Ep. 44 - Fake News Is Fake News ft. Andy Millennial
Donald Trump blasts fake news media for ignoring Russia’s uranium deal with Clinton. Meanwhile, the New York Times alleges fake news ads are popping up even on fact-checking websites, and the Democrats and John McCain are pushing legislation to require more transparency on Facebook ads. Michael explains where the falsehood lies. Then cultural correspondent Andy Millennial joins to discussed what the youth are keen on and hep to these days, as well as the crisis in the arts. Finally, all of your problems are solved in the mailbag!
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Donald Trump blasts the fake news media for ignoring Russia's uranium deal with Clinton.
Meanwhile, the New York Times alleges fake news ads are popping up even on fact-checking websites.
And the Democrats and John McCain, but I repeat myself, are pushing legislation to require more transparency on Facebook ads.
We'll discuss where the fake news really lies.
Then, our cultural correspondent, Andy Millennial, joins to discuss what the youth are keen on in HEP2 these days, as well as the crisis in the arts.
Finally, all of your problems will be solved in the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Okay, now away from the real news, There's fake news everywhere.
Trump tweeted this morning, the uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama administration knowledge, is the biggest story that fake media doesn't want to follow.
Now, this comes on the heels of this week evidence emerged that the FBI knew as early as 2009 that Russian operatives were using bribes and dirty tactics to shore up their atomic energy footprint in the United States.
The Obama administration approved the uranium deal benefiting Moscow anyway.
Hillary Clinton has been implicated in this.
All the while, let's not forget that Mueller The special counsel who's investigating Donald Trump, he was FBI director at the time.
This doesn't look good for Democrats, for the FBI investigation, or for the Russia investigation, rather, and it only looks good for fake news.
Democrats are gearing up to battle the allegedly pro-Trump fake news.
The New York Times alleges that fake news has been hitting websites like Snopes and PolitiFact, the alleged fact-checking websites.
Democrats are sponsoring legislation to require Facebook ads to disclose who is paying for them.
All of this misses the point.
Fake news is fake news.
The term emerged when a left-wing college professor, but I repeat myself again, circulated a Google document that listed lots of right-wing websites, including the Daily Wire, in the days after the 2016 election.
Democrats accused all right-wing websites of propagating fake news, the same ridiculous smear that they used to tie to the formerly only right-of-center news outlet, Fox News.
Conservatives then, pouncing on the absurdity of this claim, pointed out the countless unsubstantiated and outright false smears against Donald Trump and Republicans that mainstream outlets like the TV network, CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, breathlessly reported.
CNN's now-retracted Russia collusion story, which even forced them to fire a team of reporters, comes to mind.
Another example, among countless examples, the New York Times ran a bombshell fake news report headlined, quote, Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
Even James Comey, under oath, was forced to admit that this was not true.
Now, Donald Trump then masterfully positioned himself to appropriate the term.
It stuck to the New York Times and it stuck to CNN in a way that it didn't stick to us because the charge rings so true.
The alleged epidemic of fake news that John McCain and other Democrats want new laws to address is itself fake news.
Another term for fake news is propaganda.
That's the old term.
Propaganda is nothing new.
It's been around forever.
It will remain a communications tool as long as people speak to one another.
President Trump has narrowed in on the real issue, the fake news media.
The issue isn't random websites promoting partisan press releases.
It's the enormous institutional behemoths, like the mainstream media, which purport to present objective facts without partisan slant, often on public airways, but in reality are simply shills for Democrats and they attack Republicans.
They're the fake news media because they aren't news media.
They're attack dogs for Democrats.
It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
Fake news is fake news.
But the fake news media are real, adversarial, and conservatives ought to fight them tooth and nail.
Don't give them an inch.
Okay.
That's enough of the news.
That's all the news I want to talk about.
A little bit of fake news.
A lot of real news.
Now we have to bring on our one and only cultural correspondent, Andy Millennial.
Andy, thanks for being here.
What's up?
So, Andy, you're a millennial.
You're in Hollywood.
All you kids, all you're tweeting about these days are the Me Too campaign, the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal.
You've been out here.
What have you noticed?
Well, you know, as a millennial who identifies as a young woman, I... I came out here with my eyes full of stars and, you know, these innocent hopes and dreams.
And, you know, I immediately ran into incredible, incredible sexual, you know, harassment.
I was living with a couple of other young girls, and, you know, I suggested that we all start taking showers together.
I'm sorry, Tim.
I thought we really had to stop it.
I'm sorry.
We almost broke our record there.
I know.
You kept it longer than I did.
I was going to say to protect us from Harvey Weinstein, but they wouldn't listen to me.
That image was one that I just couldn't take anymore.
Well, Andy, great to have you back.
It's great to be here.
You know, for those who haven't been following, which you certainly should, Andrew Klavan and I have a new podcast out together.
It's a narrative fiction podcast called Another Kingdom.
It's what Drew wrote, so he did all the work, and I read it then.
And I will say publicly for the first time, Andrew Klavan cast me in Another Kingdom, and the casting process was, it was a lot like what you're reading in the papers, folks.
That's true.
I am known as the Harvey Weinstein of the podcast.
That's true.
People do call me that.
Of the narrative podcast.
I thought it was all the Oscars, and I thought, no, it's just because I chase people around the room all the time.
The podcast has been a lot of fun, and people are responding to it, shockingly.
People really like it.
I mean, I think it's now all five-star reviews.
I'm not doing it.
I know.
I tried to.
They won't let me.
I know all my tricks.
No, it is.
It's all five-star reviews.
It's got a bunch of...
If you have listened, by the way, even if you haven't, I don't really care, go over there and leave a five-star review.
It helps us out.
Definitely check out the show.
Subscribe on iTunes.
That really helps.
Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play.
What I really like about this podcast is that we couldn't have had anyone make it for us.
No one would have accepted this.
They wouldn't have made a movie.
They wouldn't have published a book.
There's no chance of it.
I've almost stopped pitching in Hollywood because I just know it's going to get to a certain level and die.
I mean, this is not a political story.
This is just a fantasy.
It's about a failed Hollywood screenwriter.
One day he walks through a door and he finds himself in a bizarre fantasy land.
And he's a murder suspect in this bizarre fantasy land.
We should say that the second episode drops tomorrow.
Yeah, because they're coming out once a week.
So we launched it on Friday, October 13th.
And they'll be coming out every Friday.
So we have the second episode coming out tomorrow.
People might be confused just on this one bit.
I will never work in Hollywood again, and I barely worked before.
But you're a real Hollywood guy.
You've had these big movies.
I had a very good run of screenwriters.
And by the way, all I ever wanted to do was write stories like this, write novels and fictional stories.
And I was dragged into Hollywood, and I was selling scripts at a very quick pace.
As most screenwriters will tell you, they weren't getting made, but I was getting paid for them.
And a couple got made.
You know, then I started to speak out about politics, and my phone stopped ringing like that.
And now, it's funny, I do get calls because they know I can do certain things really well, but I'm just always suspicious that I'm never going to get past a certain point once they Google me.
The Google.
That's the point you're not going to get past.
Exactly.
Because it's not a partisan story.
It's not about Republicans.
But it's a story that just does not care about political correctness.
It doesn't care about a lot of the tropes that you find in mainstream Hollywood and entertainment.
If you're describing the world To me, this has always been true.
There's no sense in sitting down at a computer to write something if you're not going to try and tell the truth.
So if you're just simply describing the world, you very quickly become politically incorrect.
Because girls are girls, and men are men, and we want certain things, and we desire certain things.
And you just can't describe that world and stay politically correct, if you're going to be honest.
And so I would say that they might have gotten past the first chapter on this, maybe, but after that we're done.
The one bit, there is a transgender killer.
Oh yeah, the transgender killer.
That would have knocked it right.
I mean, it would have been stormed out of the room.
No question.
And the thing is about becoming a man to some degree.
I mean, it is a journey, and it's a guy's journey.
And I think that all that stuff is just, you just can't write about it anymore, honestly.
Right.
And get into mainstream show business, which to be honest with you...
I don't care.
I just want to do what I do.
That is the really liberating thing.
Every time I really wanted to be in this movie or to get this TV part or something, my whole life staked on it.
I was miserable.
And it was hard to do.
And now I've got a ton of opportunities.
I get to make whatever I want.
And there is a little bit in this growing up narrative.
Hollywood is fantasy land.
It's where the craziest people in the world who don't want to grow up move and work here.
And you see that evolution.
With Austin Lively, with the main character, even as he's fighting off ogres and knights.
Right, because you do, you know, people do come here with this idea, they start out with this idea, they want to make art, or they want to act, they want to do all these things, and you wind up like, you know, in toilet paper commercials, and you think, well, at least I'm working, you know, and all this stuff.
But that's not really what you set out to do, and the town does churn you into that.
I always tease my actors' friends My actor friends, if they start out studying Hamlet and they end up, if they're successful, if they really make it, they end up shouting, let the girl go for the rest of their lives.
If you're lucky.
If you're lucky.
I mean, truly the top 1% of a 1%.
And there's that old showbiz line about the guy who's shoveling out the elephant cage, you know, and he's mopping it up.
And his buddy comes up to him and says, don't you want to get another job?
And he says, what, leave showbiz?
No.
I know.
I mean, I teased my pal Nick Searcy, the guy who was in Justified and all that stuff.
I made that joke to him, and he said that literally, like, his first line in movies was something like, get out of the car.
You know, that's what you wind up saying the rest of your life.
Nick's real art form is Twitter, by the way.
If you're not following Nick Searcy on Twitter.
He is the greatest Twitter.
He is the king of Twitter.
So, Hollywood's falling apart.
We get to do whatever we want, and maybe Hollywood will do something with it.
Maybe they don't.
Maybe it's just a podcast and people like it.
You're the prophet of this conservative cultural offense.
Bizarrely, I am the prophet.
It's really weird.
There's no question about it.
You published Crisis in the Arts a few years ago.
You predicted a lot of what was happening.
Or rather, you called for what's happening.
And then, like, I don't know, like Forrest Gump or something, you end up being in all the places that that's happening.
It is bizarre.
I mean, I said this to my wife a couple of years ago.
I said, I keep going and making speeches going, we have to do this, this, and this.
And then I noticed that I'm doing it.
You know?
And it really is weird because like I said, I only wanted to do one thing.
I had this very focused...
I have the opposite of attention deficit disorder.
Once I'm focused on something, I'm totally...
And I only wanted to write books.
I only wanted to write novels.
And then I found myself doing podcasts.
I mean, I helped invent an app that told a ghost story.
Haunting Melissa.
Haunting Melissa.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was a bestseller for a couple of weeks there and like, you know, I didn't invent the technical part of it.
I just wrote the script for my friend Neil Edelstein.
But I mean, it was weird to be, you know, Neil pitched it to me and I just thought, I gotta do that.
No one's ever done that before, you know.
And then this stuff I did, started doing at PJTV and now I do it here.
These kind of small but comical political commentaries.
And when I started out Nobody was doing it.
It was the first of the show.
I know.
And now it's everywhere.
My whole panel of deplorables are people who are doing that now.
They do that.
They're a new generation of people doing it.
And I think, look, the thing about it is, is I looked...
I became a conservative.
I was a liberal, grew up a liberal, and I became a conservative when I noticed that everything Ronald Reagan said was going to happen, happened.
And everything they said about him turned out to be untrue.
Now, you know, you laugh about that now, but think about it for a minute.
If suddenly you realized, I don't know, some bizarre thing, like there was no Washington, D.C. It was a complete construct of the media.
You'd go like, wait, everything is a lie.
That was the experience.
The experience was, you know, when I saw the Berlin Wall collapse, I felt like, you've got to be Are you kidding me?
Two years after Reagan leaves office, three years?
After Reagan said it would happen, and everybody said, this idiot, this fool, this cowboy, this actor, you know, and they're like, oh, I get it now.
He was right, they were wrong.
And I think that I started to realize that there was an entire, I called it the empire of lies, Of this culture that was pushing stuff on us that wasn't good for people, wasn't true.
It wasn't true that black people were being helped by it.
It wasn't true that women were being helped by it.
It was all untrue.
And so I started to think, well, why aren't the other people talking about this?
And I rapidly found out it was because conservatives as a group have neglected the culture.
They don't care about the culture.
They think the culture is Shakespeare and the opera, and they don't think it's Stranger Things.
They don't think it's Netflix and all that stuff.
Fidget spinners, obviously.
And of course, that's what it is.
You know, which is why you and I kind of get Trump in a way, because when he goes out against the NFL, that's where the culture is.
That's when the reality TV star, a major reality TV star.
Exactly.
Absolutely.
That is the culture.
So where is it headed?
Well, I think what we...
I say it like this.
You know, when we had the Revolutionary War, the British came over the hill in ranks.
Biggest empire on Earth, most powerful soldiers, best trained soldiers.
They had the guns, they had the thing.
And our guys were popping up from behind rocks with, like, flintlock pistols and popping them off, you know?
That's where we are right now.
We're doing YouTube, we're doing podcasts, we're doing, you know...
I can write my next novel if I want and just publish it right online.
You'll make more money.
You'll make more money if you self-publish.
That's right, as you would know from...
You're a major publication.
And I feel that they are an empire of lies and we are this little band of gorillas popping up from behind the rocks and from behind the trees and picking them off.
I think we're going to win.
I mean, I think it's going to be tough.
We're going to have our valley forge.
We're going to have some tough times.
They're going to come after us.
They always come after us.
They have come after us.
I mean, they came after me.
They've done whatever they can do to me.
But I think it's great.
I think we're going to beat them.
And I think we are already beating them.
And I think that Donald Trump is a sign that we're beating them.
I have problems with him for all the things he does that I don't like.
He is a sign that we can be heard even as they're trying to drown us out.
That we can, that this one strong, steady, orange man can stand up against the British Army.
Absolutely.
I share your hope entirely.
And it's great.
I'm not sick and tired of winning.
I am not sick and tired of winning.
There's not too much winning.
Bring on more kefefe.
No question.
Bring the kefefe all the way.
Andy Millennial.
Thanks for being here.
Great.
Go spread the message to the kids.
We look forward to hearing more on that Teeny Bopper Culture next time.
And Another Kingdom tomorrow.
Episode 2.
Make sure you tune in.
Another Kingdom.
It's on iTunes.
It's everywhere.
Just search Andrew Klavan's Another Kingdom.
Be sure to subscribe.
Be sure to leave a review and a five-star review.
And let us know what you think about it, too.
Because we are just little gorillas who are posting this up.
So please send in your thoughts.
All right.
Andy, thanks for being here.
It's a pleasure.
Now, I really want to enlighten all of you.
I want to change your lives.
I can answer every one of your questions in the mailbag.
But I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
To all of our current subscribers, thank you very much.
You help keep the lights on.
Cofefe in my mug.
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Yeah, yeah, I know.
What else, Michael?
What else?
Here it is.
The Leftist Tears Tumbler.
It is the finest vessel for leftist tears in the entire country.
We have several vintages, obviously, that it can hold.
It's, you know, wine glasses.
You need this for the strong red.
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Hot or cold, always salty and delicious.
We'll be right back.
Now we have the mailbag.
We have a lot of really in-depth questions this week, so let's get right to it.
The first question from Alex.
Good question, Alex.
You know, I'm a lover, not a fighter, obviously.
That's why I always have these all-women panels of deplorables.
I don't want to fight too much.
If I were forced to, if I were compelled to, I would obviously want to choose the weakest boxing opponent that I possibly could.
That historical figure would be King Charles II of Spain.
He was a Habsburg king that was so deeply inbred that he could barely function in any way.
The physician who performed his autopsy said that his body, quote, did not contain a single drop of blood.
His heart was the size of a peppercorn.
His lungs corroded.
His intestines rotten and gangrenous.
He had a single testicle black as coal, and his head was full of water.
That is my boxing opponent.
It's going to be like Mayflower McGregor.
From Hani, hey Michael, I recently started caring about the world rather than defaulting to the left like many of my high school peers, and I found recently that I need to educate myself about economics.
Do you have any recommendations for books to read that could give me an understanding of the conservative view of economics?
P.S. My name is pronounced like Hani with an H. That's what I said.
Yes, I do have a recommendation, especially if you're in high school, you should read Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.
There are a lot of great intro econ books, but Hazlitt's is great.
It should be required reading in every high school in this country.
Read it and you will be able to debunk any nonsense that your high school pals are trying to throw at you.
From Jeffrey, how much of success do you attribute to having attractive females on your panel so often?
Listen, I'm a taken guy, okay?
I'm engaged to sweet little Elisa.
But regardless, I can assure you, I have had no success with the beautiful women on my panel.
That date that I had with Roaming Millennial, that ended the minute that Ben Shapiro stopped playing violin.
No success at all, unfortunately.
What can you say?
That's probably good.
It's good for my soul, good for my marriage.
That might save my spot in heaven someday.
From Ashton.
Hey, yon brethren of philosophical lucidity.
Is the mere fact of newspapers, such as the New York Times, endorsing presidential candidates per se evidence that they're biased cesspools of distortion?
Or should we as conservatives offer more evidence to support our claims?
Thanks, Ashton.
I don't know that it's the evidence that I would point to.
I have no problem with newspaper editorial boards endorsing political candidates.
The trouble is that those editors make terrible decisions about their reporting.
I don't really have a problem with New York Times reporters.
I have a problem with New York Times editors because the editors decide which stories go on the front page, which go on page 3050, Where the retractions go, which stories get covered, which get buried.
Cheryl Atkinson from CBS talks about stories being buried because they were critical of Obama.
So what I have a problem with, as we talked about earlier in the show, is news media pretending to be objective arbiters of whatever.
They're not.
They have a point of view, an editorial point of view.
They can try to report the facts honestly, but they should be honest or they're going to be fake news.
From Andrew.
Why does the Bible say, quote, That is from 1 Timothy 2.12.
I don't know, man.
Have you ever talked to them?
Have you ever tried talking?
No, I'm kidding.
That's not true.
The reason it's in the Bible is because someone put it in the Bible.
But it is worth noting that 1 Timothy and I think 2 Timothy are considered to be not actually written by St.
Paul.
So certain letters we know are written by St.
Paul or we have a very good idea that they were.
There's a consensus right now that 1 Timothy was not written by him.
There were 306 words that Paul does not use in his unquestioned letters that he does use there.
The style of writing is different from that of the unquestioned letters.
They reflect conditions and a church organization that apparently was not Present in Paul's day, and they don't appear in early lists of his canonical works.
So I don't really worry too much about that.
Now, of course, 1 Corinthians 1434 says something similar.
It says, quote, One thing that's important to point out here is that Paul is talking to the Corinthians.
Unlike other major religions, Christianity is documenting things that really happen.
It's not only talking about the metaphysical, it's talking about the physical too.
Christianity begins not in poetry but in journalism, tracking down what a guy did with a bunch of other guys and how he...
The divine logos of the universe became flesh, dwelt among us, was killed, and then resurrected to redeem mankind.
So, Paul's talking to the Corinthians.
There seems to have been an issue in the Corinthian church about disorder and worship during this time.
Let's not forget, St.
Paul also said,"...there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." St.
Thomas Aquinas said in the Summa Theologica,"...it was right for the woman to be made from a rib of man." We're good to go.
Secondly, for sacramental signification, for from the side of Christ sleeping on the cross, the sacraments flowed, namely blood and water on which the church was established.
So I wouldn't use either 1 Timothy or 1 Corinthians as evidence that we ought to treat women poorly or not let them do anything.
St.
Paul himself actually alludes to women praying and prophesying in the church, but we should base our views of the sexes and of ourselves and our relation to God on the text as a whole, from Genesis all the way to the end.
From Clay, Greetings, Michael.
If you weren't hosting the Michael Knowles Show, what would you be doing?
From Clay.
That's a great question.
I would probably be a vagabond.
I would probably be begging for money underneath the Queensborough Bridge.
What I did before the Michael Knowles show and before I published Blank Books is I'm an actor, so I was an actor in Hollywood and New York, and I also ran political campaigns.
So I started running campaigns and working on campaigns in high school.
We had some success in New York.
I, along with some older political veterans, founded a little political consulting shop in New York.
There aren't a lot of Republicans out there, so, you know, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
We ran a bunch of campaigns over there.
I'd probably be doing that, because politics is show business for ugly people.
They both have a lot in common.
They are concerned with truth and with people.
You have to like people to do well at politics or In acting, certainly, and in a lot of artistic vocations.
So I'd probably be doing that, but this is a lot of fun, too.
I guess this is the combination of both of those, politics and show business.
All right, next question from Andrew.
Hey, Michael, big fan of the show.
I was wondering, what is the best version of the Bible?
I personally read the NIV, but I know there's also the King James, English Standard, American Standard translations.
Should I read these, too, or should I stick with mine?
Also, which do you read?
Thanks a million.
I do tend to favor the King James Version.
I read the KJV a lot.
Not very Catholic of me, I guess.
I really like it.
It's really beautiful.
I also read the ESV. I don't know Koine Greek, but I have been told that the NIV is not the best translation by people who do read the Greek.
So I stick to those two.
I think they're really good.
My favorite translation probably of any of them is the Jamaican New Testament, the JNT. I really suggest you look it up, you read it, you Google it.
It begins, I think, the Gospel of John begins, When time did start, the word was with God, and on and on and on.
So check it out.
A great translation as well.
Next question from Benjamin.
Hey, Michael, who is your favorite senator and why?
My favorite senator in recent memory is Tom Coburn.
I had the privilege of meeting him once or twice.
It's probably a sign of the times that I can't name a sitting senator that I would call my favorite.
Coburn was great, though.
He served three terms in the House.
He served two terms in the Senate.
He ended up having to retire for health reasons, but he said he would not seek a third term anyway.
He took a little break in between the House and the Senate, had a great career as a medical doctor and in the private sector.
He was an excellent fiscal conservative and a social conservative, really just a model senator.
Now he's at the Manhattan Institute, which is a great think tank as well.
The senators should be more like Tom Coburn.
Be more like Tom Coburn and have some humility.
Narcissism is an occupational hazard of politics, but I thought he was a really good one, and our current senators who are not being very productive should follow his example.
Next question from Emily.
Emily, I'd appreciate your opinion about whether or not to address minor harassment from a person of authority at work.
I'm the only woman on a team of five.
This gender breakdown is common in my field of investment banking.
Oh yeah, that's a very masculine field.
Making it genuinely hard for me to tell if the older man in question simply does not know any better because of the work environment he's experienced most of his career.
There have been a few incidents.
Two standouts are the time he kissed my cheek as a greeting.
That's not good.
And the time he threatened to spank me when he was exasperated about how much I was challenging his work methodology.
That's probably over the line.
The spanking probably crosses the line.
I'm reluctant to involve HR because he's a genuinely good character, valuable asset to the firm.
It's difficult for me to discuss this issue with him because he views me as a protege and has immense potential to boost my career.
Do you have any advice about what I should do next and what I should do the next time he harasses me in an inappropriate manner?
You're in a really tough spot, Emily.
This is not an easy question.
I think you've honed in on it.
What do you do the next time this happens?
It seems to me you have three options.
You can either ignore it and hope that you get an easier career path as a result of it, but then the harassment might get worse.
You can report it to HR. That's probably the most extreme thing you can do.
And then it's on the record.
So if you suffer any repercussions for it, it's on the record and it's public and everything.
Or you can approach him personally.
If you think he's a good guy, you have a good relationship with him.
You can deal with him personally.
And the worry here, of course, is that if he responds badly to it and you're either canned or you're not allowed to be promoted at the right pace, then there's nothing on the record.
Then it's just he said, she said.
So I don't know.
I mean, there are consequences to all of them.
I think one thing...
People are looking for an easy solution to these.
I'm not saying you are, but in general, people want these difficult problems to have a simple solution where there are no consequences.
There are consequences.
A lot of times people write in and they say, I'm a conservative on a college campus, should I voice my views?
I voiced my views and it's worked out just fine for me, I suppose, but there were consequences.
There were social consequences, even some academic consequences to it that I had to Deal with as a result.
Those actresses in Hollywood who said no to Harvey Weinstein, we've never heard of them for a reason.
He killed their careers, you know, and they had to deal with that.
Maybe they were braver for doing it.
Now everyone's jumping on the bandwagon and pretending it's courageous.
It's not courageous.
It was courageous to do it at the time.
So I don't know.
If I were you, the safe answer is to go through HR. I've run this by a number of my friends, this question, because it's pretty tough.
But Either the next time he does it, you can be very frank, very forward.
That might be what I would do in that case.
But what's really bad about what he's doing is he's left you no good option.
And if you want to play it safe, you should get it on the record.
But again, none of those sound pleasant, and he's put you in a bad position.
So anything you do is going to feel kind of gross, unfortunately.
From Teresa.
Hey Michael, how would you respond to someone who claims that the Catholic Church ordered the execution of Jews during the Holocaust?
Teresa?
Befuddlement, I think, is how I would respond.
That's absurd.
The...
The Catholic Church saved hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.
They did it through lobbying the government.
They did it through spying.
They did it through providing false documents.
They did it through hiding people in monasteries, convents, schools, with Catholic families, and even at the Vatican, institutions that the Vatican owned in the Apostolic Palace in the Castle Gandolfo.
So I've actually never heard this, that the Catholic Church ordered the killing of Jews.
If that's fake news out there, then let's try to I'm probably butchering that name, estimated the figure of Jews who were saved by the Catholic Church during the Holocaust is between 700,000 and 860,000.
In the run-up to the war, both Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII explicitly preached against racism and war in papal encyclicals.
Pope Pius II worked secretly with his close confidant, Father Robert Lieber and Dr.
Joseph Mueller, a Catholic German lawyer who the Nazis tried to assassinate.
He worked closely with them to spy on the Nazis and to subvert their efforts.
So he bugged rooms at the Apostolic Palace when Nazis came around.
Hitler actually threatened to kidnap the Pope and to take him to Liechtenstein.
He said, quote, I'll go right into the Vatican.
For one thing, the entire diplomatic corps are in there.
We'll get that bunch of swine out of there later.
We can make apologies.
According to the SS commander in Germany, Karl Wolf, the plan was only thwarted by the Allied liberation of Italy.
This doesn't sound like a guy who was collaborating with Hitler.
I think where this stupid idea comes from is there is a lot of revisionist history.
One book in particular is called Hitler's Pope by the revisionist John Cornwell.
It's nonsense.
I mean, it has been debunked so thoroughly, not only by historical evidence we had at the time, but by new evidence that has emerged since the Second World War.
One criticism that they make, these revisionists, is that Pope Pius XII didn't directly call out the Nazis or address them.
This is sort of true, though not really.
He actually did give a Christmas speech about the Nazis.
But it's in part also because of...
Keeping innocence safe.
So at other times in history when the church has spoken out against rulers, they've taken it out on the persecuted.
So in part it was to protect against innocence.
There is, I suppose, a Thomistic concern from the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and from church teaching over regicide when the tyrant is not a usurper.
Hitler was a tyrant, but he was elected democratically.
But more practically, and this has been uncovered in documents, Pope Pius XII was a pragmatist, so he just wanted his spies to be able to work more clearly, and it's a good thing he did, because they saved a lot of Jews who were being persecuted in the process.
As Father George Rutler describes in his excellent book, Principalities and Powers, a lot of the heroes of that war, a lot of the great heroes, the great saints, were Catholic clergy.
So I... The stories are endless.
I urge you to look that up.
But that is just, that's really awful nonsense.
And I'm not surprised that forces, that great forces on the move in the world, that the principalities and powers of this world would try to spread such a horrific lie.
From Andy Schwab.
Michael, you seem to really care for cigars.
What made you think that?
I enjoyed seeing the nice church warden on your return from England.
Do you also enjoy pipes?
If so, what is your favorite pipe shape in pipe tobacco?
And do you prefer cigars over pipes?
If so, why?
I do prefer cigars over pipes.
I much prefer cigars over pipes, mostly because I have trouble smoking pipes.
It's hard to keep them lit.
You've got to tamp it and pack it.
It's tough.
I do have a little collection of pipes.
My favorite is a 1960s Shellbrier by Dunhill, and I also smoke a Dunhill Mearsham, I think also from the 60s or 70s.
But I do it rarely.
It's a lot cheaper, so if you're looking to smoke and think and sit by yourself, it's a lot easier to...
To maintain your habit of pipes rather than cigars, but cigars are more artistic.
It requires someone to roll it, to blend the tobacco.
There's a lot more that can go wrong and a lot more that can go right about cigars.
There was also a good essay written in First Things about how tobacco corresponds to the tripartite soul.
So cigarettes are like the appetite, they're the pathos.
Cigars are the spirited part, they're the ethos, which I certainly see.
You think of Churchill, you think of the smoke being pushed out to Out of your mouth rather than inhaled.
And the pipes are the logos.
It's feminine.
It's masculine.
It's the philosopher smoking.
Look, man, I'm no philosopher.
The health questions, it's unclear.
Obviously, smoking cigars is like eating a bunch of vitamins and working out.
They're obviously excellent for your health.
I don't think any real scientist would question that.
But I do prefer cigars.
Good question.
Austin.
Hey, Michael.
Big fan of the show.
I've got two questions for you.
First, who is your favorite movie director?
Second, if this director made a movie about your life, what actors would play you?
Andrew Klavan and Ben Shapiro.
Thanks.
A lot of great directors.
I don't know that I can really pick one.
I love John Ford.
I love...
I love Francis Ford Coppola.
The Godfather is my favorite movie.
I really like the Coen brothers.
You know, I don't know.
I couldn't pick one director or producer team that I would totally privilege over the others, other than maybe John Ford because he's so, so important.
For the movie, this is what we can end on today.
For the movie version of The Daily Wire or of my life, who would play the characters?
I think this is pretty clear.
Daniel Radcliffe would play Ben Shapiro, no question.
Dwayne The Rock Johnson would be Andrew Klavan.
And for me...
It almost goes without saying, Denzel, the similarities are endless, and Denzel and I actually have the same acting teacher 30 years apart in New York.
Okay, that's our show.
I can't wait for the movie to get made.
I'm sure in the rubble of Hollywood, someone will be able to pitch it and get it through.
