Ep. 754 - The Most Popular President Ever
Episode Stats
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Summary
Joe Biden is the most popular president in U.S. history, and yet the numbers don t show it. Is it because he's not a bad actor? Or is it because people don t care about what he's doing?
Transcript
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The ratings are in and nobody watched Joe Biden's joint address to Congress the other night. It
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wasn't quite nobody. The ratings were not quite as low as the Oscar ratings, but they had almost
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the exact same decline year over year. So now that we have the numbers of the actual viewers,
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Biden's joint session drew 22.6 million viewers. That's across seven major networks. That is a
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drop of 47 percent from the 43 million who tuned into President Trump's first speech to a joint
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session across those same networks. 47 percent down in the ratings from Trump to Biden because Joe
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Biden, you'll recall, is the most popular president in U.S. history with the most votes and the greatest
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and everybody just loves him so much. Kind of weird how the numbers don't show it. I'm Michael Knowles.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Old Schooled, who says the one
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thing that the presidential address had going for it was that they had better actors than the Oscars
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did. That is not fair. That is not. Anthony Hopkins, one of the great living actors, he won the Academy
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Award, but he did have the good sense not to show up. So I suppose you're right. The the the comparisons
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between the Oscars and the joint session, very, very profound. And I think it gets to the acting,
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the theater that we're all seeing play out in front of us in terms of our government and and the
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difference between, as we talked about yesterday, the way the government really works and the way
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ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, ring.com slash Knowles. The most popular president in U.S. history
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over, I think he got 500 zillion votes, Joe Biden. He's so, people just love that guy. And that is why
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they don't tune in to watch him speak. That is why they don't seem to care what he's doing. That is why
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he doesn't even seem like an entity. He seems like the absence of an entity. Because the Democrats are
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so popular. That's why they've got to kick you off of the internet if you ever question any of
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their plans or any of their claims, because of how popular and in control they are. They're so
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popular. They're so in control of the narrative. They're so in control of the science that they need
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to force you to wear 17,000 masks. And if you don't, they're going to throw you off of your
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airplane or they're going to throw you out of a business or they're not going to let you travel
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and they're not going to let you do anything because of how, how in control they are. And if,
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by the way, if you want to pass an election integrity bill in Georgia, they are going to pull
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all of their woke corporate money out. And then the Congress is going to try to steal the power to
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conduct elections from the States, you know, because of how popular they are. Right? Right?
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You know, in New York, we've just had the reapportionment of congressional districts. New
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York just lost a congressional seat, you know, because of how popular their policies are and
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how everyone's flocking to New York and flocking to California. Or is it the opposite? Is it that
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everyone is fleeing those places with their terrible governments and coming here? New York is a great
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place just in terms of the location, the history of New York, greatest city, greatest state in the
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world. But I can't live there anymore. Many people can't live there anymore. People are leaving that
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place, going to other places. Same thing with California. Natural beauty cannot be matched in
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California, but people are fleeing California in droves and moving to places that maybe don't have
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quite the same natural beauty, but they've got freedom and normal people and the traditional
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American way of life. And that's what we want. New York lost its congressional seat by 89 people.
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You know, they do the census. They figure out how many people there are. Then they apportion the
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congressional seats. They came up 89 people short. Bill McMorris at the Washington Free Beacon
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tweeted out an interesting observation about this. If New York banned abortion for just seven hours and 25
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minutes in 2019, it would still have its congressional seat. It's an amazing thing to think about.
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When you consider the issue of abortion, which New York celebrates, you'll remember when Andrew
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Quovid decided to sign the new abortion law that allows people to kill their babies up until the moment
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of birth. He said, this is so wonderful. We're going to light the freedom tower up in pink to celebrate
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all the girls we're going to kill now through abortion. If they had had a slightly less bloodthirsty
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view of abortion, a slightly less celebratory view for seven hours and 25 minutes, they would still
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have their congressional seat because, because we think about these as separate. There's women's
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reproductive health and abortion and, and then there's the people. No, the, the people got into
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this world by being born. And so if they're not born, you don't get the people. There are real
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effects to these policies. Although sometimes it's a little bit delayed. The conservative consolation
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is that reality will reassert itself to some degree in the end. That is the one thing we can hope for.
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We, it might take a very long time. We might have to work very hard to do it, but eventually there is
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a reassertion of reality. You're seeing this now, even with the devout Catholic, Joe Biden.
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Joe Biden positions himself as a devout Catholic. He fundamentally disagrees with the church's
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teaching and disobeys the church's teaching on very important matters, notably life, which according
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to Pope St. John Paul II is not just one issue among many. It's not like, well, look, I agree with
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the church on tax cuts, but I disagree with the church on abortion and okay, I guess we'll take it
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or leave it. No, life is not one issue among many is the prerequisite for all of the other rights.
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Joe Biden fundamentally opposed with that. That is not permissible. That's why he was denied
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communion on the campaign trail a couple of years ago. Now the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops
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is considering holding Joe Biden to account, threatening to withhold the Eucharist. That is
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to excommunicate him, prevent him from receiving communion. This is a very good thing.
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This is not simply a punishment to attack Joe Biden. This is an act of love. The church's teaching
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is that if you receive the Eucharist in a state of grave mortal sin, you are eating your own
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damnation. It is an act of love and compassion by the church, by the bishops to withhold communion
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from Joe Biden until he gets his life in order and gets back in line. Sometimes the bishops go a little
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kooky. Sometimes the bishops don't do their job. Sometimes the bishops don't have a spine.
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I spoke to a priest once after I released my book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats. I'm sorry,
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I really got confused here because usually when I talk about my book, I mention my upcoming book,
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Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. But now I'm referring to my previous book,
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Reasons to Vote for Democrats, A Comprehensive Guide. I showed that to a priest once. He said,
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oh, I think I might steal the idea and make my own book, The Wisdom of the U.S. Council of Catholic
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Bishops. But here in the end, the faith is impelling them to hold the line on life.
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Hopefully we can pray that Joe Biden is held on that point because in other derivations,
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other churches and ecclesiastical communities that have broken away, you're not seeing that.
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There's a story out now that Southern Baptist is criticizing a Methodist church because they've
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got a cross-dressing pastor, a cross-dress. That's a very strange thing because if you don't have that
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rock, if you don't have that grounding in reality, if you don't have that respect for objective truth,
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then you're going to fall away into very kooky things. And it's why you're seeing a discrepancy
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right now between what the American political regime is telling us about how they're supposed
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to behave and about the nature of the government and the way that things really are. Because they
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have explicitly in their ideology denied objective reality. The left for decades and decades now has
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talked about how all we need to do is construct narratives. Everything is words, words, words, words.
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And if we can redefine the words, we can redefine reality. What we're seeing is just peeking through.
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That's not quite true. Joe Biden, the most popular president ever. Well,
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how come no one pays attention to anything he says? Oh, the policies of the Democrats are so popular.
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Everyone loves them. How come people are fleeing their states? Men really can be women. Well,
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how, how come so many people just don't think that? So there's a, we've mentioned this issue,
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the gender issue quite a lot on this show, because while it afflicts only a very small number of
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people as a psychological matter, though increasingly so, because it's a social contagion,
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especially among younger people. But the reason that we talk about it is because the left is
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spending a lot of time and energy and money on this issue. And the reason they're doing that is
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because if they can redefine nature, if they can liberate themselves, even from the bonds of nature,
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then there is no limit to their political project. And that has always been the point is to
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totally revolutionize society. So now they're no longer even arguing that adults should be able to
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mutilate themselves to better accord with their delusions. They're now saying that we should do
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this to children as well. And when the Republicans have pushed back and said, no, we're not going to
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do that. Very popular laws pushed by Republicans to say, you can't castrate your kids. That's child
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abuse. We're not going to let you do it. Well, what is the left saying? If you don't permit that,
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then you are abusing children. You're killing children. Ellen Page now goes by Elliot Page,
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this actress says, the backlash right now is so intense, but the rhetoric coming from anti-trans
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activists and anti-LGBTQ activists, namely people who have two eyes and recognize that men are now
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women. It's devastating. These bills are going to be responsible for the death of children. It's that
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simple. Okay. I want to take this argument on head on because I think very often people will write in
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from the left and they'll say, you just don't understand this issue, Michael. You're strawmanning
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this issue. Sure. Men and women are different, but some people have this awful affliction. And if
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you don't indulge their fantasies, then you're killing them because they're going to be depressed
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and suicidal. What about anorexics? What about people who are dangerously thin, but believe that
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they are fat. That's their truth. That's their, that's their self-perception. That's their identity.
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They're fat people trapped inside of thin people's bodies, right? And if we don't indulge their
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delusion, they're going to be very sad and depressed and upset. You're literally killing them
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if you don't allow them to destroy their bodies. What's the difference? They're both body dysmorphic
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disorders. This is actually what Paul McHugh, the doctor who helped to pioneer the transgender
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surgery at Johns Hopkins university, which was the institution that pioneered the gender
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ideology. This is what he concluded in the seventies. He said, the surgery doesn't really do anything
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to help people. It doesn't necessarily hurt, but it doesn't, as a psychological matter, it obviously
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hurts their physicality, but it doesn't, it doesn't help them. So he stopped doing it. You know who else
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was at Johns Hopkins university? Dr. John Money, a sick pervert who was totally bought in on gender
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identity theory and destroyed a young boy's life because he, as a little baby, mutilated the boy's
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genitals to make him look more like a girl and conducted heinous experiments on him. And both he
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and his brother developed horrible disorders and ultimately both killed themselves on the altar,
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sacrificed on the altar of this insane theory. I discussed this at great length, actually,
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in my upcoming book, what's it called? Speechless, controlling words, controlling minds available
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now for pre-order. Horrible, horrible things perpetrated in this name on, on a false sense of
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compassion. There is nothing compassionate about indulging the anorexic delusions and no amount of
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emotional manipulation will, will convince me that it is. There's another argument on the gender
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theory, which is this. Yes, men and women are different and yeah, that's not going to change
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reality, but these, these men who think they're women are, they're just caught in this condition
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and there's no way out of it. And so it's better for them. It's much better for them if they can
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mutilate their bodies to look more like the other sex before puberty sets in. That's the argument that
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the, the actual strong argument for castrating kids, relatively strong argument for castrating kids
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is that if you allow puberty to set in, it's going to be very difficult to mutilate their bodies to
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look more like the other sex. So you've got, you actually have to do it before they're grown up,
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before they have developed their faculties of reason totally. Otherwise they're going to miss the
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chance and you're going to be responsible. You bigoted, closed-minded conservatives, you're going to be
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responsible for killing people later on because you wouldn't mutilate them when they were kids.
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I see the quasi logic of that argument. Parents make decisions for kids, right? And they make some
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decisions for kids because the kids are not old enough to make those decisions themselves. And so
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the parents need to decide to castrate the kids. But we're not just talking about whether the kid is
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going to eat broccoli or Cheetos for dinner. We're not just talking about, is the kid going to learn
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violin or guitar? We're not just talking about, is he going to play football or baseball? We are talking
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about sexual decisions for children. And we are talking about permanent sexual decisions for
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children. And it raises this question. Someone wrote in to me, Caitlin Burns, who's written for Vox and
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MSNBC. It says, by 18, the permanent effects of natal puberty have set in. So the state has
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effectively made decisions about their body without giving adolescents any choice at all.
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Any choice. So the children need to have choice about sexual decisions and permanent sexual decisions
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of that. But they're children. They don't have free choice. If this woman's argument or man,
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I don't know. I think there might be a transgender issue in this case. I don't know much about this
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person. But if this argument is correct, why do we have age of consent laws? Why? What's the point
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of an age of consent law? The argument for an age of consent law is that kids are too young to make
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any sexual decisions, much less permanent ones. If we are now saying that children have the right to
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mutilate their genitals, castrate themselves, surely you would have to abolish age of consent laws.
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So I pointed this out. This is a very basic argument. And of course, the disingenuous left,
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what do they do? Whenever you, whenever you make a point like this, they say, well, you,
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what? Stop sexualizing children. You're just, you're trying to get rid of age of consent laws.
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No, they don't really think that they're just trying to get a cheap shot in.
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No, quite the opposite. I'm trying to make it illegal to have these surgeries
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because this is extraordinarily disordered and it's child abuse.
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And I don't think that children have free agency. And I don't think that we should sexualize
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children in the way that the left has done in a systematic way for decades, beginning with the
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bizarre fantasies of Wilhelm Reich, moving on to the sick child sexual experiments of Dr. John Money,
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who was that doctor at Johns Hopkins, who would, who would have these two brothers simulate sex,
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strip, take photos of it, all in the name of some sort of perverted science. The, the sexualization
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of children that we saw in the early essays of Bernie Sanders in alternative newspapers in Vermont,
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who would talk about how we need children to become accustomed with, to their sexuality and
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experiment with one another. Seriously, it's in there. I mentioned it in my upcoming book,
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speechless, controlling words, controlling minds. These are two totally different visions
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and there's no compromise between those things. Okay. And I think we're beginning to see
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as the leftist narrative gets so insane that you've got left-wingers arguing for the total
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sexualization of children to make permanent sexual decisions. And the vast majority of people who look
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at that and say, man, whatever that is, I'm out, whatever that is, I don't want it. You're seeing
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that breakdown now. How did we get this far? How on earth did the country get to the point that we are
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seriously having this debate? There is a Cuban refugee spoke at the GOP convention this past year who has
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come out and he's, he's said in a recent interview that the reason for this, and he doesn't want to
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sound hyperbolic, but he knows a thing or two about the subject is that America has already swallowed
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communism's poison pill. Take a listen. As we just heard here, RNC convention, you had talked about
00:18:50.440
how people in Cuba had swallowed the communist poison pill. Have Americans swallowed the communist
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poison pill. Not only they have swallowed it, they're digesting it. Listen to the media. They're
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no longer objective. You can tell how much they hate this country. Look at our, our academia. Our kids
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are not being, they're indoctrinated. They're taught that America is a bad country, that with a bunch of
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racists, that we're bad people and we have to pay back. If this country was racist, I wouldn't be
00:19:27.960
here. If this country was a racist country, most of us wouldn't be here because even some people in
00:19:35.620
your family came from another country. So he's speaking just from this personal experience where
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he says, I've seen what's happened to my old country and now I'm seeing what's happening here.
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There is a lot to be said for this. You know, the, the left always says, oh, you, whenever you talk
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about Marxism or communism, you crazy right-wingers, you're just conspiracy theorists. You got a tinfoil
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hat on. No, no, of course not. Marxism has long festered in this country, in various places,
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in higher education, in our institutions. Whitaker Chambers, in that excellent book Witness,
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helped make Reagan into a conservative. He said that communism is the great alternative faith of
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mankind, which began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent said, ye shall be as gods.
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That is what we're, when we're talking about upending the whole system, abolish the police,
00:20:28.480
which is really just a euphemism for destroying the entire justice system, right? The police are
00:20:36.040
the physical representations of the system of law and order and justice. So when you abolish the police,
00:20:41.340
what you're really saying is abolish the whole system. And the left says the system is rotten
00:20:45.680
to the core. Founded, the whole country was founded to preserve slavery. That's Nicole Hannah-Jones
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from the New York Times, the 1619 Project. So you got to get rid of the whole thing.
00:20:54.920
But we can't just even liberate ourselves from politics and tradition and society in our country.
00:21:00.080
We have to liberate ourselves from nature. And if a little boy wants to be a little girl,
00:21:03.840
you, you, we have it in our power. We shall be as gods. We will chop up that kid's genitals
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to make him look like a girl. That is, that's the actual argument being made by these people.
00:21:13.900
And the, the persuasive aspect of that argument is that we have total agency. We want to be totally
00:21:21.720
in control. We want to be totally free. Even a lot of right-wingers buy into that kind of idea.
00:21:27.080
But it's based on a false anthropology. It's based on a false understanding of human nature
00:21:30.980
that we're born into this world primarily with rights and entitlement rather than primarily
00:21:35.180
with obligation and duty and gratitude for our forebears. It's, it's based on the false
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anthropology that we own our bodies and we can do whatever we want. And true freedom is,
00:21:45.140
is being able to mutilate yourself or take a bunch of drugs or, or pursue any sort of vice you want.
00:21:50.440
The idea that true liberty is licentiousness. Our founding fathers knew the opposite was true.
00:21:55.100
But this poisonous idea has infected our institutions.
00:21:59.680
Do not forget that the father of the new left, one of the most famous Marxist
00:22:06.940
philosophers in the last hundred years, worked for the CIA or worked rather for the precursor to the
00:22:13.960
CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. His name was Herbert Marcuse. Herbert Marcuse came to fame
00:22:20.320
during the, the rise of critical theory in the Frankfurt School. Critical theory is a very simple
00:22:26.360
theory. The theory is to criticize, but it, it followed from Marx's proclamation that we ought to
00:22:32.720
pursue the ruthless criticism of all that exists. It's a brilliant academic theory because what it
00:22:39.140
involves is opening up this fallen world, which is obviously rife to criticism, to this ruthless
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assault that ultimately can deconstruct society. Marcuse is the architect of political correctness in
00:22:51.180
many ways. He, he wrote a very famous essay in the sixties called Repressive Tolerance about how
00:22:56.880
true tolerance means you got to shut down conservatives and censor them. And you've got
00:23:00.160
to encourage left-wing voices. Marcuse, a revolutionary in society. And Marcuse worked for the precursor to
00:23:08.980
the CIA. He worked for the federal government, not just during World War II, which makes some sense
00:23:13.280
because we were teaming up with Joseph Stalin to fight the Nazis, but even after World War II.
00:23:17.600
Whitaker Chambers, details at length about how explicit communists who were doing work on behalf
00:23:24.080
of the Soviet Union were working at very high levels of the state department. Alger Hiss, most
00:23:28.480
notably, one of the only politicians who actually believed Whitaker Chambers and went after Alger Hiss,
00:23:33.580
Richard Nixon, and the left never forgave him for it. And the institutions would not,
00:23:38.080
would not allow him to remain in power for very long. Well, today we are seeing the effects
00:23:47.020
of long-festering poisonous ideologies at our government institutions, most notably the CIA.
00:23:56.700
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delivered. I woke up today and I saw that the CIA had tweeted something. Should the nation's most
00:24:40.520
famous spy agency be tweeting in general? Probably not. But it got worse. It wasn't just that they
00:24:46.720
sent out a tweet. It was what they tweeted. There was no substantive difference between the video that
00:24:55.740
the CIA tweeted this morning and the most ridiculous diversity and inclusion training manual from the
00:25:04.080
most crazy leftist at the wokest corporate boardroom or university. Take a listen.
00:25:09.680
I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refused to internalize misguided patriarchal
00:25:16.360
ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the
00:25:23.460
space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me. Full stop.
00:25:31.080
My parents left everything they knew and loved to expose me to opportunities they never had.
00:25:37.940
Because of them, I stand here today, a proud first generation Latina and officer at CIA.
00:25:49.120
I'm so glad to hear that our spies are no longer suffering from imposter syndrome. That's good.
00:25:58.260
Could you imagine if those spies felt like imposters? Oh no, that would be terrible for our espionage
00:26:06.380
apparatus. The left especially has long made an argument to disband the CIA because they'll say,
00:26:14.340
oh, you know, the CIA put down communist revolutions in Latin America and it propped up strong men in
00:26:20.760
certain places that advanced our interests. And we need to, none of that I find persuasive at all.
00:26:26.180
The CIA has done. There have been plenty of CIA agents and operatives who have done excellent work
00:26:31.540
over the years. After watching that video, I am prepared to disband the CIA. Let's do it. Let's
00:26:38.580
go. We've clearly this organization has outlived its usefulness. It's always had some dodgy connections
00:26:45.520
going back at least to Marcuse, but we got to, we've, it's enough. It's enough. When the Central
00:26:52.420
Intelligence Agency, which has a lot of power in this country, which exerts a lot of influence,
00:26:57.900
even over electoral politics, as we saw with the interference that they engaged in with the Trump
00:27:05.900
administration, names like Eric Charimella come to mind. The CIA has a lot of power. They've got a lot
00:27:13.120
of power in the shadows and they have now adopted, as they are told us this morning, a very, very radical
00:27:20.760
ideology, the ideology of radical liberation, the ideology that posits that there is such a thing as a
00:27:28.700
patriarchy, which needs to be overthrown, an ideology which posits that people ought to embrace pride, the
00:27:36.260
queen of all vices, now considered the greatest virtue, according to the left. The ideology that
00:27:41.220
says that we must embrace our racial identity as the most important, and sexual identity as the most
00:27:47.520
important aspects of who we are. Absolute poison for this country. That is now being pushed, not even
00:27:55.400
secretly, by our nation's, one of our nation's most secret agencies. It's being pushed right out in the open.
00:28:01.500
A total takeover. Marcuse must be giddy. He must be dancing from the afterlife as he looks up at what
00:28:10.880
is happening here at the CIA and in the United States. All of the institutions have been infected
00:28:18.680
by this thing. There was a professor, video just leaked, professor at Cypress College in Southern
00:28:25.060
California, berating a student during fake Zoom school because the student suggested that the cops
00:28:34.440
are heroes. I think cops are heroes and they have to have a difficult job, but we have to have that
00:28:39.380
fine life. All of them? Oh, I'm not, I mean, I'd say a good majority of them. You have bad people in
00:28:45.460
every business and every part. Yet, well, wait, wait, wait, wait. A lot of police officers have committed
00:28:51.280
atrocious crimes and have gotten away with it and have never been convicted of any of it.
00:28:55.820
And I say for the person who has family members, who are police officers?
00:29:01.540
Yes, I understand. And this is what I believe. This is my opinion. And this is, you know, not popular
00:29:08.740
to say, but I do support our police. We have bad people and the people that do bad things should be
00:29:14.540
brought to justice. I agree with that. But I think that, uh, say it, I'm saying it again.
00:29:20.260
They haven't. Well, I agree with you on that point of they should, right?
00:29:24.780
So what is your bottom line point? You're saying police officers should be revered, viewed as heroes.
00:29:30.320
I go on TV shows with children. I think they are heroes in a sense because they come to your need
00:29:36.220
and they come and help you. What can I vote for this kid for?
00:29:39.800
This is terrific stuff because he's suffering with great patience, which is a virtue through this
00:29:46.720
absolutely empty headed professor's diatribe against the police. And what's her argument?
00:29:51.120
She says the police, some police have done bad things and they, and they've gotten away with it.
00:29:57.760
Uh, true. You know who else has done bad things and gotten away with it? Criminals. Criminals have
00:30:02.160
done that. And yet what the left does now is castigates all police and assumes that whenever police
00:30:07.400
use force of any kind, that that's evil and wrong. And what do they do? They exalt criminals. They
00:30:13.960
just spent a year exalting criminals. Whenever a criminal does anything, it's, well, it's because
00:30:18.600
the system made them do it. It's really because the cops made them do it probably. Totally upside down.
00:30:23.860
That's what's being taught. That's indoctrination, but education indoctrinates. That's their synonyms.
00:30:29.220
Okay. It's education is coercive. It tells people what to think. That is what is being taught.
00:30:34.300
That is what's being taught at the universities, at the colleges. That's what's being pushed in our
00:30:38.880
government agencies. That's what's being pushed in corporate boardrooms. It's the whole apparatus
00:30:43.440
here. It's so crazy on this racial theory that Joy Behar, a very white woman just lectured Senator
00:30:51.380
Tim Scott on the view because he apparently doesn't understand systemic racism. Tim Scott, he, he,
00:30:58.500
he does not seem to understand. And a lot of them don't seem to understand the difference between
00:31:04.260
um, a racist country and a systemic rate and systemic racism. They don't seem to get the
00:31:12.000
difference. Yes. Maybe it's not a racist country. Maybe Americans, the majority are not racist,
00:31:17.840
but we live in a country with systemic racism. We discussed it this week again already about housing
00:31:24.280
and about education and, and, and, and all of the things that are important to people. And, um,
00:31:29.840
and, and the fact that Tim Scott cannot acknowledge this is, is, is, is appalling. How can you go out
00:31:37.320
there and say that when you just said two minutes ago that you were the, the object and the victim of
00:31:43.300
discrimination? And then he says that this is not a racist country. At least acknowledge that there is
00:31:48.880
systemic racism. That's what I wanted to hear from him. And he didn't say it.
00:31:52.520
I'm not saying it's a racist country, but at least acknowledge it's a racist country. What Joy Behar is
00:31:57.860
doing right here is double think. She's espousing two contradictory ideas at the same time, which
00:32:02.800
George Orwell described beautifully in 1984. She's saying the country isn't racist. Sure. That's fine.
00:32:08.160
But the system is racist. So the America, America, not racist. The American system is racist.
00:32:13.880
If the system is racist, then the thing is racist. Then the thing that the system describes is also
00:32:18.740
racist. They're the same thing. It's like when the left says there's a difference between
00:32:22.480
sex and gender. Okay. What's the difference? Sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.
00:32:26.980
Okay. Well, if it's socially constructed and people have a disagreement between the two,
00:32:30.200
let's just reconstruct that because it's all social. Well, no, it's got a biological basis.
00:32:33.820
Okay. So gender has got a biological basis. Now it sounds a lot like sex and they say,
00:32:37.440
wow, you just don't get it. You're not smart enough. No, I think
00:32:39.920
the people who are thinking systematically about these things just recognize that you can't hold
00:32:45.600
contradictory ideas at the same time and, and maintain your coherence before we get to the
00:32:51.160
mailbag, which is going to be great. I have to, I have to commend Senator Ted Cruz, not just because
00:32:54.900
I host a podcast with him. He had an excellent article in the wall street journal. Your woke
00:32:59.880
money is no good here. Uh, Senator Cruz is turning away corporate PAC money. He's made millions of
00:33:05.980
dollars from corporate PACs over the years. Corporations donate to all sorts of candidates.
00:33:09.600
He is now saying that the GOP has got to recognize that a real threat in this country comes from the
00:33:15.900
corporations. It's not just the big government versus the private sector. It, the corporations are
00:33:20.340
some of the institutions that have gone totally poisonous. And in many ways, they're leading the
00:33:26.080
cultural charge. Cruz is saying, I'm not taking any more money from them. And I encourage all other
00:33:30.260
Republicans to do it too. Read the article, send it around and please help that pressure campaign.
00:33:35.920
The GOP has got to stop shilling for these woke corporations that hate our way of life and want
00:33:41.500
to destroy our American political tradition. By the way, as I'm sure you all know, the Daily Wire has
00:33:46.200
been growing like crazy. Not only did we move the whole company across the country, we also released
00:33:51.160
our first feature film. We struck up a movie deal with Gina Carano. We launched a new talk show hosted
00:33:56.880
by Candace Owens. All of that within just the past six months. I love Nashville. I'm so glad that I'm
00:34:02.180
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00:34:06.840
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00:35:33.000
Welcome back to my absolute favorite time of the week, the mailbag. First question up from Eric.
00:35:38.980
Good day, Michael. I have a relationship question for you. My girlfriend and I live together in
00:35:45.120
Toronto and she would like to go visit her grandparents. I have no problem with her
00:35:49.120
doing this because I know what her family means to her and I like her family as well. The issue is
00:35:53.540
that her grandparents are COVID crazy and they would make my girlfriend and I quarantine for two weeks,
00:35:58.880
stopping us from exercising and picking up our own groceries. They even think we should double mask
00:36:03.380
outside. My girlfriend and I had a disagreement regarding whether I will go along with that,
00:36:07.800
with what they want us to do. I'm quite tired of being a pushover and I would like to stand up for
00:36:12.900
myself if someone wants to alter my life in a way that I think is unjustified. I understand that I'm
00:36:18.280
the one being harsh in this situation. I haven't made up my mind. I'm just trying to figure out what
00:36:22.040
is the least bad decision. Thank you so much and love the show. I sympathize with you. However,
00:36:28.880
you have put yourself in a very weak position. You have left yourself open to your girlfriend's
00:36:36.940
family telling you what to do because you are not married to your girlfriend. That's the problem.
00:36:43.560
You're living with your girlfriend. A lot of people do that these days. I'm not even,
00:36:47.540
it's a separate issue. But if you live with your girlfriend but you are not married to your
00:36:54.480
girlfriend, then in some ways you get the benefits of being married, but in some ways you don't.
00:37:02.380
One of the benefits of being married is that you have the stature to be the head of your household
00:37:07.240
and to call the shots within reason. But if you're not married, you don't have that stature
00:37:14.800
and you don't have any credibility when you're trying to tell your wife's family that you're going to run
00:37:21.500
your own family and you're going to decide how best to react to these things. So my first advice to you
00:37:28.180
is get married. If you're already living together, just get married and then you'll have a lot better
00:37:32.980
stature and you will avoid these sorts of pitfalls. In the meantime, some of it depends, I suppose,
00:37:42.600
just from if you're thinking about the risk calculation here. Have your girlfriend's
00:37:46.000
grandparents gotten vaccinated? Have you guys gotten vaccinated? I'm with Joe Rogan on this.
00:37:53.640
I'm not clamoring out to go get the vaccine if I'm a young, healthy person. But likewise, I don't
00:37:59.500
think you're going to grow a tail and a third eye. Who knows? I mean, these are just risk calculations
00:38:03.060
you're making. I would defer, even if I were married, I would try to come to a compromise that
00:38:12.940
is patient and reverent toward your girlfriend's grandparents because they're not going to be
00:38:18.180
around forever. And you don't want to create a situation where your girlfriend doesn't get to
00:38:23.780
see your grandparents. I wouldn't totally roll over. But the issue is you've left yourself in the
00:38:31.140
position to be a pushover because you have not stepped up to actually lead your household by
00:38:36.340
getting married before you move in. So I'm not saying you're the only guy to do this. Basically,
00:38:40.880
everyone does this these days, but you can fix the problem by stepping up and actually leading your
00:38:45.760
household. From Matthew. First of all, love the show. Thank you. Second, what led you to Christianity?
00:38:51.160
And if you were able to elaborate on Catholicism, keep up the good work and fight the good fight.
00:38:54.920
So it's a five-year story, but I'll try to compact that. Because I mentioned this on the Tim Poole show
00:39:03.200
the other night. And some people writing in said, I wish you had spoken about this at greater length.
00:39:08.460
I was an atheist for about 10 years. But this started to crack down by the end. I was exposed to
00:39:14.580
the arguments for the existence of God and the quasi-arguments against the existence of God. I
00:39:20.380
actually don't think there really are arguments against the existence of God. I was first
00:39:24.940
introduced to the ontological argument. I later encountered other arguments for the existence of
00:39:30.160
God. They are persuasive. They simply are persuasive. We can go through those arguments. I mean, I would
00:39:35.880
just recommend going through the ontological argument. I really get a kick out of. Some people
00:39:40.060
don't find it convincing. The argument is basically God is the greatest, is the maximally great being by
00:39:45.380
definition. It's better to exist than not to exist. Therefore, God must exist. It's more
00:39:50.300
complicated and persuasive than that, but that's the gist of it. Some people don't find that
00:39:54.200
persuasive. There are many other good arguments for God, notably the ones described by St. Thomas
00:40:00.200
Aquinas. Arguments from cause, contingency, perfection. The arguments are just simply better
00:40:07.660
than the arguments against God. The best one against God, I guess, is the problem of suffering and
00:40:12.460
the problem of pain. It's known as theodicy. But suffering does not really make an argument one way or
00:40:18.860
the other, right? Suffering is, is a fact of the world, but actually you can, I think you can make
00:40:24.160
a stronger argument for the existence of God through suffering than against the existence of
00:40:28.940
God and notably for Christianity, which involves incarnation and atonement. Okay. So there's the
00:40:33.480
existence of God. What about Christianity? You've got to deal seriously with the person of Christ and
00:40:38.940
you can't just say, well, there are lots of different religions, you know, kind of, but first of all,
00:40:44.700
there are the non-theistic religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, uh, but they don't really have a
00:40:48.940
systemic, systematic theology. So that doesn't make quite as much sense. Then you've got the
00:40:53.700
three major theistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism rejects the
00:41:00.160
person of Christ. So you've got to deal there with the person of Christ. Is Christ who he says he is?
00:41:04.280
Islam is a, an, a heresy of, of, of, of reading of Islam or a reading rather of Christianity that
00:41:11.640
comes from other heresies that were going on at the time. Muhammad actually met, very famously met
00:41:16.460
with a heretical Christian monk before he launched the religion of Islam. I don't mean any disrespect
00:41:22.240
to Muslims when I, when I say this is a Christian heresy, but that, that is the history of the
00:41:27.840
development of that religion. Now you might say, well, but that's nevertheless, it's the true
00:41:31.800
religion. Okay. I'm just telling you where it comes from. So in any of those cases, when you're
00:41:35.980
dealing with the theistic religions, you have to deal with this person of Christ. And it just seems
00:41:41.600
to me, as C.S. Lewis said, he's either got to be one of the three L's. I'll, I'll even take it out
00:41:46.540
further to a fourth L. He's got to be a liar, a lunatic, a legend, or the Lord. Either he's a liar
00:41:57.160
and he, he's not who he says he is, but then you have to account for the miracles. You have to account
00:42:01.920
for the resurrection, which has 500 eyewitnesses. And you've got to account for the way that he
00:42:06.160
speaks, which just doesn't seem like a liar and a liar to what end? He ends up getting crucified.
00:42:11.980
He's either a lunatic, right? He's just saying crazy things. But again, how does he persuade all
00:42:16.820
these people to follow him? When you read what he says, does he sound like a lunatic to you? Or does,
00:42:22.780
does he sound actually like the only sane person in a lunatic world? Or he is a legend. Did he just not
00:42:27.680
exist at all? That there have been some kooks who have tried to say that in the 19th and 20th centuries,
00:42:31.720
but it just doesn't hold up. The, the evidence for the existence of Christ and for what he did is
00:42:37.100
just so good. It's so much better than for basically any other figure of the era. So I don't think that
00:42:41.580
works. Then you got to get to the Lord. Is he the Lord? It would seem that he is. Hallelujah.
00:42:47.680
Hallelujah. Next question from Rob. Sadly, my daughter was singing a Disney song tonight at dinner.
00:42:54.900
Jasmine's song in Aladdin. Speechless. Thankfully,
00:42:58.460
thankfully I've already pre-ordered my signed copy of your upcoming book, Speechless Controlling
00:43:05.180
Words, Controlling Minds available for pre-order for now. Do we get a ding for that? If I didn't,
00:43:11.000
I guess we, I don't know. I didn't, that wasn't my plug, but that was a really, that plug was so
00:43:17.080
seamless too. I'm going to take notes on how to make a transition that seamless. From Drew.
00:43:22.320
Hey Michael, my name is Drew. I'm 26 and I watched the episode of Backstage and noticed that in the
00:43:27.400
chamber, there are two symbols next to the flags called fascis. This is in the House of Representatives.
00:43:34.580
I didn't know what it was, so I looked it up and it sounds a whole lot like fascist symbolism. Is
00:43:40.880
there a good reason the United States has such a symbol in the chamber of Congress? Thanks. Yes,
00:43:45.040
the fascis is an ancient symbol that goes back to ancient Rome. You see it in Greece. You've seen
00:43:50.980
it all throughout history of many countries, including the United States. Fascism takes this
00:43:58.020
idea of the, the fascis, like a bundling up together, uh, and creates a political ideology out
00:44:05.820
of that. But fascism is a modernist political ideology. This is why sometimes when people call
00:44:11.080
me a fascist, I like to point out that I am far too reactionary for fascism. I am way more conservative
00:44:17.340
than the fascists are because fascism, it's difficult to pin down. George Orwell famously
00:44:22.820
said that fascism now only has the meaning of something not desirable. Everyone calls everyone
00:44:28.980
else a fascist. But there is an essay about fascism written by Benito Mussolini, the founder of it,
00:44:35.020
the Italian dictator, and Giovanni Gentile, who was the philosopher who helped him write that essay.
00:44:39.040
And what it basically boils down to is an atheist political ideology that worships the state.
00:44:48.000
The state comes above all other things. And, uh, that's about as specific as you can get on what
00:44:56.060
fascism is. So it takes this idea of the bundling up of everybody and just describes that as the state
00:45:02.880
in a way, sort of like what Joe Biden said the other day, when he said, we, the people are the
00:45:06.600
government. The government are the people. There's no distinction between the two things. But in
00:45:10.180
America, we, we just don't believe that. We have a great separation of powers between the federal
00:45:14.460
government, the state governments, the people themselves. And we also believe that government
00:45:18.880
is circumscribed by God, which fascism would not recognize. So it's, you know, like many ideologies,
00:45:25.220
it takes some aspect of antiquity or some aspect of the tradition and blows it up out of proportion.
00:45:31.780
Like Chesterton said, he says that most heresy is not the promotion of vice over virtue. It's the
00:45:36.320
promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of all the others. From Paula, Michael, I never thought
00:45:42.200
I would take issue with you on anything. However, I disagree with you on how we look at those with
00:45:46.900
gender dysphoria. I completely disagree that we have, or I completely agree rather that we have
00:45:52.460
only two sexes, but gender dysphoria is real. And those who suffer have to do what they have to do
00:45:57.160
to get through life. Neither you or I can grasp what a person with gender dysphoria must be going
00:46:01.420
through. On Caitlin, she does not believe she is a woman. You believe she's a woman though,
00:46:06.060
if you're going to call her she, she believes she needed to make her outside match her inside to
00:46:09.840
continue to go forward. Read the Mayo writeup on gender dysphoria. This is not a perversion. This
00:46:14.540
is a mental disorder. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Well, we're getting a little confused on our
00:46:20.420
terms here. A perversion is just an, an aberration, an abnormality, a distortion. So if you say it's a
00:46:27.240
gender disorder, not a perversion, you're, you're using synonyms here. It is a perversion. And in this
00:46:32.040
case, it pertains to sex, the nature of sex itself. And so it's a sexual perversion. But yeah,
00:46:37.860
of course, people who have this rare psychological condition, perhaps they don't, some of them think
00:46:44.020
that they are really the other sex, but perhaps some of them recognize, no, I know I'm not the
00:46:47.560
other sex, but I just have this mental problem where I think, where I would very much would like
00:46:53.440
to be. Blair White has made this point. Blair White is a famous transgender right-wing type person
00:47:00.660
who was actually on my show in the early days. So sure, I understand that. And I recognize that
00:47:07.360
it's very difficult. And I imagine that's a very difficult disorder to have. The question is,
00:47:13.980
what you've hidden here is this line. You say, she has to do what she has to do.
00:47:19.020
What does that mean? That's one of those expressions like it is what it is. Well, no,
00:47:22.240
what is it? What does she have to do? What is she, is she, she, or is she, he? I'll go back to the
00:47:28.920
example I used earlier in the show. Anorexics, perhaps they know, some of them think they're
00:47:34.960
too fat, but perhaps some of them know they're not too fat, but they just have this disorder
00:47:37.800
where they really don't want to eat because they want control or they really want to be really,
00:47:40.740
really thin, or they have this perversion or this disorder where they fetishize being very,
00:47:45.200
very thin. And they have to do what they have to do, right? No, no. Is it compassionate to
00:47:53.620
indulge the anorexic and say, look, you got to do, you have this difficult disorder. I can't
00:47:57.060
imagine how hard that is. So yeah, if you don't want to eat for a few days, you shouldn't have to
00:48:01.060
eat. No, you should. You should, you should, because it is objectively wrong and disordered
00:48:07.000
and we should not encourage disorders. We should not subsidize disorders. We should not
00:48:13.080
incentivize disorders. We should push back against them. There is no evidence that indulging this
00:48:20.280
delusion is helpful to the psychology of people with this disorder. And even if there were, the
00:48:27.080
indulgence of lies is not justified because it makes some people feel good some of the time or
00:48:33.240
makes them feel some kind of pleasure some of the time. That is not a good argument. I recognize the
00:48:40.500
heartstrings issue. You want these people to feel better, but I don't think that the indulgence of
00:48:45.400
lies makes them feel better. And this, this is a fallen world. And if we don't cling to truth,
00:48:51.480
if we search for comfort, we might find, or rather if we search for truth, we might find comfort in
00:48:55.940
the end. But if we search for comfort, we'll find neither truth nor comfort, only soft soap and
00:49:00.020
wishful thinking to begin. And in the end, despair, C.S. Lewis says. Last question. Caleb says, Michael,
00:49:05.460
big fan of the show. I love hearing about your new bundle of joy. I also recently had a baby and
00:49:09.820
seeing this anti-racist baby book got me wondering, how do I raise an anti-communist baby? Here's how
00:49:16.220
you do it. You set your phone or your speaker right next to the crib and right as, as the baby's about
00:49:24.540
to go to sleep at night, instead of putting on a noise machine or something like that, you just turn,
00:49:28.920
not so loud, you just tune on the Michael Knowles show. That is a lullaby that is going to, that is going
00:49:35.380
to raise a wonderful anti-communist baby. That's, that's the new lullaby that your child is going
00:49:44.260
to hear. I wish you luck. Congratulations on your baby. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael
00:49:48.280
Knowles show. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread
00:49:59.020
the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. We're available on
00:50:04.340
Apple podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to check out
00:50:09.920
the other daily wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro show, the Andrew Klavan show, and the Matt
00:50:14.820
Walsh show. The Michael Knowles show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
00:50:20.380
Our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling,
00:50:26.300
production manager, Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico, audio mixer,
00:50:32.240
Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator, McKenna Waters. The Michael
00:50:38.780
Knowles show is a daily wire production, copyright daily wire 2021. Hey everybody, this is Andrew
00:50:44.640
Klavan, host of the Andrew Klavan show. You know, some people are depressed because the republic is
00:50:49.260
collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood. But on the Andrew Klavan
00:50:54.300
show, that's where the fun just gets started. So come on over to the Andrew Klavan show and laugh
00:50:58.440
your way through the fall of the republic with me, Andrew Klavan.