Sen. John Fetterman has become increasingly right wing, and the Vatican says it's not going to bless same-sex unions in Africa. Plus, Lil Nas X announces he's about to become a Christian. All that and more on today's episode of The Michael Knowles Show.
00:09:40.460A lot of them do, but they shouldn't be.
00:09:43.380It's not just bad because this woman is in a position of power.
00:09:48.160And so there's a big power imbalance here.
00:09:50.720It's not just bad because parents should be able to send their kids to school without worrying about their kids being molested by teachers.
00:09:59.800It's not just bad because that woman is divorced.
00:10:03.100So it creates all sorts of, plants all new seeds of scandal in kids' minds about that, about what marriage is, about what sex is.
00:10:13.100It's not just bad because he could have gotten her pregnant.
00:10:36.880If it feels good, then you should do it.
00:10:39.380Now, if that's our moral maxim, why should this kid not be allowed to sleep with his teacher, especially if she's kind of young and hot and willing?
00:10:49.980Well, you might say, because he's a minor.
00:11:02.400Because I was told that an 8-year-old can consent to sexual mutilations and puberty blockers and hormones that will forever change his biochemistry and weaken his bones and sterilize him or her and probably lead to early death.
00:11:16.040So, hold on, an 8-year-old can consent to that kind of permanent radical sexual action, but a 16-year-old can't have a fling with his young teacher?
00:11:56.460This is what the millstone verse of the Bible is about.
00:12:00.100Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, the famous millstone verse.
00:12:04.880It's not about physically harming children.
00:12:07.200It's about creating scandal and leading people away from God.
00:12:11.180If we all know that there's something a little bit wrong with this, the weirdest part of the story is that apparently the kid's father knew, and the kid's father allowed it to happen.
00:12:22.600So then the joke is, oh, wow, father of the year.
00:12:25.000I'm going to give him number one dad in town mug for Father's Day.
00:14:47.260The FBI has arrested Arthur Hector Fernandez III and charged the 29-year-old with sexual exploitation of children.
00:14:55.480Fernandez is pictured here on his private Instagram with the username allegedlyhector.
00:15:00.120His account was named in court documents that detailed the disturbing allegations that he and at least six other unidentified men sexually assaulted and raped a toddler at what appeared to be a Galleria ball bathroom.
00:15:13.740Court documents say last month the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation reported four explicit videos found on the dark web to the FBI in which at least two toddlers, ages two and three, were filmed being sexually and verbally assaulted by multiple men at once.
00:15:31.740Relatives of the toddlers told investigators Fernandez was a friend and fellow Galleria employee who offered to watch the kids while they were at work at the mall.
00:15:41.080See, he's right there on the internet, chilling, my home is Houston, rainbow flag, rainbow flag.
00:15:51.540And he commits as heinous a crime as anyone can possibly imagine.
00:15:55.120A lot of people are calling for the death penalty.
00:15:56.960As a matter of justice, I think it would be perfectly right to execute all of these men very swiftly.
00:16:01.700My only holdup on the death penalty for rapists of any sort, even including the most egregious rapists, has nothing to do with them or their right to not be executed.
00:16:14.020It only has to do with a prudential question of if you kill rapists, if the punishment for rape is the death penalty, then there's no incentive for the rapists not to kill their victims.
00:16:26.460So that's my only prudential holdup against it.
00:16:30.180But, you know, if these guys all hanged after being convicted, I would, you know, not lose one second sleep about it.
00:16:35.420In fact, that would feel quite good and would seem quite just.
00:16:39.320The part of this story that no one's talking about is the internet part of it.
00:16:47.720Everyone's talking about the action because that's the heart of the evil here.
00:16:52.320But the more politically significant part, I think, is how these guys were apprehended.
00:16:59.800They put, they filmed pornography and then put it on the internet.
00:17:04.040This guy was a big user of the internet.
00:18:15.540They were producing pornography for other perverts because there is a medium through which they can send this pornography to other perverts.
00:18:23.780Would they have done that if pornography were not so normalized, so difficult to prosecute, declared a matter of free speech by some extreme liberals in recent decades?
00:18:51.100When I report on this, I have to say that these men allegedly raped the toddler, even though there's video footage.
00:18:58.740The men were apprehended because there's video footage, but we still have to say allegedly.
00:19:03.600Well, when there's a video, it makes that word seem kind of ridiculous, doesn't it?
00:19:09.180This isn't even just the far reaches of the dark, hidden internet where you've got to have five separate handshakes to log into it.
00:19:18.240There is a major child sexual exploitation problem on the biggest porn sites in the country.
00:19:23.020We covered it just a few weeks ago on Pornhub and the affiliated websites, which constitute the largest purveyors of pornography on the internet.
00:19:32.660If the only moral maxim that we have is if it feels good, do it, and, you know, a corollary to that is as long as everything is consensual.
00:19:45.440It's not going to be long before you get to these kinds of crimes because people are going to chip away at consent.
00:19:50.280You're already seeing that happen with the trans movement.
00:19:52.300Oh, an eight-year-old can consent to mutilate his genitals.
00:19:54.900Oh, an eight-year-old can consent to go on puberty blockers.
00:19:58.340And people are going to feel good with all sorts of deviant, disgusting, perverted things that should obviously be illegal.
00:20:06.580So if we're recognizing this is a major problem and we're going to move past that, then what do we do?
00:20:12.880What are the other moral maxims that are going to come?
00:20:16.140How are we going to recover a moral order that doesn't tolerate or incentivize this kind of stuff?
00:20:23.120You might look back to, I don't know, our 2,000-year history and the way that morality interacted with our law when we had a civilization that we called Christendom.
00:20:34.620The old Christian morality, which John Adams says, John Adams, who wasn't even particularly religious, said had to be the basis of the American morality.
00:20:45.220But then you're going to start limiting things and proscribing things and outlawing things that, in recent years, a bunch of perverts and freaks have said are natural rights.
00:23:06.100He's still polling at a higher rate than the vast majority of candidates who have been in this race.
00:23:11.560He is a little bit outside the box, so people are trying to make him into the, I don't know, Andrew Yang or some kind of eccentric figure in this race.
00:23:21.400But he's much more intelligent than basically anyone who's run for president in decades.
00:38:40.200If you go to a traditional Latin Mass, which is what I tend to do, you'll want to get a Missal.
00:38:47.060So you can either look it up online, just Latin Mass Missal or Latin Mass Propers, and that'll pull up the translation because presumably you don't speak fluent Latin.
00:39:03.300If there's not one in your area or you want to kind of dip your toe in a little bit first in a more maybe accessible Mass, yeah, just go to any Mass.
00:39:14.920You know, I wouldn't go up for the Holy Communion if you're not in a state of grace and you haven't converted and you haven't had a confession, you know.
00:39:54.080I voted for him in March 2020 when he was running unopposed.
00:39:57.160So if I could snap my fingers and make him president for four more years, I would do it.
00:40:00.680Heck, if I could get 24 more years of President Trump, I would be a happy camper.
00:40:05.420But I'm voting for Vivek Ramaswamy in the primary because I am worried about whether Trump can win.
00:40:10.860Yes, I know he has the support of most Republicans, and I know that he beats Biden in most head-to-head matchups, even when you consider the swing states individually.
00:40:19.480But I have a fear that keeps me up at night, and that fear is one Fannie Willis.
00:40:25.000I'm afraid that in September, when Trump is our nominee and we have too much momentum to choose another, district attorney Willis is going to throw Trump in a prison jumpsuit, and he will lose the support of the most crucial voting demographic, suburban white women.
00:40:37.700I worry that they will think a convict is a bad example for their non-binary sons and that they would rather have four more years of crime, inflation, mass illegal immigration, and flirtation with nuclear war.
00:40:48.380My question is, are my fears based in reality, or do they present no obstacle to voting for Donald Trump, the founder of our Feast of Kevfefe?
00:40:56.300Thank you, as always, for bringing the wisdom of 1390 to 2024.
00:41:03.480I don't want to discourage you from voting for Vivek.
00:41:05.980Like, he's a friend of mine, and I really like the guy, and I think he's had a good candidacy.
00:41:09.560So I'm not discouraging you from doing that at all.
00:41:11.880If you want an argument as to why Trump's indictments are not a reason to boot him off the ballot, one is, you know, if we establish that precedent, then we're just letting the Democrats choose our nominee.
00:41:26.160To me, the fact that they want to send him to St. Helena so badly is actually a mark in his favor.
00:41:32.740It makes me think that they really are afraid of him, that if he does make it to the general, that he really could win, which I think is borne out in the polls, though who knows?
00:41:41.100There could be shenanigans, and the polls are not all that reliable.
00:41:45.380I just also think whoever the nominee is, they're going to throw everything at him.
00:41:52.600So right now, for instance, Nikki Haley says that she beats Biden by 17 points, and maybe she does do better against Biden than Trump does.
00:41:59.060I'm a little skeptical, but maybe she does.
00:42:01.060But she ain't going to beat him by 17 points, I promise you that.
00:42:05.080It's because the Democrats haven't attacked her yet.
00:42:06.800But the minute they start attacking her, and they're not just going to attack her with TV ads.
00:42:09.880I mean, we're now in the litigious phase of American democracy.
00:42:14.060So they're probably going to accuse her of, you know, a coup d'etat or of, you know, pillaging a town or of, you know, high crimes and misdemeanors before she ever gets into office.
00:42:39.340I tend to believe that most Americans, including a lot of Democrats, think that the indictments against Trump are wrong, that it's a political persecution, even if he is convicted.
00:42:53.580What the Democrats believe is that once the evidence is presented and he's actually wearing an orange jumpsuit, that is what's going to rally Americans to say,
00:43:00.300no, this is too much, we can't vote for this guy.
00:43:03.360I kind of think it's the opposite, though.
00:43:04.720I think that the sight of an American president and the most popular candidate in the presidential race right now in an orange jumpsuit is going to so horrify Americans as to the banana republic that we've descended into that it will help his numbers.
00:43:45.300I didn't think we'd sell out four months' supply of Mayflower cigars in 24 hours.
00:43:50.020I thought it was maybe possible, but I didn't, I'm not saying I would have bet on that.
00:43:56.540However, I said, once that happened, I said, look, we're going to get a little bit more stock in, who knows what, 10,000 cigars, 20,000 cigars, not a lot of cigars.
00:44:05.400And, I mean, by industry standards, that is a lot of cigars, but I knew we were selling a lot.
00:44:09.560I said, if you want them, get them now.
00:44:11.820Log in, they're going to be gone in an hour.
00:44:13.460And then, because this is an aged product that I refuse to rush, I said, this could be months.
00:44:20.020So, I'm meeting with our production guy and our distribution guy, some of the biggest guys in the cigar industry.
00:44:27.480I'm meeting with them, I think, next week.
00:44:29.880And we're going to sort everything out.
00:44:32.500But I don't want to give you bad expectations.
00:45:25.520I mean, the guy was obviously connected to intelligence in some way.
00:45:28.900And we know that his business partner and paramour, Ghislaine Maxwell, we know her father was mobbed up, certainly with Israeli intelligence and British intelligence and maybe Russian intelligence.
00:45:57.380It seemed much more likely that he was killed through more elaborate circumstances than we've led to believe than to think that he's still alive.