Ep. 172 - MSM Pleads Guilty To 5 Charges Of Manslaughter
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
185.17708
Summary
As President Trump forces Democrats' hand on the contrived non-travery at the border, which I told you might happen yesterday when this news broke, we'll get into that. Then, the Supreme Court raises our taxes but foreshadows a possible huge victory for American liberty. Finally, the mailbag.
Transcript
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ABC News and Time Magazine go full mainstream media.
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As President Trump forces Democrats' hand on the contrived non-traversy at the border,
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which I told you might happen yesterday when this news broke. We'll get to that.
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Then the Supreme Court raises our taxes, but foreshadows a possible huge victory for American liberty.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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I also want to address something that I put on Twitter yesterday.
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I was citing a Pat Robertson quote about how feminism causes women to kill their children
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and practice witchcraft and become lesbians and all that, and I use that to refer to soccer.
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I have Tory members of Parliament in the UK tweeting about it, all these soccer journalists around the world.
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We will get to that, because it really brought up a few interesting points.
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I know, I actually must thank all of the viewers and the listeners who like soccer, which by
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my last count is 99.8% of them because I've, I have been on this holy jihad against the
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So anyway, I decided to kind of have a little fun with this and use a Pat Robertson quote,
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the televangelist, the squinty eyed guy and substitute soccer for feminism.
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So the quote from Pat Robertson is this, the feminist agenda is not about equal rights
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It is about a socialist anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their
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husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
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This is, I, I, so I substituted soccer and nobody got this.
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So I had conservative MPs in the UK tweeting all these international soccer journalists and
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And I was really shocked because every conservative should know that quote.
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That is one of the greatest quotes in the history of the English language and of politics.
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It is so funny because it gets at this thing that I think conservatives should always play
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around with, which is you say a quote and then people don't know if you're kidding or not,
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But the quote actually got me thinking because it sounds so crazy.
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Pat Robertson certainly says some, some out there things, but, uh, but on this quote,
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It sounds so crazy, but let's just go through the points.
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The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.
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It is so awful and vicious to, uh, any woman who contradicts its orthodoxy.
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We saw that it's vicious, awful, cuts women off at the knees, says that women who don't,
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you know, become middle managers at the widget factory, women who choose to have children
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and raise them, that they're like fake women or something.
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There was a feminist journal that said that Sarah Palin is just pretending to be a woman.
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Of course, we saw the women's march after Donald Trump was elected.
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We need to, you know, uh, take over the means of production.
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I mean, it was very left-wing economically, uh, anti-family political movement that
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There's the, one of the most famous quotes in the feminist movement is from Irina Dunn,
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which is that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
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The most famous feminist play is a dollhouse by Henrik Ibsen, where at the end, the woman
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That this has been, he won awards from feminist organizations for that.
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So that hard to say, no, uh, kill their children.
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America kills a million children a year, a million babies a year in the womb.
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And we have, since Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court.
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Then it gets a little kooky and you kind of wonder, because then he says it encourages
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women to practice witchcraft, you know, and he's, I don't know, could that possibly be
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But then, then I thought about it and the, the modern feminist movement has this undeniable
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connection to occult imagery all the way, the whole time it always has.
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And I said, maybe, maybe I'm just imagining this, who knows?
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Then I said, you know, the main feminist music festival, explicitly a feminist music festival
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from Sarah McLachlan in the nineties is called Lilith Fair.
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And it was all female performers and there was no men allowed, right?
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And Lilith Fair refers to Lilith, a mythical demon who snatches away babies in the night and
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Then I went to my favorite website, the greatest website on the internet, Everyday Feminism.
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I said, well, let's see if there is this occult aspect of feminism, I bet I'll find it on
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The second, the page lines, this is like the third article on Everyday Feminism.
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The headline is seven ways to use spiritual practice to heal and resist.
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And I'll just read you just the first, like two paragraphs of this, of this piece.
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A handful of dried rose petals, an apple sliced with a spoon, piloncillo, and a few drops of
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sweet smelling essential oils stirred into a pot of boiling water.
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This is the recipe to my mother's love potion made to attract self-love, a physical manifestation
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of love to pour over one's body while reciting positive affirmations.
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She raised me with tons of remedios de la abuela, or remedies from grandma, from an onion
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on your belly button to relieve a fever, burning a palo santo to rid negative energy, to the belief
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that loving yourself is a radical act of resistance.
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All knowledge that was passed down to her from parents, tias y tios, and abuelos y bisabuelos,
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Ancestral spirituality is a deeply personal practice.
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It's a vague term that essentially boils down to the act of connecting with one spirit through
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but not limited to brujeria, herbalism, astrology, oracles, and much more.
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Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.
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But you know, you read that, that's like one of the main articles on everyday feminism.
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You say, oh, I guess feminism does have this bizarre connection to the occult.
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And then finally, Pat Robertson says feminism makes women want to become lesbians, or tries
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And that one also, I said, that can't possibly be true.
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And then I read the Washington Post a couple weeks ago, where Susanna Danuta Walters, professor
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of sociology, director of the Women's Sexuality Gender Studies Program at Northeastern, and
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editor of a major gender studies journal called Signs, wrote a piece called Why Can't We Hate
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So I can't, you know, maybe I think, because Pat Robertson put that quote out in a fundraising
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letter in the early 90s, and everyone said he was a total wacko and crazy.
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And then, you know, leave it to feminists to prove him right.
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Even if it wasn't right at the time, they say, oh, that's a pretty good idea, Pat Robertson,
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So anyway, I want, I want conservatives to know that quote.
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It is one of the funniest quotes ever written in politics.
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You should know it, and recite it frequently, and see if your lefty friend's heads just explode
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Moving on to important news of the day, this has been a banner day for the mainstream media.
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And then the chyron says, Paul Manafort pleads guilty to five charges of manslaughter.
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Paul Manafort, who was the head of the Trump campaign for like five minutes around the
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convention, he was brought onto the campaign to help get delegates at the Republican convention.
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And, you know, it seems like they've got him, the Mueller investigation has him on, maybe
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some money laundering, maybe obstructing justice, whatever.
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Finally, our streets are safe with Paul Manafort.
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And then ABC ups his charges to five counts of manslaughter.
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They say, we regret and apologize for the false lower graphic.
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Because these crazy lefties working in your newsroom put it up there.
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And its new cover is an imposing figure of Donald Trump staring down at a crying, cute little illegal alien baby or toddler.
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And this is not the first time that Time magazine has done this.
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Time magazine has run a zillion covers against Donald Trump.
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They had one where he's looking into the mirror and it's a picture of him as king.
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Donald Trump is the least authoritarian president in my lifetime.
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I'm not going to make this decision unilaterally.
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I'm not going to force nuns to pay for abortions or contraception.
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And they call him an authoritarian because up is down and war is peace.
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They have another one where it's Donald Trump and it's his screaming face on fire,
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That's Trump because he's supposed to be furious and chaotic.
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He's one of the least emotional presence I've also seen in my lifetime.
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And the Washington Monument was crumbling because the country is crumbling under Donald Trump,
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except that unemployment is at virtually all time lows.
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And disability claims are way down, which means the Social Security Administration might be able to last more into the future.
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And the IMF says that it's Trump's responsibility for that booming economy.
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And we're finally taking a serious line on our trade deals.
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And our foreign affairs are looking pretty good.
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We've got North Korea coming to the table, possibly to denuclearize it.
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Other than everything going great, Washington is crumbling.
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And this gets to a point that we're going to talk about later.
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This executive order that Donald Trump issued about the immigration separation at the border.
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I said yesterday in the show when this news broke, I said,
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it seems bad, but we've got to read and see what happened.
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Because it seems bad on the surface, but maybe, who knows?
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We'll get to that, too, because there isn't a meltdown.
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Then, in moving from the world of news media to Hollywood media, you have Peter Fonda,
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former actor Peter Fonda, the brother of that traitor, Jane Fonda.
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He goes out and he starts tweeting and says that we need to rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms
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and throw him into a cage with pedophiles, see what happens.
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Then he called for riots in the streets, called for 90 million people to come out,
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you know, start targeting politicians' children.
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And you saw this kind of radical call to action from Tom Arnold, too.
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Tom Arnold didn't say any of the horrible things that Peter Fonda said,
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but it was that same, come on, you've got to do something.
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Except all of the things that they're all screaming about now were happening under Barack Obama's administration
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One thing about this news story, like the bright side of this news story, the silver lining,
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is that every single day more terrible stories from the Obama administration come out
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According to a federal court filing, 14-year-old kids under the Obama administration,
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14-year-old illegal aliens, were exposed to long periods of solitary confinement.
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They were found shivering, nude, on the concrete floor of jail cells.
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According to witnesses at some of these holding facilities,
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these kids would show up with bruises, broken bones, which were blamed on the guards.
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This is from one of the kids, under Barack Obama.
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Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,
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strapped me down all the way from your feet all the way to your chest.
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That has little holes you can see through it, but you feel suffocated with the bag on.
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There was widespread abuse of illegal aliens from 2009 to 2014.
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All under Obama and the mainstream media didn't say boo.
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They didn't say peep because they don't actually care about this whatsoever.
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It is just the only cudgel that they can contrive and make up to attack Donald Trump
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We got a little bit of time before the mailbag.
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This executive order came out yesterday during this show, and he said, okay, we're going to
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We've got to figure out a way to stop separating the families and keep them detained together
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until we can figure out their immigration situation, either prosecute or file for asylum
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So my thought initially is, why would Donald Trump cave on this?
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First, you have to find out what the executive order says, as I mentioned, because the devil's
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It says that the Health and Human Services Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, will have custody
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of families during criminal proceedings and asylum adjudication.
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So instead of putting the parents with the U.S. Marshals and the kids with Health and Human
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Services, this executive order says, Health and Human Services, oh, I'm sorry, Department
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of Homeland Security is going to have custody of these families during criminal proceedings.
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Is this criminal detention or is this some kind of government program, welfare program to
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Because the law says you can't put the kids in jail.
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And if you let the parents go and you don't keep them held in custody, then they'll just
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go and they won't show up to their asylum hearings or their criminal hearings.
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So then the executive order tells Secretary of Defense Mattis to construct facilities or
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So now we've got multiple agencies, federal agencies coming in here to talk about where we're
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going to house them. And then the order urges Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prioritize
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all of these proceedings so that the Flores consent decree, which says that the kids can't
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be in jail for more than 20 days, that might not even matter if we can get all of this taken
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The bill that Ted Cruz proposed would have done the same thing.
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It would say, let's take care of this within 14 days.
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You know, actually that last part concerning Jeff Sessions is a lot of the good stuff from
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Ted Cruz's bill is just in this executive order.
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We know from public polling that this is what most people want.
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Almost the majority of Americans, mid-40s, 44% or so, 42%, say that they want the families
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Detained together, and then we kick them out of the country because it's a crime to come
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So also, in the executive order, when Donald Trump was announcing it, he said, while it's
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consistent with the law and where appropriate, we will enforce these things.
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You can't jail the kids, and you can't let the parents go.
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So on the one hand, this may mean that the executive order does nothing, right?
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Where consistent with the law and when appropriate, just 0% of the time, might do nothing.
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But the thing that it did do, and I witnessed this myself on Kamala Harris's Twitter account,
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It forced them to show what they really think about immigration.
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And when it comes to Kamala Harris, it was hilarious the way that it happened.
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So Kamala Harris tweets out at the, I think it was 11.15, 11.15 in the morning Pacific time.
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She tweets out, this administration must end the zero-tolerance policy,
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So then, right after he does that, we're talking not even four hours later,
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Indefinitely detaining children with their families in camps is inhumane and will not make us safe.
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What are you, you just, did you read your Twitter account from four hours ago when you said,
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Then four hours later, she says, keeping the families together is inhumane.
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So what, what do you, do you want to go back to the other one?
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That's why we just rip up the executive order, go back to the, but something tells me,
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something tells me that even if we did that, then she would, she would just go back and say,
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Because every day we arrest a thousand people crossing the border illegally.
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We know that those illegal aliens are more likely to identify with the Democrat party
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And we know that even after staying in the country for a long time, or the children of
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immigrants and the grandchildren of immigrants are very, very likely to vote for Democrats
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between three and 8.75 times more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans.
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So what the Democrats want is to open up those borders, flood the country with illegal aliens
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so that at least one or two generations of the future, they're importing their own
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voters and they'll make the Republicans electorally extinct.
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That's just what the social science data bear out.
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You don't want that because you want open borders.
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But really, it could be a big win, especially if it doesn't actually affect policy, which
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it certainly cannot, because what it actually instructs the government to do is illegal.
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Illegal immigration is a huge loser for Democrats.
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Well, 19 percent, according to a YouGov poll that just came out, only 19 percent of Americans
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Eighty one percent of Americans despise the policy of catch and release, which was our prior
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We catch these people and say, oh, well, we can't separate and this and that's OK.
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Not even a chance they're going to show up to their hearing.
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The numbers get more interesting because 70 percent of Democrats oppose catch and release
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Sixty seven percent of Hillary voters oppose catch and release.
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Sixty four percent of self-described liberals of left wingers of the left part of the Democratic
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Party, which is now the whole Democratic Party, oppose catch and release.
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The vast majority of voters across virtually every demographic oppose open borders and catch
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It's a big winner for Trump and for Republicans on this issue.
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And if he can force their hands and make them state out in the open, we're for catch and
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release, we're for open borders, just like he made Kamala Harris do.
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I think the Democrats thought that this issue, if they could contrive this fake crisis at
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the border, which has really been going on under Obama and they were silent the whole
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If they could contrive that before the midterms, that they would have finally get any momentum
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And then Donald Trump basically flipped it right back on them.
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Even by the way, if you look further down the line to Donald Trump's base, independents,
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83% oppose catch and release, moderates, 84% oppose catch and release, GOP, 93% oppose catch
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Among self-described conservatives, 93% oppose catch and release.
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And of Trump voters, 96% oppose catch and release.
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So it doesn't look like, as we feared with that executive order, it doesn't look like we're
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He couldn't because statistically, Trump's entire voting base opposes the policy.
00:23:44.380
Before we get to the mailbag, I do want to talk about this Supreme Court ruling.
00:23:48.160
There was a Supreme Court ruling came out today from the cases Quill Corporation versus
00:23:54.520
And the question was on whether internet sites have to collect state taxes.
00:24:00.380
Can states demand that internet sites collect state taxes, even if they're out of state?
00:24:05.160
That's one way that internet shopping is so much better, is you can skirt a lot of taxes.
00:24:11.420
Some conservatives are angry about the decision.
00:24:14.380
Which will raise our taxes because it will allow companies to, or force companies to start
00:24:21.420
charging state taxes on the products that we buy online.
00:24:25.580
But some conservatives are complaining because the taxes go up.
00:24:28.220
But it's actually a conservative decision, which is why it was 5-4.
00:24:32.140
And it broke down Kennedy, who's a little bit of a squish.
00:24:35.340
So three of the actual conservatives on the court, Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas, who's probably
00:24:49.580
the most originalist, they were all in favor of this ruling.
00:24:52.940
And Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Roberts being a squish, Breyer being a lefty, Sotomayor
00:24:58.780
an insane lefty, and Kagan, a fairly smart, still very left-wing woman, were all opposed
00:25:06.340
So the old precedent would protect these out-of-state sellers from being required to collect
00:25:12.300
Gorsuch referred to this in the past as a judicially created tax shelter.
00:25:16.420
And the thing we should take away from this case is not that it's a good thing that we're
00:25:24.800
But what we should take away is the health of the judicial philosophy of the conservatives
00:25:34.700
That the words really have meaning and they don't just magically change over time.
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The Constitution isn't a living, breathing document that sprouts legs and starts dancing
00:25:43.140
It's a dead piece of paper with words written on it that have meaning.
00:25:47.020
Because Justice Scalia said this to me, I had the privilege of meeting him a couple times
00:25:53.800
And he said that the health of that philosophy is that if you're a good judge, you won't always
00:26:04.000
If you always like the decision that you come to, then you're probably not following the
00:26:10.100
But if you don't, if sometimes you're very upset with the decision you come to, but that's
00:26:14.020
where the logic of the law has led, that means you're probably a pretty good judge.
00:26:16.400
And that's what happened with conservatives today.
00:26:18.800
So I think it's broadly a win, even though it's going to cost us money.
00:26:24.540
The good news on this decision is regarding Chevron deference.
00:26:28.880
So Chevron deference is this principle that on matters of interpreting statutes, the courts
00:26:36.720
should defer to the administrative agencies to whom the statutes apply.
00:26:41.880
So it's because the administrative state, the deep state, you know, the federal agencies have
00:26:49.740
There are so many statutes that the courts have basically outsourced the interpretation
00:26:54.000
of those statutes to the administrative agencies.
00:27:01.440
In that same time I got to meet Scalia, he said the great threat to American liberty was
00:27:06.200
the administrative state, this bloated administrative state.
00:27:09.420
And Justice Kennedy just wrote, quote, it seems necessary and appropriate to reconsider in
00:27:13.980
an appropriate case the premises that underlie Chevron and how courts have implemented that
00:27:19.680
And Kennedy, you know, Kennedy's the swing vote on the court, but he's joined on to opinions
00:27:25.080
that have talked about this before, like Roberts's Arlington versus FCC dissent.
00:27:30.900
He cites Thomas and also Alito, Judge Alito, who is then on the Tenth Circuit when it comes
00:27:37.620
This could be a monumental win for American liberty if the courts stop deferring to administrative
00:27:45.320
agencies when they shouldn't, when those questions should be left to courts.
00:27:50.000
That would totally upend administrative law and would be a big, big win.
00:27:59.440
Maybe I'll do one mailbag question just to give you a little taste.
00:28:02.200
And then we'll have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube and get to the rest of the mailbag.
00:28:13.680
What happens when conservatives begin to feel the same way as the left and their useful
00:28:19.000
As in, they would prefer to punish their ideological opposites rather than win them over.
00:28:26.080
Unlike their experience producing good policies, leftists are pretty good at inviting their opponents
00:28:32.620
Sometimes I feel like we should give them the terrible treatment they pretend to endure.
00:28:37.140
You spoke about this issue with your guest, the idea that we're comfortable and can't
00:28:42.380
I do feel that a brief rash of face punching would reconvince us all that talking is a
00:28:50.600
Please exclude my last name if you address this comment.
00:28:55.700
My commute is consumed by the Daily Wire podcast.
00:29:11.860
This happens because the lefties do just want to cudgel us.
00:29:14.640
They totally want to just knock us over the head and, you know, smack us on this question.
00:29:25.400
We're just going to shut you up and no speech and heckle you and what hecklers veto, right?
00:29:31.460
My rule on this is if you're on Twitter and you genuinely get angry, that is you doing it wrong.
00:29:42.340
Do not punch them in the face as much as you might want to.
00:29:45.620
The way that you can convince people is by laughing at them, I think.
00:29:49.700
You're not, the left is not doing itself any favors right now by screaming and whining and no, you know, and all that.
00:29:55.700
They aren't, I mean, they're losing everything.
00:29:57.820
They're losing all of the ground they'd made on the culture war even.
00:30:03.040
They haven't been winning elections since 2008, really.
00:30:09.340
Expose how crazy their arguments are and treat them like children.
00:30:19.800
Don't let them get away with everything, you know.
00:30:23.860
You want them to kind of see how crazy their mania has made them.
00:30:32.120
Michael, what do you think is a good response when people say that gender and sex are different or disconnected?
00:30:46.300
It's a way that the left has tried to make you ignore the obvious reality that is right in front of you.
00:30:53.440
One of the essential realities of human nature, which is the complementarity of men and women.
00:31:00.540
So, they say, no, no, no, that's sex, but sex too is different.
00:31:16.420
So, in, I don't know, in Italian, the word for soccer, calcio, is masculine.
00:31:24.340
It takes the masculine articles, even though it's obviously a very effeminate sport.
00:31:32.200
They apply that to human beings because they want to pretend that sex isn't a real thing,
00:31:41.760
Before we do that, I'm sorry if you're on Facebook or YouTube.
00:31:52.200
All of that for $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
00:32:02.620
They're accusing Paul Manafort of five counts of manslaughter.
00:32:06.580
Not one, not three, five counts of manslaughter.
00:32:25.340
I've heard this before, but I don't know what it means.
00:32:31.780
Also, did I use affect correctly, or should it be the other one with the E?
00:32:39.560
Affect is the verb when you are going to affect something.
00:32:43.040
Effect is the noun, the effect of something that you have affected.
00:32:46.900
But affect can also be the condescending tone that I'm putting on right now, which is also a noun.
00:32:51.740
It's a little confusing, but you can hopefully keep it together.
00:32:54.060
The soft bigotry of low expectations is a phrase coined during the Bush era, and it refers to that really nice bigotry.
00:33:02.040
When basically people suggest that if you're – liberals do this all the time, especially when it comes to education.
00:33:09.940
They suggest that minority students, people from ethnic minorities or poor communities, they couldn't possibly be as successful or as smart or as educated as all those rich white people over there.
00:33:24.180
Let's just – maybe we should lower the standards for them because, you know, oh, good, you got a D.
00:33:30.260
That's – because of your skin color, you could never get an A.
00:33:36.200
It's so insidious because it's pretending to be nice, but it's really, really wicked.
00:33:40.440
You know, it's not – the conservative stance broadly is to treat people like they're people, like they have dignity and self-respect, or at least they should, and they should do it for themselves.
00:33:50.720
But the soft bigotry of low expectations, oh, those minority people, they can't – they could never work.
00:33:58.260
Let's just – isn't that better for – that's nice.
00:34:07.520
It's really, really awful and one of the great phrases from the Bush administration to identify it.
00:34:14.900
Dear reincarnation of Liam Neeson in Gangs of New York.
00:34:20.720
That is a totally new – and whoever came up with that, I will find you, and I will kill you.
00:34:29.540
First, thank you for your best man speech advice a few weeks ago.
00:34:36.180
That was a week – probably three weeks ago at this point.
00:34:42.200
How did we go from Botticelli, Tolstoy, and Chopin to the muck we have now?
00:34:46.980
How is it that the most popular art of the age has gone from something that could be described as being touched by the divine to Beyonce mumble-rapping expletives?
00:35:01.160
Also, the triumph of individualism in Western culture, which is sort of tied to that, but it had been building since the Renaissance or since the 16th century.
00:35:16.840
Yeats, William Butler Yeats, the last of the great poets, wrote about this in the poem, The Second Coming.
00:35:22.460
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
00:35:28.960
What rough beast is this slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?
00:35:36.660
Part of the issue here is that everything had been done.
00:35:39.800
There was this total breakdown after the World War where everything had been done.
00:35:45.260
All of the great, beginning in the 16th century or really before that, all the way through the modern era to World War I, everything had been done and then Europe destroyed itself and everything was in rubble and everything was dead and awful.
00:36:01.480
And so the artists at this era, in 1914, there were some new things that were happening that were beginning to start.
00:36:12.200
And so artists responded to that in three ways.
00:36:16.740
They started mocking the old beauty, sort of parody or satire of the old beautiful things.
00:36:23.200
They started deconstructing it down to its foundation.
00:36:26.080
You see a lot of fundamentalism come up in this period, artistic fundamentalism.
00:36:29.480
And then you had destruction, not just deconstruction, but destruction, destructing the idea of art itself.
00:36:36.560
Hemingway had a, by the way, I can't claim originality on those points.
00:36:40.700
Jacques Barsin writes about that beautifully in From Dawn to Decadence.
00:36:44.420
Ernest Hemingway had a line about this at the time.
00:36:48.880
The age demanded that we sing and cut away our tongue.
00:36:52.880
The age demanded that we flow and hammered in the bung.
00:36:56.460
The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants.
00:37:00.580
And in the end, the age was handed the sort of stuff that it demanded.
00:37:09.040
Hemingway was so much an icon of that period of time that really began this decay.
00:37:19.220
You know, he had gone through this experience of the First World War and it changed everything.
00:37:23.240
And where you see the breakdown of, like, Beyonce and mumbling all these expletive-filled rap lyrics.
00:37:33.500
Because she, the old goddess Beyonce and the divine goddess.
00:37:40.940
Because there was this movement called Dadaism, which really sums it all up.
00:37:45.920
All of those things that the artists did to react to World War I and the death of their culture come up in Dadaism.
00:37:55.880
I don't even want to know that any man lived before me.
00:38:00.160
Dada, this artistic, this anti-artistic movement.
00:38:06.760
There's this obsessive, mischievous quality to it.
00:38:10.740
It's like the old joke, how many surrealist poets does it take to screw in a light bulb?
00:38:20.020
You've gone from Botticelli to this madness and this breakdown.
00:38:23.500
And the premise of it, the premise of all of this, is that society is mad.
00:38:27.040
How else could you go through the experience of World War I without concluding that society is mad?
00:38:32.260
That some random terrorist in Serbia shoots the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and this launches a series of events that led for German militarism to try to take over the continent.
00:38:44.980
And you get mired down in this stalemate, this Western front, for four years of just Europe ripping each other to shreds, just blood and guts and mayhem pouring out of the continent.
00:38:58.860
And, you know, the Kaiser would write to Tsar Nicholas and say, dear Nicky, isn't this so strange?
00:39:03.480
You know, you'd have to conclude that the society is mad.
00:39:06.700
This comes in the wake also of Nietzsche, who says God is dead.
00:39:10.280
The belief in the spiritual elements that have animated Western culture all breaks down.
00:39:26.120
That's what we're just getting the artistic children of the Dada movement.
00:39:29.780
And so you might have been hoping that I could say, well, don't worry, we're going to get Chopin back any time now.
00:39:35.600
Oh, yeah, Bach should be coming around pretty soon.
00:39:40.740
You know, the Holy Spirit animates society at various points in history.
00:39:46.740
How on earth did, after, you know, ages of total artistic death, did Dante come out?
00:39:55.380
How do parts of spiritual and cultural renewal come out of nowhere?
00:39:59.780
Well, you know, it just, these things can happen, but you've got to go through a lot of darkness since then.
00:40:04.180
And you can't really predict when it's going to happen.
00:40:12.640
Let's get one or two more before we have to go.
00:40:15.940
Oh, Hawaiian buccaneer of Sicilian descent, Knowles.
00:40:19.520
You rightly describe many leftists and even some conservatives as being lightly educated.
00:40:25.300
But in a time when interest in the past seems to be at an all-time low and means for instant gratification exist everywhere in abundance,
00:40:34.120
how and why should people go about making themselves more than just lightly educated?
00:40:40.320
Would you prescribe a specific curriculum of essential books to read?
00:40:44.420
If so, what are some of the books that you would include in it?
00:40:51.940
Except you probably wrote that a few days ago, so it's not your birthday anymore.
00:40:57.240
The lightly educated phrase is as much a self-indictment as it is an indictment of all of culture.
00:41:04.800
Because it's not just that certain people are stupid and don't read.
00:41:07.600
It's that our education system has utterly failed.
00:41:12.540
And so even if you go to a great school, I went to a great high school, I went to a great college, you know, brand name and all.
00:41:22.420
Donald Kagan, the great ancient Greek historian, former dean of Yale College, said, this was decades ago, he said,
00:41:29.300
you can still get an education at Yale, but you don't have to to graduate.
00:41:33.760
And then a few years later he said, I'm not even sure if you can anymore.
00:41:37.740
So this isn't, I don't mean to say, you know, I'm so smart and you're so stupid.
00:41:44.400
Our culture is in the midst of just a period of total ignorance and unculturation.
00:41:50.620
So what you have to do is go right back to that canon.
00:41:56.120
And you should, you know, I think all of these shows reference Aristotle like every single day.
00:42:01.300
So you should go right back there to Aristotle and Plato and you should read up through the canon and maybe, you know, just make some time for that.
00:42:10.720
The reason to do it, because there's instant gratification everywhere.
00:42:13.740
So, you know, I don't know, you could probably just eat like giant tubs of ice cream and watch internet porn and get a massage all day long.
00:42:22.480
We're at that point in culture where you could certainly do it.
00:42:28.620
You'll be more connected to both the society around you, your past, your history, and God.
00:42:34.780
If you throw yourself wholly into culture and into reading and knowing about your history.
00:42:41.700
And a lot of the political problems we're in are cultural problems and they're cultural problems because we're just so ignorant and uncultured.
00:42:57.300
I'm a Catholic college survivor of rape and was given plan B at the hospital to prevent pregnancy the night after.
00:43:13.220
I hope you're doing well recovering psychologically and spiritually from that.
00:43:20.400
In many ways, it's worse than murder to happen to you because it's such a conscious robbing of your liberty.
00:43:28.500
It's so cuts to the core of what it means to be a human.
00:43:36.160
As for the question you asked, so I'll give you the answer as best as we have it.
00:43:40.080
Is plan B, the emergency contraceptive slash possible abortifacient drug, is that abortion or is that a sin?
00:43:50.000
You're a Catholic student, so I'll give you the church's perspective.
00:43:52.480
The church has not declared definitively one way or the other on this because we don't know.
00:43:57.920
The plan B drug, which is different than some other of these drugs, primarily exists to prevent ovulation.
00:44:05.340
So it exists to prevent the egg and the sperm from joining together.
00:44:09.620
Now, there are two different definitions of abortion here.
00:44:12.260
The Catholic definition of abortion is intentionally killing a fertilized egg.
00:44:18.420
And the government sort of secular definition of abortion is preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg.
00:44:25.240
So the Catholic Church says that life begins at conception when the egg and the sperm are joined together.
00:44:31.220
The government says that life begins at implantation.
00:44:35.340
So the sperm and the egg join together and they are then implanted in the uterine wall and goes on from there.
00:44:43.720
There was one study that came out that said that plan B does not really work to prevent implantation,
00:44:50.400
that its primary purpose and its primary function is to prevent those two from joining.
00:44:54.480
If they don't join, then certainly it's not abortion.
00:44:56.240
And there's really no way of knowing what happened in that particular case other than maybe statistically over time, whatever.
00:45:06.040
I would say the thing for you to worry about right now is how to recover psychologically and spiritually from what happened to you.
00:45:12.540
You should not right now be worrying about the statistical probability that the sperm and the egg were joined but didn't implant rather than not joining at all.
00:45:28.820
Maybe the church will discuss it in more definitive terms later.
00:45:31.980
But what you should do is figure out how to put your life back in order after such a horrific event.
00:45:39.100
And I'll be praying for you and I hope that it turns out okay for you.
00:45:50.480
It's not just because you're listening to this show doesn't mean the Clavenless weekend can't affect you.
00:45:54.880
By the way, we're about to start work again on Another Kingdom.
00:46:04.820
So we could get a season two at some point in the next 50 or 70 years.
00:46:11.380
Another Kingdom by Andrew Claven is wherever fine narrative fiction podcasts are downloaded.
00:46:26.160
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
00:46:45.320
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
00:47:10.620
And, the Felicia boys have received a couple of your cuts