Andrew Clavin and Father Michael O. Knowles clash over NFL anthem protests, framing Trump’s stance as a populist backlash against "disrespectful" kneeling—backed by 72% of Americans—while dismissing free speech arguments. They pivot to Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, where conservative theologians’ "filial correction" letter accuses him of heresy, citing ignored Dubia on gay marriage and sacraments, despite papal infallibility limits. Clavin ties this to broader cultural wars: Hollywood’s leftist bias, UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Week cancellations, and Feinstein’s anti-Catholic judicial attacks, arguing Trump’s "take back the culture" movement is a necessary counter to institutional liberal dominance. The episode ends with a preview of media boycotts and generational divides over free speech, framing today’s conflicts as a clash between tradition and progressive erosion. [Automatically generated summary]
People on the left and even some on the right are going after Donald Trump for going after football players who disrespect the flag.
I am going to tell you why Trump has got this one 100% right.
Plus, is the Pope Catholic?
Some conservatives actually don't think so.
Father Michael O. Knowles, who you remember from his role in Going My Way, will be here to discuss it all.
And do you remember when Berkeley was the home of the free speech movement?
Well, neither do they.
We'll talk about what went wrong, but first, NFL football, which used to be the most popular sport in America way back about 20 minutes ago, is suddenly playing to half-filled stadiums and getting much lower ratings on TV.
I wonder, could it be because some of us don't want to watch a group of muscle-bound multimillionaires exercise their right to disrespect a flag for which many of their fellow Americans died so that millionaires would have the right to disrespect the flag for which many of their fellow Americans died?
Nah, that can't be it.
Maybe people are just busy doing something more important on Sundays, like picking the dirt out from between their toes and then shaping it into tiny animal sculptures.
And what about the recent Emmy Awards, another gathering of wealthy people, only here they get together and give each other statuettes for playing Let's Pretend.
Then they stand at a podium and send a message to half of America that translates roughly to we hate you, you stink, get stuffed.
Now, for some reason, a lot of people don't want to watch this show either.
I know, it's a head scratcher.
It's almost as if a lot of people would rather not listen to the half-informed political maunderings of a group of thrice divorced genetic jackpots, many of whom measure the depth of their wisdom by how many times they've been in rehab.
And what about our academies?
College attendance has dropped every year since 2010.
And some colleges, where raucous left-wing demonstrations have taken place, have seen their attendance fall as much as 35%.
Whoa, it's almost as if people don't want to spend their life savings and go into debt in order to have their children turned into raving lunatics who think they're oppressed because they have to go wee wee in pee-pee in the wee wee room or vice versa.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to notice a pattern here.
In sports, in showbiz, and in the academy, leftists have scored tremendous victories, infiltrating once-beloved institutions and transforming them into megaphones for their cramped and censorious ideologies.
And in the aftermath of those victories, these once-titanic institutions are shrinking and shrinking until soon the only person watching Stephen Colbert will be Colin Kaepernick.
It's almost as if Americans have better things to do than to watch the most privileged people on earth indulging in champagne socialism and limousine radicalism while disrespecting the hardworking people who make their shabby little lives possible.
Better things to do, like braiding their nose hairs or being free.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is to give.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky boom.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Hooray for Stamps.com00:02:39
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, this NFL thing has got me so worked up.
I think I need to calm down.
I need some single-nostril breathing here.
But you know, you do hold and you breathe through one and you hold it and then you exhale through the other and you keep going.
I feel so much better now.
All right, we're going to discuss this NFL thing.
I'm going to explain to you point by point why Donald Trump is 100% right about this no matter what anybody says.
And we have Father Michael Knowles will be here.
Not many people know that he's an actual priest.
I won't make that joke.
It was a good one, but I'm going to leave it go.
No, he actually is a practicing Catholic, and he's going to practice until he gets it right, I think.
Meanwhile, you may say to yourself, Where were you during the Clavenless weekend while one of our beloved institutions, the NFL, was going to hell in a haybasket?
Where was I doing?
I'll tell you what I wasn't doing.
I wasn't waiting online at the post office because, first of all, it's closed on Saturday and Sunday.
So, what would be the point?
But, of course, also I use stamps.com because it's just nuts to stop the busy, fast-paced life we all live now to go drive to the post office, wait online.
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Why Luther Strange Left00:08:06
You know, before we talk about the NFL, we just have to take a brief.
This was breaking news as I was coming in.
Anthony Weiner got sentenced.
You know, I was thinking, this is a hard time to be Anthony Weiner because he's going to be doing a hard time, says the disgraced ex-congressman, broke down crying as he was sentenced.
I know, I know, Anthony.
That's sad.
He was sentenced to 21 months in prison.
That's nearly two years for convincing a high school student to undress and touch herself by a Skype in 2016.
She told him in the phone call that she was 15 years old.
I know, I know.
You know, the guy must be, the compulsion in him must be so bad.
He must have wanted to get caught at some level because he's doing it again and again.
Somewhere, Andrew Breitbart is probably laughing uproariously.
After the courtroom cleared, the one-time Merrill Hopeful sat crying silently in his chair alongside his tearful mother.
I mean, the one thing that he can console with is that at least he got to read Hillary Clinton's emails.
So it looks like, you know, Uma De Abisin was copying Hillary Clinton's classified emails into Anthony Weiner's computer.
Oh man, what a crew, what a crew.
All right.
You know, over the weekend, I had a chance to look at some of the comments, not just on this show, but also on my blog over at PJ Media.
And it's hilarious.
I get called everything.
I get called a Trump bot.
I get called an anti-Trump person.
I get called a secret liberal.
I get called a right-wing white supremacist.
And sometimes within 10 comments, within 10 comments, I will be called on every side.
And I felt like, what on earth?
You know, like, how are they all reading and listening to the same thing?
Oh, somebody called me an establishment Republican.
I felt like, yeah, you know, that's me, all right.
But you know what it is?
It's that I do not think they know the sound of realism anymore.
I don't think they understand what it is to play politics as if politics were a process with a goal.
It's not an expression of your morality.
You know, your morality forms your principles, forms your political principles.
But politics is the means by which you get to where you want to go, and you have to be realistic and read the field.
You can't always get 100% wins all the time.
And sometimes settling for what you can get is okay, sometimes it's not.
Sometimes you've got to stand on principle.
So that is why, that's why I wanted to say this first, so that when I tell you that I think President Trump is 100% right about the NFL, there's a reason I say it.
There's a reason I say it, and I will explain it all.
So first of all, it starts out Friday, I guess it was.
He's in Alabama.
He's backing this guy, Luther Strange, who's kind of the establishment.
You know, there's a pro-Trump candidate running against Luther Strange, but Trump doesn't care.
He's backing Luther Strange.
And he says, you know, Luther Strange shares our values, believes in the flag, and then he interrupts himself and says this.
This is cut one.
Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag?
To say, get that son of a off the field right now out.
He's fired.
He's fired.
You know, some owner's going to do that.
He's going to say, that guy that disrespects our flag, he's fired.
And that owner, they don't know it.
They don't know it.
They're friends of mine, many of them.
They don't know it.
They'll be the most popular person for a week.
They'll be the most popular person in this country.
Because that's a total disrespect of our heritage.
That's a total disrespect of everything that we stand for, okay?
Everything that we stand for.
And I know we have freedoms and we have freedom of choice and many, many different freedoms.
But you know what?
It's still totally disrespectful.
Okay, so now the NFL goes nuts, right?
First, Roger Goodall, the commissioner, he responds, he puts out a statement.
He says, the NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture.
Divisive comments like these, the president's comments, demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game, and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities.
And there are many, many NFL players who do a lot of good things.
But when he says, we help create a sense of unity in our country, remember, it's not Trump who started doing this.
It's the players, Colin Kaepernick, and then a couple other players.
So then all the players get together and where before it was just a few players who were kneeling basically in a Black Lives Matter protest against police, what they consider police brutality, they were kneeling during the national anthem.
Now a lot of them do it.
And the Pittsburgh Steelers, in one of the, to me, like maybe I'm the only person seeing this, but I thought one of the great miscalculations, right?
They're at Soldiers Field, Soldier Field in Chicago.
They're playing the Bears, and the entire Steelers team stays in the locker room during the national anthem, right?
One of them comes out, Alejandro Villanuva, who is one of, is that how you pronounce it?
Villanuva?
Villanueva.
Villanueva, sorry.
Alejandro Villanueva, comes out and he's an offensive lineman who is one of three, I believe, veterans in the NFL.
And he's an Army Ranger.
I think he did three tours overseas, and he comes out, and he stands and does the...
Now, to me, maybe I'm old-fashioned.
To me, that makes the rest of the team look like trash.
They look like garbage.
Here's the guy who served.
Here's the guy who did it.
You go out with that guy.
And the coach of the team is saying, well, we wanted more unity.
We wanted more unity.
You know what?
You know, you look bad.
You look bad.
And just so you know, just so you know, it's against the rules.
The rules of the NFL, page A6263 of the league's game operations manual, this is what it says.
The national anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the national anthem.
These are the rules that you sign up for when you sign a contract.
During the national anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking.
The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition.
It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country.
Failure to be on the field by the start of the national anthem may result in discipline such as fines, suspensions, and or the forfeiture of draft choices for violations of violations of the above, including first offenses.
Okay, so that's those are the rules, right?
Those are the rules.
And John Nolte points out that the NFL has no problem shutting down free speech.
Okay, John Nolte says, he points out, he says the NFL threatened fines in September of 2016.
Three NFL players planned to wear cleats in honor of the 15th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on America.
The NFL put a stop to it with threats of fines.
In July 2016, in honor of five police officers murdered in cold blood by a Black Lives Matter activist, the Dallas Cowboys wanted to honor the slain officers with a small helmet decal.
The NFL put a stop to that.
NFL fined players in 2015.
They fined William Gay for wearing purple cleats meant to raise awareness for domestic abuse.
And of course, the NFL doesn't want to raise too much awareness for domestic abuse because they'll start to notice that a lot of NL players are domestically abusing their wives.
So the NFL players are going nuts and they attack Trump.
And the big thing is, oh, he's divisive.
He's politicizing everything.
Tom Brady, who is a pal of Trump's and a friend of his and voted for him, he said this on radio.
Upside of Big Corporations00:03:30
I mean, I certainly disagree with what he said and thought it was just divisive.
And like I said, it's, you know, I just want to support my teammates.
And I always one that says, oh, that's wrong or that's right or that's, but I do believe in what I believe in.
And I believe in bringing people together and respect and love and trust.
And, you know, those are the values that my parents instilled in me.
And that's how I try to live every day.
So, you know, Brady, obviously, he's in there with these other players.
He's the leader of the team.
He can't, you know, go against his team.
But when he says, I'm not one of the people to say this is right or this is wrong, I am.
You know, I do think that's something that all of us have to actually do is determine right and wrong.
Ratings, the audience went away.
Ratings dropped.
And this is from an article posted on Drudge on a day full of criticisms from Donald Trump, political protests, linked arms, players taking a knee or not coming on the field during the national anthem, and renewed pleas for unity from the league.
NBC and the NFL took a hit last night on Sunday night football in a metered market numbers.
The primetime matchup between the Redskins and the Oakland Raiders was the worst Sunday night football has performed this season so far, an 8% dip from the early numbers.
And Trump is calling for a boycott.
He's saying, boycott the NFL, and this will change in a big hurry.
All right, I'm going to get to why I agree with Trump in just a minute.
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Why We Left Google00:15:56
All right, first, this is not a free speech issue.
Do not listen to any of the free speech thing.
As I said before, the NFL is perfectly happy to find people and stop them from exercising their free speech.
We all agree that they have a right to do this.
We all agree that these millionaire athletes have a right to disrespect the flag.
You know, that's not the point.
The point is if you're going to go into the end zone and dance around like a little girl for five minutes and we're supposed to think you're so great, even though you didn't do something like, for instance, go to Afghanistan and fight for our freedoms or go to Iraq and fight for our freedoms or run into a collapsing building to save people, all you did was carry a ball across the line and now we have to watch you dance around.
You have the right to disrespect the flag, but you might consider what you look like.
You look like a jerk, okay?
That is the first thing.
Plus, I will not, I will not be lectured to by the left on free speech, the left who shuts down free speech, these coddlers of antifa, these people who think that hate speech isn't protected by the First Amendment, these guys who go after and sue and fine a baker because his religious beliefs will not let him cater a gay wedding, even though he'll serve gay people.
He can't cater a gay wedding because it's against his religious beliefs.
They'll go after him.
I will not listen to the left on free speech.
They have nothing to say.
But we all agree they have the right.
Second, this thing about divisiveness, as it has actually pronounced, I believe, divisiveness, is total garbage, okay?
It's divisive when you disrespect the flag.
The NFL started this.
It was divisive right away.
Their ratings are already down.
Their polls show that they're down in large measure because of the disrespect for the flag.
So it has nothing, you know, it has nothing to do with Donald Trump being divisive.
He's just calling them out.
He's calling them out on what they're doing.
Divisiveness only becomes a problem when the right does it.
It only, you know, we had Barack Obama in office eight years, tore this country apart, made us all hate each other, made race relations worse, all that stuff.
Divisiveness was never a problem.
Now suddenly it's a problem.
Bite it.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
Third, and this is the one you sometimes get from high-minded people.
They say, well, you know, the flag is just a piece of cloth, and kneeling is not disrespecting it.
It's not like turning your back on the flag.
It's not like all baloney, all baloney.
Flag is a symbol of the country.
The flag represents the country.
Symbols are important in human life.
We're all just human beings.
We are not like floating minds in a test tube.
We're human beings with hearts and souls.
When we see the flag, it represents our country.
You stand for the flag.
That is what you do.
Okay.
Now, here are the three reasons why you don't respect the flag no matter what you believe, okay?
Because I understand, you know, I disagree with the Black Lives Matter people.
I think the cops do a pretty good job, even in their neighborhoods, but I'm not there.
And I understand that the experience of being a black guy in these neighborhoods dealing with the cops is different than an experience being a white guy like me driving around.
I get stopped by a cop.
He's like, hello, sir.
I say, yes, officer.
I give him my license.
He gives me, slaps me with a $500 ticket or whatever it is in LA.
Now, I understand that this is a different experience, and I understand the emotions.
I disagree with them politically.
It's not a disagreement of hate or wanting to see them be abused.
It has nothing to do with that.
But, but, three reasons you don't disrespect the flag.
You have the right to protest because you live in this country, because people died for that right and are dying now and die every day and fight for your right to do that.
And the flag represents your right to do it.
So when you are exercising that right, you don't exercise it against the flag.
It makes no sense.
You exercise it within the context of the flag.
You salute the flag because you have the right to make the protest that you want to make.
Secondly, the very thing that you're demanding is an American value.
You are demanding equal justice under the law.
You are demanding to be treated by the police as if you were the important person in exchange with the police, which you are.
It is not the cop who's important.
It's you who's important.
And your rights are important.
You know, whether even when you're guilty, your rights are important.
The justice you're demanding is represented by that flag.
So when you disrespect the flag, you're actually sending this incredible mixed message.
The American justice system that you want is represented by the flag.
You know, it's like Martin Luther King said the smartest thing about this.
He said he called on America to live up to the meaning of its creed.
Okay?
To call on America to be more American is an American thing to do.
When the left says it's patriotic to protest, I don't believe it's patriotic necessarily, but it is American to protest.
We've been protesting from the very beginning.
The flag represents that.
And three, the only reason we give a crap about you at all is because you're an American, because you live with us under that flag.
It's not because, oh, black people were held slaves.
You weren't there.
That didn't happen.
I didn't do it.
I got no interest in that.
It's not because I agree with you.
I don't agree with you.
It is not because you're some multi-millionaire who throws a ball around and works 16 days a week, a year.
All right, that's a little unfair, but still, you know, still, you know, you're one of the privileged people in the world.
It is not because I care about you, because you are my fellow American, because we are both protected by that flag and by this country.
And so when you disrespect that, you disrespect me, you disrespect my concern for you, you disrespect the reason, the only reason I care about who you are.
And it is just absolutely insulting.
It's absolutely insulting.
Now let's talk about Donald Trump for a minute.
I'm going to stay on just to get through this and then we'll go to Knowles.
But you won't be able to see Knowles unless you come on over to theDailyWire.com because we'll have to leave Facebook and YouTube.
But if you subscribe, you could just watch the whole thing.
If you just watch it, it allows you $10 a month.
And for a year, it's $100 a month, and you get the leftist tears tumbler.
But let me just finish this thought, all right?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump pulls the same trick on these clowns every single time.
I keep hearing how stupid he is, how ignorant he is.
He pulls the same trick.
They keep falling for it.
Methink maybe it's them who be stupid, okay?
Because what he does is he takes something that most normal, everyday Americans agree with, okay?
I think the number is 72% of people believe that you should stand during the national anthem.
72% of Americans disagree.
You know, you can't get 72% of Americans to agree about anything.
Sugar is sweet, maybe.
You'll get like 68%, but 72%.
So he takes an issue where he knows he's safe, not just with his base, but with most normal human beings.
And then he expresses it in this kind of grotesque, over-the-top way.
So it's like instead of saying, you know, well, I have faith in God, he'll say, I have faith in God, and anybody who doesn't have faith in God is an idiot.
He says, they ought to go out and say, you're fired.
They ought to tell that SOB this and that.
So people instantly react.
They instantly seize up.
And immediately he has his opponents opposing the flag.
He has these clowns, the Democrats, sitting around going, no, yeah, let's disrespect the flag.
I mean, the other day he goes to the UN and he delivers that speech against North Korea and Kim Jong-un.
And there were leftist commentators, Chelsea Handler, she's saying, I'd rather have Kim Jong-un as my president.
You go like, yeah, so now nothing she says means anything ever again.
So it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant political tactic.
I don't see why he shouldn't use brilliant political tactics.
Obama trolled us for eight years.
You know, Trump is trolling us back.
So now, this is what comes from the right, okay?
And I and I sympathize with this.
People say, oh, everything is political.
The Wall Street Journal had this editorial today.
Oh, everything is political.
Can't we just have our sports?
Can't we just have our show biz?
Why is everything political?
Donald Trump is making everything political.
Nonsense.
Donald Trump did not make everything political.
Everything is political because the left took over our communications industry and our news industry.
That's why everything is political.
For 10 years, 15 years, I've been going to conservative conferences, on cruises, conservative cruises, saying, take back the culture, take back the culture.
This is how you take back the culture.
And people say, well, the president shouldn't do it because he represents all of us, but that's garbage.
Every Hollywood actor attacks us.
Every mainstream news show attacks us.
Every late night comic, who's going to speak for us?
Who has a voice loud enough to speak for us except for the president?
He is in the right on this.
He did the right thing.
He is taking back the culture.
American culture is not opera.
American culture is reality TV and football and all the movies and all this stuff.
And the only person who has a voice loud enough to counter the steady stream of leftist garbage that we get buried under every day is Donald Trump and he's doing it.
And you know what?
I'm for it.
I'm for it.
Do it.
You know, these guys, these privileged guys dancing in the end zones at their own achievements, they should salute the damn flag.
I love the NFL.
I love football.
I will stop watching it if they keep doing this.
I will stop.
It will not kill me to stop.
I'll watch college football.
If they do it, I'll stop watching that.
I'll just do crossword puzzles.
I'll be fine.
All right.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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We've got Michael Knowles coming up right now.
All right, Knowles, have we got you?
Hey.
Hey.
Here we are.
All right.
So, you know, so it used to be an old joke.
Is the Pope Catholic?
You know, that was like this old joke.
But now, yeah, now you are Father Michael Knowles, right?
You were a priest before, I think, the scandal, right?
My father plays dominoes better than your father plays dominoes.
I believe that's how the Latin goes.
You actually speak.
You speak the ancient tongue of your kind.
So, you know, a lot of conservatives have been worried about this Pope.
I mean, the Pope says stuff, and conservatives sit and listen to it and say, well, wait a minute, that's not Catholic doctrine as I know it.
But now there are actual conservative theologians who are attacking him.
Have I got the story right?
Well, you know, we do live in a time that has transcended parody.
So the question, is the Pope Catholic, is now no longer a joke.
It's actually a question raised by dozens of Catholic theologians and priests.
So this group of priests and one bishop, though it's important to note, the bishop in question here is the bishop of the Society of St. Pius X.
This society broke away and was excommunicated by the Vatican 30 years ago.
It was recently brought back into communion with the Vatican by Pope Benedict.
They are a little more old school, a little more conservative.
They prefer the Latin Mass, as I do.
They prefer the traditional liturgy, as I do.
Pope Benedict began a reform of the reform, a kind of reform to the Vatican II changes that gave us all of those god-awful acoustic guitars.
But the only bishop that signed on to this was the bishop of SSPX, which has no standing in Rome.
The rest, though, were priests and theologians and academics, and they formally accused the Pope of heresy.
So fair enough, this makes headlines.
The reason that they've accused him of heresy is that in particular, his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetizia, the joy of love, seemed, by many interpreters, to have opened the door for civilly divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to have communion and to loosen the rules about alternative living situations such as cohabitation and all of the stuff that Catholics do but say that they don't do in the United States.
Okay, now a lot of non-Catholics believe that the Pope, when the Catholic Church says the Pope is infallible, that every word out of his mouth is infallible.
But that's not right, right?
Not at all.
Like many things in the Catholic Church, you can't really understand it.
And I don't mean that flippantly.
I think one of the good arguments for the Catholicity of the Church is that nobody really gets the thing.
It isn't a man-made ideology.
So when people try to pin it down, it eludes being pinned down.
This letter is worth reading.
It's a 25-page letter, and it quotes the first Vatican Council, which defined papal infallibility.
And this is what it said.
The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.
So papal infallibility has only been invoked a handful of times in history when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra to defend religiously some doctrine that's been around forever.
It is not invoked when the Pope decides that he fancies one new thing or the other.
That doesn't count.
Okay.
So they're not attacking him in any place where he's infallible.
They're not actually attacking the doctrine of infallibility.
And it's amazing to read this.
I think people, conservatives, even American conservatives, and certainly non-Catholics, really should read the tone of this because it's called a filial correction.
It's a correction as a son writes to his father.
It's deeply respectful.
It's a real turn.
It's a real impressive act to formally accuse somebody of heresy while still being quite respectful.
But the piece says you're still the Pope.
We believe that you are the Pope.
We believe that you're infallible on matters in which you're infallible, but you're misguiding a lot of people.
And what this is really about, this is a small group of Catholic theologians.
It won't make a blip.
But what they refer to here are much more prominent theologians and archbishops, cardinals, bishops who have sent in letters to the Pope called Dubia saying, you know, this was a little unclear, Papa Francesco.
Maybe you ought to clear up what you think about this, that, or the other thing.
He has not responded to those things.
So does the Pope have the power to declare that, for instance, cohabitating, living together outside of marriage is now okay?
Does he have the power to just change that rule?
The short answer is no.
It could be left to theologians to debate whether infallibility could be invoked in some way.
But the short answer is absolutely not.
It would be a very hard case to make.
The Pope can't all of a sudden decide that gay marriage is protected by the church or expounded upon by Christ or that abortion is just fine.
All of these things that I think the left who read Huffington Post headlines believe that is just around the corner for Pope Francis.
Now, one of the other really interesting aspects of this filial corrective is that it comes in the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther, and half of the letter takes issue with Pope Francis's, quote, unprecedented sympathy for Martin Luther.
And in particular, on the sacraments.
Martin Luther did not have much care for the sacraments, particularly the sacrament of marriage.
He said that the sacrament of marriage was simply there to quench the fire of concupiscence, and he was reading St. Paul as he said that.
That has never been the position of the Catholic Church.
And the fear among conservative theologians and conservative Catholics is that the Pope is taking a Lutheran view.
He's allowing Lutherans to accept the Eucharist at Catholic Masses.
He's saying very nice things in their churches and about Martin Luther, and they're worried that the sacrament is being watered down and that rock steady, incredible, immovable authority of the church will be watered down, eroded, and left to become some liberal squishiness like all the mainstream Protestant churches.
Catholic Conservatives Under Scrutiny00:06:16
Well, here's the weird thing as a non-Catholic, the weird thing about this to me is that I'm watching here in the States, the left has been hammering candidates for judgeships that Trump has appointed because they're Catholic.
Basically saying, you know, just the very fact that you're Catholic is disqualifying, which is literally unconstitutional.
But they're saying that just the very fact that you're Catholic disqualifies you for being a judge.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I actually, we pulled this clip.
This reminds me of Chesterton, who said that the reason he knew the Catholic Church was legitimate is that it gets attacked for opposite reasons at all.
You know, it's too far left, it's too far right.
Do we have this clip of Senator Dianne Feinstein?
Why is it that so many of us on this side have this very uncomfortable feeling that dogma and law are two different things?
And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma.
The law is totally different.
And I think in your case, Professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.
And that's of concern.
Does the dogma live loudly within you?
I don't know.
It's been carrying in my ears.
It's the curious incident of the dogma in the nighttime, which they're like, they expect it not to bark.
An amazing, an amazing religious test by absolutely empty-headed Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Unbelievable.
But it does raise this question, okay?
Because a lot of the conservative judges, maybe not all of them, but a lot of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are in fact Catholic.
That's right.
It was formerly Scalia and then Alito.
Thomas is Catholic.
I believe Roberts is Catholic.
And then some are nominally Catholic, but are not in a recognizable way.
So we on the right, I think, tend to look a little bit to the Catholic Church to be a stalwart voice for a lot of kinds of conservatism, not all kinds of conservatism.
The Pope has never been any good on economics.
They don't know anything about economics.
But on kind of social conservative conservatism, the right kind of looks to the Catholic Church.
Is that fair?
I mean, where is the Venn diagram of Catholicism and conservatism?
Where does it intersect?
Absolutely.
And I do think Pope John Paul II was in his own time quite good on economic matters, only inso much as he opposed communism vigorously.
But it is true that the church, you know, it isn't a one-to-one.
It isn't a perfect overlap.
But I don't think it's any coincidence that the founder of the modern American conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr., was a Catholic.
And he was a Shiite Catholic.
He was devoutly Catholic.
He was Catholic before he was a conservative even.
And his priest in New York pointed out that because Buckley's Catholicism informed his conservatism, it kept his conservatism from being narrow or nostalgic.
It kept it from the shallowness that we see in various forms of libertarianism or fiscal conservatism and social liberalism and yada yada yada.
And it was the French writer, Hilaire Belloc, said, a man who does not accept the Catholic faith writes himself down as suburban.
I think that is what...
When a Frenchman calls you suburban man, that's just cruel, yeah.
It's pretty brutal.
I think that's why American conservatives look toward and admire the Catholic Church because of that, because it has a depth of conservatism that isn't simply captured by free markets and guns and capitalism and things like that.
And I think that's rightly why the left in America fears it.
So one last question, and then I will let you go to prepare your show because the Michael Knoll show comes on after this, and I know you actually do an occasional bit of work to pay.
I do it seven or eight minutes a day, yeah.
As a Catholic and a conservative, when you look at this Pope who has given people like me, he kind of gives me a headache.
I mean, every time he opens his mouth, I think like, you know, part of it is the whole South American thing.
They've never experienced real capitalism.
They've never experienced honest capitalism.
So they have perfectly good reasons to hate it.
But I look at him and he gives me kind of a headache.
What is your experience of this Pope?
You know, we've just had two of the greatest men in the history of the church serve as popes consecutively.
We had St. John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict, two men who worked together in the same rooms by sheer providence.
So by that standard, if he falls a little short, I can understand it.
On some issues, he's quite good, and those issues are not— and I'm speaking politically because he makes political statements.
Sometimes he's quite good on matters of social conservatism, and on some matters, he can be completely out of left field on matters of environmental regulation or on matters of economics.
But a priest once told me that the good Lord sometimes sends us bad popes to remind us that the Pope is fallible except when he's infallible.
And the nice thing is, if this were some Protestant sect or some denomination that doesn't have the weight of history and the weight of glory behind it, then it could turn the whole thing right off the rails.
And certainly the Catholic Church has been pulled off the rails before by some of the craziness surrounding Vatican II, which Benedict said was downright Pelagian.
It can be pulled off, but because it has the weight of two millennia, and because Catholics believe it was instituted by Christ on earth, then We believe it has this spiritual steadiness to it, then it's much harder to move the bark of Peter, and we can survive even the hypothetical, not very good poet.
Debating Content and Process00:06:34
All right.
The semi-infallible father Michael Knowles will be on the Michael Knowles show after this.
Great to see you, Michael.
I will say, just as a filial corrective to you, Drew, I am infallible on all matters that are not spiritual.
So on every other matter, that's where I'm in.
Cigars, I'll give you cigars.
You're infallible.
I'll see you later.
Thanks, Michael.
All right.
And if that weren't low enough, if talking to Michael Knowles isn't crappy enough, here's our crappy culture.
So we have to talk about the fact that the week of Free Speech Week in Berkeley was canceled.
It was canceled by the student group sponsoring the event.
This was, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos was going to go and speak, and I think Ann Coulter was going to be there, and a couple of other right-wing speakers.
Milo went to the quad, I think, where the quad is their free speech area.
It's kind of like that place in England, they have a park where if you stand on a soapbox, you can't be arrested no matter what you say because you're not standing on English soil.
It's true, you know, then you go there and there's always some crazy guy standing on a soapbox declaiming.
But they canceled this, and of course, you know, we've all talked about the irony of the fact that the free speech movement started in Berkeley.
And now, you know, the administration says a spokesman for the university says, claims that this cancellation is somehow the outcome desired by the campus are without basis in fact.
The university was prepared to do whatever was necessary to support the First Amendment rights of the student organization.
But as we know from Ben Shapiro's recent appearance there, just having him go there cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.
We needed an infrastructure of Young America.
The Young America Foundation had to provide this tremendous infrastructure, security, all kinds of coordination with the police.
It shouldn't take that for somebody like Shapiro, who is basically a conservative in the great American tradition.
It should not take that kind of effort for this to happen.
Even though Milo is a provocateur and definitely Anne is a provocatress in some way, they shouldn't need that kind of structure to surround them.
And when you say that the university is not to blame, the New York Times, a former newspaper, had an article called Let Right-Wing Speakers Come to Berkeley.
The faculty is divided.
So students looking to the faculty and administration for guidance on how to interpret the free speech issue are seeing deep divisions among their leaders.
At Berkeley, there are both unequivocal voices championing the importance of free speech, no matter how inflammatory, and professors who say lines need to be drawn on campuses.
So, you know, the one person who has stood up, by the way, is Carol Christ, who is now the chancellor of the University of New Chancellor.
I took an English class from Carol Christ when I was at Berkeley.
And she was very good, but she was very young and just kind of still being formed in all this stuff.
And I think that it's just interesting that she's gone on to become a fairly stalwart defender of free speech.
You know, a lot of this has to do with, there was a piece by Jean Twinge, who I think is going to come on the show soon, who writes about generational differences.
And she says, members of iGen, the iPod, iPad generation, have spent more time with screens and less time interacting with each other than any previous generation.
And because they communicate primarily online, most of the threats they experience come through social media or text and not in person.
For iGen, danger tends to take the form of words, not physical altercations.
So these people think they are in danger when people are speaking to them.
And I obviously think that a lot of this is not, it's not just the iPhones and the social media.
It is also these professors who have been preaching, professors and the news media who have been preaching all this time that there's their opinion, their left-wing opinions, and there's hate, right?
There's no other way.
There's not, oh, you want good for the black community through leftist means.
Oh, you want good for the black community through right-wing means.
Let's see which one is actually good for the black community, for this neighborhood.
There's nothing like that on the news.
There's nothing like that on CNN.
Nothing like that on the networks.
Nothing like that in the New York Times.
Nothing like that in the Academy.
It's all their way and hate.
And the left has also done this important thing.
They have blurred the line between process and content.
Because you have the right doesn't make it right.
This is what we're talking about with the NFL.
You know, something is, you have the right to do things that are wrong.
That is the way rights work.
So for instance, and the way things are done, the way things are done is the way your freedom is preserved.
The way things are done is the way your freedom is preserved.
So it is processed to allow free speech, but that doesn't mean you can't criticize the content of the speech.
And the left constantly blurs these things.
They say, well, gay marriage is right, and therefore it's good that the Supreme Court decided that gay marriage should be legal everywhere.
But it's bad.
No matter what you think of gay marriage, it is bad that the Supreme Court stripped the states of their rights to do this.
There is nowhere in the Constitution that says the federal government has the right to say anything about marriage like this.
So it is bad when you lose the process.
When you lose the process, when the process is eroded, your freedom is eroded.
That doesn't mean you can't debate the content.
And they're constantly confusing this, and they do it on purpose.
They say, well, what do you mean the NFL, like football players, can't disrespect the flag?
They have a right to do it.
We know that.
We're debating whether it's right or wrong.
And we also have the right to boycott, and we should debate whether that is right or wrong.
And this is the thing that the left has done.
This is why the left no longer understands free speech, because they are so convinced of the justness of their cause, the justice of their cause, that they have decided that process doesn't matter.
But process is all, because process is what defends your freedoms.
And that's the way we hope we can get to the good, the good content.
You know, tomorrow, Christian Toto, our conservative movie critic, is going to be in.
He's just put out an article which features me.
I think me and Ben are both in it about whether you should boycott movies.