe crack the spine of a book,

00:17:56.800 heaven forfend, and see if you're right. Maybe say, oh, maybe that person has something to teach me.

00:18:01.840 Maybe the attorney general knows a little bit more about legal history than I, some dude,

00:18:08.020 knows about legal history. That humility, if we had just one extra ounce of humility in our politics,

00:18:14.400 I think all of this rancor and division would be dramatically diminished. Speaking of rancor and

00:18:20.220 division, I want to touch on this. We have a lot of this day in history to get to. I do want to

00:18:23.540 touch very quickly. The New York Times is now officially drawing moral equivalence between

00:18:27.540 the United States and North Korea. The New York Times reported on the Olympics, Vice President Mike

00:18:32.460 Pence, who was leading the American delegation to the Olympics, warned that the North was trying to

00:18:36.540 hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games with its propaganda, they use the quotes,

00:18:42.000 not me, and a charm offensive. Mr. Pence mounted a counter-propaganda campaign of sorts,

00:18:48.140 meeting defectors from North Korea and bringing with him the father of Otto F. Warmbier, an American

00:18:54.280 university student who died last year, shortly after he was released, from months of detention in the

00:18:59.820 North. But his efforts did a little to stop the hoopla over Ms. Kim. So you see what they did.

00:19:04.980 There's the propaganda offensive from North Korea, and then there's the counter-propaganda,

00:19:08.580 and that's just it. There's just propaganda, counter-propaganda, just what he said, what she

00:19:12.880 said. And look, so she goes and she pretends that she doesn't enslave hundreds of thousands of people 1.00

00:19:19.320 in concentration camps and starve millions of people in her own country. And Mike Pence goes

00:19:24.060 with the father of an American student who was murdered by that regime. It's just this one and

00:19:30.460 this one. Who can say who's right? It's just what he said and what she said. It's so disgusting.

00:19:35.640 The New York Times has been doing things like this for a very long time. This is particularly

00:19:40.680 egregious, and we should not hesitate for one moment to rake them over the coals for this.

00:19:47.040 It's really, really disgusting. Imagine being the father of Otto Warmbier. Imagine being that guy and

00:19:52.360 reading in what was once the major newspaper in your country that you are, yeah, you're basically,

00:19:58.520 you know, you're our propaganda and they have their propaganda. It's so, so gross. Okay. I guess

00:20:04.940 that's why Andrew Klavan calls him a former newspaper. Let's get to this day in history.

00:20:10.040 This day in history.

00:20:12.980 On this day in history in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech on race at the New York Republican

00:20:18.920 Club. And the whole tenor of the speech was on race relations. He had just won his second term.

00:20:24.080 He was elected the first time in 1901. Then he entered his second term in 1905. And he gave the

00:20:29.220 speech in honor of Abraham Lincoln around Lincoln's birthday. And it's really fitting because 1.00

00:20:33.880 everyone is having this hullabaloo over Jeff Sessions's allegedly racist comments that were

00:20:39.520 not racist at all. Teddy Roosevelt gave a really beautiful speech. He started quoting Abraham

00:20:44.660 Lincoln's magnanimity upon reelection. And then he quoted, this is Roosevelt.

00:20:48.760 This is the spirit in which mighty Lincoln sought to bind up the nation's wounds when its soul was yet

00:20:53.780 seething with fierce hatreds, with wrath, with rancor, with all the evil and dreadful passions

00:21:00.620 provoked by civil war. Surely this is the spirit which all Americans should show now when there is

00:21:06.520 so little excuse for malice or rancor or hatred, when there is so little of vital consequence to

00:21:11.460 divide brother from brother. He went on, we of today in dealing with all our fellow citizens,

00:21:18.040 white or colored, North or South, should strive to show just the qualities that Lincoln showed.

00:21:23.260 His steadfastness and striving after the right and his infinite patience and forbearance with those

00:21:27.860 who saw that right less clearly than he did. His earnest endeavor to do what was best and yet his

00:21:33.720 readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable. His unceasing

00:21:40.140 effort to cure what was evil, coupled with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any ill-judged

00:21:47.240 or ill-timed effort to make it better. This is so profoundly applicable to today. People, especially on

00:21:53.900 the right, sometimes criticized Teddy Roosevelt for not being a real conservative. He liked the

00:21:59.060 environment a lot and he called himself a progressive, even though that term was quite

00:22:03.400 different than how we use it today. But what he just explained is a profound conservatism,

00:22:08.780 especially that last line of the first part. There is so little of vital consequence to divide brother

00:22:15.860 from brother. Today, there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother from brother. We live in the

00:22:21.700 most prosperous time in the history of the world. There is so little true social inequality, insurmountable

00:22:29.140 social inequality that can't be fixed by going to school and working hard. There is so little health

00:22:36.080 inequality. Everyone is living so much longer now. We do have universal healthcare in this country, regardless

00:22:41.400 of what the lefties say. We don't have socialized medicine, thankfully, but anyone who goes to a hospital

00:22:45.860 will be treated. There is so little to divide us that we make up this petty nonsense. We're not

00:22:52.200 fighting major wars anymore. There's no military draft. There are no major religious wars in the

00:22:57.320 United States. There's just a malaise of secular humanism, a malaise of atheist decadence. That is 0.79

00:23:04.260 not sufficient. So Roosevelt is talking about this moment, looking back on the Civil War. We can look back

00:23:09.700 on the early 20th century and say, we have it so much better now. But he makes the point to not be

00:23:14.800 utopian, to not be rationalist about these things. Lincoln had this earnest endeavor to do what was

00:23:22.020 best, but he had the readiness to do the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable.

00:23:28.140 He wouldn't make a situation worse by trying to do the best. He would deal in reality. That's so

00:23:35.360 beautiful. And a lot of the speech is about the betterment of black people and white people. These

00:23:40.460 days that would be called racist, just like everything is called racist these days. But it was

00:23:44.820 really beautiful. What Roosevelt is saying is that black people are socially unequal at this moment

00:23:51.980 because they've been excluded from society. They've been enslaved. They've been denied education.

00:23:57.280 They've been denied human dignity. They've been denied liberty. Of course, they're unequal.

00:24:01.680 How on earth could they possibly be equal in a social measure after all of that, just coming out of

00:24:07.740 all of that? But the point he was making is that our fortunes are intertwined together. If we fail in

00:24:15.200 this endeavor to raise up people that have been excluded from society and to involve them in society,

00:24:21.500 all races will fail. All people in this society will fail. And if we succeed in that, all races will 1.00

00:24:26.500 be bettered. He was really good on this point on race from early on in 1901, right at the beginning

00:24:33.420 of his first term. He became the first president invited who invited a black person to a meal at

00:24:38.840 the White House. Black people had been invited to meetings at the White House before that. But

00:24:43.240 meetings are just business. Black people built the White House. Black people had a business 1.00

00:24:47.480 relationship. Black slaves had a business relationship with their slave masters from 0.94

00:24:52.060 the early days of this country. But they didn't have social equality. And a meal at the White House

00:24:56.880 implied social equality. That's why this was such a big moment. He invited Booker T. Washington.

00:25:02.140 We could do a whole episode on Booker T. Washington, one of the great men of his century.

00:25:06.320 But it took political courage because segregation was the law of the land.

00:25:09.960 Washington and Roosevelt had become fairly close. They corresponded. And this was Booker T. Washington

00:25:15.280 was a former slave. And he had dinner with the president of the United States. But Teddy Roosevelt

00:25:19.520 did it because he was fairly impulsive. Historians say he was given to impulse. And so he just decided

00:25:26.500 he was going to invite this guy to dinner. And he hesitated because he realized what the fallout would be

00:25:31.020 from society to him and also against Booker T. Washington. And then he was ashamed that he felt

00:25:38.980 the hesitation. And he sent the invitation. And when Booker T. Washington received the invitation,

00:25:43.880 he felt dread and hesitation because he knew what the consequences would be. But he knew that he was

00:25:48.600 being called on for this major moment in history. And he did it. A former slave and the president of

00:25:53.800 the United States having dinner at the White House and both Republicans caused a lot of a stir.

00:26:00.620 And but that impulsiveness and that not caring about shaking up tradition, which might remind us of

00:26:07.600 some people in the Oval Office today, this is what made this moment happen. And in the selection of

00:26:13.800 Booker T. Washington is even so beautiful. This is one of the great men. He created the Atlanta

00:26:18.040 Compromise in 1895. The agreement of the Atlanta Compromise was that for the time,

00:26:23.680 Southern blacks would consent to white political rule in the South, as long as Southern whites 0.92

00:26:29.180 guaranteed blacks education and due process. And this, oh, that doesn't sound pretty. That's wrong. 0.53

00:26:34.740 It is wrong. Obviously, it's wrong to consent to that. Oh, that's not. And so the utopians

00:26:38.800 ultimately excoriated him for this. W.E.B. Du Bois, a more utopian and left-wing

00:26:43.520 black rights activist, initially liked the Atlanta Compromise, and then it wasn't good enough for

00:26:49.180 him. But Booker T. Washington dealt in reality. And dealing in reality is not a bad thing. It's

00:26:54.620 not morally icky to deal in reality. It's really the only courageous choice, because if we just deal

00:27:01.300 in the clouds, we might feel pure and morally pure, but we won't do anything. And we might actually make

00:27:07.040 a bad situation worse. So the selection of Washington is so beautiful. And this shows

00:27:13.320 the Republican history. Very, very often you'll hear people say, oh, well, the party's switched.

00:27:18.020 And no, he wasn't a real Republican and this and that and this and that. Nonsense. The Republican

00:27:21.860 Party, since it was found, the Republican Party was founded in opposition to slavery. But since the

00:27:26.260 beginning, it has stood for human dignity and ordered liberty. You can trace that conservative

00:27:31.440 tradition through all its meanderings, from Edmund Burke all the way up to Bill Buckley and wherever

00:27:36.680 we are now. You can trace that thread through human dignity and ordered liberty. And it's a lovely

00:27:41.680 moment that happened on this day in history when Teddy Roosevelt gave that speech. All right, do I

00:27:46.480 have to? I got probably have to say goodbye. I'm sorry. I have to say goodbye. We have so much more to

00:27:50.440 get to, though. We have my favorite subject, one of my favorite subjects, which is why Galileo was a big

00:27:55.720 jerk and the church was right and they should never have apologized to him. But and we and we'll also

00:27:59.940 we'll close talking about St. Valentine. But I'm sorry, if you're watching this on Facebook,

00:28:04.800 I got to say goodbye. If you're watching this on YouTube, you're a liar because they probably

00:28:09.300 aren't letting me stream to YouTube anymore. I think they're censoring every word that comes

00:28:12.920 out of my mouth, me and every other conservative. So if you're on Facebook, go to dailywire.com right

00:28:17.660 now. If you go to dailywire.com, what do you get? You get me, the Andrew Klavan show, the Ben Shapiro

00:28:22.080 show. You get the conversation. You get to ask questions. And my conversation is up and it's up

00:28:27.300 tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. So check it out. Then you can ask me anything.

00:28:32.840 The love doctor is in the house, baby. Ask me any question and I'll probably ruin your 1.00

00:28:37.400 relationship, but take it for what it's worth. You'll get to ask questions. Many everybody can

00:28:41.820 watch. Few can ask questions. Many are called, but fewer chosen. None of that matters. What really

00:28:45.980 matters is the leftist tears tumbler. You need to get it. It is. This is an insurance policy for your

00:28:51.340 family and for your family's safety. There's a lot more coming down the road, a lot more success out of

00:28:55.680 this administration. The advancement of a conservative agenda. Nobody wants that. Jeff

00:29:00.120 Sessions is going to, he might even say things like God bless America in the future. The tears are

00:29:04.580 going to be flying. The salty, delicious tears are going to be wall to wall. Make sure you can protect

00:29:09.080 you and your family. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back.

00:29:11.920 Moving right along on this day in history. This is a really good day in history. I'm glad we were

00:29:26.400 going to move this show, but there were too many this days in history to do. So I'm sorry,

00:29:31.520 we have to do it today, even if we're in like the bunker here. So on this day in history in 1633,

00:29:37.000 Galileo was called to Rome for questioning. Galileo was called to Rome. Those terrible

00:29:42.820 Catholics who hated science, the anti-science. He was just trying to show them the light and, 1.00

00:29:48.500 and the cat, that awful anti-progressive Catholic church shut him down. Thank goodness we had the

00:29:53.880 reformation so that we could have some science and enlightenment and whatever nonsense people say.

00:29:59.060 That isn't, none of that is true. And Galileo was a big jerk and he should have been punished more

00:30:03.400 harshly. That's basically what you should take away from this to begin with the first charge.

00:30:07.360 The church is not anti-science. It's not anti-science now. It was not anti-science then.

00:30:12.320 It never has been anti-science. During Galileo's time itself, Jesuits ran plenty of scientific

00:30:17.620 endeavors in Rome. From the early Middle Ages, Bishop Isidore of Seville wrote the Encyclopedia of

00:30:23.480 Natural Knowledge. Bede of Gero, same thing. Alcuin of York advised Charlemagne on scientific

00:30:29.180 matters. Rabinus Maurus, the Archbishop of Mainz, was one of the most prominent scientists of the

00:30:36.560 Carolingian age. In the later Middle Ages, the Catholic Church founded the university system.

00:30:41.560 So all, really all of the categorized science, all of the institutionalized science comes from the

00:30:48.080 Catholic Church. The Chartres Cathedral School, University of Bologna, University of Paris, Oxford,

00:30:53.460 Salerno, Vicenza, Cambridge, Salamanca, Naples, Padova, goes on and on and on. Those were all founded by

00:30:59.140 Catholics. Georgius Agricola, Georgius Agricola, was the founder of geology. He was devoted Catholic.

00:31:06.200 Nicholas Steno, anatomical scientist and geologist, devoted Catholic. On astronomy,

00:31:11.340 the Church founded the modern calendar. So we're saying, well, maybe they were good on geology,

00:31:15.380 but they were nuts about the sky. They just believed in silly myths about the sky. Not true.

00:31:21.440 They actually founded the modern calendar because the old Julian calendar didn't match up with

00:31:25.860 astronomical reality. So they started the Gregorian calendar. Even Copernicus. So Copernicus was the

00:31:31.700 first guy to propose the heliocentric view of the universe, that the sun is in the center of the

00:31:37.700 solar system and the earth revolves around the sun. And the same thing that Galileo was talking about.

00:31:43.180 So Copernicus must have been burned at the stake, wasn't he? He was tortured, just like Galileo was

00:31:47.020 allegedly tortured, but he wasn't. No, that's not true at all. When Copernicus presented his theories,

00:31:53.080 Pope Clement VII was quite interested in them and received them warmly. Copernicus actually dedicated

00:31:58.700 his major work to Pope Paul III. Ironically, Martin Luther appears to have made a big deal about

00:32:03.960 rejecting that theory before Catholics did. And his followers, the Lutherans, rejected that model.

00:32:09.240 Kepler expanded on Copernicus's work of the heliocentric solar system. And he was run out of town by his

00:32:16.640 fellow Protestants. In fact, the only place he found refuge was among Jesuits. There's also, by the way,

00:32:23.360 at the time, there was good evidence against heliocentrism. So Galileo's idea is that he said

00:32:29.280 he was building on the work of Copernicus and others, but he was saying that the earth revolves

00:32:35.020 around the sun rather than the earth sitting at the center of the universe, of the solar system.

00:32:39.460 But the evidence at the time came all the way back from Aristotle, who made this point.

00:32:44.580 If the sun is at the center, then there should be observable parallax shifts in stars' positions.

00:32:50.960 But the technology at the time, including Galileo's technology, couldn't measure those shifts.

00:32:55.480 So there actually was plenty of good scientific evidence against the sun being at the center.

00:33:00.060 Obviously, now we have much more sophisticated equipment, so we can see that that isn't true.

00:33:03.820 St. Augustine, by the way, gives great ample evidence that the Catholic Church has never

00:33:11.100 stood in the way of science because he liked to observe that the Bible teaches us how to go to

00:33:16.620 heaven, not how the heavens go. He wrote, one does not read in scripture, I will send you the

00:33:21.800 paraclete who will teach you the course of the sun and the moon, right? He doesn't teach us about that.

00:33:26.880 He teaches you how to be a Christian, not how to be a mathematician or an astronomer. 1.00

00:33:30.060 Some within the church at the time of Galileo, admittedly, insisted on too literal an interpretation

00:33:36.000 of scripture, but that persists throughout the world today, not predominantly among Catholics,

00:33:40.700 but among other denominations. We hear of Bible literalists, Bible churches, or the Bible is

00:33:47.060 literal. But even this, I don't mean to mock those points of view. It's a subtle and difficult point

00:33:52.940 because the word literally means not symbolically, right? It's not simply, it's literally, except that

00:34:00.880 the word literally is referring to letters, which are symbols. So even in literally, you get a

00:34:06.820 difficult image with which to view the relation of the symbol to the symbolized. More on that later.

00:34:13.460 Even with all of this, even with all of this, Pope Urban III allowed Galileo to publish arguments for

00:34:19.940 his theory. He just said, do not advocate the new position too forcefully, but you can publish all

00:34:26.040 of your arguments and all of your evidence if you like. Galileo, being a jerk, put those words into

00:34:32.300 the character Simplicio, Simplicio in his dialogue on the two world systems. So he's basically calling

00:34:39.580 the clergy, he's calling the great high ups in the clergy, idiots in his dialogue because Galileo is a 0.81

00:34:46.880 jerk. So not only does he not do, he does the one thing that he was told not to do, he could publish

00:34:51.720 whatever he wants, but he also alienated all of his advocates in the church so they couldn't

00:34:55.920 support him anymore. Now he wasn't tortured. While the Protestants in New England were busy burning 0.99

00:35:00.700 witches at the stake, the Catholics were very nice to Galileo. He was imprisoned in his very nice home.

00:35:05.740 He had a servant. He had everything he could ever want to do scientific experiments. And then in 1992,

00:35:11.100 for some reason, the Vatican apologized for its treatment of Galileo, which it certainly shouldn't have

00:35:16.080 done. It didn't really do anything wrong. Galileo was a big jerk. Sometimes you got to smack big

00:35:20.260 jerks around and make them stay in their nice house. And also he wasn't entirely right. Galileo 0.92

00:35:25.600 said that the sun was in the center of the universe, but obviously that isn't the case. The universe is

00:35:30.140 much larger than we thought it was. So even looking back on Galileo, it's not like he got it perfectly

00:35:35.580 right either. Okay. That's enough of my lambasting Galileo. One last bit I want to leave you on before we

00:35:41.020 hop out of here. I want to leave you with a little bit of love, a little, here's the love doctor, 1.00

00:35:45.760 onto St. Valentine's Day. So people ask, what is St. Valentine's Day about? Who is St. Valentine?

00:35:50.600 What do we know about him? How did we get from St. Valentine to giving each other chocolates?

00:35:55.100 St. Valentine is apparently an early Christian martyr, had his head chopped off and suffered

00:36:00.380 all manner of torture. So how do we get from that to giving each other nice candy hearts and flowers

00:36:06.320 and things? A lot of this does date back to ancient Roman festivals. So sometimes people criticize the

00:36:13.980 Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church and some of the high Protestant churches for indulging

00:36:19.260 in pagan rituals, you know, Christmas trees or whatever, celebrating Christmas in December when

00:36:24.620 Christ might have been born in the spring or something like that. But the church for thousands

00:36:30.600 of years now has made it a cause to take pagan things that were popular and then baptize them into 0.51

00:36:37.180 Christianity, which seems fine by me. That's really the mission of the church, right? It's to baptize

00:36:42.380 the whole world, not just, you know, among Jews in first century Palestine, but to all peoples for all

00:36:48.880 times. So there was an ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, which was observed from February 13th to

00:36:56.100 February 15th. It involved cleansing rituals. It was a festival of fertility. Sounds like a lot of fun.

00:37:01.940 Pope Galatius I abolished this at the end of the fifth century. Sad, but it's easy to abolish these

00:37:10.540 things. It's harder to stamp out the rituals, especially when fertility is concerned. So the

00:37:15.440 first link between Valentine's Day and St. Valentine, these rituals that came out of Lupercalia and St.

00:37:23.120 Valentine was from Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales. And he noted it in relation to the

00:37:29.340 marriage of Richard II and his wife. Chaucer wrote, for this was on St. Valentine's Day,

00:37:34.220 when every bird cometh there to choose his mate. You know what those birds get up to, those birds and

00:37:40.080 those bees. So current scholarship suggests that Chaucer actually might have had a different St.

00:37:46.960 Valentine in mind. We don't know anything about St. Valentine really, other than he was a martyr who

00:37:51.820 died for Christ. But we know so little about the guy. All we know is that he was a Christian

00:37:56.840 martyr who died for his faith. But he actually had to be removed from the Catholic calendar because

00:38:03.940 we don't know anything else about him. That is fine. You know, we've made it through all of this

00:38:08.720 history. And now, you know, we've clearly the whole holiday has been imbued with the romance and

00:38:14.720 the eros that it had from ancient days. And so maybe give a nod to those Christian martyrs and think

00:38:20.600 about as you indulge in romantic love, it's not like the church or St. Valentine or our civilization

00:38:26.860 says that romantic love is bad or erotic love is bad. It isn't. But there is a higher love and there

00:38:32.300 is the love of God. No greater love has a man than to die for his brothers, for his friends. So maybe as

00:38:38.380 you get a little saucy on Valentine's Day, consider all the variations of love and how the love that we

00:38:44.820 feel for one another and our romantic partners is lovely in itself and an evidence of a higher love,

00:38:50.900 which might be even more pleasing, though that's hard to believe. Okay, that's our show for today.

00:38:55.940 I will see you for the conversation. Make sure to come on the show at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific

00:39:02.300 and ask some questions. And otherwise, I will see you then unless something happens midair. But

00:39:08.580 let's knock on wood that that won't happen. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The

00:39:12.400 Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.

00:39:14.820 I'll see you tomorrow.

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The Michael Knowles Show - February 13, 2018

Ep. 104 - The Republican-American Heritage of Anti Racism

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