00:01:24.300The people who are accusing Pope Leo of being a huge lib are once again looking not quite right as the Pope on the papal airplane just shoots down an attempt by German cardinals to promote weird sex stuff.
00:01:38.660We will get to the orthodox views, the dare I say conservative views of the Holy Father.
00:01:45.280First, though, I want to tell you about Balance of Nature.
00:18:29.020And then she almost starts to say in the cartoon, I just, maybe I should have, maybe I shouldn't
00:18:35.040have, maybe, but she can't even say that she regrets it or that she should have spoken to
00:18:40.140him first. That was obviously what was being left on the table there. Maybe I should have
00:18:43.500called you, talked to you, should waited, but they can't even say that. They can't even admit that.
00:18:49.060And I think for the pro-abortion people in 2026, they are much weaker and they are much more
00:18:56.060self-deluded, and they're much more dishonest than the pro-abortion activists of the 70s.
00:19:01.600You know, the pro-abortion activists of the 70s, say what you will about them,
00:19:04.300they had an infanticidal bloodlust, but at least they were honest about what they were doing.
00:19:10.340This is how you get Hillary Clinton, even Hillary Clinton running for president saying,0.99
00:19:13.880abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. The reason she acknowledges that it should be rare0.98
00:19:17.700is because she knows it's murdering a baby. And she comes to the wrong moral conclusion,
00:19:22.440which is that it's okay to murder a baby if I want to. But she at least acknowledges what it is.0.85
00:19:27.720The abortion activists today won't do that. They only speak in euphemisms. It was a choice. It was
00:19:33.660reproductive health. It was in really, it's you need to support me. And it's actually wonderful
00:19:37.820when I kill my kid. And actually, if I kill my kid, it's your fault. And that's how it plays1.00
00:19:43.100out in the popular culture. Not recommending either of these behaviors, either the cartoon
00:19:47.980lady or Michael Corleone here, but one of them is much more in tune with reality. Okay. Speaking
00:19:54.360of moral questions, Papa Leone, the Pope, the Holy Father, who happily that little spat between
00:19:59.720the president and the Pope, that's over now. It seems like they're getting along just fine. That's
00:20:02.420excellent. Very pleased to see that the secular and the temporal, sorry, the temporal and the
00:20:06.460spiritual power need to work together, even though there's always some tension. But some people have
00:20:11.920taken that opportunity to accuse the Pope of being a liberal or a leftist or something, which
00:20:16.700is really silly because on the whole, the sovereign pontiff is much more right-wing
00:20:25.900than any American politician by definition. The terms left and right come from the French
00:20:30.960Revolution when the people on the right were the ones who defended the church and the people on
00:20:34.320the left were the ones who wanted to destroy the church. So when you look down, certainly on the
00:20:39.160social issues, contraception, abortion, marriage, the pope, really any pope, even the most liberal
00:20:46.400pope is much more conservative than the most conservative American politician. And then on
00:20:53.080the other issues, migration, the pope is a little bit more liberal, a little bit more moderate,
00:20:58.240I guess you would say. But even the pope will say, nations need borders. It's totally right
00:21:02.480to have immigration laws. So even there, I think it's kind of silly. But just to underscore this1.00
00:21:07.420point, the pope was asked about these German bishops. The German bishops who have been a big
00:21:13.940problem for a long time. They're basically in schism with the church. They constantly promote
00:21:18.400heresy. So there's this one German bishop, Cardinal Marx. Cardinal Marx. It's amazing.0.66
00:21:24.240If you abbreviate cardinal, you take out the D-I-N-A, dot, dot, dot. It's Karl Marx.0.50
00:21:30.380Karl Marx says he wants to issue apostolic blessings, Episcopal blessings to same-sex
00:21:39.680married couples. Pope Leo asked about that. Here's his answer.
00:21:44.340The Holy See has already spoken to the German bishops.0.68
00:21:47.680The Holy See has made it clear that we do not agree with the formalized blessing of couples,
00:21:57.340in this case homosexual couples as you ask, or couples in irregular situations,
00:22:01.960beyond what was specifically, if you will, allowed for by Pope Francis in saying all people receive blessings.
00:22:10.480When a priest gives a blessing at the end of Mass, when the Pope gives a blessing at the end of a large celebration like such we have today, there are blessings of all people.
00:22:21.960Francis's infamous, famous, well-known expression of tutti, tutti, tutti is an expression of the Church's belief that all are welcome, all are invited.
00:22:34.360All are invited to follow Jesus, and all are invited to look for conversion in their lives.
00:22:40.060To go beyond that today, I think that the topic can cause more disunity than unity,
00:22:47.080and that we should look for ways to build our unity upon Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ teaches.
00:22:52.360Beautiful, beautiful, a deeply orthodox and conservative answer.
00:22:57.780Conservative in the political sense, by which I mean, he's asked,
00:23:00.720hey, are you going to promote this gay marriage stuff, so-called gay marriage stuff in the church?
00:23:06.080And Leo goes, no, we're not doing that.
00:23:09.320And by the way, we're not doing that for people who are cohabitating but not married.
00:23:13.460And by the way, we're also not doing that for people who are divorced and civilly remarried.
00:23:16.340We remain firm in our views, which have been consistent for 2,000 years.
00:23:23.200Also, this is basically what Pope Francis said.
00:23:27.460Now, Pope Francis would appear to be a little more to the left than Pope Leo.
00:23:32.360It's one of the reasons that conservative Catholics,
00:23:35.000one of the reasons that we're pretty happy with how things are going under Pope Leo.
00:23:38.500But notice he doesn't say, and Francis was totally wrong, and my predecessor was wrong, and I'm right.
00:23:44.220Because that, even if the predecessor were distinctly left-wing, that very kind of rupture, that very kind of disunity, to use Poplio's word here, would express a radical impulse.
00:23:57.840There's something deeply conservative about saying, no, no, no, listen to what my predecessor said.
00:24:03.640He said that blessings are for everybody.
00:24:06.220So yes, at the end of mass, we give a general blessing to everybody.
00:24:09.600Well, we're not going to say, all right, all the fanooks get out of here and all the divorced0.99
00:24:12.580and civilly remarried get out of here. And you only blessings. No, no, no. We give a general
00:24:16.480blessing to everybody, but we're not doing the gay marriage stuff. That's a very conservative0.89
00:24:22.000impulse. Frankly, it's to the right of much of the Republican party and most Republican politicians.
00:24:28.300And it's the right thing to say. And the German bishops need to figure it out. These German
00:24:33.060bishops. Good grief. Okay. Much more to get to on disunity in Washington, D.C., especially among
00:24:41.600Republicans, because there's a major fight going on right now about an issue that was so huge for
00:24:46.900Republican voters. That is FISA surveillance by the government, which was being used against
00:24:53.240many ordinary conservatives. It was used against President Trump, actually, on his campaign.
00:24:57.340uh now there's this fight over whether or not to reauthorize the surveillance program or how to
00:25:04.820reauthorize the surveillance program or is the gop going to do 180 here so we have someone who's in
00:25:10.420the fight himself congressman brad knott coming on to explain the issue for us first though i want
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00:26:11.220That is puretalk.com slash Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S, to switch to my wireless company,
00:26:16.160which happens to be America's wireless company. Pure talk. The government has been surveilling us
00:26:22.480basically forever, but they have dramatically increased the size and scope of that surveillance
00:26:30.440in recent years. It's been a big sticking point for conservatives. We know that these powers of
00:26:36.480the government were being used unjustly against us, used unjustly against President Trump,
00:26:41.580not that long ago. So now there's this big fight over whether or not to reauthorize the program,
00:26:45.840how to reauthorize the program. Big fight on Capitol Hill that basically no one, myself included,
00:26:50.380knows almost anything about. That's how behind the scenes it's remained. So pleased to be joined
00:26:56.240right now by Congressman Brad Knott to explain the battle. Congressman Knott, thank you for coming on.
00:27:03.500Hey, Michael, thank you for having me. So, Congressman, it's my job to follow these
00:27:09.280things, at least relatively closely. I guess really my job is I'm a cigar salesman, but my
00:27:14.140hobby is politics and media. And so I've followed this reasonably closely and I can't quite figure
00:27:20.420it out. Republicans were totally unified on seriously weakening the powers of the government
00:27:27.360to spy on Americans because we were the victims of it. And now maybe not. Well, you highlight a
00:27:34.620very important principle here. And let me say before we dive into the Fourth Amendment
00:27:38.620intricacies that your cigars are fantastic. Thank you, sir. I enjoy them. You know, there's
00:27:46.240nothing, we've talked about this, there's nothing more enjoyable than a good cigar and good
00:27:49.780fellowship to accompany it. But returning to FISA, you hit the nail on the head. You know,
00:27:55.840last Congress, the 118th Congress, there was a tremendous battle and Joe Biden was the president
00:28:02.380and we were discussing, I was not there, but I was following it. Can there be a warrantless
00:28:08.300surveillance of American citizens. And now that Republicans are in charge of the executive branch,
00:28:14.960there seems to be a little bit of a drift back to we need to maintain FISA in its current form,
00:28:21.720reauthorizing it without a warrant requirement. And as is the case with any complex situation,
00:28:29.080there are intricacies and nuances. But just optically speaking, that does not look very
00:28:34.840good to say when we're not in charge of the White House, we want the warrant requirement. When we
00:28:39.720take charge of the White House, we do not want the warrant requirement. So there is a battle going on
00:28:45.380and the main concern that I have been relaying to the leadership in the House, the White House, is
00:28:51.980even under current reform structure that we achieved last Congress, the system relies
00:28:58.680exclusively on the executive branch to detect, to discover, to report, and to basically audit
00:29:06.180itself with this vast surveillance power aimed at foreigners that collects American citizens'
00:29:13.180data as a byproduct. And that's the framework of the fight that we're engaged in right now.
00:29:18.800So right now, it's all up to the White House being honest. And so with this White House,
00:29:24.160I certainly trust the White House and they've done a great job. And I was just just pointing out last night, I did a hit on Fox News, but we're talking about on the show yesterday as well, that you can see how important it is when the White House shifts, because three years ago, the DOJ was partnered with the SPLC to persecute normal Americans.
00:29:41.920Now, after an election, the DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC because they've committed fraud.
00:30:38.940I knew that defense counsel had the right to inspect the hardware and how the warrant was executed, how the wiretap was achieved.
00:30:47.300That gave us tremendous incentive to adhere to the letter of the law, because if there was any abuse of that authority, the court could order it revealed and the case could be closed and we could be sanctioned or worse.
00:31:01.120And that mechanism was put into the Constitution for a reason by our founders.
00:31:06.160The separation of powers mechanism is an unbelievably proficient incentive not to abuse power.
00:31:14.060And we don't have that with FISA, and we're working towards that now.
00:33:18.000What we need to do is we need to insist that the FISA powers are reauthorized within the constitutional framework so that there is a separation of power, that the intelligence community cannot be tasked with policing itself if they're searching American citizens' data.
00:33:37.180And achieving that is going to require a lot of legwork on the Republican side only, because I don't think that the Democrats are going to act in good faith.
00:33:43.980And so it's going to be a very academic, a very focused and a very constitutionally centered, centered debate going on that we need to get done.
00:33:52.960Well, we know the Dems aren't going to act in good faith.
00:33:54.700In fact, that's the whole reason that people are concerned about this.
00:33:57.460It's because the minute the Democrats get back into power, we know what they're going to do because they've done it before.
00:34:04.520I don't envy your task because, you know, first of all, getting Republicans together in our nation's capital is it's like herding cats generally.
00:34:12.720but that is that is the real hard meticulous work of government it's very very important we talk a
00:34:18.000lot about the stakes of elections the stakes of shifts in power this is a big one this power was
00:34:22.720used against us and and we need to make sure we get it right congressman thank you for coming on
00:34:26.320the show i look forward to a cigar together at some point soon amen thank you michael good to
00:34:32.380see you the daily wire gives you access to everything tomorrow night do not miss our special
00:34:37.120wired in live white house correspondence dinner coverage with exclusive red carpet pre-show
00:34:41.140coverage at 6 p.m. Eastern, followed by the dinner live at 8 p.m. Eastern right here on The Daily
00:34:45.240Wire. It also marks President Trump's first appearance at the dinner as president. So I
00:34:49.540think it's fair to say he may have a few things on his mind. Watch live tomorrow night starting
00:34:53.760at 6 p.m. Eastern on The Daily Wire. Okay, my favorite comment yesterday is from FamilyGash7500
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00:35:11.460You're so right. You're so right. We're going to be living in GTA 6 if the libs take power before
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00:44:26.400So, no, it won't be treated the same way, even though what Ilhan Omar is accused of doing is infinitely more egregious, almost infinitely more egregious.
00:44:34.420But no, because it was just a political op.
00:44:40.020Sometimes American Catholics get accused of having dual loyalty.
00:44:43.740It seems that we're seeing more of this recently with everything going on in Iran and the ongoing sort of clash between President Trump and Pope Leo.
00:44:52.820So I'm curious how you would explain the relationship between church and state to a non-Catholic and how the church actually understands the Roman pontiff's temporal and moral authority.
00:45:07.740Yes, you have heard these charges of dual loyalty in American history.
00:45:11.680It's funny because these charges are made of Jews today, but they were more often made of Catholics in American history.0.54
00:45:18.380The reason it doesn't work for Catholics is because it's true that we have a loyalty to a foreign potentate, a foreign monarch, but it's of a different kind than the loyalty to our nation.
00:45:32.160because the loyalty that we have to the Pope,
00:45:34.640especially now that the Pope doesn't have any territory,
00:46:16.540I mean, this is one of the real problems with nationalism, which arose in the 19th century.
00:46:22.660Don't forget, before the 19th century, before the big nationalist movements, the revolutions of 1848, there were all sorts of different kinds of political order.
00:46:30.620empire was much more popular, much more common. And so within empire, oddly enough,
00:46:41.360groups like the Jews who have this kind of tribal identity, but lacked a territory or a state,0.92
00:46:48.460that's actually much easier because there are all sorts of little groups that have their own
00:46:51.480kind of loyalties, but they're kind of taken within this broader empire. When nationalism
00:46:56.220arose as a consequence of modernity, it put the Jews in a very difficult position because,
00:47:03.140and this is why the two responses, the two attractions for a lot of, especially intellectual
00:47:09.020Jews, were either communism, which kind of tried to undo a lot of nationalism, or Zionism, which
00:47:17.140was a Jewish form of nationalism. But in that case, they were kind of criticized from all angles,
00:47:22.540Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That was a consequence of a major political revolution in0.99
00:47:29.260the world order. And so I think there are lots of problems with nationalism. I guess it's preferable
00:47:34.020to liberal globalism, but that's why I always say two cheers for nationalism. That's why there's a
00:47:38.640lot of kinship between the Catholics and the Jews on this point, because really just historically,
00:47:45.140The Catholics and the Jews are two political identities that have endured since antiquity.
00:47:52.600And they don't fit perfectly neatly within the nationalist framework.
00:47:59.660For the reason that when nationalism really comes about in the piece of Westphalia, the Treaty of Augsburg, one of the conclusions of that was cuyus regio, eus religio.
00:48:28.800So this is one of the issues of nationalism.
00:48:30.860That's not like a really sexy, pithy answer,
00:48:34.440and it's not going to inflame the antagonisms that people want to naturally sort of stoke.
00:48:39.120But it's just a kind of curious fact of the world order.
00:48:41.300And I don't think that our present nation state system, I don't think the UN is going to endure for the rest of time.0.55
00:48:46.740There will be some other form of world order that will present its challenges and its difficulties to Catholics and Jews and all sorts of other people alike.