In this episode of The Michael Knowles Show, host Michael Kinsley is joined by guest host Michael O'Donnell to discuss climate change and the role of religion in American politics. They also talk about how religion is being used in the service of social engineering, and why it s a bad idea.
00:08:04.800Who cares if you can win the whole world but you lose your soul?
00:08:07.500The soul is going to persist a lot longer.
00:08:10.160When we talk about the soul, we talk about eternity.
00:08:12.920When we talk about just fleshy things, that will pass away ultimately.
00:08:17.700It is, Raphael Warnock has no idea that he's conveying all of these things.
00:08:21.900But it's a pregnant answer to the question from Jen Psaki.
00:08:26.340And it's a reminder that ultimately the leftist religion is worldliness.
00:08:31.640Now, I mentioned ultimately you don't need to fear bullets.
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00:10:38.260The Italian government gave Indy Gregory citizenship.
00:10:41.560So the UK government ultimately ended up killing an Italian citizen, which creates an international legal crisis that will probably just be brushed aside, but it seems significant to me.
00:10:53.200The Vatican offered to treat baby Indy Gregory at the Bambino Jesu Hospital.
00:10:58.280But the UK was so embarrassed by this.
00:11:00.300The UK couldn't allow the baby to go seek treatment elsewhere because that would be an indictment on the UK.
00:11:05.940It would be a global embarrassment that some other government has to step in to save a British citizen because the British government just wants to kill that citizen to save a few bucks, even a little innocent baby like Indy Gregory.
00:11:18.000Now, we knew this was the way the story was almost certain to end from the very beginning, and that is what happened.
00:11:24.800But there was one happy little turn before the story, before Indy Gregory's earthly story ended, which is that Mr. Gregory, the father, had the baby baptized.
00:11:37.420And it's not as though Dean Gregory was some devout, practicing Christian.
00:12:20.460Some people won't like this argument because they'll say, well, you know, no, that's, you're, you're not making a perfectly rational argument for the existence of God and for the historicity of the gospels and for the, this, and it's not neat and pat.
00:12:36.120And, no, this is a great, this is a great argument.
00:12:38.220This is a much, much realer argument, frankly.
00:12:41.220Because he's saying, you know, yeah, I'm not religious at all.
00:12:44.280And I, I can't recite to you Thomas Aquinas' five ways for knowing the existence of God.
00:12:50.220But I'll tell you what, when I was in that British courtroom and that, that evil judge was killing my daughter, I knew what evil was.
00:13:30.360I, to this, I don't know what he currently thinks about all these things, but he knew enough to say, I am going to do what I can to save my daughter.
00:13:39.240Even the fact that he had to confront something that most of us can push off, which is the fact of mortality.
00:13:45.440We're all going to end up in the same place as Indy Gregory.
00:13:47.680Most of us don't end up there at eight months old, but, but we're all going to end up there at some point.
00:13:52.380And so, you know, the silver lining in that storm cloud, which is, which is a storm cloud that we're all going to face,
00:13:58.340which is the fact of a fallen world and our own mortality, he was able to find that silver lining there, which is the confrontation of death.
00:14:06.140It's, it's why, why Dr. Johnson had a famous line, which is, depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he's to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.
00:14:16.900Say when we, when we actually have to face the thing that we put off as best we can for our entire lives, namely the fact of our death, our inevitable death, it concentrates us.
00:14:26.380And it, it doesn't confuse us what the atheists and the liberals want us to believe is, well, it just has us desperately grasping at straws and wish casting this notion that we can live forever.
00:14:41.300Am I just a bag of chemicals or am I something more than that?
00:14:44.500Do my natural desires and longings for something beyond this world point to something that does exist beyond this world?
00:14:50.240Does my natural intuition and deduction of the metaphysical, the fact that we know, we know for certain there are things that are not merely physical in this world, like, I don't know, mathematics, the fact that there are metaphysical things, does that imply something more about metaphysical reality?
00:15:06.620And all of that hit Mr. Gregory like a ton of bricks in that courtroom and the, the, the personification of evil that he saw occurring around him and to him and therefore the personification of good.
00:15:20.820Ultimately, ultimately, ultimately a happy ending, albeit with much pain in the meantime.
00:15:27.500Now, speaking of this, speaking of politically motivated conversions, I teased a story a few days ago that I do want to get to at least briefly.
00:15:35.740Ayaan Hirsi Ali, very prominent political figure.
00:16:04.800She has converted sort of the way that Indy Gregory was converted through her father, which is politically, as a result of political events.
00:16:14.360Though, though, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it's even, it's even more political in that she says, the reason that I'm a Christian is because civilization cannot withstand barbarism without Christianity.
00:16:26.780So she is, she is describing Christianity in a kind of instrumental way.
00:16:31.400She says, why do I call myself Christian now?
00:16:34.320Western civilization is under threat from three different related forces.
00:16:37.620The resurgence of great power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Putin's Russia.
00:16:43.520The rise of global Islamism, political Islam, which threatens to mobilize a vast population against the West.
00:16:49.480And the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fiber of the next generation.
00:16:53.740She says, we endeavor to fend off these threats with modern secular tools, military, economic, diplomatic, and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease, or surveil.
00:17:03.760And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground.
00:17:08.640We're either running out of money with our national debt in the tens of trillions, or we're losing our lead in the tech race with China.
00:17:16.280We can't fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question, what is it that unites us?
00:17:23.740The response that God is dead, which Nietzsche gives, is insufficient.
00:17:27.300So, too, does the attempt to find solace in the rules-based international liberal order, which is just a bunch of gobbledygook words that have not done very much for us recently.
00:17:36.440The only credible answer, says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:17:44.320That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.
00:17:48.880Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity.
00:17:50.880I discover a little more at church each Sunday, but I have recognized in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.
00:18:03.340And so there are going to be Christians who criticize Ali and say, well, in the same way that I just criticized Raphael Warnock, you shouldn't just use Christianity as some instrument toward a political end.
00:18:15.800But whereas for Raphael Warnock, that appears to be the end of his faith journey.
00:18:23.540Well, for Raphael Warnock, this is something that he has considered for decades, working as a professional Christian.
00:18:30.400He says, no, this is what Christianity is about, actually recoiling against people whose faith points to something higher than politics.
00:18:36.760For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this is only the beginning.
00:18:39.080And she is admitting this here in the column.
00:19:17.960We live in a very modern liberal individualist age.
00:19:21.020And modern, certainly a number of strains of modern Protestantism, not all, but a number of them, are highly individualistic and highly emotivist.
00:19:33.460And they'll say, well, you just need to be feeling certain things individually.
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00:22:47.540Speaking of civilization breaking down, Secret Service agents just had to fire on a criminal while they were protecting Naomi Biden.
00:22:57.780Naomi Biden is one of Joe Biden's grandkids.
00:23:01.220Secret Service is protecting Naomi Biden.
00:23:02.960I believe she was living at the White House for a while.
00:23:28.720The Secret Service didn't hit the guys, and they still haven't caught them, at least according to news reports.
00:23:33.460This is a family member of the sitting president of the United States out in Georgetown, which is supposed to be the nicest neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
00:23:46.460It's supposed to be basically inaccessible by public transportation because they wanted to keep the riffraff out.
00:23:51.240Looks like the riffraff got in there, and they're trying to carjack the Secret Service.
00:23:55.220So much so that the Secret Service have to shoot at them, and the Secret Service can't even hit them, and they get away.
00:26:00.680Isn't there a level of competence that ought to be required of our politicians to say, no, go arrest the burglars, go arrest the carjackers?
00:26:13.660And we paper over that incompetence with ideological distinctions where you have someone like Rashida Tlaib who says,
00:26:19.520we need to abolish all prisons and let all the criminals off the hook, and it's society's fault or whatever.
00:26:23.820But I think there's just a basic incompetence here.
00:26:27.200You know, being mayor, being a prosecutor, being chief of police, it's a job.
00:26:34.140And some people are good at their jobs, and some people are bad at their jobs.
00:26:36.580There are basic requirements of the job.
00:26:38.980And our politicians not only fall into all sorts of ideological confusion, they also just can't do their jobs.
00:26:46.420And when you have a breakdown in competence, your civil order is going to break down really, really quickly.
00:26:50.940Speaking of politicians, Nikki Haley is in hot water right now because she has suggested a new form of social media reform that would get rid of the anonymous accounts online.
00:27:11.980When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms.
00:27:21.320Let us see why they're pushing what they're pushing.
00:27:23.720The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name.
00:27:29.500That's, first of all, it's a national security threat.
00:27:31.840When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say, and it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots.
00:27:39.400And then you're going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say.
00:27:53.040The first part about making the tech companies show the algorithm so that we can make sure that they're not suppressing conservatives or shadow banning conservatives.
00:28:04.540But that great idea is why the second idea is so confusing.
00:28:09.840Because if you're acknowledging that tech companies are pulling all sorts of shenanigans, especially against conservatives, then why would you want to de-anonymize those very same persecuted conservatives?
00:28:25.320I understand the argument in the abstract.
00:28:27.480Everyone's piling on Nikki right now and saying it's a terrible idea to force people to stand by their words.
00:28:33.060In principle, I don't think that's a terrible idea.
00:28:37.240I think that's actually a very good idea to hold people to certain standards and make them stand by their words.
00:28:42.920If the government were not persecuting normal people for being normal, that's the problem.
00:28:48.620The fact that we're acknowledging that the government and the private corporations doing the bidding of the government but without the accountability, often at the direct behest of the government, as we saw uncovered in all those files from Facebook and Twitter, where the FBI and other government organizations are going in to the big tech companies and saying, hey, ban that guy.
00:29:10.940So if we know that, if we know that people are being persecuted by the government, not for committing crimes, not for being extremists, but for being normal, then by de-anonymizing the people, you're just making them sitting ducks for a predatory political order.
00:29:27.880There is a long-standing history of anonymous political discourse in America.
00:29:32.760It goes all the way back to the Federalist Papers.
00:29:35.440Publius was the pseudonym of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay writing the Federalists defending the Constitution.
00:29:48.400So it's a problem with the Haley campaign because I think some of the criticism of her is undeserved here.
00:29:56.100There would be something good about making people stand up for what they believe in and holding people accountable for their words if it were 20 years ago.
00:30:09.400If the government were not going into Catholic churches and spying on the supposedly dangerous, extremist, traditionalist Catholics going to mass.
00:30:21.140If the government were not arresting pro-life activists just for standing and peacefully protesting outside of abortion clinics, infanticide mills.
00:30:31.200If the DOJ were not comparing parents who don't want their kids to be taught weird sex stuff in school to terrorists.
00:30:38.220If we weren't living in that world, yeah, okay, we don't need anonymous accounts.
00:33:31.340Tim Scott ran a smart runner-up campaign in that he didn't destroy his future political prospects in a way that DeSantis, by going up against Donald Trump so directly, may have seriously hampered his future political prospects.
00:33:50.760Nikki Haley, by supporting Trump and then opposing Trump and then supporting Trump again, saying, I'm not going to run for president if Trump runs, and then running against Trump, she's probably hurt her future political prospects.
00:34:02.140I'm not saying it's totally dead for either of them.
00:34:04.360But if they lose this race, I don't know that they're going to come out better for it.
00:37:11.860Even if your stupid, fear-mongering were plausible, we know he won't do that because, and this is, I think, the real advantage Trump has in this weird sort of re-election campaign.
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00:43:56.740Because it's just the same, you're like robots.
00:43:58.720You know, it's the same nonsense over and over again.
00:44:00.860But this time you look even more ridiculous because you've either proven yourselves to be hypocrites and proven yourselves to be unserious, or you've proven your warnings to be specious and ridiculous.
00:44:15.340Which is why, by the way, you are now seeing the field winnow in the race, and you're seeing the endorsements begin to coalesce around Trump.
00:44:28.100Whether you like Trump, whether you hate Trump, there's a reason why in Florida a number of people who had previously endorsed DeSantis are now endorsing Trump.
00:44:34.720Certain people who had been on the fence are still endorsing people like DeSantis, potentially like Haley.
00:44:42.480That was a big one in Iowa, the governor of Iowa.
00:44:45.700But generally, the movement seems to be for endorsements into the Trump camp.
00:44:49.460Because even if the people endorsing Trump right now don't even like Trump that much, even if they had previously endorsed Ron DeSantis and they ran against Trump, they realize that it just looks like the guy is going to be the nominee and they're going to get on the winning team.
00:45:02.360This is including the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.
00:45:06.180As far as I know, you have not endorsed the former president yet for 2024.
00:45:11.100And this is, everybody's watching this show right now.
00:45:13.860If you're going to do that, this would be a great time to do it, Mr. Speaker.
00:45:28.060Those first two years, as you all know, we brought about the greatest economic numbers in the history of the world, not just the country, because his policies worked.
00:46:02.760Speaker of the House is a big endorsement.
00:46:04.240And there are a lot of other people who are endorsing, I think, in a less sincere way, but simply because they see that the writing is on the wall.
00:46:13.580And in part, this is because Trump made a bet.
00:46:15.780The bet was, I think the nomination is locked up.
00:46:18.480I'm not even going to show up to the debates.
00:46:27.460That's what Haley and DeSantis and the other Republicans argued.
00:46:31.520And it just doesn't seem to have worked.
00:46:33.480So with the writing on the wall, you can expect more endorsements.
00:46:37.480And you can expect a more concerted strategy from the Democrats to call Trump-Hitler even more loudly and with even more of a serious face on it.
00:46:47.740And you can expect more celebrities to threaten to leave the country, and you can expect more liberals to sacrifice their children and their property to nature gods.
00:46:56.340And you can just expect more of the same that we've seen for years and, frankly, even millennia.