The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 60 - Luther Revisited ft. Eric Metaxas

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00:00:38.060 Sanctimonious Democrat Al Franken has been not only accused of groping a news anchor during a USO tour while she slept,

00:00:45.700 he even posed for a photograph doing it.

00:00:48.160 What a smart guy. 0.98

00:00:49.220 If we have to lose the Alabama Senate race, we can at least take that clown down with us. 0.94

00:00:53.920 White nationalist Richard Spencer loses his verified status as Twitter infringes on his constitutional right to a blue checkmark. 0.90

00:01:02.220 And Charles Manson lies on his deathbed 46 years after he was sentenced to death for the murder of 11 people.

00:01:08.600 Fleckus Talks Bradley Devlin and Alicia Krauss join the panel of deplorables to discuss.

00:01:14.200 Best of all, the great Eric Metaxas comes on the show to defend Martin Luther's honor against my popish insults,

00:01:21.640 and to discuss his new book, Martin Luther, The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.

00:01:26.900 Finally, all of your most pressing questions are answered and your life is changed in the mailbag.

00:01:32.240 I am Michael Knowles.

00:01:33.260 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:34.280 There is so much news to get to today and so much delight that we can take at Al Franken getting caught up in this sexual harassment witch hunt.

00:01:49.360 By the way, when I say it's a witch hunt, we're clearly in a witch hunt mindset, but there are witches.

00:01:54.060 That's the other aspect of this, too.

00:01:56.380 There are Weinsteins out there, so we're in a witch hunt, but there are witches here. 0.93

00:02:00.220 We have a lot to get to, but listen, I caught a lot of flack for my Martin Luther episode.

00:02:05.580 People thought that I was a little harsh on the corpulent German heretic. 1.00

00:02:08.940 They felt that I was overly popish and a little leaning in toward Rome.

00:02:13.600 So to rectify this, I brought on the great Eric Metaxas.

00:02:17.960 He was kind enough to do an interview.

00:02:19.520 We prerecorded it so it could go a little bit longer, and providentially it was on Martin Luther's birthday, actually, November 10th, that we recorded it.

00:02:26.000 He's going to talk about his new book and defend Martin Luther against my popish onslaught.

00:02:31.460 Now I have the great pleasure of being joined by someone that I'm a big fan of both for his radio show and for his writing, Eric Metaxas, host of The Eric Metaxas Show and author of the new book, Martin Luther, The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.

00:02:47.280 Now, Eric, I do not share your admiration of the corpulent German exactly, but I did really enjoy the book. 1.00

00:02:54.260 I thought the narrative is very compelling, very readable, and I learned so much about Martin Luther that I didn't know before.

00:03:01.720 And more importantly, I unlearned so many things about Martin Luther that I did know.

00:03:06.420 It's like what Ronald Reagan used to say. 0.96

00:03:08.260 It's not that our liberal friends are ignorant. 0.96

00:03:10.020 They just know so much that isn't so.

00:03:11.680 That basically was my view of Luther, and your book corrected that a lot.

00:03:15.600 So, yeah, what made you write it?

00:03:17.880 Most of what we know about him is a myth or a legend or at least a half-truth, which is to say a lie.

00:03:24.320 I didn't go into this book.

00:03:26.000 I don't go into any of my books knowing what I want to write.

00:03:28.480 I just go in with a healthy level of ignorance and curiosity and honesty, and I say I'm just going to write what I find.

00:03:36.560 But what I found about Luther was that much of what is said about him over and over and over is just not true.

00:03:42.080 The first thing is everybody says he was raised in a very poor family, that his father was a poor miner.

00:03:49.140 He often said, kind of like politicians sort of furnish their street cred, you know, their humble bona fides.

00:03:54.740 He says that my father was a humble miner.

00:03:58.180 That's true, and it's not true.

00:03:59.560 His father was a successful businessman in the mining business.

00:04:03.420 He was socially upwardly mobile, which is an extraordinary thing in the 1480s that there was enough of a free market that somebody could be not wealthy but could get wealthy or could work hard and that there was enough of an opportunity, let's say.

00:04:19.620 So the father borrowed, it seems, a lot of money from the mother's family and started this huge business.

00:04:25.260 And it had to work very hard to justify the loan to get it, you know, to work out.

00:04:31.380 So these were hard workers.

00:04:33.340 But the more we know about Luther, there's a bunch of things in the book that are brand new.

00:04:37.280 I talk about a couple of archaeological things that were done, 2003, 2008, where they discovered that the actual house that Luther was born in is three times as large as they've been saying for 500 years.

00:04:49.300 So it's kind of crazy, and then they found a lot of garbage, trash, and they could dig through it, and they discovered real evidence that these were people of some means.

00:05:02.200 He was not raised under difficult circumstances.

00:05:05.940 They found nice toys.

00:05:07.620 They found nice toys.

00:05:09.260 You read the book.

00:05:09.920 Thank you.

00:05:11.000 I really enjoyed the book.

00:05:12.400 I read it over a cigar because the body is a temple and the temple needs incense.

00:05:16.260 It's the claim that comes later on in the book that you point out, which is probably the essence of the Protestant Revolution, and it's what Hamlet talks about, is that Luther cracked the cover of objective truth, cracked the authority and the ownership of objective truth.

00:05:36.360 And we've seen a lot of varied consequences from that.

00:05:40.140 On the one hand, we have political freedom and the nation states and liberal democracy.

00:05:44.980 On the other hand, you and I both attended a former university called Yale, and there are people wreaking havoc over there because—

00:05:54.120 Is it still Yale, or have they changed the name because he was a slaveholder?

00:05:57.320 He was a slave trader.

00:05:58.740 They have to change it to, I don't know, Mr. Rogers University.

00:06:02.660 Hale.

00:06:03.180 I think Nathan Hale.

00:06:04.640 Nathan Hale is the greatest man ever to graduate from Yale, at least in previous centuries.

00:06:09.840 And I think that they should change the name.

00:06:12.260 But yes, the world—the door that Luther opened, we all know, led to tremendous things and to terrible things.

00:06:20.780 That's part of the price of freedom, right?

00:06:23.140 In other words, when you say to people you are free, you are free to say and believe stupid things or to say and believe wonderful things. 0.97

00:06:32.060 That's freedom.

00:06:32.720 In America, we protect people who say things we disagree with.

00:06:36.940 That's at the essence of freedom.

00:06:38.940 You know and I know that it's a little more complicated than that.

00:06:41.780 I wrote a whole book called If You Can Keep It, my book before this, where I go into how if you don't have a virtuous populace, if faith is not at the heart of a culture, self-government doesn't work.

00:06:53.620 People will destroy themselves, as has happened many times in the past.

00:06:58.260 Free market will not give us everything we're looking for.

00:07:00.880 These things need to have people running them in such a way that they're going to give us what we want, right?

00:07:07.760 So what Luther enabled, I think, led to great things, but it also led to many terrible things. 0.89

00:07:14.440 I'll be the first to say it.

00:07:15.520 And I love the point about mass communication.

00:07:19.000 I loved when you're writing about how Luther himself didn't intend for his 95 theses to spread as quickly as they did, as ubiquitously as they did, almost like a Facebook debate.

00:07:31.060 You know, it gets out of hand and everybody sees it.

00:07:33.600 And he said he had some doubts about them.

00:07:35.560 He might have written it differently.

00:07:36.820 How instrumental were two things to the spread of those theses?

00:07:43.140 The sale of indulgences.

00:07:45.280 My only quibble with your book, by the way, is I felt you were a little harsh on Pope Sixtus IV.

00:07:50.460 I felt that he—but, you know, people are a little harsh on Sixtus.

00:07:54.100 And the confusion over the sale of indulgences married to this printing press where people on the other side of the world end up reading Luther's thesis and say,

00:08:08.840 Oh, Martin, good job, pal.

00:08:10.060 I didn't know you read it.

00:08:11.740 The channels of communication effectively don't exist.

00:08:15.180 The cultural elites, which in those days were the church and the state, have complete control.

00:08:21.900 And if you try to get a message to somebody else, you can't.

00:08:25.880 There's just no ability to do that.

00:08:28.420 Suddenly somebody invents the printing press, and you can write something, and whether you like it or not, someone else can copy it and print it and distribute it very cheaply.

00:08:37.420 And then people who get it can reprint it and distribute it, and it goes on and on.

00:08:42.340 It's no different than, you know, forwarding something, hitting reply all, and it goes to everybody, and you think, uh-oh, what just happened?

00:08:49.680 And that wasn't possible 10 years ago or 20 years ago.

00:08:52.940 But suddenly everybody knows, and there's no way to get the horse back in the barn.

00:08:57.220 Luther's theses, I mean, one of the hugest misconceptions in the story of Luther, which, you know, it's such a good story if people want to believe it.

00:09:04.460 But they had this idea that in 1517 this young man wanted to stick his finger in the pope's eye and post this incendiary document in the most incendiary place imaginable.

00:09:15.500 Well, hey, how about the church door?

00:09:17.780 And then you find out, no, no, no, no, no, that we're looking at it, you know, from a different perspective.

00:09:24.280 What happened at the time was a humble monk who loved his church and loved his pope wanted to bring attention to something that he thought was dragging the church's name through the mud.

00:09:38.180 And he did this for the church, for the honor of the church.

00:09:41.280 He said, this is not right that we have allowed the practice of indulgences to get out of hand so that people are coming to my confessional and throwing this piece of paper in front of me saying, hey, Padre, what can I get for this?

00:09:52.200 Get out of penance, free card, right.

00:09:54.580 That's what it is.

00:09:55.840 So Luther saw as a brilliant theologian and as a very serious priest and monk, he said, this is bad for the faithful.

00:10:04.120 The souls of my flock are in danger.

00:10:07.620 And so he says we need to have an academic debate, a proper academic debate.

00:10:11.540 But everybody was having academic.

00:10:13.160 It's what you did when there was, you know, trouble.

00:10:15.380 You said, let's discuss it.

00:10:16.420 So he writes in Latin, 95 points, some of them slightly provocative because you want it to provoke a good academic debate.

00:10:24.040 And he posts it on a local bulletin board, which is the church door.

00:10:29.520 But it's as if – so you picture him with a hammer and nails thundering against the papacy, you know, and that's completely wrong.

00:10:36.000 Shattering the theology, right.

00:10:37.540 You might as well picture him with a pushpin down by the laundry room, putting it on the bulletin board next to the thing with the missing cat and the guitar lessons.

00:10:45.220 I mean basically that's what he did.

00:10:48.080 But people saw it and somehow it just spread and spread and it got way out of hand.

00:10:52.540 He never intended it to cause trouble.

00:10:54.640 That's a fact.

00:10:55.140 And speaking of his deference to the pope and not trying to, you know, poke a nail into his eye, there's the most heartbreaking moment of the story is that he writes the letter to the pope.

00:11:06.020 He writes a letter to Leo X, I believe, and it never is sent.

00:11:10.360 Well, see, this is the thing.

00:11:11.440 You start – I mean I hope people will read the book because it's startling and stunning when you see what actually happened.

00:11:19.900 It's not – it's the way real life works.

00:11:23.300 Dumb little things happen. 1.00

00:11:24.640 Stupid people misunderstand things. 1.00

00:11:26.480 Good people misunderstand things. 1.00

00:11:28.380 Miltitz, who was this papal legate sent to kind of deal with Luther, made some terrible mistakes.

00:11:34.860 And a couple of other people involved made some terrible mistakes.

00:11:37.980 He kind of kept thinking if I could deal directly with the pope, surely he has to see what I'm saying is correct.

00:11:44.260 I'm not trying to upend Catholic doctrine.

00:11:48.360 I mean so much of his point is that the pope – the Christian doctrine, church doctrine on indulgences is that, you know, it remits penance and temporal punishment for sin.

00:12:01.820 And while the pope doesn't have jurisdiction over souls in purgatory, he can intercede on your behalf.

00:12:07.480 He can ask really nicely for those souls to have less punishment.

00:12:10.980 And then you get guys like Tetzel down at the ground who are hawking when the coin rings and a soul out of purgatory springs.

00:12:18.280 So much seems to be Luther wanting to reach the pope, wanting to go directly to the vicar of Christ on earth, the bark of Peter.

00:12:25.940 I mean look, it's no different than a president like Reagan not knowing what's happening with his guys with Iran-Contra.

00:12:33.060 I mean you realize that it's very complicated.

00:12:37.000 So he's on the hook ultimately, but there are people that he has trusted, and obviously people like Tetzel were very fast and loose, and the corruption.

00:12:46.300 One moment that struck me is when Luther had not talked to his father for a while because his father wanted him to become a lawyer.

00:12:52.940 So he's this genius.

00:12:54.960 He's clearly a prodigy.

00:12:56.340 Just as he's about to become a lawyer, he doesn't want to become a lawyer.

00:12:59.400 He's struck down.

00:13:00.380 There's this moment, this vision, this thunderbolt, and eventually they reconcile.

00:13:06.220 And Luther's father says, God grant that that was not an apparition of the devil that convinced you to go and enter into the monastery.

00:13:18.040 What are the odds that it was an apparition of the devil 500 years later?

00:13:21.640 The fact is it could have been, but it doesn't matter because we serve a God who is able to braid plans B, C, and D back into plan A.

00:13:34.060 Luther, his heart was in the right place, and the Bible says God looks on the heart.

00:13:40.020 This was a man who wanted what God wanted, and so sometimes we struggle to figure out what is it that God wants?

00:13:47.140 What is God like?

00:13:47.960 When he did this initially, his whole view of God was wrong.

00:13:51.900 He had a view of God as a nasty judge who was just slavering, ruling to throw people into hell.

00:14:01.260 If you have that view of God, you're going to act accordingly.

00:14:04.000 And Luther thought, the only thing I can do to cover my rear end is to go into the monastery.

00:14:07.600 I'm not going to risk eternal hell for a good law career.

00:14:13.700 So he goes to the monastery really to cover his rear end, and when he gets there, he tries as hard as anyone to pray his way into the peace of God and to, in effect, earn his way.

00:14:26.680 This is what happens is that he has this sense that I've got to do this and this and this and this.

00:14:31.440 I've got to jump through these hoops, and you feel like you're performing and you're failing, and what kind of a God would put you through that hell?

00:14:37.940 So you begin to resent God and hate God.

00:14:40.380 He's reading the Bible, reading the Bible, and of course, famously at some point, he discovers this idea that we are saved by faith.

00:14:46.900 The righteousness of God is given to us.

00:14:49.620 It's not something that God uses to beat us into hell.

00:14:52.340 He gives it to us as a free gift.

00:14:53.820 So it turns his world upside down, and right around the same time was when he decided to post the theses on indulgences, and so it all kind of exploded thereafter.

00:15:07.000 The portrait you paint, as you've just described, is of a guy who is an obsessive.

00:15:13.300 He's neurotic.

00:15:14.380 He is constantly worrying himself to death. 0.89

00:15:17.460 He seems to have a great fear of death.

00:15:19.700 He's so gaunt and thin, not like that portrait that we imagine of him, and then later on, he becomes this garrulous, fat German fellow, and he's constantly troubled by intestinal pains. 1.00

00:15:33.000 A priest friend of mine, because of the word in cloaca or ox cloaca, it is a suggestion that he had his epiphany about Romans while sitting on the commode,

00:15:44.040 and my priest friend wondered what torrent of commentary he could have unleashed on the world with a modern colonic irrigation.

00:15:50.280 That is neither here nor there.

00:15:52.500 Of course, I make fun of the Freudian.

00:15:55.140 That's, you know, that's...

00:15:56.980 That's what I want to ask about, are these Freudian theories.

00:15:59.560 Right.

00:16:00.580 I mean, there was a guy named Eric Erickson who wrote a book about Luther called Young Man Luther,

00:16:05.340 and if you want to talk about a mid-century horror of a cliché, Freudian nonsense, 350 pages of Freudian nonsense,

00:16:15.600 really giving Luther no real credit for being a person.

00:16:23.820 No rational credit. 0.97

00:16:25.200 He's just all ass of urges and constipation and libido, and hey, that's what makes the world go round. 0.71

00:16:30.800 Of course, that's not true, but in 1958, it was difficult to argue against it. 0.95

00:16:35.480 So, yeah, people really misunderstand Luther in that way, too.

00:16:38.400 They say, oh, his father was really cruel, and he was rebelling against his father,

00:16:41.880 and that there was this Oedipal spasm against his father and the father god that made him do everything he did. 0.98

00:16:48.180 It's completely ridiculous.

00:16:49.460 And again, the least you can do in a biography, and I hope I do in my book, is simply tell the facts, 0.56

00:16:54.420 and a story emerges from the facts, at least if you have enough facts.

00:16:57.920 And at this point, we can say we do.

00:16:59.420 You certainly achieve it in the book.

00:17:01.220 It's really, really good.

00:17:02.480 I highly recommend it, even as a very popish fellow and traditionalist conservative.

00:17:08.380 I really, really enjoyed it.

00:17:09.600 I recommend that everybody go out and read it.

00:17:11.700 It's Martin Luther, The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.

00:17:16.060 We can quibble about maybe the subtitle or Sixtus IV or what have you, but a really good book.

00:17:20.620 Everyone should go out and read it.

00:17:21.620 And, of course, listen to The Eric Metaxas Show.

00:17:23.920 It's a great show.

00:17:24.680 And, Eric, thanks for being here, and we definitely want to have you back as soon as possible.

00:17:27.860 Michael, it was my joy.

00:17:29.520 Thank you so much.

00:17:30.460 Did I defend Sixtus enough?

00:17:31.960 I felt I didn't sufficiently defend my—

00:17:35.040 It was too much.

00:17:35.280 It was too much.

00:17:36.300 Well, we can all argue about that, I guess.

00:17:39.100 Okay.

00:17:39.640 That was really great.

00:17:40.420 I really love Eric Metaxas.

00:17:42.960 I like his show a lot and his writings.

00:17:44.600 So now I'm moving on to his Bonhoeffer book.

00:17:46.280 And regardless of him not really convincing me to like Martin Luther, I still enjoyed the book, and you should all go out and read it.

00:17:54.340 So before we get to it, we have an excellent panel today.

00:17:56.800 We have Bradley Devlin.

00:17:57.840 We have Fleckis Talks.

00:17:58.700 We have Alicia Krauss.

00:17:59.800 An excellent panel.

00:18:00.600 So much to talk about.

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00:20:46.120 Panel, thank you for being here.

00:20:47.660 We have much to get to today.

00:20:49.480 We have Al Franken getting a little handsy with reporters and being sanctimonious as ever.

00:20:54.260 We have Richard Spencer being unverified.

00:20:56.360 And poor Charlie Manson is on his deathbed, apparently.

00:21:00.240 So let's start with Al Franken.

00:21:02.520 He is in hot water.

00:21:04.060 He has been sanctimonious since the 90s, since he was Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live.

00:21:09.640 Just liberal, insufferable. 0.95

00:21:11.380 He wrote that book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. 0.99

00:21:14.640 Wah, wah, wah, wah.

00:21:15.320 And so anyway, now that we have this sexual assault craze that is sweeping the nation coast to coast,

00:21:21.700 he's being swept up in it too.

00:21:23.420 This is a guy who's demagogued on Donald Trump.

00:21:25.940 He's constantly berating Republicans.

00:21:28.960 And now it turns out that in 2006, during a USO tour, he groped a reporter, a news anchor named Leanne Tweeden, in her sleep.

00:21:38.520 He also said that they had to rehearse a bit for the USO show.

00:21:42.540 He said, we have to practice the kiss.

00:21:43.860 This is a line that actors use all the time.

00:21:45.920 They joke, they say, oh, we've got to practice that kissing scene.

00:21:47.960 You've got to practice, you know, and it's a little joke.

00:21:49.820 Apparently, he took it pretty far and he said, we've got to practice that kissing scene. 0.95

00:21:53.060 And he grabbed her and forced his tongue down her throat. 0.99

00:21:55.260 And she said she had to go wash her mouth out to get the taste of Al Franken out of her mouth. 0.96

00:21:59.600 I certainly can imagine why she would do that. 0.98

00:22:02.880 So she wrote this piece.

00:22:04.540 It's, I've decided it's time to tell my story.

00:22:07.500 Franken is getting totally swept up in it.

00:22:09.220 I love it.

00:22:09.780 It's so much fun.

00:22:10.540 But, Alicia, to be fair, we always try to be fair, Roche-Foucault said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

00:22:17.780 So should we hold Democrats in particular to account on sexual debauchery and assault because they're always demagoguing the women's issue, the war on women? 0.99

00:22:27.840 Or is that not fair?

00:22:29.580 Should we hold them to the same standards we hold Republicans?

00:22:31.720 I would, personally, I would hold them to the same standards that I hold Republicans.

00:22:35.880 And were this a Republican senator, main reason I don't want Roy Moore to live.

00:22:39.280 By the way, he just had a crazy press conference.

00:22:42.160 It was insane.

00:22:42.900 Did I miss it during my show?

00:22:44.180 It's all the media's fault.

00:22:45.380 It's all Mitch McConnell's fault.

00:22:46.920 Well, that's true.

00:22:47.840 But he also might have done all that stuff.

00:22:49.780 So I'm going to hold Al Franken to the same standard that I hold Roy Moore.

00:22:53.420 This isn't alleged groping, as Politico said in a title in a tweet earlier.

00:22:57.500 There's photographic evidence of this.

00:22:59.340 He posed for the photo.

00:23:00.360 He posed for the photo, and we're now finding out that the USO volunteer photographer was indeed his brother.

00:23:05.940 So apparently, creep runs in the family.

00:23:07.960 I've met Leanne before.

00:23:09.240 She's a lovely woman.

00:23:10.240 She's done multiple USO tours.

00:23:11.980 She used to come for free to the Sean Hannity Oliver North Freedom Concerts that raise money for KIA, MIA children to go to college.

00:23:18.560 She's a wonderful human being, and I'm a fan of her as a person.

00:23:22.100 And I'm sure that she, like many women that have been victims of this, had to consider, you know, what is this going to do to my career?

00:23:29.520 What is this going to do to, you know, the situation at large if I come out and share this story?

00:23:34.820 And it looks as if there might be another woman that has said publicly, yes, Al Franken did do this to me too, and my story will be out soon.

00:23:43.060 And, of course, now reporters are hounding down if there's any women that he's treated this way since being a sitting senator on Capitol Hill.

00:23:48.880 And I've got to say, I'm shocked we didn't look for this sooner.

00:23:52.060 The guy has spent his whole career in Hollywood and Washington, D.C.

00:23:55.320 I mean, he worked with Lorne Michaels, who is, of course, the creator of SNL.

00:23:58.980 And when he was asked about, well, how come you guys didn't do a cold SNL open making fun of Harvey Weinstein, he said, oh, well, you know, it's a New York thing.

00:24:05.740 Well, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, also people that are all from New York that Lorne Michaels has been totally okay with making fun of over the years.

00:24:13.920 And it doesn't really surprise me that Al Franken came from that boys' club of comedy in liberal New York.

00:24:20.980 And this is exactly the point, because there have been plenty of sex scandals to go around, certainly, at Fox News or wherever.

00:24:29.320 But for the really high-profile ones of people in office or running as candidates, they seem to have been Democrats of late.

00:24:35.700 Obviously, Bill Clinton is the sexual creep par excellence, but there's Anthony Weiner.

00:24:41.020 We're seeing Al Franken now. 0.96

00:24:44.320 The list goes on.

00:24:45.460 And, Bradley, I'm curious about this as a campus question, because with the sexual hysteria on campus now, that bogus statistic that one in four women is raped or something like that, who are the people perpetrating this?

00:25:00.240 The hookup culture is pretty weird.

00:25:01.700 You know, I'm not that old.

00:25:02.940 I was on campus five years ago, and there was just a ton of sex happening all the time.

00:25:07.160 It's pretty casual.

00:25:08.520 But who are the guys who are really perpetrating the creepy stuff here?

00:25:11.120 Is it the conservative kids, buttoned-up Brooks Brothers, or is it the lefties who are at one corner of their mouth spouting all of this feminist hogwash, and then when no one's looking, they're the ones perpetrating these crimes? 0.99

00:25:25.580 Yeah, I completely agree with you that that statistic is fairly bogus.

00:25:30.380 But it's because we see a movement towards sexual liberation on the left, thinking that women are the same as men, that women want it just as badly as men.

00:25:39.940 And there's been several studies where college-aged men admit that they haven't had consensual sex.

00:25:48.380 So what they say is, oh, well, I was with her all night, and I had sex with her, and that's just the way I operate, and that's the way she operates, because the left has been telling me that women are the same as men, and women want it just as bad.

00:26:02.620 But that just simply isn't true.

00:26:04.160 So we can't deny women their own agency and their own volition by forcing upon them belief systems and values to fight the patriarchy. 1.00

00:26:14.880 And I think that that is a major pitfall for the left and why you're seeing a movement back towards conservatism.

00:26:20.920 Right now it's a very, very liberal environment, but I think you're going to start seeing social conservatives come out of the woodwork with all these net negatives that are coming from this leftist agenda.

00:26:30.760 And a huge statistic is 300,000 abortions per year.

00:26:36.080 Right. That's interesting, because I was asking in particular, because my theory is that feminist woke, woke bro nice guys are the creepiest dudes on the planet, and I would never let my daughter or my fiancé or my female friends alone in a room with them, you know, because they say they're really nice.

00:26:53.200 Oh, man, I get your feelings, you know, and then they just get really creepy and weird.

00:26:57.100 Oh, yeah, man, I love feminism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:26:59.220 But what you're saying is it's the philosophy itself.

00:27:01.940 It's that philosophy that says women and men have entirely identical views of sex and relationships to sex and just unquenchable desires for sex.

00:27:11.920 And so if a woman regrets an experience or a woman is in a bad place and gets very drunk and the man gets very drunk and there's some regret or something, then, hey, no harm, no foul.

00:27:22.700 Well, you know, we both made a mistake or something when really that that isn't a traditional view.

00:27:26.800 And that that isn't the case because men and women are complementary and they're not identical.

00:27:30.920 Very good point. Fleckis, you're out in Hollywood.

00:27:34.320 You know, for so long, there has been this double standard.

00:27:37.040 So Gloria Steinem flacks for Bill Clinton, right? 1.00

00:27:40.780 Bill Clinton is accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault, on and on.

00:27:43.860 And she says, well, he's good on abortion, so we're going to stand by our guy.

00:27:47.580 The feminists follow her. 0.99

00:27:49.080 Is that we're seeing now left wing guys falling because of this.

00:27:52.540 Is that double standard cracking or once this witch hunt goes away, is it going to be right back in place?

00:27:59.620 I think the double standard is cracking.

00:28:02.260 And hello, Michael Knowles.

00:28:03.340 Thank you for having me on again.

00:28:04.320 Good to see you, man.

00:28:04.820 I loved your last video on Ben Shapiro at the outside of UCLA.

00:28:09.920 Everyone, if you're not watching Fleckis's videos, go to Fleckis Talks on YouTube.

00:28:13.280 Those guys, man, the difference between the protesters and the Shapiro audience people is just tremendous.

00:28:21.220 It says a lot about our country.

00:28:23.460 Yeah, a lot of Nazi go home chants.

00:28:25.840 And I was like, wow.

00:28:27.920 But yeah, the double standard is cracking.

00:28:30.140 I really think it is because I think right now we're dealing with a lot of echo chambers.

00:28:35.240 So everyone's just seeing what they agree with.

00:28:37.880 They're seeing their values reaffirmed.

00:28:40.100 And it's tough to get stories that actually break through the echo chamber and are bipartisan people that can agree on in a bipartisan way.

00:28:46.440 So when they do, and it's like these sexual misconduct cases, even though they said alleged, meanwhile, he's looking at the camera, and it was completely premeditated.

00:28:56.220 But when these cases do actually break the echo chambers, I think it raises the level of awareness.

00:29:01.680 So going forward, I think these cases of sexual misconduct are going to be way less popular and just way less in general, and the whole industry is going to change.

00:29:12.500 But I think the fact that we are seeing these cases come forward, and it does tend to be Democrats and disgusting Hollywood, I think going forward it has to change, and I think it will.

00:29:24.940 Well, I hope it does.

00:29:25.860 I don't know.

00:29:26.480 I'm a little less hopeful than you are probably.

00:29:29.140 But the stats show that it is changing.

00:29:32.000 I mean, Hillary Clinton lost millennial women because millennial women were children during the age of Bill Clinton. 0.93

00:29:38.180 And then now in the age of the Internet, even if they didn't vote for Donald Trump, his bringing the accusers to the debate, his bringing it up, his surrogates bringing it up,

00:29:46.180 was enough for a lot of millennial women to go, yeah, we're not OK with this. 1.00

00:29:50.700 We're not going to go out and go vote for a woman that stayed married to a man that had these accusations in his past.

00:29:57.300 And so I agree there.

00:29:58.980 I think that politically this is maybe potentially an opportunity for the Republicans to say, hey, guys, we're supposed to be the party of the good guys.

00:30:06.500 We call out our own creeps.

00:30:08.260 The Democrats don't.

00:30:09.300 They have a history of not doing it.

00:30:10.540 So come on over to the right side.

00:30:12.320 Absolutely.

00:30:12.840 They wouldn't just vote for her because she was a woman. 0.97

00:30:14.560 And one thing, when Trump decided to bring those women to the debate, all of Clinton's accusers, people said this is awful, this is tawdry, no one cares, this is 20 years old, why are you rehashing this?

00:30:25.620 He clearly sensed something about the moment.

00:30:28.240 Sexual harassment, sexual assault is in the air right now for many reasons.

00:30:32.780 Obviously, the Access Hollywood tape came out against him talking to Billy Bush.

00:30:36.780 And it's just in there.

00:30:38.380 And bringing the fight to them, which we have not done for 20, 30 years, bringing it to them on that is really a really strong response.

00:30:48.000 And I'm glad we're seeing it crack.

00:30:49.640 And I hope that that double standard goes away.

00:30:51.500 OK, we have much more to get to.

00:30:52.960 We have to talk about verification.

00:30:55.160 Richard Spencer and Charlie Manson is dying.

00:30:58.100 But unfortunately, you can't see it.

00:31:00.380 Plus the mailbag, by the way.

00:31:01.380 I'm going to answer all of your questions in the mailbag.

00:31:03.440 But unless you're a Daily Wire subscriber, you can't see it.

00:31:06.540 So go over to DailyWire.com right now.

00:31:08.640 What's the pitch?

00:31:09.340 Well, you get me.

00:31:10.360 You get the Andrew Klavan show.

00:31:11.400 You get the Ben Shapiro show.

00:31:12.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:14.200 But this, this, I can't tell you how many people envy my vessel, the Leftist Tears Tumblr, because they're so abundant right now.

00:31:22.780 The Leftist Tears are pouring out everywhere.

00:31:25.040 Every new Trump tweet about CNN and the failing New York Times and those basketball players who then thanked him.

00:31:30.800 Once they thanked him, they started gushing.

00:31:32.600 I could, I had to hold my breath.

00:31:34.240 And the only way to get this is to subscribe right now as an annual member.

00:31:37.820 Ten bucks a year, or I wish, ten dollars a month, a hundred dollars a year.

00:31:41.520 And you will get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, the finest vessel for Leftist Tears on planet Earth in the entire multiverse.

00:31:49.020 So go to DailyWire.com.

00:31:50.260 We'll be right back.

00:31:50.800 Richard Spencer has been unverified on Twitter.

00:32:04.800 They did this to Milo Yiannopoulos before they kicked him off.

00:32:06.980 I think they kicked off Baked Alaska, who's a white nationalist guy, you know, alt-right figure.

00:32:13.500 And Richard Spencer has lost it now.

00:32:16.040 He is, his constitutional right to a blue checkmark is clearly being infringed on.

00:32:20.400 And Alicia, to play devil's advocate here, literally devil's advocate in this case, should we be worried?

00:32:28.660 To invert a phrase often used against Nazis, first Twitter came for the Nazis.

00:32:34.320 How long before they start coming for regular run-of-the-mill conservatives who violate their regulations and start criminalizing thought?

00:32:44.380 I'm even wondering if they're going to start coming after conservatives that aren't violating the regulations and they keep moving those regulations.

00:32:50.700 You know, we've seen other social media platforms do this as well to fit with the more politically correct narrative.

00:32:57.000 Listen, I'm not a fan of Spencer.

00:32:58.420 I'm not a fan of these other people that have lost their checkmarks and eventually their accounts.

00:33:01.860 But there is a level of hypocrisy here.

00:33:04.320 And I'm kind of torn on it because I don't know that a blue checkmark is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.

00:33:10.300 But it isn't to promote, the blue checkmark from Twitter doesn't mean that Twitter agrees with every single tweet that Ben Shapiro, you or I, send out.

00:33:17.280 It just means, yes, this is Alicia Krauss, this is her verified account.

00:33:21.200 So anything else that has like, you know, Alicia Krauss' eyebrows or something isn't going to actually be myself.

00:33:27.440 So it's a process of verifying that that's the real person to prevent fraud, not necessarily to silence speech or promote certain types of speech.

00:33:34.580 And the reason I'm torn on this is because Twitter is a private company.

00:33:38.840 And I think that Daily Wire should be able to do what they want.

00:33:42.040 Michael Knowles should be able to do what he wants.

00:33:43.720 And part of me does believe that Twitter, as a private company, as a corporation, should be able to make the decisions that they want.

00:33:50.520 Well, at least Michael Knowles should be able to do what he wants.

00:33:52.420 I agree with that.

00:33:52.800 Even if those decisions could potentially lead down the slippery slope of conservatives eventually being silenced.

00:33:58.980 Sure.

00:33:59.260 Though there is some case, at least for Facebook and YouTube, that they do have a virtual monopoly over forms of information.

00:34:05.580 That's why Prager right now is suing them.

00:34:07.580 So I don't know.

00:34:08.360 I go back and forth on this because I share many of your misgivings about telling companies what to do.

00:34:13.120 But that distinction between the checkmark initially was just to identify that this is the real person because there are a lot of fake accounts.

00:34:21.060 You get these all the time.

00:34:22.060 You know, there's a really funny account, Ben Shapiro's yarmulke.

00:34:24.960 You know, you get all of these.

00:34:26.000 Ben Shapiro 2020.

00:34:27.160 Ben Shapiro 2020.

00:34:27.380 It's not really his political pack.

00:34:28.980 I'm sorry, folks.

00:34:29.680 And, you know, you get like there are a thousand fake Trump accounts, but the one with the checkmark is how, you know, you're talking to the real guy.

00:34:37.260 Now, though, it's considered like just a status symbol.

00:34:40.320 It's a mark that I'm famous or I'm powerful or influential or whatever.

00:34:44.740 There are people who have that checkmark who have like 100 followers, but they just they need to know that it's the real person because they've done something.

00:34:53.220 It's not because they're a celebrity or a media personality.

00:34:54.520 No, they're not a celebrity at all.

00:34:55.940 But, you know, Fleckis, in this celebrity culture, that's what it's come to be.

00:35:00.840 It's a coveted status symbol, that blue checkmark.

00:35:04.100 Who cares about it?

00:35:05.100 Who cares?

00:35:05.500 What does Richard Spencer care?

00:35:06.820 He gets to say what he wants.

00:35:08.040 People are still following him.

00:35:09.600 If Twitter is going to act childish, as I think they are, who cares? 0.97

00:35:14.480 He still gets to spread his ridiculous message anyway. 0.98

00:35:17.980 Why? 0.98

00:35:18.800 Why the cult of celebrity?

00:35:22.000 That's a great question.

00:35:23.020 And I actually just made it through the Twitter purge myself.

00:35:26.340 I did not lose my blue checkmark.

00:35:27.600 You made it.

00:35:28.000 All right, baby.

00:35:29.380 Not a Nazi.

00:35:31.480 Yeah, I think with the situation with Richard Spencer, it's just Twitter trying to do everything they can to not associate with him in any way.

00:35:40.340 So, I mean, we're seeing it as well with Taylor Swift.

00:35:42.700 A lot of people are coming out now and saying, hey, Taylor Swift, why didn't you get political?

00:35:46.060 Why are you staying apolitical?

00:35:47.500 Why haven't you taken a side?

00:35:48.980 So I think it's kind of like the leftist pressure on Twitter.

00:35:52.300 They don't want Twitter to give him a blue check because you don't have to give him a blue check.

00:35:56.940 And getting a blue check means that Twitter went through your profile and thought that you were worthy.

00:36:02.000 So they don't want Twitter to think Richard Spencer is worthy of anything, I think.

00:36:05.840 And that's why the purge happened.

00:36:07.940 And, you know, a lot of these people, yeah, they lose their blue checkmark.

00:36:10.840 They don't really care.

00:36:11.460 But I think it does affect them in a bigger way.

00:36:13.200 And it goes back to what I was saying before.

00:36:14.660 It just feeds the echo chamber.

00:36:16.400 That Twitter echo chamber now is, you know, a little bit stronger.

00:36:19.100 And they keep chipping away and eventually it will be just, you know, a complete leftist mouthpiece.

00:36:24.540 The one advantage I will say of the blue check is that as someone who got a blue checkmark for literally doing nothing,

00:36:31.520 for publishing blank pages and selling a lot of books, the advantage is that businesses, when you complain about them, they give you stuff.

00:36:38.580 So, you know, I had a flight that was delayed like 1,000 hours and it was all messed up.

00:36:43.120 And I complained about it and they basically said, what can we do?

00:36:45.620 We'll do anything for you.

00:36:46.720 That's the only advantage.

00:36:47.740 It could also have to do with the number of followers that you have.

00:36:50.140 I mean, this is something that I think Gary Vee and other people in entertainment and marketing and stuff have talked about.

00:36:55.640 It's like, you know, is it really a company having good customer service if they're only answering to their popular people that tweet hate at them?

00:37:01.840 Right, right.

00:37:02.680 It doesn't matter to me as long as I get the free stuff.

00:37:04.300 But I just mean Richard gets to say whatever he wants.

00:37:08.400 His followers have total access to whatever nonsense he wants to scribble.

00:37:13.580 So, you know, what's the big deal? 0.94

00:37:15.200 And Bradley, I do want to talk about this a little bit because, look, I think Richard Spencer is basically the devil.

00:37:21.980 But I do like that he's honest.

00:37:23.440 I think a lot of people who share his point of view, they're not honest.

00:37:26.460 They try to combine various elements of conservative political philosophy with this sort of quasi-fascistic, racialist political view.

00:37:37.700 And I respect him in that he doesn't do that.

00:37:41.120 He is very clear.

00:37:42.080 He says the alt-right is about white identity.

00:37:44.180 We want a white ethnostate. 0.96

00:37:46.460 And so I at least give him some credit for that.

00:37:49.300 He's had some luck recently with a campaign that the alt-right has run, which is on college campuses, and it's a sign that says it's okay to be white. 0.59

00:37:58.580 Obviously a totally innocuous statement.

00:38:00.980 And they were relying on the backlash for reasonable people to say, well, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.

00:38:06.220 It's okay to be white. 0.97

00:38:07.100 And obviously their meta-political goal here is to have people start identifying essentially or primarily with their skin color rather than with something like their ideas or their faith in God or some other ideological component.

00:38:21.520 Do you find on campus that this is catching on, that people are falling for this trap that the alt-right are setting for them and that the left and the regressive left is basically rolling out the red carpet for people to do?

00:38:37.560 Or is it falling flat?

00:38:40.060 Oh, yeah.

00:38:40.740 I have several thoughts on the alt-right and its campus presence.

00:38:44.180 But first, if there are any young conservatives watching, watch Michael Knowles' video on Prager University about the alt-right.

00:38:51.280 It will give you everything you need to know about who they are and what they believe in. 0.99

00:38:55.500 And if you're going to be a Nazi, you might as well tell me straight to my face that you're being a Nazi so I can punch you in the face. 1.00

00:39:01.820 I'm joking. 1.00

00:39:02.740 I'm joking.

00:39:02.940 You're going to get unverified for that.

00:39:05.100 You're going to lose your checkmark.

00:39:05.920 Well, actually, a little aside here, young conservative writers that I run in the same circles with are having a very, very difficult time getting verified.

00:39:16.500 You're getting a blue checkmark because you're verified that you have a business.

00:39:20.320 I run a website called the University of Politics.

00:39:22.700 I'm their editor-in-chief.

00:39:23.780 I still am struggling to get verified.

00:39:26.740 So there's definitely ideological censorship going on at Twitter.

00:39:30.780 It doesn't mean that you have a right to have that blue checkmark.

00:39:34.040 That's what the founders wanted.

00:39:35.920 Personally, if you're running a company and you're barring half the population, 47% of the population voted for Donald Trump, and you're barring half of the population for sharing their viewpoints and being a verified individual, you're going to lose individuals on the website.

00:39:54.280 True.

00:39:55.740 Further than that, yes, it's okay to be white. 0.97

00:39:58.820 Yeah.

00:39:59.380 Poster.

00:40:00.040 Yeah.

00:40:00.160 Are they winning?

00:40:00.940 Is the old right winning on campus? 0.98

00:40:04.080 They're not.

00:40:04.740 They're winning on the message boards on 4chan and Reddit because the echo chamber within hyper-liberal campuses have pushed these individuals down into this scummy, pepe, mean society where they're radicalized and it bubbles out in events like Charlottesville.

00:40:26.400 So constitutional conservatives need to come out very strongly against the alt-right and tell individuals who don't necessarily like political correctness that just because the left labels you alt-right because you don't like political correctness doesn't mean you are alt-right.

00:40:42.560 You can come join the conservative movement.

00:40:44.400 You can come be for individual rights.

00:40:46.160 You can come be for lower taxes and be for a strong national defense.

00:40:49.860 I'll go further.

00:40:51.040 I'll go further.

00:40:51.640 I want the memes.

00:40:52.440 I love the memes.

00:40:53.220 I think they're hilarious.

00:40:54.240 I want Pepe.

00:40:55.000 Pepe's great.

00:40:55.900 I just don't want the ethnostate. 0.99

00:40:58.040 I don't want people to ground their identity essentially in race because I think that's very stupid and it misses the point of our creation and of our lives. 0.95

00:41:06.020 Okay, speaking of people who miss the point of their life and speaking of great evil and principalities and powers of this world, Charles Manson is on his deathbed only 46 years after he was sentenced to death, tells you something about criminal justice in the United States.

00:41:22.580 So my first question, Alicia, on the death penalty itself, is it cruel and unusual punishment to abolish the death penalty?

00:41:30.440 He's only still alive because it was found unconstitutional in California for some ridiculous reason in the 70s.

00:41:37.680 Is it wrong to abolish the death penalty and lock people up for half a century?

00:41:44.380 I think, well, I mean, he would be in hell a hell of a lot sooner, so I think that I'm okay with the death penalty.

00:41:52.180 This is something that I know that especially some Catholic friends of mine say, well, if you're going to be pro-life, then you have to be pro-life throughout the whole life.

00:41:58.420 But my argument is that a baby in utero didn't murder people senselessly and create a cult and lead people to do disgusting and horrible things.

00:42:06.400 You know, Manson did do that as an adult and had a fully formed functioning ability to decide between right and wrong.

00:42:13.120 A child in the womb does not and is at the whim of the mother and the doctor, you know, the abortionist.

00:42:17.920 So, but I think Manson should have died a long time ago.

00:42:21.120 It really pisses me off that my tax dollars have been paying to keep him alive and to hospitalize him and to feed him. 0.97

00:42:28.480 And, you know, to have his crazy wife that he married a couple years ago come and visit him and all that stuff. 0.94

00:42:33.260 Or tried to marry. 0.93

00:42:34.060 I think that the license went through.

00:42:36.280 But, yeah, I guess it's harder to marry Charles Manson than you would think.

00:42:40.920 Yeah.

00:42:41.280 I mean, that to me is a very large red flag of our criminal justice system.

00:42:45.760 Understandably, there are some people that commit crimes that lose their right to vote.

00:42:49.860 And people are like, oh, but felons should have the right to vote.

00:42:52.600 And I'm like, no, no.

00:42:54.700 Like, I think you should lose everything when you commit certain crimes.

00:42:57.480 And in this case, I think Manson should have lost his life a long time ago.

00:43:00.620 But for a little sympathy for Manson, by the way, I will say on the Catholic point, Pope Pius IX, blessed Pope Pius IX, killed over 500 people.

00:43:09.360 He executed them.

00:43:10.160 So, you know, there's some disagreement among Catholics here.

00:43:12.560 Certainly, I think so.

00:43:14.540 But a little sympathy for Manson.

00:43:16.480 The guy had a horrible life.

00:43:17.960 His mother had him when she was 16.

00:43:21.220 Not an excuse.

00:43:22.500 Well, I mean, there's lots of people out there that have had horrible lives that have not gone on the rampages that he has or been responsible for what he has done.

00:43:29.280 Sure, but just a little.

00:43:30.100 Well, Alyssa, I'm just trying to be so empathetic and bleeding heart here.

00:43:33.260 He, you know, his mother didn't want him.

00:43:35.980 He was he didn't have a name when he was born.

00:43:37.900 He was only given a name a couple of weeks later.

00:43:40.180 He was abandoned by his mother.

00:43:41.960 Initially, he had to live with an aunt or uncle or something.

00:43:44.640 His parents went to prison.

00:43:46.420 He never knew his actual father.

00:43:48.720 And he said the only nice memory from his childhood is the one hug his mother gave him after she got out of jail.

00:43:56.060 He was completely illiterate.

00:43:57.840 He didn't he was sent to a boarding school because his mother tried to give him away to the state.

00:44:03.880 The state refused him.

00:44:05.160 He was sent to a boarding school.

00:44:06.200 He ran away to his mother.

00:44:07.440 His mother rejected him.

00:44:09.040 I mean, this guy was in prison for half of his life before the the Manson family.

00:44:13.360 He just I mean, it's in some ways he never had a shot from the beginning.

00:44:17.720 I mean, it was really, really a horrible, tragic life that you imagine for a little baby.

00:44:22.340 Just because it was a horrible, tragic life.

00:44:24.220 You can't tell me that there wasn't one decent person that ever interacted with him and gave him the opportunity to choose between right and wrong.

00:44:30.880 He had multiple moments throughout his life to do that.

00:44:33.040 But that that is the question.

00:44:34.600 You know, Fleckis does.

00:44:36.280 Should we have any compassion for this guy or should we be happy that he's about to be sent to hell? 0.92

00:44:42.240 Um, I think if he wasn't a white male, you'd have a case there, Michael. 0.95

00:44:47.560 I'm sorry.

00:44:48.300 I forgot it's 2017.

00:44:49.620 Yeah.

00:44:50.480 Yeah.

00:44:51.020 Yeah. 0.86

00:44:51.540 If he wasn't a white male, you'd be on to something. 0.86

00:44:53.660 I don't agree with you.

00:44:54.740 I don't think Charles Manson was a great guy like you do.

00:44:58.280 Yeah.

00:44:58.640 That's going to be the takeaway.

00:44:59.880 Noel says Manson's a great guy.

00:45:01.400 I mean, we're going to be, have to talk about, hash this out later.

00:45:04.900 I'm scared to touch this one, Michael.

00:45:06.620 Noel says guy who murdered 11 people is really cool or something.

00:45:09.760 That's what's going to be the headline.

00:45:12.040 You're going to lose your checkmark.

00:45:13.400 Yeah.

00:45:13.740 Yeah.

00:45:14.100 There it is.

00:45:14.480 There it goes.

00:45:15.100 Oh, it's gone.

00:45:16.640 And it's gone.

00:45:17.800 Um, but I think, yeah, he's a bad guy. 0.92

00:45:19.400 I wish he had died sooner, but you know, he also has a swastika tattooed to his face.

00:45:23.660 So maybe if these protesters are not working at all ever, they should go to the hospital and,

00:45:29.140 you know, rally for his death or whatever.

00:45:30.940 Maybe that's something that they would have, you know, more fun doing than going to the

00:45:34.540 Ben Shapiro thing.

00:45:35.300 Point them in the direction of a true Nazi. 0.94

00:45:37.060 Yeah.

00:45:37.380 I would like to show just, we have a little clip of all the crazy things Manson said,

00:45:41.200 not all of them, but a, an abridged version.

00:45:43.740 Let's just show that to get a picture of this guy.

00:45:46.220 Well, God, I guess you're my best friend means I invented you.

00:45:49.980 I don't need to kill anyone.

00:45:52.300 I think it.

00:45:53.300 When I stand on the mountain and I say, do it, it gets done.

00:45:56.560 If it don't get done, then I'll move on it.

00:45:58.960 And that's the last thing in the world you want me to do.

00:46:02.240 I'm a boxcar and a jug of wine and a straight racer.

00:46:07.600 If you get too close to me.

00:46:09.040 Is Charlie Manson crazy?

00:46:10.480 Whatever that means.

00:46:11.700 Sure. 1.00

00:46:12.020 He's crazy as mad as a hatter. 1.00

00:46:13.320 What difference does it make? 1.00

00:46:14.280 A long time ago, being crazy meant something. 0.96

00:46:16.260 Nowadays, everybody's crazy. 0.95

00:46:17.620 Believe me. 0.99

00:46:18.940 If I started murdering people, there'd be none of you left. 0.98

00:46:23.780 My children are coming. 0.98

00:46:26.920 I told you 20 years ago.

00:46:29.140 The Charlie Manson that you created, that's not me.

00:46:34.600 That's only an illusion in your minds.

00:46:36.800 It hasn't got anything to do with me. 0.99

00:46:38.220 You know, if I wanted to kill somebody, I'd take this book and beat you to death with it. 0.99

00:46:42.800 And I wouldn't feel a thing. 0.99

00:46:44.680 It'd be just like walking to the drugstore.

00:46:46.820 How much evil is there?

00:46:49.000 As much as you see.

00:46:51.160 What do you see?

00:46:52.480 All of it.

00:46:57.420 Dreams you haven't dreamed.

00:46:59.540 And worlds you haven't conquered.

00:47:01.900 The mind is endless.

00:47:03.940 Terrifying guy.

00:47:05.140 Obviously demonic.

00:47:06.540 Really scary stuff.

00:47:07.640 It's stuff you read about in the Bible.

00:47:09.400 You see it coming through this guy.

00:47:10.960 So he's probably going to hell, but we can pray for his soul.

00:47:13.580 And maybe he'll have a last minute conversion.

00:47:16.160 But I'm not terribly hopeful of that.

00:47:18.340 Panel, thank you for being here.

00:47:19.580 We are running a little bit of late.

00:47:21.100 So I have to say goodbye to Bradley Devlin, Fleckis, and Alicia.

00:47:24.860 See you guys soon.

00:47:25.760 So I'm going to burn through these mailbag questions.

00:47:28.200 I'm going to change your life as quickly as I ever have.

00:47:31.280 First question from Stephen.

00:47:34.380 Michael, what advice do you have for someone wishing to start their own business?

00:47:37.440 I hope these get through the conversation.

00:47:40.220 I'm watching on my cell phone.

00:47:41.300 Thanks for watching.

00:47:42.420 And great questions.

00:47:43.380 We're always talking about politics and government political philosophy.

00:47:46.480 Conservatives should be starting businesses and doing things in the real world.

00:47:49.340 My main advice is register in Delaware.

00:47:52.040 They have good state tax laws.

00:47:54.240 So register in Delaware.

00:47:55.320 Get a registered agent over there.

00:47:57.020 And you're going to fail.

00:47:58.500 You're going to just fail and fail and fail and try new things.

00:48:02.060 But do it.

00:48:03.040 That's the most important thing.

00:48:04.480 Everybody has great ideas and a great business that they could start.

00:48:08.240 But very few people raise the capital and go through the personal risk and the hard work of doing it.

00:48:15.060 I've started businesses.

00:48:16.600 Businesses are very difficult to start.

00:48:18.660 You don't get paid a lot for a long time.

00:48:20.580 And then if it's successful, hopefully you will.

00:48:22.160 So persevere.

00:48:24.180 Make sure you have a good lawyer and an accountant so that your paperwork is very important.

00:48:28.880 And persevere because it's a real test of your character and what your character has developed into to see if you can actually put the pedal to the metal and leave the field of abstraction to exist in the real world.

00:48:41.160 From Matthew, question, what is President Trump's greatest flaw in your opinion?

00:48:46.400 You know, I had a lot of criticisms of Trump as a candidate.

00:48:49.780 I've been very pleased by his presidency.

00:48:51.860 He's been much better than I expected.

00:48:53.740 He's been really good, I think.

00:48:55.520 He gets good grades from me.

00:48:57.220 But he's a flawed guy just like anybody.

00:48:58.900 He might be more flawed than some people.

00:49:01.060 And I love – the thing that I think is his greatest flaw partakes of one of the great aspects of him, which is his spiritedness.

00:49:08.260 He has ethos when he talks, when he gives a speech, when he commands a room.

00:49:13.720 You see that.

00:49:14.940 And I think we're waiting for him to be Ronald Reagan.

00:49:17.420 We really wish that he could give a time for choosing speech and articulate these timeless principles from the Bible up through Hayek and Burke and Kirk and whatever.

00:49:29.000 And he doesn't demonstrate that.

00:49:30.800 He hasn't been able to do that.

00:49:32.220 Andrew Klavan says he's a plumber.

00:49:33.600 Sometimes you need a plumber to clear out your pipes, and sometimes you need an orator.

00:49:38.600 And he's been really good at connecting people and communicating.

00:49:42.340 And, you know, I think if he were able to exhibit that high moral, truly inspiring on a moral level rhetoric, I think he would be a force unlike which we've seen certainly in my lifetime.

00:49:56.820 But all in all, he's been doing pretty good.

00:49:58.980 From Marie.

00:49:59.660 Hey there, Michael.

00:50:00.940 I've been trying to learn more about how this country was founded and the balance between natural rights and natural laws.

00:50:06.020 It seems interesting to me that these rights would be deemed inalienable or unalienable when some could be taken away or restricted by the same government.

00:50:13.480 I can understand there are limits because of natural law, but why then call them inalienable or unalienable in the first place as they are clearly not in some situations?

00:50:24.120 Are there any good books you could recommend on the topic?

00:50:26.280 Thanks.

00:50:26.520 So I think people misunderstand this.

00:50:30.480 To say that a right is unalienable is not to say that your right cannot be violated.

00:50:36.220 It's to say that it's a right that's absolute.

00:50:38.280 It's not a contingent right.

00:50:39.580 It's not a right that depends upon the caprices of political winds that depend on this party being in power or that party.

00:50:48.920 The right to control the border of the United States might be dependent on which party is in power at the time and which party is running the government, but not my absolute right.

00:50:59.480 Now, you have plenty of natural rights that are violated all of the time.

00:51:02.320 You have a right to life, but the right to life is constantly violated, which comes out of the natural law, which comes out of God and Christianity.

00:51:10.500 So it's absolute.

00:51:13.040 It means that you can – a right that's contingent on a government, you can go to a government and say, look, my right was violated and go before that judge.

00:51:20.780 A right that's absolute and not contingent on a government but contingent on your creator, you'll have to appeal to heaven.

00:51:27.100 And as this George Washington flag shows, you'll have to appeal to the ultimate judge in heaven.

00:51:32.620 Next question from Jason.

00:51:34.760 Little old Knowles.

00:51:35.760 Yes, little old me.

00:51:36.920 I was recently discussing spiritual presence with a friend.

00:51:39.820 He was talking to me about when he visited Germany and had the opportunity to stand in one of the crematoriums at a concentration camp.

00:51:47.040 We questioned how men could stoop to such evil as to systematically kill people the way the Nazis did. 0.69

00:51:52.560 My conclusion was that there are certain ideologies that are at their foundation evil, and people could only become so evil by ensconcing themselves in those ideologies.

00:52:01.540 Would you agree?

00:52:03.240 And what ideologies do you think deserve to be labeled as such?

00:52:07.260 I don't agree.

00:52:07.960 I don't think people become evil simply because of ideology.

00:52:12.160 Someone had to create the ideology, right?

00:52:13.940 The ideology had to come from somewhere.

00:52:15.160 I agree with what happens right after Noah gets off the ark, and he sacrifices to God, and God says, God knew at that moment that the imagination of man's heart was evil from the beginning.

00:52:27.280 There were fallen creatures, and evil in here and in that, not simply in ideas.

00:52:31.940 But further, evil has a personality.

00:52:35.000 Evil isn't just an ideology.

00:52:36.660 It isn't just a set of ideas.

00:52:38.480 It has a personality, and it has a name, which is Satan.

00:52:41.100 You see in 1 Peter, quote,

00:52:43.280 Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil is a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

00:52:49.680 In Ephesians, put on your whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

00:52:55.160 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

00:53:04.320 Then entered Satan into Judas Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve. 0.73

00:53:11.900 The book of Job has God speaking to the person of the devil.

00:53:15.640 Jesus was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

00:53:19.180 It has a personality.

00:53:20.760 It is creeping along in the world, as we see in Paradise Lost, as we see in the Bible, as we see in our own metaphysical vision of the world.

00:53:29.000 And he's trying to get your soul.

00:53:30.660 So I think when you view things that way, it's less clinical, it's less secularized, it's less rationalist, but it's much more accurate, and it will serve you better to try to fight against evil.

00:53:43.000 From Fitzgerald.

00:53:44.960 My girlfriend told me she's bisexual.

00:53:47.160 What should I do?

00:53:48.400 I always liked straight women. 1.00

00:53:49.820 You lucky duck.

00:53:50.760 Man, that sounds great.

00:53:51.720 No, I'm kidding.

00:53:52.380 I don't know.

00:53:53.100 It's very fashionable these days for women to say that they're bisexual or men to say that their sexuality is on a spectrum and gender is on a spectrum.

00:54:00.120 We see in all of the data show this, that among polling people, are much less likely now to say that they're straight or cisgender, that they are the gender that they are.

00:54:11.400 I think that's a fad.

00:54:12.780 Now, obviously, there are people who are attracted to both sexes, and so your girlfriend might be in that category.

00:54:19.420 I don't know.

00:54:19.860 Do you love your girlfriend?

00:54:20.800 If you do, stick with her.

00:54:21.680 If that's a breaking point, then, you know, obviously, you guys should break up, and I'm going to withhold all of the other jokes that I was thinking of when I saw your question.

00:54:33.120 But I don't know, man.

00:54:34.240 Listen, this is—these are not the worst problems in the world, you know.

00:54:37.680 Okay, next question from Cedric.

00:54:40.100 Hey, Knowles, King of Trolls.

00:54:41.420 Clavin makes fun of you all the time, but why do you never make fun of him?

00:54:44.620 A simple answer, he's the supreme lord of the multiverse who could strike me down whenever—by just closing his eyes and transporting me mystically into a clavin-less weekend.

00:54:54.440 So I would never tempt that power at all, and if you're listening, Drew, I'm sorry I even read the question, okay?

00:55:00.240 And from Teresa, hey, Michael, someone close to me strayed from the church years ago and is now beginning to embrace the left.

00:55:06.100 They think the stigma around socialism is unwarranted.

00:55:08.820 They detest capitalism.

00:55:10.100 They don't like organized religion.

00:55:11.460 Sounds like a great person.

00:55:12.300 It's almost impossible to debate them because they either get so heated or they pull the moral relativism card.

00:55:18.740 They just basically ignore the conversation, you mean, and say that there's no point to talking because nothing is true or false, but heaven makes it so, which is an argument against its own argument.

00:55:28.260 I've been trying to get them to at least consider going back to church.

00:55:31.040 They refuse.

00:55:31.880 Is there anything I could do to help them embrace a less destructive worldview?

00:55:37.480 Yeah.

00:55:38.340 So the term capitalism, we use—we defend capitalism.

00:55:41.500 We know what we mean by capitalism.

00:55:43.040 The term is an invention of socialists and communists.

00:55:45.840 It's not like this term has been around for thousands of years.

00:55:48.420 It was coined in the 19th century by French socialist politician Louis Blanc.

00:55:53.600 He used it first.

00:55:54.360 Marx and Engels used it soon thereafter in volume one of Der Kapital.

00:55:58.660 The idea of capital comes from the 12th century of the idea referring to funds and stock of merchandise and money and money that carries interest and so forth.

00:56:08.300 But it's freedom.

00:56:09.480 Talk about it in terms of—don't use the isms that the communists and the other ideologues try to foist on us.

00:56:14.940 Talk about it as a matter of freedom.

00:56:16.640 Do you think people should be able to use the money how they want and hire who they want?

00:56:19.860 And do you think the people should be able to work for whom they want to work and negotiate contracts and deal in free markets that are protected by laws?

00:56:27.320 If you like that, then that's pretty good.

00:56:29.000 As far as going back to the church, if this person is using relativistic arguments, it's very simple to stop those arguments.

00:56:36.800 They say, well, you know, that's your opinion, man, but don't forget opinions are not preferences.

00:56:41.420 They're statements of fact as you see them.

00:56:43.620 So a preference is I really like this covfefe.

00:56:47.200 An opinion is this is the greatest covfefe in the world.

00:56:50.760 One is a statement of fact.

00:56:52.100 Another statement of fact would be I think this is the greatest covfefe in the world or this is the greatest covfefe in the world, right?

00:56:57.640 So the way to stop the relativist so-called argument is to say if they say truth doesn't exist, then you say, well, that's impossible because for you to state the truth doesn't exist requires there to be a truth that is truth doesn't exist, which doesn't.

00:57:16.440 So if you can communicate the point that communication breaks down because of relativistic nonsense, you might be able to crack her, this intellectual fad that she seems to be going through, which has no bearing to reality.

00:57:29.220 OK, I think we sprinted through that.

00:57:30.980 That's our whole show.

00:57:31.860 Heading into the Clavin-less weekend, listen to Another Kingdom by Andrew Clavin and performed by me.

00:57:37.040 It's everywhere great podcasts are downloaded.

00:57:39.460 Stitcher, Google Play, and iTunes.

00:57:41.100 And I will see you next week, folks.

00:57:43.100 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:57:43.940 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:57:45.140 Try to survive the weekend.

00:57:52.380 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.

00:57:55.600 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:57:57.680 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:57:59.620 Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.

00:58:01.940 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:58:04.520 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:58:06.620 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

00:58:08.860 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:58:11.060 And our associate producer is Bailey Lynn.

00:58:13.820 The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:58:17.240 Copyright Forward Publishing 2017.

The Michael Knowles Show - November 16, 2017

Ep. 60 - Luther Revisited ft. Eric Metaxas

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