Ep. 134 - Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
185.12302
Summary
A Planned Parenthood branch in Pennsylvania has demanded that Disney start giving its princesses abortions. Meanwhile, our friend Jordan Peterson seems to think that nobody would ever consider abortion a good thing. We ll discuss with Faith Moore why everything not forbidden is compulsory. Then, the mailbag.
Transcript
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A Planned Parenthood branch in Pennsylvania has demanded that Disney start giving its princesses abortions.
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Meanwhile, our friend Jordan Peterson seems to think that nobody would ever consider abortion a good thing.
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We will discuss with Faith Moore why everything not forbidden is compulsory.
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Then, the mailbag. I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Okay. This is a tweet that came out recently from Planned Parenthood, the butchery in Keystone, Pennsylvania.
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The tweet reads, quote, we need a Disney princess who's had an abortion.
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We need a Disney princess who's an undocumented immigrant.
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We need a Disney princess who's actually a union worker.
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We need a Disney princess who's trans, which is a prince. That would make him a Disney prince.
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This intersectionality is the theory that we all need to gang up, regardless of our own groups.
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We need to gang up to attack the white, straight male who knows he's a male devil.
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Not just any white, straight male, because he could be trans.
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There's just one bad guy, and then the rest of us need to gang up and fight that guy.
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Who cares about union workers in the Planned Parenthood tweet?
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It's an incoherent ideology, but it's brilliant because it unites all of the aggrieved groups,
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the allegedly aggrieved groups, against the bad guy, which is the straight white man who thinks that he's a man.
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In the old days, you'd hear Louis Farrakhan yelling about the white devil.
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It is a straight white man who thinks he's a man devil.
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The idea that we need to have a Disney princess who has an abortion is a big shift that has happened recently in the view of abortion on the left.
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In the same week, we had this video come out from Jordan Peterson, who has said that abortion is clearly wrong,
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and nobody would ever consider it a positive good.
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You wouldn't recommend that someone that you love have one.
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Nobody debates that, says Jordan, but I don't know if he's saying this for rhetorical effect.
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Nobody would seriously debate that, but plenty of frivolous people do debate that.
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They try to make it a debate, even though it obviously isn't.
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We know that some people pretend that it's a positive good and not just a bad thing, since Hillary Clinton.
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Hillary Clinton used to say it should be safe, legal, and rare, right?
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Saying abortion is a bad thing, but we should tolerate it for some reason.
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The Shout Your Abortion movement encouraged women who were sucked into this awful choice,
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this traumatic choice that, in many cases, ruins people's lives.
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Not just the lives of the kids, but the lives of the people who do it.
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Here's just the first YouTube result that comes up when you look up the Shout Your Abortion movement.
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My name is Sammy Detzer, and I had an abortion on May 20th, 2014.
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And here are a list of things that happened on that day.
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Anyway, I had a blueberry danish for breakfast.
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I walked from my apartment to the Madison Street Clinic.
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I received free healthcare from Apple Health on that day.
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I sat with my best friend in the waiting room while Let It Go by Adina Menzel played over the intercom.
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I had a small glass of orange juice in the waiting room afterwards.
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And I hugged the nurse who was there watching to make sure I didn't get sick.
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I ate an enchilada at the Mexican restaurant across the street.
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And here are a list of things that didn't happen.
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It is so hard to watch that because everything about that second part is a lie.
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And, of course, the question is, who are you trying to convince?
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That's the definition of what you're doing right now.
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And she's on the verge of tears even describing this.
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The amount of sympathy that anyone would feel for this woman is awful.
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She's trying to convince herself to believe these lies that she's saying.
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Notice in the beginning, she said, here's what happened on that day.
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Everything she acknowledges that happened is material.
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She doesn't say, you know, I felt this, and then I thought about this, and then I had this idea, and I knew that this meant this.
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I took a bunch of drugs because this is a horrible thing, and I knew it was a horrible thing, and I had to numb the pain.
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The only way that you could get yourself to have an abortion is to deny the metaphysical, to say this is just a clump of cells, right?
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It's just material, and I ate the burrito, and I took the drugs.
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It's really, I mean, you just feel so awful for this woman.
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And then to be used by the abortion movement, to be used and paraded on there and say, tell them it's a good thing.
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And tell them you're not looking back as you look back.
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In this issue, there are two options, repentance or doubling down.
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You can change your mind, or you can deny the reality.
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You can deny, deny, deny until you, deny until you die is the Italian-American expression.
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You know how you know, by the way, they talk about pro-choice.
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It tells you everything you need to know about pro-choice, pro-freedom, pro-choice.
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Comments are disabled because they know what the comments would say.
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We know what her comments would be if she were speaking honestly, if she weren't, if she didn't have to hold back the tears.
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It's not enough to say abortion is an evil, but we have to tolerate it for some reason.
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It's not enough to do safe, legal, and rare, which is the old Hillary Clinton example.
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They have to move into the totalitarian principle, as enunciated by T.H. White in The Once and Future King.
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He said, everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.
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This is a play on the constitutional principle of English law.
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Everything which is not forbidden is allowed, right?
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But the totalitarian principle, a play on that is everything that's not forbidden is compulsory.
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That's the sign above the ant colony in the book.
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Totalitarian frameworks, rather, are too fragile.
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So, the framework of life, the moral framework and the physical framework of totalitarianism cannot tolerate freedom.
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In the Soviet Union, the future was always certain, but the past was always changing.
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They would have to rewrite what reality is because their fantasy, their delusion was absolutely certain.
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And when reality disagrees with that, reality has to be denied.
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The circumstances of history have to be changed.
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There's no room for freedom, and there's no room for free thought.
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Absurd moral frameworks that permit abortion, they are too fragile to permit free thought.
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There can be no disagreement tolerated on abortion.
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And the reason that the pro-abortion movement can't tolerate it is that any rational discussion
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If you think about this for more than two seconds, you'll realize that it's wrong.
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Just shout it and do it and do it again and shout it.
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On this day in history in 1992, several hundred thousand people marched on Washington for abortion rights.
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This was really the last major gasp of the pro-abortion movement.
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There was another flare-up in 2005 protesting both Bushes, Bush 1 and Bush 2.
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Other than that, other than those little flare-ups that come for pro-abortion, the march for life,
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the march against abortion, is the longest continuous protest in American history.
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President Trump addressed the march for life this year.
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And it's because we have permitted freedom on this topic.
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As freedom has been allowed to expand and the totalitarian principle has been ignored,
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the opinion has changed in the direction of pro-life.
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I'll explain those numbers and explain why that happens.
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If you work at a coffee shop, you're probably going to spell that in many creative ways
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According to a Marist poll from the end of last year, the majority of women, the majority
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of American women, support making abortion illegal in 99% of cases.
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The majority of American women, 52%, according to this poll last year, say that women support
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making abortion illegal in all but rape, incest, life of the mother, in all but 1% of cases.
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We're not allowed to deal freely in these ideas.
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We have to gang up with other imaginary victim groups.
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They have to further divorce their own deluded visions from reality.
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To discuss that delusion, we will be joined by the official Michael Knowles show, Disney
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princess correspondent, Princess Faith Moore herself, who recently published an op-ed in
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the Wall Street Journal called Planned Princesshood.
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And coincidentally, on this day in history, Pocahontas married English tobacco planter John
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Now, of course, if Planned Parenthood and the feminists over at Disney had their way,
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she'd have just met John Rolfe and then had a one-night stand of casual sex and then gotten
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And then, and only then, would Pocahontas be empowered.
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Your Highness, Your Highness Princess Moore, thank you for being here.
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So, why is Planned Parenthood specifically targeting Disney princesses?
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And the answer is, um, Disney princesses are really influential.
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Little girls love princesses and they love Disney princesses.
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And no matter how much the feminists in general have tried to stop them from loving princesses,
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So, now, what they're doing, instead of saying, um, you know, don't love princesses, love lab
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technicians, love doctors, love, you know, whoever, sports players, they're like, okay,
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Now, we're going to redefine what a princess actually is.
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And, you know, now it's somebody who, you know, plays sports or fights with swords or has abortions.
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They're using the princesses as tools for propaganda because the girls love them so much.
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So, they say, we can't turn your attention to G.I.
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So, we're just going to turn the princess into G.I.
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Disney princesses made it a long time before feminists tried to ruin them.
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So, the first three princess movies happened under Walt Disney's watch, right?
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So, they happened, you know, from 1939 up until around 1966 and that's when you get like
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Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and then, um, and then there was what, what
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There were a lot of sort of really terrible movies and some good movies.
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Um, and then they came back with the Renaissance and the Renaissance is the movie, are the movies
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that we sort of think of when we think Disney, like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast
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Um, and, and what happened when they were making those movies is that all of a sudden people
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were sort of starting to say like, you know, those earlier princesses, they were kind of,
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you know, they were kind of damsels in distress.
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They sort of were sitting around waiting for men to come and save them.
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And, but the reason that those movies are actually so good still is that they updated
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And so, in a fairy tale, and this, this is what the feminists don't understand.
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In a fairy tale, the trope of princess means something.
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It's a symbol for sort of the, the feminine ideal, like the perfect woman.
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Um, and everything in a fairy tale is really a symbol.
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You know, like the forest is a symbol for, you know, your inner turmoil and all of these
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And so when those Renaissance movies came back, they updated, um, the princesses to make
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But they didn't take away the, the sort of inner goodness of the princess.
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But they had that idea, that idea that like those other princesses are not okay.
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And we need to somehow, um, make them, make them better, make them feminists.
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And, and that pendulum just kind of kept swinging, kept swinging till it was like, it was sort
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of in the perfect place in Beauty and the Beast.
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And then it was like, Jasmine's kind of annoying.
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And then, you know, then you get Pocahontas, Mulan.
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I'm sorry, but Mulan, um, you know, and then Merida, um, from Brave, princesses that are
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just basically, um, just sort of tools for propaganda for a feminist ideology of what a
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And, and one of them was elected to the U.S. Senate.
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That, that is a, that is a real, uh, accomplishment for Disney.
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That issue of bringing down the ideal, uh, obviously I've noticed this not just in Disney,
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And I wonder how much of this has to do with the democracy of it all.
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Because we're a democratic culture, lowercase d, and we love, we talk, extol the virtues
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But the idea of the princess is the idea of the aristocracy.
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They appeal to aristocratic ideals, to nobility, to things that are above that which is common.
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How much of the degradation of Disney princesses can we simply blame on the hyper democratization,
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steamrolling over aristocratic ideals in our, in our whole culture?
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I thought you were being stolen away by some evil villain and I was going to have to go
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I am going to have to go, I'm going to jump through the woods and I'm going to run, you
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know, with my sword and turn into a frog and I don't know what happens in these things,
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but this is going to be my chance to save the princess.
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I'm going to get to put my money where my mouth is.
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Do, am I really just some paltry, you know, lowercase d democrat in America of some commoner
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or am I a virtuous knight, a virtuous prince going to save Drew's daughter?
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Let's see, do we think we can get her back or no?
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Because I'm perfectly willing to give my view of all of this, my very elitist and aristocratic
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I was so nervous that you had fallen asleep and, you know, we'd have, I don't know, again,
00:21:59.100
There was some sort of evil witch or something, but I'm back.
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I think it was the evil witch of feminism, just the evil ideal of feminism is going and
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My question is, how much all of this has to do with the democracy of it all?
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They appeal to aristocratic ideals, to nobility, things that are above the common level of culture.
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How much of the degradation of Disney princesses can we blame on the steamrolling democratization,
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constantly trying to be more democratic, more equal, more egalitarian over what were once
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Well, I think what we're talking about is basically that we've forgotten that this idea of princess
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We think it means a princess, and that's when all the feminists get all up in arms about
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her tiara and her dress and what that means to little girls.
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The point is really that a princess is sort of this high-born lady, the highest ideal of
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And so when we start to think about it like that, like, oh, she's really the princess,
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and there are these serfs and people, that's not what it's supposed to be at all.
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But it is when we think about it like that that we begin to sort of misunderstand it completely
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and move away from that ideal that we're supposed to be kind of taking on.
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It was predicted by Edmund Burke and others to see that happening.
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You know, that's kind of a cultural observation in general.
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We can go retire to our country clubs and, you know, read all of the great books.
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There's always hope springs eternal in the human breast.
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Princess, Your Highness, excellent to have you here.
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I'm glad we were able to rescue you from the feminist demons of Skype and let us know if
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you have any more technological troubles, and we will go and ride on white horses and save you.
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Let's try to get into the mailbag a little bit.
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I think we can do one or two questions, and then I have to say goodbye to those of you
00:24:48.620
Oh, swarthiest of empty book writers, Knowles, you have said that you enjoy the music of Frank
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Sinatra and have quoted some of his songs on the show.
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What are your favorite Sinatra songs and albums, and what other types of music do you enjoy?
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I've had a Sinatra-esque fedora since I was like nine years old or something.
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When I was in fourth grade, I sang with my elementary school orchestra playing.
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Because it's the most conservative song ever written, maybe other than Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson.
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One of the greatest albums ever made in pop music is In the We Small Hours by Sinatra.
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That's one of those moody things when you're driving along the highway, smoking a cigarette, feeling bad for yourself.
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Really, I guess the first concept album probably in pop music.
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As for other popular music, and by that I mean, I don't mean Kesha.
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I mean like post-World War I, all of the American Songbook, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, all those guys.
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In pre-pop music, I love Bach and Mozart and Haydn and Handel and all those guys.
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For even older stuff, because we get very myopic in our culture.
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I talk about how conservatives or Philistines and, you know, even conservatives, but college kids today especially, they don't have any culture.
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They don't know of anything that happened before yesterday.
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They do think, I actually think that Tide Pods are the most delicious dessert in history.
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And they're very good, but they're not the most delicious.
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There are other creme brulee and things like that.
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If you want to go all the way back, basically some of the earliest music you can find.
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There's a good one called Abjoy et Abjovens Mapais.
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Try that and then you'll get into like a very, very old school sensibility.
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You often say that some conservatives act like Philistines.
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Philistines, it means they are uncultured or they don't like culture or they're hostile to culture.
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The word came into common usage after a confrontation between college students and the locals in Germany in, I think, the 17th century.
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So right around that time when the university was getting very, very popular, this was from a, it's from the Bible.
00:27:38.780
And it's like, you know, it's not just, you know, these crazy tribes trying to conquer the Israelites.
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It's saying, you know, you're so hostile to culture.
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You don't, you don't participate in this culture at all.
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We're all sort of Philistines because nobody reads books anymore, myself included.
00:28:01.420
So it's good to try to diminish your Philistinism.
00:28:06.700
Then I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
00:28:08.240
From Ben, I've noticed that you've made frequent references to the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides in your podcast.
00:28:16.340
And at least once in your writings or not in my writings.
00:28:19.480
What you're referring to is that I dedicate reasons to vote for Democrats.
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I use the same introduction to that book that Thucydides did for his history of the Peloponnesian War.
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I say this is not an essay to win the applause of the moment, but a contribution for all time, which is true.
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I find his history of the Peloponnesian War fascinating and relevant to the modern day.
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You're probably familiar with how the Greek city-states created a coalition called the Delian League shortly after the Persian Wars,
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based on the notion that they were strongest when united against Persia.
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Unfortunately, over time, that became dominated by Athens, became the Athenian Empire that demanded tribute from member states,
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It was this tyranny against the Spartans that brought on the Peloponnesian War.
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However, while I do not believe that modern supranational organizations like the EU have reached that level of malignancy of the Athenian Empire,
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The one-state hegemony of Germany over the EU, the onerous taxes required by Brussels,
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the anti-democratic leanings of the EU, suggestions that they form an EU army,
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Does the work of Thucydides demonstrate that supranational organizations are doomed to fail?
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It does. It actually says more than that, though.
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And this is a very conservative idea, which is that you should keep the government as local as you can.
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The more local the government, the more responsive it will be, the better it will be, the freer that you will be.
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Now, the lesson from Thucydides, from the Peloponnesian War,
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is not that supranational organizations are bound to fail.
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That Thucydides would have said that you keep it in the polis, in just the city-state,
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because, you know, the Athenian Empire united not even all of Greece, just part of Greece.
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Athenian imperial democracy wasn't supranational.
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This could apply to national organizations or even regional organizations, too.
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We have to be very careful with these organizations.
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Some supranational or international organizations have worked out well.
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NATO has worked out well, certainly, in the 20th century.
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Some have not worked out well, like the European Union,
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which has been mostly a spectacular failure for national sovereignty and for culture.
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And, you know, like Germany is the worst country in the history of the world.
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I'm going to have to do a whole show on this from the fall of Rome to the present.
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But, you know, they tried to destroy the world once in the 20th century.
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And then we gave them control of Europe, and they've done it again.
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We have to be very, very careful of these and use them for very specific purposes.
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When you have these supranational organizations that just are there,
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they're just peering and watching you and just kind of encroaching more and more on your liberty,
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I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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If you're at dailywire.com, thank you very much.
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We actually just had an earthquake here before the show,
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If it was, more of you have to go over and subscribe.
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It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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You'll obviously, you can ask questions in the mailbag.
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Everybody can listen to the questions, but only members can ask those questions.
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When that earthquake just happened right before our show,
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I assumed it was a loud national groaning and screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeth
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because I was going to talk about how awful abortion is.
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And the first thing I reached for, I didn't try to protect the producers.
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I knew that this would be the key because when the deluge comes in,
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that earthquake happens, and then the tsunami of Leftist Tears engulfed me,
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You need to protect yourself and your family, too.
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Michael, I think you are right about the silent majority in the short term,
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Nixon's silent majority turned on him after the Tet offensive,
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They are flakes who scatter to the wind at the first sign of trouble.
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Ben correctly stayed true to conservative values over temporary electoral power.
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What good is a Republican Congress of conservatives who aren't true conservatives
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with a capital T and a capital C and a trademark sign above them?
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So I think what we're debating, once again, is the election of Donald Trump,
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We should, conservatives should take what we can get.
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And other conservatives said, no, he's just too awful.
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You're right that the Reagan Democrats, as they were once called,
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or the silent majority, as Richard Nixon called them,
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or the Trump Democrats, the populist people, as Trump would refer to them,
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They're certainly not ideological, and they join coalitions with us for many good reasons,
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by the way, many good reasons that conservatives might want to take a look at,
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like the preservation of tradition and common sense beyond theory.
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Very often, the Reagan Democrats or the silent majority are people who say,
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yeah, your theory is fine, but let's look at reality.
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And then the ideological people say, who cares if it works in practice?
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There was a fear that if we elect this person or support this person,
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then 40 years from now, something bad will happen.
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Politics is things that happen in the real world,
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and it doesn't happen like it happens in philosophy books.
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because you say that the Trump voters have been proven wrong.
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You say that the people who didn't vote for Trump have been proven right
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There was an omnibus budget bill that went through
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who said we shouldn't vote for him because he's too yucky and we don't like him,
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if they had their way, we would have much more abortion.
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We would have massive regulation as opposed to the massive deregulation that we've had.
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We would have a radical Supreme Court justice that Hillary Clinton would have appointed
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who would have gutted the First and Second Amendments as she promised in her campaign.
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We would have had more weakness overseas as we had for the last eight years
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that Hillary Clinton was personally involved in, by the way, when she was Secretary of State.
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We would have had, who knows in the future what would have happened with the federal courts,
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because it's not just the one place on the Supreme Court.
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Donald Trump has stacked the court with federal judges.
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And people say, yes, well, okay, those are some victories.
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Okay, Heritage Foundation says this has been the most conservative first year
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Okay, President Trump has enacted two-thirds of our agenda.
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And if you say, well, I don't want to have a huge swath of the American population,
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I don't want to be associated with them because I don't agree with them on everything.
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You know, go vote for the Libertarian candidate or the Green Party candidate or whatever.
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And I hope you feel very proud of yourself and very morally pure.
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He said, at all times, the friends of liberty are few.
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They achieve their ends by associating with auxiliaries whose goals differ from their own.
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You have to risk your own integrity and your own morality by supporting someone who isn't perfect,
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obviously isn't perfect, is eminently imperfect.
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But that's the only way to achieve political good in a liberal democracy.
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I think conservatives ought to be less rationalistic and less ideological and less worried about
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if it works in theory, who cares if it works in practice?
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Is President Trump doing things that we don't like?
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Why he hasn't defunded Planned Parenthood, why the congressional Republicans haven't defunded Planned Parenthood is beyond me.
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And you should keep that in mind and not let the perfect get in the way of the good.
00:37:59.400
Michael, which left-wing media sources do you think are the least reliable in reporting the facts?
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Washington Post is particularly awful these days.
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But the Washington Post, as you know, is where democracy dies in darkness.
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I'll single them out because the lies that they espouse are in the language that they use.
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So obviously, the editorial staff picks ridiculous stories.
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They don't pick any stories that will support his narrative.
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But the language they use, they use the phrase not just illegal immigration, which is a ridiculous phrase.
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To be an immigrant, you have to be accepted by a country.
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You can be an immigrant, or an illegal alien, or a resident alien.
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But they use it to conflate legal immigrants from illegal aliens.
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Trump is perfectly fine for people who immigrate to this country and observe our immigration laws.
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And so when you read them, it's very hard, unless you're very precise with your language,
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It's hard not to get sucked in by the facts, because bad language gives away whole premises.
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I'm doing a video for PragerU that's coming out soon on this very topic.
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It's worth reading them all to see what they're thinking and to get a different perspective.
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And then you, within about seven seconds, I think, can knock down that perspective and say it's completely ridiculous.
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Your history of Protestantism is a bit slanted.
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Luther and the Wittenbergers, however, never sought to leave the church.
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Luther was excommunicated in ex-surge domine in 1520.
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Still ten years later, Melanchthon's Augsburg Confession made it clear that the desire that,
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one, a council be called to resolve their issues, and two, that it be done so all of us can accept and preserve a single true religion.
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This, too, is argued because the Turks must be opposed by a unified Christendom.
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The Lutheran polity, in turn, was never formalized like the Calvinist polity.
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That's because the Lutherans allowed princes to function as emergency bishops,
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and they only allowed this to occur when Rome refused to give the German churches priests,
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Lutherans were not iconoclasts like the Reformed.
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Lutheran liturgical reforms were, in fact, quite conservative.
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Now I'm under no whitewashed delusions about some of the flaws in Luther
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and some of the atrocities committed by Protestants later on.
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Some of his later writings, in particular, make Trump's rants sound tame.
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But it's also wrong to characterize the Lutheran Reformation as radical.
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If you're interested, my dissertation examines the theology of the body in light of Luther's paradigmatic distinction.
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All right, I'll read that later. I don't need to read that on the show.
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Check it out. I absolutely will read it because I am very interested in these questions in this time period.
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Luther is radical because he cracked Christendom.
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That's why I attack Luther as being, and because he sucked up to the Muslim invaders.
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I'm really not hard on Luther for his theology because his views were almost exactly the same as the Catholic views.
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He believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
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He believed in the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
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He believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary.
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And for that matter, Zwingli and Calvin also both believed in lots of these things,
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Virtually everybody believed in that from the first century through very, very modern times.
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They accepted that as clearly implied by scripture.
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But, you know, there are some things that can be said for the guy that can't be said for his followers.
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The real problem is that he cracked Christendom.
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But all in all, he's better than a lot of other people.
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What's worth pointing out here, I think, is that all heresies, all breaks from the church,
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this occurred to me the other day, they all seem to try to get rid of mystery.
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So, these days, a lot of breakaway churches or very modern churches,
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they don't accept the perpetual virginity of Mary because it just is hard to make sense of.
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Early on in the church, there was the Arian heresy.
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That was the one that denied the divinity of Christ
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because they couldn't understand how Christ is holy God and holy man.
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It's a holy mystery that tells us something about the faith and about God and about ourselves.
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The Albigensian heresy, which came later, basically denied the body.
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It said that only the spirit was good and the body was utterly depraved and awful and evil
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because it couldn't resolve that we are spirits but we have a corrupted body.
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It couldn't resolve the mystery of the unity of man.
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They couldn't resolve how God is God and dies on a cross, so they deny the cross.
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They crucified him not is a line from the Koran and St. Paul writes about this.
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He says, many are walking now and I tell you even weeping who deny the cross of Christ.
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A lot of modern people have issue with the sacraments.
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They can't understand how the physical and the metaphysical touch.
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That mystery is too much and you can't resolve it.
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It's a mystery that tells you about your faith.
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I think this is what all heresy comes from and I'm not really accusing Luther of this.
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Luther didn't have trouble really with some of those mysteries other than the guy sitting on the throne in Rome.
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But I think when we're considering questions of faith and religion, if you find yourself trying to come up with an easy answer to mysteries of faith, you're probably going the wrong way.
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As Dr. Johnson pointed out, all shallows are clear.
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I've been smoking a cigar for a few months and I hope not the same cigar.
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As you say, the body is a temple and the temple needs incense.
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What cigars would you recommend that I can get at a local shop?
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One I've been smoking lately that's very good is the Davidoff Escurio Gran Perfecto.
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That has an Ecuador Habano wrapper, Brazilian binder, Brazilian and Dominican filler, and it's rolled in the Dominican Republic.
00:44:44.780
I smoked a really nice new cigar last week in New York at the Cigar Inn.
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It's one of these new boutiques that's come out.
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You can now get it other places and it's an excellent cigar.
00:45:00.840
I've been smoking a lot of Tetuaje Cajonu 2006.
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If you're just starting out, if you're not totally into it yet and you want a good cigar on a budget, Oliva V is great.
00:45:19.180
You and Klavan are always talking about the culture and that conservatives generally do not do well on that political front or that cultural front, rather.
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My question is, what can the average Joe do to help shift the culture toward conservatism?
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Particularly, what can a 30-some-year-old cigar smoker history teacher do?
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Please don't tell me that I have to start watching Roseanne or the Kardashians.
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I kind of like Roseanne, but you don't have to watch it.
00:45:52.040
You're in the perfect place because the culture is formed in those schools and you're teaching a highly politicized subject where the left has succeeded in the culture because they invaded all of the schooling, all of the universities, and even younger, and Hollywood and New York.
00:46:11.000
You are in a prime spot, especially teaching history.
00:46:14.900
You should not be afraid to ignore people like Howard Zinn, which Mitch Daniels, as head of Purdue and as governor of Indiana, called his ridiculous revisionism execrable.
00:46:28.820
You should teach that Christopher Columbus was a great man and a great devoted explorer who founded our civilization.
00:46:34.280
You should teach that the founders and framers of the United States were great men, wonderful men, who formed the greatest, freest, most prosperous, charitable country in the history of the world, who were much smarter than we are today, who were much better educated than we are today.
00:46:55.800
People think that science just floats in the air somewhere.
00:46:59.880
You should teach the religious underpinnings and the religious premises that are required by science and the profound piety and Western culture of the people who founded science, like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.
00:47:14.160
You should teach all of those things fearlessly because there is an awful movement of historicism and schools of resentment that want to hate our forebears, that want to spit on the shoulders of giants.
00:47:28.160
But we shouldn't spit on the shoulders of giants.
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We're dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.
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I would teach a grateful history and an accurate history, and you'll be doing the Lord's work.
00:47:44.240
I know Drew is not only not here, but he's on the road.
00:47:49.380
In the meantime, speaking of Drew, you can listen to Another Kingdom, which is his story that he wrote that I perform all the characters in.
00:47:55.620
You can get that wherever fine narrative podcasts are downloaded.
00:48:07.620
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.