Ep. 41 - The NYT Is Trash: An Historical Retrospective
The New York Times accused conservatives of pandering to our audiences, so Michael gladly plays to type! Then Allie Stuckey and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Rex Tillerson’s reported castration, a congressional candidate abducted by aliens—E.T., not S.A.—and the latest naval-gazing Facebook meme in the wake of the Weinstein scandal, scores of women posting “me too.”
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A writer in the New York Times accused primarily Ben Shapiro, but also Molly Hemingway, Ben Domenech, and me of pandering to our audiences.
So, playing against type as always, on today's show we will examine the various and sundry ways in which the New York Times is trash, an historical retrospective.
Then, Allie Stuckey and Jacob Berry join the panel of deplorables to discuss Rex Tillerson's reported castration, a congressional candidate abducted by aliens, E.T., not S.A., and the latest navel-gazing Facebook meme in the wake of the Weinstein scandal.
Scores of women posting, Me Too.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This Times piece may have been the great highlight of my weekend.
It was called The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro.
And I do not need to defend Ben Shapiro.
Ben is a big boy.
He can defend himself just fine.
Twitter excoriated this poor chick at The New York Times and really showed her piece to be without evidence and frivolous.
And I've never been one to accuse The New York Times of standards, but even below...
They're paltry standards that they once had perhaps just in my imagination.
But the Times article also talked about me.
It linked to my episode last week or two weeks ago on Christopher Columbus.
Christopher Columbus was actually a great man.
It linked to that.
It disparaged it.
It didn't explain why it disparaged it.
It didn't actually make any criticism of it.
It just said this was evidence of Pandering and frivolous journalism.
Now, our audience likes the truth.
It likes history.
It likes philosophy.
It likes people taking history seriously and philosophy seriously.
So if that's a pandering, then I suppose we're pandering, right?
We're pandering to people who want an alternative to anti-historical, ridiculous partisan narratives like we see in the New York times.
But it gave me this great opportunity today to take a brief walk down memory lane in all of the ways that the New York times is absolute garbage.
And we'll begin with this article.
The article begins and says, it's true that campuses tend to be hostile places to conservatives like Mr.
Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Heather McDonald.
But the notion that they are the cultural underdogs is bogus.
What Mr.
Shapiro does on campus is shadowboxing, meant to pander to his conservative fans whose values dominate mainstream American culture.
If he wanted to be genuinely brave, he'd challenge some of the wrong-headed ideas held by his right-wing fans.
Instead, he uses his megaphone, the website The Daily Wire, to reinforce what they already believe.
Now, I'm not sure of this, but I think Jane, who wrote this article, should have Googled Ben Shapiro before she wrote this piece.
Ben Shapiro, the leading anti-Trump voice during the election, the guy whose entire year was spent making enemies out of conservatives because he told them things they didn't want to hear.
This is the guy that she holds up as an example of someone who panders to the right.
It's unbelievable.
It...
She goes on, I guess the more egregious claim, Ben is Ben, you can think whatever you want about him, but the more egregious claim is that conservatism is the dominant culture in America.
When can you turn on a television?
When can you go see a movie?
When can you go look at a poster, even on the internet, even with censoring of conservative videos by YouTube, by Facebook, alleged censoring by Twitter?
Where can you look where conservatism and conservative thoughts are not under fire?
People being fired, having to leave their companies.
Brandon Eich at Mozilla forced to leave his company because he supported the definition of marriage that everyone agreed on until the day before yesterday.
The culture is oppressively left-wing.
People are being fired from Google for passing around basically unobjectionable memos questioning discriminatory policies.
People are being suspended at universities.
They're not being allowed to speak.
You talk about the hollow bravery of Ben Shapiro.
When he went to Berkeley, it cost $600,000 to defend Berkeley against a 5'9 Jewish guy who's completely in the mainstream of conservative culture and is even so nuanced about it.
That he can't fully support Donald Trump.
He calls it balls and strikes and calls it like he sees it.
So that's $600,000 to defend against that guy.
It's basically like the president coming to town.
They're shutting down the city.
But one conservative who has mainstream ideas is so terrifying to the left, so unpopular, so censored that it costs that much money to bring him into town.
The piece was without evidence.
I don't think we need to go much further than that.
She was excoriated.
I'm, believe it or not, even shocked that the Times would run it.
But then I rethought about this, and I thought...
Lest we think this is an isolated incident, let's cover a few more.
Just today, there was a headline in the New York Times that said, aiding transgender case, Sessions defies his image on civil rights.
What image?
What your image?
The image that you have painted of him, he's defying that image.
And he's defying that image because it's a false image.
It's a slanderous, smearing narrative that you're painting of him.
The whole article was about what a terrible guy Sessions is, and then it just explains away all of his work.
The article said this.
Critics and supporters agree that Mr. Sessions is more likely to pursue civil rights matters in individual cases rather than trying to address larger systemic issues as the Obama administration did.
He has promised to punish any police conduct that violates civil rights, for example, but is skeptical of efforts to force department-wide overhauls.
He supports prosecuting those who commit violence against transgender victims, but opposes reading the law in a way that broadly extends discrimination protection for transgender people.
This is not that complicated for people who aren't in the ideological bubble of the New York Times.
Jeff Sessions is a federalist.
He doesn't think we need a gigantic federal government that's solving all of our problems for us because as it tries to solve those problems, it will create many more that we can't foresee.
So yes, he's prosecuting these cases, but he doesn't believe that we need these sweeping powers created by unaccountable, godless bureaucracies that are not accountable to the American people.
This example here is called the Fox-Butterfield effect.
We'll talk about this later, but it's an example specifically in the New York Times where they look at a situation and they see a paradox where really there's a causal connection.
So they say it doesn't make any sense that Jeff Sessions would prosecute these cases, but he doesn't want huge sweeping programs from the federal government.
Of course it makes perfect sense.
That He understands the role of his department, and it comports perfectly well with his view of politics and his view of the government.
Next, this is from New York Times.
Now, this is very scary.
They report, quote, The editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal has faced unease and frustration in his newsroom over the stewardship of the newspaper's coverage of President Trump, which some journalists there say has lacked toughness and verb.
Some journalists there or some journalists at the New York Times?
I'm not quite sure.
The baker responded to these emails.
There was an exchange that was uncovered.
He said, sorry, this is commentary dressed up as news reporting.
So he's taking some of the stories that were too hard on Trump.
He said, you're injecting your commentary here.
We have to be straight news.
He wanted to say, could we please just stick to reporting?
What he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism.
So he's suggesting that the news organization do what news organizations are supposed to do.
The New York Times is shocked by this.
The only way they can view this is that it's soft coverage.
It isn't soft coverage.
It's keeping the opinion separate from the news reporting.
This used to be done or at least attempted in the mainstream media, but for years it has not been, which is why you see the nonsense that comes out of the New York Times as it does.
Then there was a letter from the publisher, "To our readers from the publisher and executive editor," and President Trump described this as an apology for all the terrible coverage that they did of him and their awful predictions about the election, none of which came true.
The paper pushed back and said the New York Times never apologized.
But the New York Times public editor herself, Liz Spade, admits that they blew it too.
In this letter, they say, After such an erratic and unpredictable election, there are inevitable questions.
Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?
Gee, I wonder.
What forces and strains in America drove this divisive election and outcome?
The second part, the second sentence, that's the part.
Yes, you did misunderstand half of this country.
You totally blew it.
You don't know anything about them.
But then, and you acknowledge this, you apologize for this, and then you immediately follow it up and say, what led to this awful, divisive, terrible election?
It's only divisive because you make it divisive.
Any election, by definition, is divisive.
Half the people vote for one guy, roughly half vote for the other guy.
But only you, because of your horror at Donald Trump, And your total inability to understand why anybody would oppose your narrative, would vote for your preferred candidate, only then is it divisive.
Only then is it awful.
And so even in their apology, of course they don't see it as an apology because it's a false apology.
They're saying we did something wrong, but really we didn't do anything wrong.
It was on half of the country that made us do it.
Slap, slap.
Why did you make me do it?
I hate it when you make me do this.
Then they did an entire piece, a huge piece, you can get it right now, called Trump Lies.
This is the serious journalism.
Democracy dies in darkness, all the news that's fit to print.
Trump Lies.
Let's go through some of those Trump Lies.
I just picked out random ones, and every one that I picked out turned out not to be a lie.
It was the New York Times that was lying.
They said, quote, This was a quote of Donald Trump's.
You had millions of people that now aren't insured anymore.
He's referring to Obamacare.
The Times adds, the real number is less than one million, according to the Urban Institute.
Sure, I guess it's according to the Urban Institute.
How about according to MSNBC? How about according to Van Jones?
The Urban Institute is a left-wing think tank.
But of course they can't disclose that in their reporting.
And even the Washington Post admits that after Obamacare was passed...
28 million people still lacked health insurance.
And it's true that many millions got health insurance because of Obamacare.
What they leave out is that they had previously lost their health insurance.
So now they had their insurance, they lost their insurance, they got it again.
But unfortunately now the premiums increased, the rate of increase increased, and they couldn't choose their doctor.
Barack Obama said, if you want to keep your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Not the case.
So what Trump said, absolutely true.
The New York Times said, not true at all.
Another one in the Trump lies section, it's gotten to a point where it is not, this is from Trump, it's gotten to a point where it is not even being reported.
And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.
He's talking about terrorism and the New York Times adds, terrorism has been reported on, often in detail.
Yeah, okay, sure.
I guess occasionally a story is run.
The question is, what is the volume of stories being run?
Where are the editors placing these stories?
What are they focusing their coverage on?
Are they spending 10 hours on one thing, on Russia, which you'll notice nobody is talking about anymore because it was completely frivolous, and then one hour on terrorism, or are they prioritizing as the American people would prioritize?
Now, here's an example of this.
White supremacist Dylann Roof shot up that historically black church in Charleston.
There was wall-to-wall coverage of this for weeks.
We're still hearing about it.
They got vicious white supremacists.
They covered the trial very closely.
It was awful.
There's a national conversation about Confederate monuments and Confederate flags and guns and hate speech and censor-censor, what have you.
Recently, a Sudanese immigrant, Emmanuel Kadega Sampson, shot up a historically white church in Nashville.
The only reason the shooting wasn't worse than it ended up being is that the usher there, who the guy had pistol whipped, was able to wrestle him to the ground, caused the shooter to shoot himself accidentally, and then pulled out his own gun because he was carrying, because they were in Nashville, and that's what people do in Nashville.
Of course, the coverage of this was paltry, barely existent compared to the coverage of the other one.
Now, both cases, it appears, were rationally motivated.
Dylann Roof admitted it, and Samson, this killer in Nashville, wrote a note that appears to suggest it was revenge for Charleston.
They are parallel stories.
But it contradicts the New York Times narrative, and if it contradicts their narrative, they're just not going to give it too much ink.
Another example is the Orlando nightclub shooting.
This was the New York Times headline, Orlando gunmen attacks a gay nightclub, leaving 50 dead.
They don't mention his name.
All of the Dylann Roof coverage mentioned his name, but they don't mention his name because his name is Omar Mateen.
Nowhere in that headline does it mention that Mateen swore allegiance to ISIS, that he was a radicalized Muslim.
But all of the New York Times coverage of Dylann Roof, that uses his name, because that name, it's clear from the context of that story what was behind that shooting.
Now, you know, Dylann Roof brings us to another lovely New York Times headline.
Quote, Sessions, Trump, Dylann Roof, your Tuesday evening briefing.
Okay, let's go through that.
Jeff Sessions is the Attorney General of the United States, former esteemed senator from Alabama.
There's a Donald Trump, real estate magnate, reality TV star, President of the United States, and a white supremacist killer named Dylann Roof.
It's amazing how one of those things seems not like the other.
But the times, they can't even hide it sometimes.
I think, especially in the age of Donald Trump, although they behaved this way during George W. Bush, they get so riled up, they get so excited, they can't help themselves, and they humiliate themselves in headlines such as that.
How about this op-ed that the New York Times allowed to run?
Quote, Why we are on hunger strike in Israel's prisons.
Okay, it's a pro-Palestinian piece about the alleged occupation, all the alleged atrocities of Israel.
We've seen this a lot.
It's my Marwan Barghouti.
Now, the article originally stated Marwan Barghouti is a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.
Okay, that seems innocuous enough.
Except the New York Times public editor Liz Spade later wrote a piece, even she criticizing the Times, for omitting that Barghouti is a convicted murderer who is serving five consecutive life sentences for killing innocent civilians.
So Barghouti is a Palestinian leader.
Okay, check.
He's a parliamentarian.
Check.
He's a vicious murderer who's serving five life sentences for killing innocent civilians.
No, no, no, the Times editors, we've got to leave that one out.
We're running out of space.
We only have space for two of your titles.
Let's leave in the completely innocuous ones.
Now, trash is not a new quality at the New York Times.
In 2004, reporter Fox Butterfield published a headline that would make him legendary.
The headline is, quote, more inmates despite drop-in crime.
So more people are going to prison despite the drop-in crime.
This is the Butterfield Effect.
I think Wall Street Journal's James Toronto named it that.
The Butterfield Effect is when someone makes a statement that is ludicrous on its face, but it reveals the speaker's own biases, right?
So they express it as though it's a paradox when really there's a causal relationship between them.
Why is the crime rate dropping?
Possibly because we're throwing all of the criminals into prison.
That would make sense.
But to Fox Butterfield, to the New York Times, they're living in an ideological fantasy land wherein there can't be a connection between imprisonment and crime.
We all know how unjust the prison system is anyway.
We should probably open up all of the jails anyway.
So there couldn't possibly be a connection.
And this effect, this bias, pervades their reporting.
Who can forget Lincoln Steffens, the New York Times reporter who returned from the Soviet Union and declared, I've seen the future and it works.
The Soviet Union.
This was what Bill Buckley reacted to when he launched National Review.
He said, He was referring to that, the future and it works.
That future doesn't work, but he was shilling for the Soviet Union.
Of course, this isn't the only time the New York Times has shilled for the Soviet Union.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Walter Durante He famously wrote a series of 11 articles on the Soviet Union in 1931, I believe it was.
And he denied the Holodome War.
He denied the man-made famine that killed between 7 and 10 million people.
I believe he still has his Pulitzer.
This is almost a century back now.
And I will...
I will talk more about the New York Times in my final thought, what we should do about it.
But now, I think we have to get away from fake news.
I've had enough fake news for today.
My heart is racing.
I need to get to some real news.
So it's time to bring on our excellent panel of deplorables.
We are going to have on Ali Stuckey, and we are going to have on Jacob Berry.
Listen, I want you to be able to watch it.
I'm hoping, I know they've got a lot of great stuff to say.
We have to talk about aliens, illegal aliens and Martians.
We have to talk about the Me Too campaign.
We have to talk about Bob Corker saying Rex Tillerson is castrated.
But you can't watch it unless you go to thedailywire.com right now and subscribe.
It is just $10 a month, $100 a year.
We want to thank everybody who already has subscribed.
It helps us keep the lights on.
It keeps me in Rachel Maddow glasses polish.
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Biggest podcast on the right.
Forget about all that.
I know.
You're bored.
Your eyes are glossing over.
Well...
What about this?
Now have I got your attention?
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
The single most coveted item in the United States, I believe.
It is the perfect way to just collect all of the Hollywood tears, all of the news tears.
I used to take this in New York.
I'd bring it outside of the New York Times building and then I could take a shower and fill up my mug at the same time.
I really like it.
It goes really well with a little Daily Wire punch over here.
You pour that in and it makes a delicious cocktail.
That's thedailywire.com.
Go over there right now, and we'll be right back.
Allie, Jacob, thank you for being with us.
We need to rush right into all of the important news on the memes.
There is the Me Too campaign, which has been launched on Facebook and Twitter.
Alyssa Milano kicked this off.
She tweeted, So then you might have noticed your Facebook feeds have just got a lot of lefty people tweeting, Me Too, Me Too, Me Too.
Allie, there seems to be a pretty wide gulf between sexual assault and sexual harassment.
Is this an important gesture to show how widespread the problem of sexual misconduct is?
Or is it disrespectful and absurd to conflate rape with being winked at at work?
Yeah, absolutely.
I also think that there's a problem when sexual assault is Or the idea of sexual assault and people being sexually assaulted becomes a trend in which people feel like they have to jump on a bandwagon in order to be accepted.
And I think that's kind of what we see happening here.
If you haven't been sexually assaulted, Or sexually harassed, then you're thinking back, trying to rack your brain.
Oh, maybe that employer that one time did wink at me or maybe he did touch my shoulder weirdly.
And yes, yes, me too.
And it absolutely minimizes the cases of real assault and harassment that are happening when people are simply adding themselves to a trend to either look or sound cool.
And it's a shame.
I saw this on Facebook today.
A girl wrote, you know, I wasn't sure if I'd write Me Too.
I wasn't sure if I'd join into this.
But then I just thought even the fact that I couldn't tell, I wasn't certain, you know, if the guy winking at me, if that constituted it, that made me realize that I am a part of it and I have to write Me Too.
But of course the opposite is true.
If you're not sure...
Then not you two.
You excluded.
Not you.
You'll know.
I mean, it's an egregious, egregious crime.
You'll know if it happens.
Jacob, sexual harassment can include unwanted sexual advances.
Sexual assault can be a guy at a bar, a drunk guy, you know, trying to kiss you a little too much or being too aggressive in his come-ons.
And there may be, indeed, a spike in sexual assault On campuses or wherever when there's a lot of booze and no social mores and people who Who have a lot of hormones that are flying through them.
But the same feminists who insist on conflating harassment and assault also seem to be the ones who are supporting this hookup culture, this culture that makes sex basically not a big deal.
So therefore, if sex isn't a big deal, then why is sexual assault so much worse than regular assault?
Can one coherently list sexual harassment among the most widespread social problems, but also support the hookup culture?
No, I think it's completely hypocritical.
I mean, people were saying, oh, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke, people were saying, oh, look, what's his name, the creator of Family Guy?
You know, he joked about it when he hosted the Academy Awards, and he was saying, I was trying to bring attention to it.
Why didn't you just say that he was a sexual harasser?
Right.
I mean, if you really want to bring attention to it.
So I think that all these ladies are coming forward, and I think that it's important that they do.
But these other people who said, well, I knew about it, but I just didn't say anything.
I think that that is them encouraging this culture.
And no, you can't have it both ways.
You can't say, oh, I am for hookup culture, but don't wink at me.
Are you crazy?
Right.
Absolutely.
Someone brought this up to me in college.
We were debating, is there a rape culture?
That's the term that feminists use now.
There's a rape culture in Pakistan.
There's not a rape culture on Yale University's campus.
But is there a rape culture?
And that's a really difficult question to answer.
If sex doesn't matter, if sex is just like any other act, it's like giving someone a high five, if sex is without any moral significance, then...
Why is sexual assault so much worse than regular assault?
We would all agree that sexual assault is much worse than punching somebody in the face or what have you.
But why is it much worse?
Obviously there is a moral weight to it which flies in the face of the hookup culture that defines a generation.
Okay, enough about sex.
We've had too much sex.
But we'll stick to sexual organs because a new report from Bob Corker, the showboating senator Bob Corker, suggests that the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been castrated.
Here is Tillerson's reaction.
I want to ask about Senator Bob Corker, who said something about you.
And he was referring, he's a friend of yours.
He has tremendous respect for you.
He speaks highly of you all the time.
He says that you're one of the best things about the cabinet.
And he's dismayed he thinks President Trump is constantly undermining you.
This is a Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He said that the president has, quote, castrated you before the world stage.
That's his word, not mine.
What's your response to that?
Well, as I indicated earlier, Jake, I think this is an unconventional president.
He uses unconventional communication tools.
He uses unconventional techniques to motivate change.
Again, I would say I am fully committed to his objectives.
I agree with his objectives.
I agree with what he's trying to do.
How he wants to use his own skills tactically to push things toward change, I'm there to help him achieve those.
You have a cattle ranch.
You don't want to say anything about the senator suggesting you've been gelded before the world?
That's not anything that bothers you?
I checked.
I'm fully intact.
I did not expect that answer.
You do have to love Rex Tillerson.
I checked and I'm fully intact.
Gotta love the guy.
But Ali, the question remains, has Tillerson been castrated politically, if not physically?
I also love how Jake Tapper brought up that he has a cattle ranch as his segue into that question.
Yeah, comedy is not his forte.
Yeah, that was really interesting.
News is not his forte either, but definitely not comedy.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, not really.
Well, we have some people saying, okay, this was Trump playing good cop, bad cop.
Then you have people saying, absolutely not.
This was Trump's way of kind of...
I guess taking the credit for being tough on North Korea and then emasculating Rex Tillerson.
And maybe that's true.
I kind of actually lean into that camp rather than thinking this was some big strategic heroic move on Trump's part.
I think that he should leave diplomacy up to Rex Tillerson.
We've already seen that that's not Trump's forte.
But Tillerson also knows how much Trump values loyalty.
And that's the game that he's playing with the media right now.
And I have to say I think he's doing a pretty good job of it.
He pivoted very well with those questions.
He's a pro.
He's really good.
For a guy who spent his career as a private businessman, CEO of ExxonMobil, obviously you develop political skills that way.
But he has been absolutely agile, completely adept in politics.
Jacob, should Tillerson have answered the question about calling Trump a moron?
In this interview, he said, you know, people say you called Trump a moron.
Do you deny it?
Did you call Trump a moron?
What happened?
The question seems to me like the usual mainstream media treatment of do you still beat your wife?
But should he have answered it or should he say I'm not going to dignify your question with a response?
I think it would have been better if he had denied it, but I honestly don't see his, I'm not going to dignify that with a response.
I see that as a denial.
It just didn't come on strong enough.
But I think either way he is saying, no, I did not.
I'm not going to play this game with the mainstream media because Trump's mistrust of the media, the well-deserved mistrust, I think it trickles down into his cabinet.
And so I think Tillerson's saying, look, I'm not going there.
I think he's just saying, I'm not playing your game.
Absolutely.
See, I disagree.
I disagree with that.
I think that he was actually saying, or he wasn't saying that he didn't say that.
I think that he would have flat out denied it if he had called Trump an effing moron.
And ironically enough, he said, you know, those are the games of Washington.
I think that he was playing the game of Washington, which is good PR, or wannabe good PR. You know, I'm not going to dignify that with their response.
That's a really, really good way of saying, oh my gosh, I don't want to talk about that.
That was really embarrassing.
It is true.
I'm really torn on this because I don't know if he called Trump a moron or not.
I don't really care.
I just certainly believe that in no instances should people be dignifying these little grade school questions from the mainstream media with a response.
Right.
Even if, I don't know, maybe he did call him a moron, but even if he didn't, I think that Tillerson should have the same answer.
I am not going to play gossip.
You know, Jake Tapper, you're supposed to be a serious news reporter.
Mainstream media, you're supposed to be reporting news.
I'm not going to mention which little insults I've thrown at my boss and colleague.
It's just, it's below the dignity of the office of Secretary of State.
But I don't know, he's probably weaseling out too, who knows.
It might have worked in both ways.
Okay, the most important news story of the day.
A congressional candidate claims to have been abducted by aliens at age seven.
The Miami area politician, of course it was a Florida politician, Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera says aliens brought her onto their spaceship, they predicted that ISIS would develop, and they telepathically explained that God is a universal energy, not a person.
He's part of everything, not a person.
Gotta love Florida.
Allie, in the grand scheme of things, is this woman any nuttier than your average member of Congress?
That's exactly what I was going to say.
I would say the only difference between her and a congressperson is that she's owning her crease.
She's owning the fact that she's unstable.
I'm thinking she actually has a leg up on most people in congress, that she's just being honest about the fact that she's completely mentally unstable and she might not get anything done.
At least she's telling you beforehand, and honesty is something that she has more than the average congressperson.
And I love her radical candor.
Some of those other psychopaths in Washington, they're able to hide their psychoses a little bit better.
Absolutely right.
And I think this was in Federalist 15 when Madison and Hamilton are explaining that the purpose of the Congress is to throw all of the crazy psychopaths into one room so that they could fight each other and not destroy the country.
I'm paraphrasing, of course.
So she seems great.
We should endorse her, I think.
Jacob, this woman claims that God is a universal energy, not a person, which seems to favor pantheism over a theistic religion such as Christianity or Judaism.
We hear this all the time.
People say this a lot in popular culture.
They say, you know, the universe is really good to me.
I'm sending you good vibes, man.
The universe is bringing it all together, right?
They talk about material things instead of metaphysical things.
C.S. Lewis claims that this sort of pantheism is the natural state of man.
This is the natural temptation of man in thinking about his surroundings and that theistic religion only comes from the ancient Greeks and the ancient Jews, basically, who realize there's something higher.
Is he right?
Are all people naturally pantheists, both crazy congressional candidates and regular old citizens alike?
I would say so.
I think that if you really get down to it, everyone has had some sort of cathartic, metaphysical experience, but they don't want to admit that there is a God out there because then they would have to live by His standards.
And that's why Ahn Ren said she was an atheist originally.
Later she came back and said, no, I'm just smart.
That's why I'm an atheist.
Yeah, right.
But I honestly think, yeah, people want to believe in something bigger than themselves, even bigger than the tangible universe, right?
So I think, yes, we're predisposed to this pantheism because it gives us a reason to believe in something without any consequences to our actions.
That's true.
Ali, looking around the world at our situation today, is it more likely that we're being telepathically controlled by aliens or that there is a just and loving God?
Yeah, well, I think C.S. Lewis also said if there's a longing inside of us for something other than this world or bigger than this world, there must be something actually bigger than this world.
And I think that that is a commonality that all of us have innately, that we have this longing.
And exactly like Jacob said, we want to attach it to something, but instead of attaching it to something that might have moral standard that's going to demand an action, we want to attach it to this relative, amorphous, crazy being that I think that we're going in the direction of moral relativity,
which is why you're seeing, but we're also going in the direction of wanting to feel good.
I think that we're going more towards agnosticism than we are atheism.
We want to believe that there is something bigger that's going to send us good vibes and good feelings, not something that's going to tell us what to do.
I think that's why we're seeing this pantheistic, ethereal I don't even know if it's increasing.
I think we've had it forever.
But it's certainly becoming, I guess, more prominent when members of Congress are espousing these kind of beliefs.
Future members of Congress, that is.
Yeah, and you touched on it.
Both of you touched on it.
That we're afraid of these moral standards.
We're afraid of exacting moral standards.
So then the thing that's higher than us has to be physical.
It has to be the aliens or it has to be the universe.
Because you can't derive an ought from an is.
You can't derive a moral standard from a physical thing.
So we have to move away from these metaphysical gods into physical gods, whatever that may be.
Otherwise we're going to have to feel bad, man, and not have all the good feels, you know?
Okay, panel, so good to have you as always.
Allie Stuckey, conservative millennial from The Blaze, and Jacob Berry, Daily Wire's own.
Now it is time.
I already have my smart glasses on.
It's time for the final thought.
Andrew Klavan calls the New York Times a former newspaper because, he says, they used to be a decent paper until they completely sold out as a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party.
He makes a good point.
The reporters, as opposed to the editors and opinion writers at the New York Times, are still generally excellent.
But the Times has always had a strained relationship with the truth.
And over the past decade and a half, it has decayed into utter trash.
Some Republicans fall prey to their promise of mainstream or left-wing validation.
The classic example of this is John McCain, whom the New York Times would praise when he criticized Republicans.
Only later to smear him when he ran against one of their guys.
The promise here is that the New York Times can offer the patina of credibility, a desirable sheen for politicians, artists, and cultural figures.
But the New York Times is trash.
The only patina or sheen it can offer is muck because it is premised on a lie that the New York Times offers fearless, unbiased journalism when in reality they are the most powerful Democrat communications firm in the country.
To cite a personal example that gives me endless joy, my best-selling political tome, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, outsold the number one New York Times best-selling book the week that it came out by an order of magnitude.
But the New York Times refused to name it on their list.
Unlike virtually every other news source in the world, they refused even to acknowledge it, only finally running an op-ed that half-mentioned my book, In order to suggest a handful of humorless blank book titles that mocked Republicans, Ted Cruz's friends at work, that sort of thing.
The New York Times has its narrative.
They're sticking to it, and conservatives shouldn't waste one moment seeking their favor or indulging their nonsense.
