Ep. 164 - The Real Trump-Kim Summit
Summary
After months of high-stakes negotiations, the Trump-Kim summit is finally back on. That's right, Kim Kardashian is coming to the White House. We'll analyze the political and philosophical ramifications of the Kim summit. Then Allie Stuckey will stop by to give me advice on love, sex, marriage, and children. And then we'll have the mailbag.
Transcript
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After months of high-stakes negotiations, the Trump-Kim summit is finally back on.
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That's right. Kim Kardashian is coming to the White House.
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She's going to be talking about criminal justice reform.
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I know that's the Kim summit you've all been waiting for.
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We will analyze the political and philosophical ramifications of the Kim summit.
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There's actually a lot to see here and a lot of new directions for the administration.
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Then Allie Stuckey will stop by to give me advice on love and sex and marriage and children, at least three of those four.
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We will get to her, and we'll talk about other things as well.
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And then we will have the mailbag, because I'm going away on my honeymoon for a week, and I want to be able to talk to you.
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You people, you people whom I love so much, I want to be able to talk to you before I go away.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Before we get to the Kim summit, before we get to the Kim Kardashian summit, I guess we still have to talk about Roseanne, right?
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Roseanne has been trending on Twitter for the last 48 hours, just consecutively.
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You know, she's actually been pretty gracious about all this.
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But the thing I really don't want us to lose sight of, while everybody is criticizing Roseanne, is that Valerie Jarrett is a terrible person.
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Conservatives fall into this trap where we really don't want Democrats to call us racists.
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She was the top personal aide to Barack Obama for his entire presidency and, really, before the presidency.
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She goes back in Chicago a long ways with Barack and Michelle.
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The Obama White House, these are people who work for Barack Obama, referred to her as the night stalker, she who must not be challenged.
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She would follow the Obamas into the private residence at night and keep talking to them.
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Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's chief of staff, regularly referred to Valerie Jarrett alternately as Uday and Kusei Hussein.
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She had a staff of three dozen, and she did everything from decide who goes to state dinners to what gifts should be given to foreign heads of state.
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She might have been behind the idea of Obama giving Queen Elizabeth an iPod full of his own speeches.
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But she also was in charge of advising on who should be nominated to the Supreme Court, advising on who should be appointed as certain ambassadors.
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She was considered effectively the chief of staff.
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That's why she butted heads with all of Obama's chiefs of staff.
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It was her idea to appoint Van Jones, 9-11 truther Van Jones, to a czar position at the White House.
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She got Barack Obama to give a speech at Solyndra headquarters.
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She helped crush American business when she was the White House liaison to the business community.
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Obviously, the Obama White House was terrible on business.
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When Valerie Jarrett comes from Chicago, she is a crony, corrupt Chicago politician on the order of Barack Obama, but only more so.
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So when she was in Chicago, she was the CEO of this crony Democrat Chicago real estate firm called The Habitat Company.
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When she was CEO of The Habitat Company, Valerie Jarrett built some of the worst public housing slums in the entire country.
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Many of those required federal intervention to fix.
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In 2011, Valerie Jarrett disrespected a four-star general because she was in an event with him and she ordered a drink from him.
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She wanted him to – she thought that he was a waiter or something like that.
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I'm going to keep going on because there's a lot more to say about Valerie Jarrett.
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That is candidco.com slash cofefe, C-O-V-F-E-F-E.
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Because now conservatives are defending Valerie Jarrett like a bunch of dum-dums.
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So she was practically a slumlord when she was the head of that company,
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She demanded a full security detail when she was in the White House,
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even though it wasn't quite clear what her job was,
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other than just being a powerful person behind the scenes,
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A lot of Obama aides said it was for simple prestige.
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She's got longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,
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spoken as a keynote at Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization at national events.
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So many of her family were anti-American, radical communists,
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Her family members were under FBI surveillance for that reason.
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A lot of conservatives are saying right now that we have to disavow Roseanne.
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We have to say Roseanne is a neo-Nazi and she's terrible and I hate her and her no-good stinking dog, too.
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And this is the worst illogic of conservatives.
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But who cares if a Democrat calls you a racist?
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You know why I don't care when Democrats call me a racist?
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Because I don't despise people because of their race.
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I don't want to discriminate against people because of their race.
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A key to a happy life is not caring what your political opponents say.
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They can slap me on the back and call me Charlie for all I care.
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I would much rather be called a racist than a Democrat, by the way.
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I mean, that is one of the worst epithets you can call somebody is Democrat.
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They're going to call you all manner of evil things, regardless of what you do.
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Don't, you know, discriminate against people because of their race.
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We thought those, we thought these peace talks had all broken down.
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But no, the Supreme Leader, Kim Kardashian, is coming to the White House.
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That cultural dictator, Kim Kardashian, is going to make it to the White House.
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I am obviously, you might have thought I was talking about the little fat guy in Korea.
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We are talking about another global scourge, Kim Kardashian.
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For comment right now, we turn to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
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I'm so lonely, so lonely, so lonely and sadly alone.
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There's no one, just me only, sitting on my little throne.
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We're going to get into what this Kim Kardashian talk means.
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Plus, we'll have some mailbag and talking to Ali Stuckey.
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Because this Kim Kardashian talk actually really does matter.
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And we should pay attention because it's not just a little sideshow.
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It is an important piece of policy that's going on right now.
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Before all of that, I've got to tell you about Dynatrap.
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But, okay, so we're running low on time here, but I'm going to fly through these.
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Kim Kardashian, what's she going to the White House to talk about?
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She's going there to meet with Jared Kushner about prison reform, criminal justice reform.
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This is something, this is one of these issues that lefties are pushing and conservatives who
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want to seem like cool guys and get approval from the left, they are pretending is important
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What it really means is letting criminals out of prison.
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When you hear criminal justice reform, usually what you're hearing is let's let bad guys
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So anyway, Kim Kardashian wants to go and talk to Kushner about this.
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Part of the reason that Kushner really cares about this issue is that Jared Kushner's father
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went to prison for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, witness tampering when Kushner
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And so now he wants to get Republicans to back letting criminals out of prison.
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So Kushner is pushing this bill called the first step act, the first step act.
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It illustrates a total misunderstanding of this issue, but we can explain why that is.
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He says, if we start showing that we can make the prisons more purposeful and more effective
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at lowering the recidivism rate over time, that may help the people who are trying to make
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It just passed the house overwhelmingly 360 to 59.
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This is where Jared Kushner's Democrat card is showing, and I hope Republicans don't fall
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And what they do in DC is they make these acts.
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So it's the formerly incarcerated, re-enter society, transformed safely, transitioning every
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What it does is it gives out good time credits to prison inmates, and it can cut a week per
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year off of their sentence, but it works retroactively.
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So there are going to be people who, when this passes, they'll just get out of jail immediately.
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They also are now proposing a quarter billion dollars in extra spending for educational and
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And Kushner explained the core of this issue, the core of this total misunderstanding by, he
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said, quote, the single biggest thing we want to do is really define what the purpose of
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a prison is, is the purpose to punish, is the purpose to warehouse, or is the purpose
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Yeah, well, all of those things, that's the purpose.
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I know what he wants us to say is that it's just to rehabilitate.
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This gets to a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of prison and of justice.
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There are three kinds of punishment, retributive punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation.
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Those are the three purposes of punishment and of our prison system, to exact retribution
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for crimes that were committed, to deter, and to rehabilitate.
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But now we only ever talk about the latter two, and really just the last one.
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We really only talk about prison as therapy, as though we're sending them to some nice,
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to Turks and Caicos so they can work out their problems.
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Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, as Adam Smith said.
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I talk to a lot of people in this field, in the criminal justice field, criminologists.
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I kid you not, I ask them, what's the purpose of criminal justice?
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And almost uniformly, they say it's sometimes deterrent and to rehabilitate.
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Then I say, okay, well, that's criminal justice, huh?
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Does justice have anything to do with criminal justice?
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They say, oh, I kid you not, I've talked to people who have PhDs in this.
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They say, huh, I've never thought about that before.
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I've never thought that criminal justice maybe should have anything to do with justice.
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We're missing this now because our ability to discuss questions about virtue and morality
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and the moral order and the metaphysical world is so, so weakened.
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It's become so degraded and it's decayed so much that we don't even know that that's a possibility.
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There's another large push now on so-called criminal justice reform to treat 21-year-old criminals as though they are children.
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I mean, now we have 30-year-olds living with their parents and refusing to be evicted.
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So I suppose maybe that's the, maybe it should be 30-year-olds next.
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This is why we don't punish people anymore is because we're trying to defer moral responsibility.
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Or finally, which is what we've gotten to, my brain made me do it.
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Just my brain, the random physical material synapses in my brain just made me commit the crime.
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If materialism is true, then you certainly shouldn't punish anybody for a crime.
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So this is the morally idiotic and practically idiotic aspect of so-called criminal justice reform.
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You know, now we're referring, we don't call people juvenile delinquents anymore.
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which is ironic because they're explicitly injustice-involved youth.
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But listen, if we quibbled about every word, we'd be here for my entire honeymoon.
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People say, we have too many people in prison in America.
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Then I think we have too few people in prison in America, don't we?
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There was that famous headline in the New York Times.
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It was something to the effect of, the crime rate continues to fall despite prison's filling.
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So you're locking up all of the criminals and the crime rate is falling.
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That's probably the word I would use to describe it.
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Tom Cotton has basically exactly the view that I have.
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We don't have an overpopulation problem in prison.
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We need to lock up more criminals and we need to stop pretending that people don't have any moral culpability whatsoever.
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Let's get to the mailbag in the remaining few minutes.
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I'm going to have to ask the control room how many more minutes I have to get through these mailbag questions.
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Dear soon to be shackled Michael Knowles, will the Daily Wire be live streaming the blessed day?
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You know, we were going to live stream the blessed night, but I got such a negative reaction to my Valentine's Day promotion video with the short little smoking jacket and my dainty little legs that I didn't want to subject myself to that sort of insulting criticism again.
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So no, we won't be live streaming the day or the night.
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What do you think makes Dante's Divine Comedy stand out among the other classics of the Western canon as a work of singular genius?
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What would you say are its most fundamental themes and what are the most important lessons we take away from reading Dante?
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Since you've quoted Dante in both Italian and English, I figured you must have carefully studied the comedy at some point.
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I look forward to hearing your insights on the poem.
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So my basic insights are that it is so shockingly beautiful and it is so unified that this is what strikes me most.
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You don't really catch this in the English, but he employs a scheme called terzo rima.
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These rhymes of three that just very quickly, the beginning of the poem, it sounds, just listen to the sounds if you don't speak Italian, just hear.
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Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la dritta vi era smarita, hai quanto a dir quale era e cosa dura, esta selva selvaggia aspre forte, che nel pensia rinnova la paura.
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You can hear those rhymes in those sets of three.
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So it's very beautiful and that goes on for a hundred conti and also it's all unified.
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So instead of giving you my thoughts on this, I asked a close friend of mine, Catherine Illingworth, who is a Dante scholar and coincidentally was a TA of mine in college.
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And I asked her for her thoughts because she's a real expert on this and she said exactly what I think in much better words.
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You go from the depths of evil to the heights of holiness and it touches on all things, seen and unseen, of the human condition.
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Dante has drunk up and read and consumed all of the art and culture and literature of his time and then he creates something original out of it because he's totally absorbed it and turns it into something new and because it's so beautiful.
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The most fundamental themes are that human love is rooted in God.
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All of it, all of human love, the erotic love, fraternal love, love of your friends, love of the divine love, all of that love from whatever you were doing on Saturday night to whatever you were doing Sunday afternoon, all of that is rooted in God.
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You see Beatrice, a girl that wasn't Dante's wife, leads him to salvation because he's following her through to salvation, to God.
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There's the unity of the private and the public.
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So the idea here is that the world will be orderly when people are virtuous.
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It won't just become peaceful and orderly if you have vicious people or bad people.
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There's a unity here of what you do in your private life and what you do in your public life.
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Sometimes in politics and other works, we try to divorce those things.
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And there's the relationship between love and knowledge here.
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So for Dante, one leads to the other, and together they both lead to salvation, to a total transformation, not following a set of rules to being utterly transformed by divine love.
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You have to read a lot of books just like Dante did so that you can absorb all of that, and it can really save your civilization and save your soul.
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This is an utterly graceful poem, and you should accept grace because it's the only goodness.
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It doesn't matter how lost you are when you begin that journey, what age you begin that journey at.
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You see people in paradise who weren't always such great people.
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St. John Vianney said, not all the saints started well, but they all ended well, as you see that.
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Love is always good, but you shouldn't just settle for a little piece of it, just a little fragment of love.
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You should follow it to its logical conclusion.
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Beatrice, Dante finds this girl when he's a little kid.
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He falls in love with her, marries another woman.
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And he follows Beatrice, not to just devour Beatrice, to make an idol of his love for Beatrice,
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but to follow that love and allow that love to be ennobling and lift him toward the very heights of heaven,
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to the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
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We could talk about Dante forever and ever, especially when I'm hearing all these good thoughts from Catherine Illingworth.
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Before we get to the next question, I've got to talk about another cool story.
00:23:35.520
This is a good narrative story, an ennobling story.
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And this one's fun, and you can listen to it in your car.
00:23:41.020
I'm really excited to tell you about a cool new show called This Sounds Serious, a new cast box creation.
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It tells a fictional murder story that involves twins, cults, and a Florida weatherman.
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If you are a fan of true crime shows and comedy, you will love this show.
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You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:00.420
I really like this because I don't like things that take themselves too seriously.
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But I really like this because it's so self-aware and very funny about it.
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This Sounds Serious, The Case of Daniel Bronstad.
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If you love narrative podcasts, obviously I do.
00:24:24.140
But if you're tired of all those serious storylines, check this out.
00:24:27.460
It pokes fun at the mystery and crime categories in a unique way.
00:24:30.540
You should download This Sounds Serious today wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:50.180
This Sounds Serious is a CastBox original written by the people behind Maximum Fun Stop Podcasting Yourself.
00:24:57.500
CBC's This Is That and Panoply's Dexter Guff Is Smarter Than You.
00:25:01.640
stars Peter Oldring, Dexter Guff Is Smarter Than You, and Carly Pope from Aerosuits and Elysium.
00:25:08.560
Each episode is about 25 minutes long, perfect for a commute or a road trip.
00:25:20.080
Okay, I've got only four minutes before we can get to my conversation with Allie.
00:25:27.920
She gives me pretty mind-blowing advice on marriage, whether or not I should run away right now.
00:25:33.260
I could still leave a Michael-shaped hole in the wall somewhere, but let's try to get one or two more questions in.
00:25:42.660
a trend among liberal hit job interviews is to barrage conservative interviewees with a host of questions
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that are designed to misrepresent the views of the person being interviewed
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and put the onus on them to debunk an argument that they never make.
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He cites the example of Jordan Peterson who does.
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Jordan Peterson answers that British interviewer perfectly, reasonably,
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and then she twists it and tries to make him look like a monster.
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Is it interviewing etiquette for the person who's being interviewed not to call the interviewer out for nefarious tactics?
00:26:10.960
Or would it be smarter to hold interviewers to their own standards
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before allowing the conversation just to skip to the next point
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without forcing the interviewer to concede both the tactic and the point?
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So what they do, what the left does and the mainstream media do,
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Then any answer you give, it's not going to look very good for you.
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So the way to do this now is to be a bulldog with these people.
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I mean, be an absolute, call them out on everything.
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I've had many reporters call from Fox or the New York Times or whatever.
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And I'm not, I'm cordial to them, but I'm not nice.
00:26:58.180
And I don't, you know, I'm pretty open with my feelings about what they do,
00:27:01.780
what kind of broadly speaking, what hit jobs they do.
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Another way for conservatives to do this is not to agree to pre-taped interviews
00:27:11.640
They always mix them up and make us look like racist, mean-spirited, evil people.
00:27:17.620
If you're going to agree to one, make sure there's a live component to it
00:27:21.120
or make sure that you're filming them filming you.
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That's a real key because otherwise they're going to make you look awful.
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Dear Rachel Maddow's estranged brother, does Ben pay you in shekels or cold?
00:27:39.600
but I like to think of that more as a future diamond.
00:27:42.300
I think that that's really, you know, Ben wanted to get me like a nice big diamond ring
00:27:45.900
or something, and, you know, I will say he just sent me a wedding present
00:27:51.240
He really did get me a blender, and I don't know why.
00:27:53.300
I don't know why when Ben thinks of me and my future,
00:27:55.720
he just thinks of very sharp blades spinning around very fast,
00:28:07.240
Dear patron saint of smug Catholics everywhere,
00:28:10.100
I've been hearing a lot recently about how the American Constitution
00:28:19.280
P.S. Any tips on getting started with cigars would be appreciated.
00:28:23.440
That would be the first step to getting started with cigars.
00:28:26.320
Cutting them is good, too, but lighting is probably the most important one.
00:28:30.420
As to the question about the Protestant foundations of America and the Constitution,
00:28:36.260
Good old Papa Knowles who came over on the Mayflower,
00:28:42.680
I mean, they would be shocked and horrified by the flagrant potpourri of their progeny.
00:28:47.660
So there is an aspect of this, and it manifests in a few ways.
00:28:51.700
That rugged individualism, that distaste for many institutions,
00:28:55.920
I will concede that has some Protestant foundations.
00:28:59.080
I will point out, though, that America, the Americas, have a Catholic foundation.
00:29:07.340
It was Christopher Columbus, a devout, wonderful, serious, devout, charitable, wonderful, brilliant,
00:29:15.480
fabulous, terrific Catholic man, Christopher Columbus.
00:29:21.800
I think it's totally ridiculous to say that Catholics don't have the pioneer spirit
00:29:26.000
or want to go and spread the word of God and glory and freedom to every end of the earth.
00:29:32.720
So, yes, you can concede that there's a largely Protestant foundation in the United States.
00:29:37.240
But, you know, this, the Americas baby, that was the first one.
00:29:44.720
Okay, it's too bad because we've got some great questions to delve into.
00:29:54.580
I will point out, just before we go, one person who wrote in said,
00:29:57.680
Hey, Michael, I just got my Helix Sleep mattress and Bowling Branch sheets in the mail today.
00:30:01.120
It's quite possibly the greatest combination in the history of the world.
00:30:04.080
Thank you for the mountains of Covfefe and Leftist Tears that I take straight to the dome daily.
00:30:09.180
I wanted to get that little sponsor plug in there because I sleep on them and they are fabulous.
00:30:17.620
That's enough for today for everybody who's on Facebook and YouTube.
00:30:24.400
You help me guzzle down delicious Leftist Tears and I am mainlining them before my wedding.
00:30:31.120
You get me, the Andrew Clevenger, the Ben Shapiro show, questions in the mailbag, blah, blah, blah.
00:30:37.380
You are going to need it in my absence because I'm going to be there.
00:30:39.460
I'm going to have an ocean of mostly magma and lava in Hawaii.
00:30:43.140
But what you can do is try not to drown in the leftist tears.
00:30:46.800
I'm going to avoid big magma boulders and you can try not to drown in leftist tears.
00:30:51.780
We'll be right back with my interview with Allie Stuckey.
00:31:14.640
So we talked about the really important things because after this, folks, the next time you see me, I'm going to be about 50 pounds heavier, probably sweatier, unshaven, you know, pushing a lawnmower in the suburbs somewhere, 10 kids around me.
00:31:30.040
I got a little advice from Allie Stuckey on that and many other topics.
00:31:42.420
Allie has a flight in about 17 hours, so you have to leave for LAX right now.
00:31:53.980
I just, I'm worried and I don't know LAX and so I just have to make sure that I get there on time.
00:32:01.020
This is a, I know you're in town to do a Prager video.
00:32:05.000
Part of it talks about sexual differences between men and women.
00:32:10.080
This is a sexual difference between men and women.
00:32:13.540
Yeah, I go, I was going back to New York for Christmas.
00:32:28.960
The pre-check is the greatest invention in the history of the world.
00:32:31.400
But you just never know and I feel like people in California are just kind of crazy.
00:32:37.160
It is also, they're the worst drivers in the country.
00:32:42.600
We'll be flying, you know, domestically and she'll say, you know, Mac, we need to leave
00:32:51.760
I'm sure that your fiance doesn't sound like that.
00:32:53.940
Wait, you mean it's horrible like it isn't accurate?
00:32:55.580
No, I don't know how she sounds, but I hope she doesn't sound like an 85-year-old hag.
00:32:58.960
How dare you call my fiance an 85-year-old hag?
00:33:04.880
You might want to nail the impersonation before you leave for the honeymoon.
00:33:07.940
Sweet little Elisa got very upset because I did this podcast with Drew, Another Kingdom,
00:33:12.620
where I played all the characters in Drew's New Book.
00:33:17.780
So I told sweet little Elisa, I said, your voice, and by your voice, I mean the voice
00:33:22.700
that I have created for you, it plays a role in one of the characters.
00:33:26.100
She goes, oh, is it that pretty character, Jane?
00:33:38.160
We're going to get up there and then I'm just going to do the vows for her.
00:33:46.000
She has a long life of suffering ahead of her, but it'll be nice for me.
00:33:49.380
Well, she knows what she's getting herself into.
00:33:51.960
Now, on the topic of marriage, you're a big marriage proponent.
00:33:59.420
Yeah, well, I'm trying to get advice from all corners here before I make this major life
00:34:03.480
Well, you've already made the decision, my friend, so you should stick to it.
00:34:09.860
Best, second best decision I've ever made after following Christ.
00:34:17.940
Everyone's like, oh, you get to marry your best friend.
00:34:21.200
I mean, what could be better than going home and being like, I get to hang out with the
00:34:25.540
person that I always want to be with all the time, the only person that I really want
00:34:28.820
to talk to, the only person that I really want to spend time with and watch Netflix
00:34:36.820
But I do have to ask, because I hear this, and I only hear this from girls, the marry
00:34:49.140
Now, I love my other friends, but he is my best friend.
00:34:52.220
He's the person that I want to spend time with all the time.
00:34:54.800
Don't you think there's a categorical difference?
00:34:56.520
Like, when I think of my best friend, I think of, you know, going out and smoking cigars
00:35:00.940
and, you know, carousing and, I don't know, doing whatever guys do, you know?
00:35:07.380
I think of my best friend as someone who I can be my most genuine self with all of the
00:35:15.600
But, you know, you have a different mentality about that.
00:35:19.060
I mean, practically speaking, your wife will be your best friend.
00:35:29.200
You know, when I just think of that, though, it's like...
00:35:37.240
There's a new comment out by an AI computer scientist, the guy who invented that robot
00:35:43.600
that looks a lot like a woman, you know, and it's like really uncanny and scary.
00:35:57.480
He says that we will be marrying robots by 2045.
00:36:17.080
Do you see the culture moving in that direction?
00:36:21.400
Do you think there will be a time when we're marrying artificial intelligence robots?
00:36:29.280
I mean, we've already devalued and cheapened marriage so much to the point to where it's
00:36:35.100
This transaction where you do it for a little bit if it works out.
00:36:40.340
If you want to break it, you can get out of it.
00:36:42.660
We've already devalued it and cheapened it so much that I have a hard time believing
00:36:47.200
that humans have some kind of moral limit that we won't get to the point of objectifying
00:36:53.920
or cheapening marriage that much to where we're marrying artificial intelligence.
00:36:59.580
I would love to think that deep in the human heart, something's just going to wake up and
00:37:04.880
But I will tell you that if the robots are anything like they are in Westworld, it will
00:37:09.480
be very, very difficult to actually distinguish.
00:37:13.000
Because, okay, this is another gender difference.
00:37:17.740
My only experience of Westworld is the star of Westworld, the blonde girl.
00:37:23.340
Evan Rachel Wood started a Twitter fight with me.
00:37:31.440
She was being very mean and I was being very respectful.
00:37:34.020
And then at the end, she said something else mean and then she blocked me.
00:37:46.720
It's interesting with Westworld and I'll try to tie it back into what we were actually
00:37:50.620
So season one, you know that all the artificial intelligence that they're robots, all the
00:37:55.520
guys in my life, all the people that I know that watch Westworld, we all love season
00:38:04.220
No guy that I know that watched season one likes season two.
00:38:07.160
And I think the reason is because they start to blur the lines between the robots and the
00:38:11.620
humans to where you don't know anymore if who's a robot and who's not.
00:38:15.220
I don't mind that because to me, I have a soft spot for the robots.
00:38:20.600
But all the guys in my life, they're like, what the heck?
00:38:28.260
And I wonder if that mentality will be true to when, if that'll be true when artificial
00:38:33.840
intelligence starts infiltrating our lives, if there will be a different perception between
00:38:39.900
That, yeah, I wonder about that because women are just nicer and more pleasant and more nurturing
00:38:45.160
And men, yeah, they're a little colder, you know, they're not as nurturing toward babies
00:38:50.760
So you don't really sentimentalize a robot or something like that.
00:38:54.400
Yeah, I mean, we've already got so much of them in our, in our homes, you know, the government
00:39:03.780
I am like, if Alexa has rights in the, in 2045, I'm getting booked and going to jail.
00:39:11.680
Before I let you go, I want to talk about work.
00:39:15.540
I want to talk, you know, there's marriage and there's work.
00:39:18.520
That's how you say, marriage is work, they say.
00:39:21.600
The, there is a new study out that the number one cause of long-term poverty in America
00:39:33.600
I didn't want to do that to you just before you're about to get on a flight.
00:39:39.580
So the statistics that are being cited here, 82% of people on food stamps are able-bodied
00:39:47.320
38, I think it's 32% of them, 32 or 38 are working at all.
00:39:53.400
Not full-time, just part-time, a couple hours here and there at all.
00:39:57.420
The vast majority of them are not working one little bit.
00:40:04.260
How do we, how do we, you know, because we have this very sentimental view of it.
00:40:08.980
We say, oh, these poor people, we need to spend more money from the government, more food stamps,
00:40:14.900
But why, why would they work when they probably make more money off of the government?
00:40:19.200
They'd probably lose some money by getting a job.
00:40:21.380
When I spoke at UC Berkeley, we had someone that drove four hours to come hear our little
00:40:27.280
panel and he was telling me his story afterwards, how he used to be homeless and now he has
00:40:31.780
a job and he has a lot of friends who are still homeless, who don't understand why he
00:40:36.240
transitioned from homelessness to having a job, just because it's so much harder having
00:40:41.420
I make less money than I did when I was homeless.
00:40:45.440
And so I, I think it's abuse of the welfare system.
00:40:49.140
It really is more lucrative to not have a job these days than to, than to have one.
00:40:54.920
Sometimes it depends on what kind of job you can get, I guess.
00:40:57.280
I remember John Stossel did one of these, you know, sting things and he went out and
00:41:04.740
And then he annualized his income and tried to figure out how much he could make.
00:41:08.440
And it was something like 90 grand a year tax free or something.
00:41:14.020
So that's why I think like when Ben Carson has said this and he's gotten, you know,
00:41:18.140
he's gotten so much flack for it that a lot of times poverty is a mentality, not in
00:41:22.220
all cases, certainly not in all cases, but a lot of times it is.
00:41:25.260
And I honestly don't know how you shake someone out of that.
00:41:32.420
I mean, people, you know, in, in economies, people fall on hard times for a period of time,
00:41:37.800
but long-term poverty certainly is a, is a choice.
00:41:41.140
You know, um, do you saw the story about the millennial, the 30 year old kid, the 30,
00:41:52.660
He has his own son is, is living in his parents' house.
00:41:55.760
They beg him to leave or get a job or do anything.
00:42:01.560
They finally have to take him to court to do it.
00:42:05.480
You know, the millennials are the, I mean, millennials, part of your Christian name, I believe.
00:42:18.580
But I don't know if it's the fact that he is a millennial and he's like really kind of on the edge of millennials.
00:42:24.300
Anyway, I think that you have deadbeats in every generation.
00:42:29.120
I do think it's probably a trend in millennials.
00:42:32.820
We don't know the value of a dollar as much as our parents did just because a lot of us didn't have to.
00:42:37.960
Um, but I think it's something like a third of millennials still live at home,
00:42:44.120
I have friends who are now very successful who had to live at home right after college.
00:42:48.240
But it's this perpetual adolescence and this prolonged immaturity that we see among millennials that scares me.
00:42:56.080
Those are the people that are voting for Bernie Sanders.
00:43:01.000
I'm about to go on a three day long bachelor party to be talking about irresponsibility and carousing and things.
00:43:05.600
But, uh, yeah, that, that, that does seem to be certainly the case.
00:43:10.720
I want to ask you before I let you go, because you're an expert on millennials.
00:43:15.680
You're an expert on marriage now having done it.
00:43:19.040
And you, you're also an expert on Christianity.
00:43:22.500
Now, listen, I don't know if I'm an expert, but you talk about it a lot.
00:43:28.120
I'm a practicing Christian and, you know, I'm not going to pull out the squirt gun of Catholic holy water and spray you and try to bring you back home to Mother Church.
00:43:36.540
I've had enough potpourri on the show recently.
00:43:39.420
What I do want to know, though, evangelicals have been getting a lot of flack recently, too.
00:43:43.800
This week has been a rough week for evangelicals.
00:43:47.780
And I want to know specifically, evangelicals are being called hypocrites for supporting Trump.
00:43:53.340
There was that big piece in the Atlantic last month by Michael Gerson, I think, how they sold their soul to support Trump.
00:44:04.740
Because, you know, listen, I'm a Catholic, so we're, we have a little more loosey goosey view on some of these things, you know.
00:44:10.020
Yeah, that's a, that's a good way to describe Catholic, loosey goosey.
00:44:14.140
Do you, what is your take on that, on the hypocrisy, the alleged hypocrisy of evangelicals who support Donald Trump?
00:44:20.260
It's only hypocritical if you're saying simultaneously, oh, actually having sex with a porn star while you're married is totally fine.
00:44:27.860
And over here saying adultery is wrong, but I don't see, and I'm not saying no evangelicals are doing that,
00:44:32.720
but even Robert Jeffress, who has been quite a mouthpiece for Donald Trump,
00:44:36.220
and I don't agree with everything he has said in favor of Donald Trump,
00:44:39.180
but even he has said, you know, we still stand where we stand morally.
00:44:43.080
We don't think it's okay to have sex with a porn star.
00:44:45.520
We don't think it's okay to cheat on your wife, but he is the most pro-life president that we've ever had.
00:44:50.740
Moving the embassy to Jerusalem is a big deal to them.
00:44:54.320
Even things like deregulation and promoting capitalism is a big deal to Protestants.
00:44:59.600
Protestantism and capitalism really have gone hand in hand since the Protestant Reformation.
00:45:03.120
So we have these values that we feel like Donald Trump is promoting, and I do think it's important that we say,
00:45:09.600
hey, we disagree with a lot of the personal moral choices that he's made, and we can hold him accountable for that.
00:45:15.220
But at the same time, we support him actually advancing our agenda, whereas under Barack Obama,
00:45:20.020
we felt like there was a lot of antipathy towards evangelicals, and so we didn't support him.
00:45:25.020
Do you think there was antipathy because he said that they're all Bible-thumping, gun-clinging ingrates and idiots, basically,
00:45:34.220
and then he painted the White House in rainbow colors just because?
00:45:40.920
And Lois Lerner, maybe just like a little bit of that.
00:45:47.240
I think they more see him, and I don't want to objectify him, but they almost see him as a tool to advance our agenda,
00:45:56.060
and a useful tool to advance our agenda, more than they see him as a Ronald Reagan, some stalwart of Christian values.
00:46:03.460
I think we all know that he's no choir boy, but I think it's important also for evangelical leaders to make that distinction and to say that.
00:46:10.920
And maybe they haven't done a good job of that, but to say it's hypocritical, everyone is hypocritical.
00:46:15.800
Everyone holds personal values that probably differ from any politician.
00:46:20.080
I would hope so that all the people that voted for Hillary Clinton don't think that all the things that she's done in her life are morally okay.
00:46:28.180
No, I don't know. I'm not making any accusations or anything.
00:46:33.300
It's just a way for them, once again, to virtue signal, to say there's no way that you can either be religious or a good person and vote for Donald Trump, and that's just not true.
00:46:52.540
So my podcast is every Wednesday. It's called Relatable. You can find it on iTunes, SoundCloud, all of that. Obviously, on Wednesdays, you have to listen to my show and Michael's show at the same time. You can't replace it.
00:47:12.640
So you can find me there. You can find me on CRTV.com. Sometimes I'm on TV with Michael Knowles.
00:47:20.580
So, yeah, all over the place. Social media, you can find me there, too.
00:47:30.020
I wish I could change my handle, but I can't. But you can just look up Allie Stuckey. I think I'm there.
00:47:41.280
Really good advice. ConserveMillen. That is so... I want one. I want a cool millennial nickname.
00:47:47.680
Like CofefMillen. Like all the millennial... You know, all the millennial companies are like...
00:47:53.640
There are two words smashed together and random capitalization and all that. That's what I want.
00:47:58.900
So while I'm on honeymoon, please figure that out for me because I already spent all the blank book
00:48:03.660
money. I need something else to pay for this honeymoon. It's very nice to be able to say goodbye
00:48:08.780
to you guys for the next week. I'll be gone if I don't get swallowed up by sharks or lava or magma.
00:48:14.160
I will see you again soon next time as a much fatter, more suburban married man,
00:48:21.800
hopefully with lots of children by then. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
00:48:24.760
This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you in a week.
00:48:44.160
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.