Oh no! If only we had listened to Nancy Pelosi! Republican tax reform killed everybody! We discuss the reaction to tax reform passing. Then, the great Matt Walsh, Paul Cardinal Bois, and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Nikki Haley’s tough talk at the U.N., the mother who is only two months older than her daughter, the Catholic sex abuse scandal 15 years later, and most importantly, Michael tries to enlist Matt Walsh in Santa’s army for the War on Christmas.
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They're all dead because of a relatively modest tax reform package that slightly lowers rates but doesn't even consolidate the brackets.
They're all dead.
Why didn't we listen?
We will discuss the reaction to tax reform passing.
Then, the great Matt Walsh, Paul Cardinal Bois, and Jacob Airy join the panel of deplorables to discuss Nikki Haley's tough talk at the UN and Trump's threats, the mother who is only two months older than her daughter, the Catholic sex abuse scandal 15 years later, and most importantly, we debate.
Hashtag Never Santa conservatives who deny the war on Christmas.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Republicans have finally passed tax reform.
Let's just take a live look at the house floor.
floor.
Wow.
Oh, no.
It's going to topple that.
Oh, the whole wave.
Wow, that is even worse than I thought it was.
That comet just striking the earth, tidal waves everywhere.
Really, really bad.
It gets ugly in Washington, but that's really bad.
So, the apocalypse has happened.
It's all over.
We're all dead, I guess.
But you're still alive.
I don't know.
Maybe it was like the rapture.
All the good people went up to heaven, and it's just you and me.
We're the ones that were left.
So before tax reform, the Washington Post and the Wonk blog said, quote, Senate tax bill would cut taxes of wealthy and increase taxes on families earning less than $75,000 by 2027.
If the tax cuts are repealed, then the taxes will go back up again.
But by $75,000, they're going to raise the taxes.
Now, after tax reform, The Washington Post got a little bit more honest.
They said, quote, the tax bill is likely to become more popular after passage.
But here's the truth, it says.
Eight in ten Americans will pay lower taxes next year, according to the Nonpartisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of the final bill.
Only 5% of people will pay more next year.
That's me, mostly.
Mostly, those are folks who earn six figures and own expensive houses and places with high local taxes, such as New York and California.
Really, they forgot to include people who wrote a blank book one time.
We're all so lumped in there.
Forget owning a home or anything.
So that was the Armageddon.
Everything is going to be awful.
The taxes are going to go up on everybody until it happens.
And then they say, oh, well, never mind.
I guess actually all of you are going to get a tax cut.
Whoops, I guess we got it wrong a day ago and for the last three months.
In other news, AT&T just announced that it will pay, quote, a special $1,000 bonus to more than 200,000 AT&T U.S. employees due to the tax reform passage.
It will also increase U.S. capital spending by $1 billion.
Billion with a B. Boeing, not to be outshone, just announced $300 million in employee-related and charitable investments to spur innovation and growth in response to the tax reform.
So it sounds pretty good to me.
I'm no expert on tax law or the economy, but sounds okay.
Nevertheless, Democrats persisted.
Rosie O'Donnell wrote, in all caps, of course, No, no, I will not kill Americans for the super rich.
I will kill them, because slightly lower taxes kills people.
She also offered to pay $2 million to senators to vote against the tax bill, which is a felony.
It's a federal crime, but it's okay.
Ben tweeted out and said to lock her up.
Not a bad idea.
This is even as this is happening.
So it's going to be awful.
They know it's going to happen.
I can't imagine that they're so stupid and ignorant as to think that taxes are going to kill people, but Then again, we're talking about lefty Democrats in Hollywood and D.C. Not to be outdone by Rosie O'Donnell.
Nancy Pelosi one-upped her.
This GOP tax scam is simply theft.
Monumental brazen theft from the American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it.
The GOP tax scam is not a vote for an investment in growth or jobs.
It is a vote to install a permanent plutocracy in our nation.
They'll be cheering that later.
It does violence to the vision of our founders.
It disrespects the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, who are a large part of our middle class and to whom we owe a future worthy of their sacrifice.
Anything else?
Is there anything else, Nancy, in there?
Unbelievable.
So, according to Nancy Pelosi, letting people keep a little bit more of their money is theft and taking more of their money is charity.
That's how it works in Nancy Pelosi's mind.
She says that it betrays the founders.
It betrays the founding vision of the founding fathers.
Just a little history lesson for Nancy Pelosi.
The first federal income tax was enacted in 1861.
All of the founders were dead, long dead by that time.
The first corporate tax was instituted in 1894, but that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, it was re-initiated in 1909.
And if my math works, the founding fathers who lived in the 18th century were no longer alive.
They never had that vision.
They had no vision for a personal federal income tax or for a federal corporate tax.
She then, Nancy Pelosi, can't help but use veterans as a political prop here.
Men and women in uniform.
I have no idea why.
It has no relation whatsoever to this tax reform bill.
But Nancy Pelosi has never been beholden to the facts.
And don't worry, it gets even better.
At this news conference and on the floor, Democrats talk about this bill often in very apocalyptic terms.
But isn't really what's going on is that Many people are getting a very modest tax cut, and some people are getting a tax increase while a lot of this is also going to business, but it's not the end of the world?
No, it is the end of the world.
The debate on healthcare is life-death.
This is Armageddon.
This is a very big deal.
Because you know why?
There's really a very hard way to come back from this.
They take us further, more deeply into debt.
What can you do but raise taxes?
They contend that their gift to corporate America of a trillion and a half dollars, could be up to a trillion and a half dollars, will be paid for by the growth it creates.
And even their own people say, nonsense, not true.
It is Armageddon.
No, no, no.
Hey, wait, hold on.
It is Armageddon.
And obviously this rhetoric is insane.
So she's saying that it's a gift to corporate America.
It isn't a gift to corporate America.
It lets them keep more of the money that they've earned.
That's not a gift.
Maybe in Nancy Pelosi's mind it is, but that isn't a gift.
And then she says, but it's so hard to undo.
That's why her argument is it's Armageddon because it's so hard to undo this.
In order to undo this, Democrats will have to raise taxes.
You know, the thing that Democrats have always done since the beginning of time, since the first sunrise on Earth?
Yeah, they'll have to do that.
It's very hard.
How would Democrats ever raise taxes?
I can't imagine.
Now, I'm a little confused.
Democrats say that slightly lower tax rates will literally murder people.
It betrays the Founding Fathers.
It will result in Armageddon.
That seems to me like pretty reckless rhetoric.
Doesn't it?
That seems a little bit like reckless rhetoric to me.
But I thought it was Trump who used all of that reckless rhetoric.
Which is typical of the rhetoric, the reckless rhetoric you're hearing from the candidates, especially on the GOP side.
I am prepared to, ready to actually take on those challenges, not engage in a lot of irresponsible, reckless rhetoric.
Senator McConnell and all congressional Republicans' leaders have never taken a stand against Trump's vile rhetoric.
You know, Hillary was saying, Donald Trump has to stop the rhetoric.
He has to stop it.
And my people are great.
It's these people that are the problem.
Well said.
Well said.
Yeah, his rhetoric is just fine compared to those guys.
They're the ones, they're constantly talking about, oh, the rhetoric, oh, the rhetoric, the rhetoric.
Listen to the way they talk.
Listen to what you just heard from them.
And then don't forget, the Democrats are the party that told you, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Obamacare wouldn't raise taxes or premiums, only later to admit, well, you didn't think you'd get all that great stuff for free, did you?
The party who told you I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
The party who told you the terrorist attack in Benghazi, which they knew for certain to be a terror attack, was really caused by a random YouTube video, then they imprisoned the guy for it.
The party who told you Trump could never win.
That said that none of Hillary's emails were marked as classified.
That said Hillary had turned over all of her work-related emails.
That told you Hillary had never been subpoenaed with regard to her email.
That told you Barack Obama had no knowledge of Hillary's private email server.
The party that told you Romney hadn't paid his income taxes.
The party that told you that net neutrality will end the Internet as we know it.
Oh, God, did the feed cut out?
Because the Internet as we know it is over.
So I presume, oh, no, it's exactly the same as it always was.
Now, those are just a smattering of the minor lies.
Completely untrue.
But some of these lies stick.
For instance, I bet if you went out on the street and asked anybody, were there any weapons of mass destruction discovered in Iraq, they'd tell you absolutely not.
Bush lied people died.
But there were weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq.
The New York Times even admitted that there were in 2014.
We found a ton of chemical weapons.
We found them as early as 2004, but we didn't tout it because we were afraid that terrorists were going to go find them and use them.
So, total lie.
We're told by Hollywood, by the left, that JFK was murdered by a right-wing conspiracy in Texas.
That's what that movie JFK is about, by Oliver Stone.
That isn't true.
JFK was an anti-communist.
He was killed by a communist.
We know that he did it.
We know that he had connections to the Soviet Union and to Cuba and to Mexico.
He met with humans in Mexico.
Nevertheless, they create this total lie.
If you ask most people on the street, they would say, oh yes, dark forces of hate in Texas.
They've been spinning that yarn since the moment he was assassinated.
We were told by these people that the Russians hacked the election for Donald Trump.
There is no evidence of this.
No evidence at all.
There is plenty of evidence that the Russians colluded with the Democrats, but there's no evidence that the Russians delegitimized our election to give Donald Trump victory.
And they tell us this one, this one persists all the time, that the Democrat and the Republican Party switched.
Because the Democrat Party is trash.
It is an awful, awful party.
It's the party of slavery.
It's the party of cronyism.
It's the party of Jim Crow.
It's the party of urban destruction.
It's the party of stealing your wealth and your freedom.
And then they decided that one day, one day magically, and I don't know, like 1967, yeah, let's say 67, we all just decided, we all got together and said, okay, you Republicans, now you're going to be Democrats.
And we, Democrats, now we're going to be Republicans.
And that way we can get rid of all of our terrible history.
We're going to screw everything up in the future, too, and it's going to have perfect coherence with our founding principles as the oldest active political party in the world.
But no, we just switched one day.
If you asked most people on the street, they would tell you that.
They're taught that in schools.
They're taught that in universities, high schools, even earlier than that.
Totalize.
Don't believe.
The next time they tell you that the sky is going to fall, Remember this.
Remember those clips.
Remember Nancy Pelosi's crazy frozen face and her ridiculous rhetoric.
Let's bring on our panel to discuss.
We have the first time on the panel of Deplorables.
Matt Walsh is here in studio.
Then we have Paul Cardinalbois and Jacob Airy.
I notice...
Gentlemen, thank you for being here.
Welcome.
I notice this is the first in-studio panel we've done during the Christmas season.
We have a little mistletoe back here and it's an all-male panel.
I blame Marshall for this.
We almost exclusively do all-female panels.
It's the only reason I took this job.
And yet, it's all men today.
I'm very, very upset by all of this.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Let's get right in.
You have been critical of President Trump.
Slightly critical.
Slightly.
But now, we've got tax reform, like 28 originalist judges, something like that, Gorsuch.
Deregulation.
ISIS is out of Iraq and Syria.
Embassy in Jerusalem.
Obamacare mandate repeal.
Mainstream media credibility in the gutter.
No evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Plenty of evidence of collusion between Democrats and Russia and the FBI, who's ostensibly investigating Trump and Russia.
Economy soaring.
Consumer confidence at all-time highs.
Even Ben Shapiro is saying nice things about Donald Trump.
Has all of this, this first year in office, changed your mind about Trump?
No.
I'm still right.
How did I know you said that?
No, I never thought that it would be the end of the world.
I'm not like Nancy Pelosi, who I love, but I love Nancy Pelosi so much.
She's so hilarious.
If she didn't exist, we would have to invent her.
Yeah, I know.
She's like your great aunt that comes to Thanksgiving and yells at the cat or something.
Anyway, no, my hope with Trump was that he would get into office and kind of let his administration do things, which I think is what he's doing.
And so a lot of the things that his administration does have been very good, and I'm happy with them.
I think when it's just him unfiltered, and that's like Twitter or if he's giving a speech or something without a prompter, that's when things go off the rails and he undermines his own agenda with his bad communication skills.
That's the part that's going to hurt.
But do you think, because I once thought this, and I opposed Trump in the primary pretty vigorously.
I was for Cruz.
I'm beginning to think he's the great communicator.
I'm beginning to think, I used to say, get off the Twitter.
I think the Twitter might be the key.
Do you think it's that he is undermining his legislative or his policy agenda through his rhetoric, or do you find that it's so just uncouth?
It's so vulgar that it...
It seems to undermine the nice patinas of credibility.
I don't care about vulgarity, and I don't care about being harsh or anything like that.
You know, I've been accused of that myself a few times.
So I don't care about that.
I don't see, when Trump is feuding with LeVar Ball or Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever he's doing, or he's complaining about CNN nonstop, I don't see how that advances the agenda.
I'll tell you how.
I will tell you how.
It's because it's a reality show.
It's because we have the great reality show runner, one of the kings of it for 15 years, network TV number one.
We have him in office and he knows, maybe I'm reading too much in, but it's certainly how it works on me.
He knows that in order to keep people glued to that Twitter, glued to him rather than glued to CNN, you have to entertain.
You have to fight these cultural battles.
So on the one hand, you get a great...
I like that he's smacking down Colin Kaepernick.
I like that as a matter of culture, but I also like that he's keeping the show engaging enough for people that they keep tuning into that Twitter account and it bypasses CNN and the New York Times.
Yeah, but I don't think there's a—see, this is what's been happening with Trump since the beginning.
I think smart conservatives like yourself are helping him, are kind of intellectualizing what he's doing, when in reality, I think he just gets—he's just a 71-year-old man who gets up in the morning and turns on Fox and Friends and just gets mad about things and starts shouting.
But he has—unlike most 71-year-old men, he has Twitter that he could shout into Twitter— And so I think that's all that's really happening.
I don't think there's a lot of strategy to it.
And I still don't see the value.
Okay, he's got people glued.
They're paying attention.
And they're paying attention.
And then they see him complaining about an athlete.
What's the value in that?
How do we...
Now, if he was using his Twitter...
Which he does sometimes, to call attention to actually important issues, then I would say, great.
But don't you think, Andrew Breitbart used to always say, politics is downstream of culture.
And we're in a cultural moment right now.
Do you not think there's value in calling out Colin Kaepernick or the NFL, which is kneeling for not just some issue, but in front of the American flag itself, the Star Spangled Banner itself?
Yeah, I'm not in favor of the kneeling thing.
I think we've we've all made our opinion known about that.
I don't think the idea that had to be this year long issue that we're all that we're outraged about for a year.
I just think I don't know.
I don't know what the value is.
And of all fights the cultural war.
Of all the great villains in the culture, I don't think the NFL is even in the top 100.
If I'm going to start, okay, what are the sort of organizations and institutions that we as conservatives need to be attacking relentlessly?
And I'm going to list 100?
I don't think the NFL makes it on the list.
Probably the top of the list would be maybe something like Planned Parenthood.
I would love to see Trump.
Maybe say a thing or two about that.
He doesn't seem too concerned about that.
He's been good on pro-life.
He reinstated the Mexico City policy.
There are arguments over how Planned Parenthood funding is going, but he's allowed states to pull their funding at the very least.
That's all pretty good.
Well, and I don't blame him for this entirely because it's the Republicans in the Senate and the Congress.
The fact is that we have a Republican House, Senate, and White House, and we are still giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the abortion industry, which, why aren't people more upset about that?
I mean, to me, that should have been priority day one.
I get it in the office.
I'm getting rid of that.
I'm doing whatever I can to get rid of that.
That's a good point.
So those are the...
To me, that's what I would be focused on, but...
That's so much less fun than football.
Abortion is so much less fun than football.
It's less fun.
I know it's less fun.
I think we should stand up against things like that.
But for it to be the primary focus for as long as it was, I just...
It's too much covfefe.
People are ODing on covfefe.
That's what I was searching for, yeah.
Mr.
Bois, Paul Cardinal Bois, when it comes to Democrats' long-term lies, we'll get back to Trump later.
Every conversation for the last two years obviously has to come back to Trump at some point.
But when it comes to Democrats' long-term lies, not just tax reform killing everybody, WMDs in Iraq, the JFK assassination, the party switching, that sort of thing.
How do Democrats convince everybody not to trust our own lying eyes, the things that we know to be true?
We've seen them ourselves.
I think because they've raised an entire generation, an entire populace, to not think and feel only, to feel only emotion.
So that's why I think everything, from pretty much since the moment we're toddlers and we're put in front of a television, everything is geared towards You feeling your way through life.
If you feel it, if you feel this, if you feel that.
And sometimes you feel a little too low and then you have to resign from the Senate.
Yeah.
And then, so by creating an entire generation that just basically lives their intellect, basically subordinates to their emotions rather than the other way around, that's pretty much it.
You don't have anything.
Logic goes out the window.
There's not a single argument that I've ever been in with a leftist Or somebody who's just sort of on the fence with things.
I would say even the average American, really, that it The argument that's being put forth is based on logic or based on reason or evidence-based or point A to point B. I blame rock and roll music.
It puts everything in their bodies and they stop thinking, Jacob, the mainstream media has changed its tune overnight on this tax reform, probably because we're all still here and we're not dead.
Is this blithe ignorance or is it cynicism?
When the media report falsehoods like it's going to kill everybody, it's going to raise everybody's taxes, are they lying or are they just weak and ignorant?
I think they are lying.
I think it's an intentional falsehood that the mainstream media puts out all the time.
It's like we were talking about how when Ted Kennedy died, they didn't mention the fact that he committed manslaughter, right?
In fact, someone said, oh, the girl he left to die helplessly, she would have voted for him if she was still alive.
That's right.
They put that stuff out there.
And the sad thing is Republicans repeat it.
When Mitt Romney ran against Ted Kennedy, who, by the way, he almost beat Ted Kennedy, Romney didn't say, oh, Ted Kennedy committed manslaughter.
That should have been enough to win the election.
But Mitt Romney just went along with these mainstream media lies.
Oh, Ted Kennedy, he's such a lion in the Senate.
Oh my gosh.
He ate that poor girl alive, the lion of the Senate.
Exactly.
And I think it is an intentional falsehood.
And the sad thing is the American people don't hold them accountable when they have egg on their face for whatever reason.
Yeah, that is true.
It's not enough covfefe.
See, it's a balancing act.
You can't have too much.
If you get too much, you're going to overdose on it.
Now, speaking of overdosing, we have much more to talk about.
We have Nikki Haley and Donald Trump smacking around the UN. That's glorious.
We're going to talk about Cardinal Law, former Archbishop of Boston, who was at the center of the Catholic abuse scandal.
We're going to be talking about that with our three-quarters Catholic panel, because he just died today.
We're going to be talking about the mother, who is two months older than her daughter.
And we're going to be talking about the war on Christmas.
And I'm going to try to enlist Matt Walsh into Santa's army.
But you can't see any of that unless you go to dailywire.com right now.
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UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and President Trump are smacking them around today.
She tweeted, At the U.N., we're always asked to do more and give more.
So when we make a decision at the will of the American people about where to locate our embassy in Jerusalem, we don't expect those we've helped to target us.
On Thursday, there will be a vote criticizing our choice.
The U.S. will be taking names.
Then Donald Trump followed this up.
President Trump said, for all of these nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council, or they vote against us potentially at the Assembly, they take hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, then they vote against us.
Well, we're watching those votes.
Let them vote against us.
We're going to save a lot.
We don't care.
But this isn't like it used to be, where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knows what they're doing.
You know, Jacob, that sounds like a threat to me.
Is this threat serious?
Will Trump pull foreign aid or is he bluffing?
From what I've seen, I don't think it's a bluff.
I think he's serious.
He wants to do it anyway.
He's been talking about it for years.
Exactly.
And quite frankly, I want him to do this.
So I actually hope they do vote against this.
By the way, why are we paying all these nations money?
We never get anything in return.
We bail them out of every world war.
I say, you know, they can pay their own way for a change.
Let them fund...
They're armies with all their socialist taxes.
You know, I say go for it and good on Nikki Haley.
She's probably the greatest UN ambassador we've ever had.
Excuse me, there was John Bolton.
I don't want to hear anything that excludes my man John Bolton.
Second best.
Matt, I think there is a legitimate argument for foreign aid.
Some say that by having foreign aid, we're able to exert greater influence over these countries, greater influence in the world.
Some say we look like a bunch of wusses and we're just paying the people and saying, thank you, ma'am, may I have another?
And they smack us more and put their cigarettes out on our chest.
Which is it?
Should we cut U.S. foreign aid to these people?
I'm going to go with the latter.
I think it's immoral.
It's a scandal to take money, because of course we know, liberals don't understand this, but we understand that the government isn't just, the money isn't falling from the sky, they're taking the money from the American people.
So the idea that the government is taking money from my family and giving it to a foreign government, I think is...
Just is scandalous.
And I know it's been going on for a long time.
So I'm, you know, and I think Trump is more on that side of the fence and I agree with him.
And this is one thing.
This is where now usually I'm opposed to how Trump communicates because I think it distracts.
Now, this is the kind of thing that no other Republican would ever say.
It's the right thing to say.
And if he actually does it, which I hope he does, then I will gladly say that this is something that no other Republican would have done, and it's a good thing.
And it's exactly the kind of thing that, if we can get Trump doing this sort of thing, then I think...
People who supported Trump can make the argument that, in the end, it was the right thing to support him over the other 17 candidates, because it's the sort of move that no other Republican would pull.
And he does get better, too, one notices.
During the campaign, his rhetoric was In many places, quite objectionable.
And it's gotten less objectionable, and he's getting more of these good things.
So if it keeps on getting better and better, I would be very pleased with it.
My skepticism will have vanished, basically.
Mr.
Bois, what do you think?
There's no role for leadership by funding these countries and being able to dangle it over their heads.
Will America be stronger and have a stronger hand in the world if we pull back?
I certainly think it will make these nations that are receiving aid from us think second best before they spit in our face.
I mean, I think they're just sort of, they're getting a lot of kickbacks from us, they're ungrateful, and they need to stop biting the hand that feeds them.
That's good.
We're all talking like mobsters now.
Okay, let's move on.
Bernard Cardinal Law, the former Archbishop of Boston, whom the Boston Globe exposed to have covered up sexual abuse by priests, has died.
We are three-quarters Catholic today, and we're working on Jacob.
Maybe by the end of the show it'll be 100%.
Paul, you are a cardinal yourself, obviously, your eminence.
How has the church recovered from the sex abuse scandal, now 15 years later?
I would have to say, internally, They're doing a better job, certainly trying to clean out the seminaries and input solid protections that were in place prior to the 1950s that led to this.
There's certainly a lot of liturgical abuses going on, a lot of liberalism going on in the church, and frankly that is what this stemmed from.
The leftists want to go ahead and say that the Catholic culture and celibacy, that's nonsense.
If a priest throughout history was having difficulty with his celibacy, they would fine him with a prostitute or with a married woman or someone else in the parish.
Some of those popes, like the Borgia popes, they had a ton of illegitimate children and all of that.
So that's much of a fraudulent nonsense.
In terms of the public image, I don't think it's gotten much better, and that's largely because Catholic media is just horrible right now, and the Catholic message is horrible right now in the culture.
And Hollywood just created a spotlight and of course they're never going to tell the truth about what really was taking place.
So it's a mixed bag.
I think it's going to take a longer time to fully recover it.
I do think that what's happening in Hollywood right now with the Me Too movement and the sex scandals is sort of shifting the pendulum.
I think the Catholic Church, they went through their beating, if you will, and now we're kind of turning the spotlight on leftist culture and their madness.
And this is the moment for Catholics and media to take the mantle and turn it back on them and really take it home and just say, like, you know, like, we have the right answer and just take it away from leftists.
I'm just pleased that you're blaming the sex abuse scandal on bad liturgy.
Those acoustic guitarists drive me so crazy.
I'm very pleased by that.
Matt, many people have been hoping for and predicting the end of Christianity, of the Catholic Church, since approximately, I think, the year zero.
So Caiaphas couldn't make it happen.
The Muslim armies at the Battle of Tours couldn't make it happen.
The Muslim armies at the Battle of Lepanto couldn't make it happen.
Not Nietzsche, not Richard Dawkins, not anybody else.
How will history judge the significance of this sex abuse scandal?
I think it's impossible.
Martin Luther, by the way, also is another one that couldn't make it happen.
I know.
I was going to hold my tongue, but you're absolutely right.
He didn't make it happen.
Sad for him.
It's impossible to understate the significance of it.
I mean, Satan made great inroads into the church itself with the scandal, obviously, because that's what it is.
It's satanic when you look at what some of these priests were doing.
And guys like Cardinal Law.
But it's also difficult, kind of like what Paul was talking about, it's difficult for Catholics because we know how horrible it is and we don't want to understate it and we need to talk about that.
But what we've been saying for the past 15 years is all these people that are Acting so shocked by the church.
They have their own issues in their own institutions, and nobody's talking about that.
And in fact, if you look, there have been studies done that in the Protestant church, sex abuse is an even bigger problem than it ever was in the Catholic church.
In public schools, I mean, it's just...
I forget what the stat is, but one in every...
I want to say one in every...
Well, I won't say it because I don't want to misquote it, but thousands and thousands of kids, let's put it that way, are being abused by teachers in public school.
I see those stories of the cute blonde teacher and the little 15-year-old boy.
They're out every day.
I see them all the time.
It really is every day.
More than every day.
So there's always this difficult game to play where it's not a game, but it's this difficult move where you want to also shed the light on this greater problem that's happening in the culture across the board without trying to do the what about thing.
I'm all for what about.
What about you guys, you lefties?
What about you?
Look at yourself.
Jacob, you're not yet home in the Church Universal.
Not yet, maybe by the end of the show.
Did the scandal change outside perspectives of the Catholic Church, or was it just ammo for people who were already critical of it?
I think it was ammo, and I actually believe it or not, I actually agree with Paul and Matt.
I don't think it was a problem within the Catholic Church itself.
I personally, and I know I'm probably even going to take flat from some of my fellow Protestants, but I believe as long as you believe in Jesus Christ as your Savior, you go to heaven.
And so I didn't see it as an issue within the Catholic Church other than cardinal law should have been defrocked.
I think that was a bad move to move him to Rome because that made it look like the Catholic Church was covering something up.
Protecting him.
And so I think it was more about optics when it came from other Christians looking in, outside Christians looking in.
It was kind of like, oh man, that was a bad move.
And evangelicals aren't immune to this.
I mean, Baker and that guy in Louisiana and, you know...
We have had our own share of scandals, just like Matt said.
And I know evangelicals came out and other Protestants came out, and that was wrong.
There should have never been any finger-pointing.
That being said, though, those priests did disgusting, horrible things.
And Cardinal Law did the wrong thing.
Even if you want to say, oh, the spotlight was misleading or this media report was misleading and teachers abused kids more.
Cardinal Law was still actively involved in covering up the scandal and he should have been removed from his position.
And that is my honest take on it.
It was something that was horrible.
But I think that, like Paul said, I do think the Catholic Church has made moves, particularly thanks to Pope Benedict.
He really took a hand in combating it and putting in a decent safety measure.
Hey, if Pope Benedict was still the Pope, you might have a shot at converting me in this episode.
I hear this from a lot of conservative Protestants.
Yeah, gotta love Pope Benedict.
Excellent book for Advent.
The infancy narrative is really nice.
We have to move on.
We're talking about weird sex.
We've got to move on to some weirder sex.
A mother in Tennessee is only two months older than her daughter, which means that I know Tennesseans are very precocious.
I mean, teen pregnancy has gotten very out of hand.
The mother, 26-year-old Emma Wren Gibson, has broken a world record by giving birth to a baby whose embryo was frozen in 1992.
We are really through the looking glass now, are we not?
Matt, how should people who are concerned with natural law, who have bioethical thoughts, how should they consider this event?
I don't know.
That's why we bring you on.
Bold declarations.
There's two questions here.
There's the question of IVF and creating human beings in a petri dish, which is immoral and wrong and bad.
It's a simple case of just because science can do it doesn't mean it should.
Just because it can solve a problem, which is infertility, doesn't mean we should go that direction.
We shouldn't be making dinosaurs.
We shouldn't be making dinosaurs, we shouldn't be making people, we shouldn't be making any living thing in a petri dish, probably, I guess.
At least dinosaurs and people.
So there's that question.
And then you end up with, now we have, like we were talking before we went on the show, 600,000 to a million human embryos in storage.
So they're just frozen little embryos.
Yeah, we store them like hot pockets in the freezer, but these are human beings.
So the first question is, well, it's wrong to do that.
The second question is, now that they're there because of this immoral act, what do we do with them?
That's the I don't know part, because normally, and I know the church teaches, and I think this is just consistent with natural law, that to go and pull a human being out of storage and implant them in your body is unnatural and wrong.
However, they are there, so the other option is just to let them die.
So I would think...
I don't know, but I would think the morally correct answer here is it's a matter of kind of intent.
So if your intention is to do an act of mercy and to rescue a human being from this limbo state by...
That's what it is.
It's earthly limbo.
Right.
And if your intention is...
Act of mercy, rescue the human being from limbo, bring him into the world, then I think it's right.
If your intention is, I have a problem I need to solve, I'm infertile, and oh, we've got these embryos hanging around.
Sure would like a kid today.
Right.
Then it's wrong.
So that's what I would think the answer is.
I don't know.
Paul Cardinal Bois, you are an eminent Cardinal.
There are lots of these little frozen embryos.
So should there be a movement now to save them from earthly limbo, like Matt is saying?
Should there be a movement to go and rescue these little frozen pre-babies?
Or is that taking pro-life too far?
Yeah, it's a very new issue.
There's actually been two paragraphs written about it in an encyclical in 2008 by Pope Benedict, Dignitatis Personae.
So essentially what, and Matt talked about it, is the problem here is, yes, it's intent.
And the proper way to frame it is embryonic or embryo adoption.
So basically, like he said, the idea of family or saying, I'm going to go out and I'm going to save people.
One of these little...
Yeah, one of these embryos.
Not, I need to start a family.
Not, you know, I want to start building my family.
Look at how I build my family.
That's the thing.
Because with regular IVF, very often, there will be multiple embryos that are created.
And then they'll implant them.
And it's very expensive.
It's very hard to see which one will implant.
And then they'll abort some of the others.
So there's this abortion component for regular IVF that you don't have with embryonic adoption.
Yeah.
So the goal really is to stop this from happening.
Stop the IVF. That's going to be very hard in this culture.
Stop the freezing of these embryos, the creating of these, and then the freezing and the storing of them.
And then while you're doing that, these poor souls that are stuck in earthly limbo, get them a Try and get them a chance to be adopted without turning it into this trendy thing of like, oh, we're picking up the embryos.
It's like the new pit bull, you know.
Pit bulls were really cool for a while.
Yeah, so the new one's embryos.
Spiritually, I'm thinking to myself, I mean, that's something because every child at the moment of conception has a soul.
These, I mean, theoretically, these are all souls that are not able to die or depart from their bodies.
It could happen for, I don't know, decades.
Sounds like a horror movie.
It's insane.
Jacob, as we move into our brave new world.
What should conservatives think about IVF in general, in vitro fertilization?
A ton of downsides.
There are these abortions that are a part of it.
It's very clinical.
It misses the most fun part of creating a baby, which is usually left out of the discussion.
On the other hand, it is now common practice.
It allows infertile couples to have children.
How should conservatives approach the issue moving forward?
I think it all goes down to intent, and it puts pro-lifers in an awkward situation.
I am of the belief that anything created by science doesn't have a soul.
I believe that only through natural conception does one have a soul.
Wait, what about people who were born IVF? They don't have souls?
Well, no.
They're like little scary automatons.
I know, that's what I'm saying.
It puts me in this awkward position.
I have a couple of friends who might describe them.
Well, I just think that...
I'm just going to say, I don't think clones have souls.
I think they're just organic robots, and that's my humble opinion.
But also, I think that they have a...
But now that this is a part of what we are, we're going to have to take a serious look at it.
I honestly don't know where this leaves...
Conservatives.
Are we going to move forward and get these people out and give them an opportunity to life?
Because one of the biggest rights in America is you have the right to life.
You have that right.
And I don't think freezing them, whether you think they have souls or not, freezing them, because if they do, freezing them is wrong.
You shouldn't just store them.
So I think this paints us in a little bit of a corner.
You know, I gotta tell you, pal, I'm glad that I'm not your clone.
I'm really glad.
This is some really clonophobic language that you're using on here.
Outrageous.
Okay, let's get off of these questions of natural law and souls and everything.
Get on to the real battle, the war on Christmas.
Here is a glimpse right now from the battlefield just outside our window.
No!
Oh, no, they got him.
Did I get him?
They got him.
They got Santa.
Santa down!
I got to put on my helmet for this.
Is it still lit up?
Yeah, it is.
Okay.
All right, ready to go.
I don't have my candy cane pipe anymore.
Matt, I love your writing.
I love reading your pieces.
You wrote a piece a couple days ago that I almost threw my computer out the window.
I was so horrified.
I wanted to bring you up on charges, martial charges, for evacuating your post in the war on Christmas.
You don't think it's a real thing.
You don't think conservatives should be worried about it.
No, not at all.
I think it's...
You think it's ridiculous?
Well, that's not ridiculous.
That's practical.
My Christmas tree bow tie.
I think it's even dumber than the standing, than the NFL thing, to be honest with you.
There are two aspects to it.
The question is, is it an important issue?
Is it something we should worry about?
And the other question is, is it helping Christmas?
In other words, when we try to essentially force people to say Merry Christmas and to decorate their department stores with mistletoes and plastic reindeer and everything.
And so on that second, I think I'll move right to that second question.
I would say that I don't think that we help Christmas.
In other words, if you have...
What would we consider an act of war on Christmas?
For instance, if Macy's were to say, we're banning Christmas decorations, you're not allowed to say Merry Christmas, then that's the war on Christmas, isn't it?
It's the latter, though, because they still have the decorations.
The decorations are up everywhere.
It's not like we force them to.
People put them up because they put them up Earlier and earlier, actually, because they want to get people to buy more presents and these sort of things.
The act of the war on Christmas and why I think it's so insidious is it's all about language.
It's just a front in this politically correct, euphemistic battle.
So what they do is they have all the reindeer even, they have the little Christmas Snowflakes or whatever, but they won't call it Christmas.
They'll say it's for the holidays.
They use this euphemism, holidays, even though there's only one major holiday in December.
So let me ask you, how is the sacredness of Christmas preserved?
By having the cashier at JCPenney just have this rote greeting of Merry Christmas, as opposed to saying Happy Holidays, which by the way, as you know, holidays means Holy Day, so they're still acknowledging...
But they say holidays, but there's only one.
There's only one major holiday in December.
What's the other holiday?
Hanukkah is a relatively minor Jewish holiday compared to other Jewish holidays.
It only became a big deal...
Feast Day of St.
Nicholas.
You could be referring to that.
This is actually another point on this.
So you do make a great point.
Obviously Christmas is commercialized.
A lot of people, they are the Christmas and Easter Christians.
They go to church twice a year, maybe, usually once a year, and they don't go any other day.
And that's a problem.
I totally grant that that's a problem.
Isn't hypocrisy the tribute that vice pays to virtue?
Is that situation really made better by indulging this bizarre campaign to replace Christmas, obviously the central holiday of Christmas time, with this weird euphemism, holidays, where we pretend that Hanukkah is a major holiday, even within the Jewish religion, and that Kwanzaa is anything but a socialist contrivance.
It seems to me, you know, we have Santa Claus up.
What does Santa Claus have to do with the birth of Christ?
Not terribly much, except that this folk tradition that we have, the merging of Christianity with these various folk traditions, does speak a little bit to it.
We have Saint Nicholas.
Saint Nicholas is known for two things, giving out presents to people and punching heretics in the face.
And we incorporate the former into our Christmas traditions.
That doesn't seem like such a bad thing to me.
I would love to incorporate the latter too.
It's only the Walsh house.
If they started doing that at Macy's, I would be totally in favor.
Here's the way I look at it.
If a department store company or whatever says, don't say Merry Christmas, say Happy Holidays.
Their logic, partly, is, well, we can't really wish, because Christmas means Christ mass, as you know, it's a very religious phrase, and it's intensely religious.
So the logic of these corporations is, well, if we say that, then we're essentially endorsing that religion, we're promoting it.
And so they say, well, we're a secular company, we're not interested in promoting a religion, so we're just going to back off and not say anything, or just use this generalized phrase.
And my point is, in that decision, they're actually showing more respect, even if, not intentionally, but they're showing more respect for the religious nature of Christmas than are a lot of Christians who only care about Christianity when it's Christmas time.
But then shouldn't they not use the word holy day?
Shouldn't they not use the phrase holidays?
If they're saying we don't want to take a religious stand...
Because I think they're not using it for that reason.
I think they're not doing it because there's a left-wing, euphemistic struggle that infects all of our politically correct language.
Christmas is just one little aspect of that.
But by that logic, if there is only one major holiday that is celebrated in December, shouldn't they just not acknowledge anything?
If they're going to acknowledge that there is something, there is a holiday that must not be named because we're respecting the religious nature of this country and of the people who celebrate Christmas, Then they should take down the ornaments, right?
They should take down the snowflakes and the trees and the reindeer.
So I guess my problem with the War on Christmas is that they're not going far enough.
Take it all down.
Because I don't need this...
The way that Christmas is so ubiquitous, it's only drained it of its significance.
I think it would be great.
Part of the point I made in that piece, we live in a godless...
Satanic culture.
We should have to face that fact, even around Christmas.
I know we want to run from that and we want to pretend we're driving down the street.
We see the Christmas lights everywhere.
We say, oh, look at all these Christians.
They're so great.
And meanwhile, you know, those people with the Christmas lights are in their house.
You know, they're looking at porn.
They're whatever, beating their kids, whatever they're doing.
So what you want to do, you want to take down the reindeer and you want to replace them with little devils and little, like, Baphomet.
I think it would be good if we got to a point in our culture where only the people who are authentically, really, devoutly, observantly Christian even acknowledge or celebrate Christmas.
Because they're the only ones who should be.
They're the only ones that...
This is not a holiday for everyone to enjoy.
The spirit of Christmas is giving to people.
That's not what it is.
We're celebrating the birth of Christ because He came to this earth to redeem mankind.
That's why we're celebrating Him.
And so it's the people who actually care about Christianity who have a right to our celebration.
I don't like how our culture comes in and takes all of the Christian celebrations and gets rid of all the religious significance and they just keep the celebrations for themselves.
They do it with Mardi Gras.
They do it sort of with They certainly do it with Mardi Gras.
They do it with St.
Patrick's Day.
These are ours.
We earn those holidays in a sense.
They're culturally appropriating from us.
They are, in a way.
On this point, though, the Incarnation does draw all of the nations in the world into Christ, even though we see those three wise men come from the land of the sunrise.
They weren't Jews.
They lived at a time when there were prophecies floating around that the ruler of the world would come from Judah.
But even in that first year of incarnation, you see a journey of the world who might be kind of kooky on their religious views or a little out there or not quite.
They might be magi from which we get magician.
They were drawn a little closer to Christ.
I'm looking at it a little more glass half full if we can get them to like Santa Claus.
This happened to Andrew Klavan.
He really liked Christmas as a boy, even though he came from a basically secular Jewish household.
And years later that played some role in his conversion to Christ in a way that didn't involve Christmas cookies and little decorations on the tree.
Yeah, and here's where I want to kind of put my, because I think where I disagree with you, Matt, is what you're talking about is a society that completely and totally takes away their decorations and it's gone and it's everything.
That's not a society that takes away their decorations and we're going to let the Christians do their thing.
That's a society like the Soviet Union.
They don't just take the decorations down.
They ensure that nobody puts any decorations up.
So we're in a post-Christian society right now, but we are not yet fully in an anti-Christian society yet.
And so long as that shell of a Christian society remains, we have to protect that shell so we can fill it up with something Christian because that natural law of being around the beauty of the decorations of Christmas and hearing people say Merry Christmas and Santa Claus, like he said about Andrew Klavan, could play a I know how to do it.
I know how to make all of this work and to unite all of these various armies, some who want more Santa Claus and some who want the war to go further and have the devils go up.
we have to add this important component of punching heretics to our Christmas tradition.
As Saint Nicholas, as Santa Claus himself would have wanted.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
That is our show today.
Thank you for being here.
Matt Walsh, great to have you.
You gotta come back next time you're in town.
Jacob Berry, Paul Cardinalbois, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Get your mailbag questions in.
You have to.
This is the last one before Christmas.
Who knows when the comet and the meteor is going to strike Earth because of tax reform.
So make sure you get them in.
Your eternal soul might depend on it.
See you soon.
See you soon.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
