Just when you thought tax reform couldn’t get any better, the worst people on earth voted today to save taxpayers billions of dollars. Despite warnings from Nikki Haley and President Trump, the UN voted 128-9 to condemn the United States for moving its embassy in Israel to the capital of Israel. Now they may lose foreign aid. We will explain why President Trump should go further and defund the UN. Then, the Mailbag!
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Just when you thought tax reform couldn't get any better, the worst people on earth voted today to save taxpayers billions of more dollars.
Despite warnings from Nikki Haley and President Trump, the United Nations voted 128 to 9 to condemn the United States for moving its embassy in Israel to the capital of Israel.
The United States has two words for those countries, and they're not Merry Christmas.
So those countries might now lose foreign aid.
We will explain why President Trump should go further and defund the UN. Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.
Then the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
What a glorious news cycle.
This is the last show before Christmas, before New Year's.
We're not going to be on the air next week.
And we're going to do a nice little Christmas show.
But Nikki Haley gave us an extra present.
How sweet.
Before we get to any of that.
I've got to tell you about Thrive Market.
This was another Christmas present that came in early.
We have another sponsor, and these guys are great.
I told you, Shapiro hasn't paid me since he gave me that election bet check, so I really count on freebies from sponsors.
This one is really, really good.
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That's true, but sweet little Elisa, my fiancé, she does.
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The way they do it is they cut out all of the middlemen.
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If left to my own devices, I would just eat like week-old sausage and swaddled in my own filth in my apartment.
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It's much easier than the grocery store too.
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Okay.
I was going to do...
You see I have my little Christmas tree tie on today?
This was from Cynthia who does all of the wonderful artwork around here.
It plays music.
So I was going to do this nice show about Christmas.
But then...
Then this wonderful speech came out about the United Nations.
So Nikki Haley turned my whole morning around.
Here she is ahead of a vote by the UN General Assembly condemning the United States for moving our embassy in Israel to the capital of Israel.
The United States is by far the single largest contributor to the United Nations and its agencies.
When a nation is singled out for attack in this organization, that nation is disrespected.
What's more, that nation is asked to pay for the privilege of being disrespected.
The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation.
We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world's largest contribution to the United Nations.
And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.
Be still, my beating heart.
Oh my God.
I just want to watch it like three more times.
This is so beautiful.
This is the sort of thing we've been waiting to see from the United Nations for a long time.
She has been wonderful in this role.
So she's laying down the smackdown.
President Trump warned people too.
Nevertheless, undeterred, the United Nations voted 128 to 9 to condemn the United States.
The only nations that voted against this resolution are Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Falau, Togo, and the United States.
You might remember that you can't even pronounce most of those names because you don't hear the United Kingdom.
You don't hear France.
You don't hear Italy.
A lot of our allies voted against us.
128 different nations, including our allies, voted to condemn the United States at the UN for exercising its sovereign right to establish embassies where it so pleases.
So we might cut their foreign aid and listen to them whine.
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said, We were all asked to vote no or face consequences.
Some even threatened to cut development aid.
Some, the United States, the people that give you development aid.
This is bullying.
It is unethical to think that the votes and dignity of member states are for sale.
Is that right?
Okay, that's fine.
But you can't stand on your box and preen and moralize while you've got your handout taking money.
Good luck, guys.
That's okay.
You want to vote how you want?
You want to bite the hand that feeds you?
You want to condemn the greatest force for peace and prosperity in the history of the world, the only reason that we've had peace, relative peace for a century, or three-quarters of a century?
Fine.
Fine by me.
Go ahead, guys.
Back-to-back World War winners, that's absolutely fine, but we don't need to give you money.
Let's go over some numbers.
The United States pays 28.5% of the $7.3 billion UN peacekeeping budget.
We pay 22% of the core budget of $2.7 billion.
Since 1948, since it was founded, the United Nations has spent almost $109 billion on peacekeeping missions.
Now countries speaking in support of this measure today were North Korea, Yemen, Turkey, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, South Africa, and Iran.
Not to be outdone.
Hamas also praised the resolution.
You're known by the friends you keep.
So why exactly do we have it?
Why do we have the UN? We have the worst people in the world standing up and condemning us for this.
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton sums it up.
The point that I want to leave with you in this very brief presentation is where I started, is there is no United Nations.
There is an international community that occasionally can be led By the only real power left in the world, and that's the United States, when it suits our interests, and when we can get others to go along.
The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 stories.
If you lost 10 stories today, it would make a bit of difference.
This kind of mindless The creation of the United Nations as something different than what it's in the United States' interest to do isn't going to sell here or anywhere else.
The United States makes the U.N. work when it wants it to work.
And that is exactly the way it should be because the only question, the only question for the United States is what's in our national interest.
And if you don't like that, I'm sorry, but that is the fact.
I love him so much.
One of the greatest things that President George W. Bush ever did was make that man the ambassador to the United Nations.
I one time had lunch with a former U.N. ambassador and I said, is it possible for a Republican to be the U.N. ambassador?
Is it possible to be an ambassador to the United Nations and still support the United Nations?
And he said, yes, you have to support the basic mission of the United Nations.
Unless you're John Bolton, then you can get out of it.
It's really beautiful and he sums it up exactly as it is.
Now, during the Cold War, the United Nations stayed out of the peacekeeping business.
Why is that?
Because you had the brink of global nuclear conflict and all of these little peacekeeping endeavors would have been proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union.
So let's just look since the 90s.
After the Cold War, humanitarian crises in the Balkans, Somalia and Cambodia It led the UN to dramatically increase its peace operations funding.
And yet, despite all of the additional funding and activity, it utterly failed.
It failed utterly.
It failed in Somalia.
It failed in the Rwandan genocide.
It failed in Bosnia.
According to the High-Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations, quote, more than 98% of military and police personnel deployed in UN peacekeeping missions today have a mandate to protect civilians as part of integrated mission-wide efforts.
The UN has deployed peacekeeping missions on 70 occasions over the past 70 or so years.
It has sort of succeeded in two of them, Sierra Leone in the early 2000s, Burundi later that decade.
It only even intervened to protect civilians in 20% of the cases for which it was authorized to do so by the UN Security Council.
That's its main mandate, 98% mandate.
Only 20% of the time did it even try to come through.
A 2007 UN Office of Internal Oversight Services report showed that 40% of peacekeeping contracts analyzed contained significant corruption schemes to the tune of $619 million.
40% of the ones that were analyzed.
The UN mission in Sudan alone squandered tens of millions of dollars in mismanagement, waste, fraud, and corruption.
Now, we've recently discovered widespread fraud by UN peacekeepers in Western Sahara, peacekeepers illegally reselling food in Lebanon.
That's where our investments are going.
That's where our charity is going to enrich peacekeepers.
Selling of UN peacekeeping jobs in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the most ironically named country in the history of the world.
These are just the corruption cases that happen to have been exposed.
There are plenty of others.
The UN is classically very secretive with its own internal operations.
Those are just the ones we know about.
In 1975, the UN adopted the resolution, Zionism is Racism.
You'll notice a running theme at the UN. They're not a big fan of the Jews.
Now, in the history of the world, many people have tried to kill the Jews.
This has not changed over time.
They're God's chosen people.
It's not terribly surprising that this would happen.
It's the central failure though of the United Nations, which is moral relativism.
The UN during its founding period was much, much better than it is today because it was limited to countries that had declared war against the Axis powers in World War II.
So yes, it might've included Stalin.
It wasn't all great, wonderful Western liberal democracies, but it exclusively kept people out who had been on the wrong side of that war, had been on the side of evil, clear evil.
The modern UN bears no relationship to this whatsoever.
In 2011, this is unbelievable.
In 2011, the United Nations General Assembly held a moment of silence to honor a deceased leader of a country.
Do you know who that leader was?
Marshall, do you have any idea?
Yeah, that would be Kim Jong-il, the dictator of North Korea, one of the worst people ever to live.
They held a moment of silence to honor him.
We have to end the United Nations.
We have to defund it.
I see two options here.
Either we can admit the reality of this, admit the reality that John Bolton is talking about, and say there is no such thing as a United Nations.
This is a ridiculous fiction.
The United States is the global superpower.
We're going to do what we want to do.
We're perfectly happy to listen to other people's ideas.
We're perfectly happy to form coalitions, but we're not going to pretend that little nations or little nations that aren't even really nations, there would be nations, they get to tell us what to do.
They have an equal seat at the table as the United States.
We can call it the American Forum.
We're happy to pay for the whole thing.
We're happy to host it.
And these terrible, terrible people can come groveling to us and beg our mercy and beg our forgiveness and beg us to help them.
And we'd be perfectly happy to assume that global leadership and consider their proposals.
Or they can have their United Nations.
That's perfectly fine.
We'll pay the $20,000 a year that many of those countries pay.
Virtually nothing will contribute very little.
They don't get to come to our soil.
Right now, the United Nations is hosted in New York City.
It is ludicrous.
It is one of the most ludicrous aspects of American foreign policy that with regard to the United Nations, we invite the worst people on earth to come to our soil, to come to our best city, the best city in the world, and then stand on a platform and criticize us and condemn us.
Horrible human rights abusers, brutal tyrants, butchers themselves get to stand on our soil in our city and condemn us for what?
For nothing.
Because we try to stop them when they brutalize their own people.
So That's fine.
If they want to have a United Nations, maybe we'll even participate.
You don't get our money.
You don't get to do it in our country.
Host it in your country.
See how that works.
You pay for the security for it to work in your country.
Absolutely fine by me.
It is a fiction.
There's a feeling, I think, among people of the old liberal consensus or on the left who say, well, it helps us to exert influence in the world.
We can exert as much influence in the world as we like.
We don't need to play into any fictions.
The United Nations has utterly failed when it's tried to intervene in humanitarian conflicts.
It has made matters worse.
It has made chaos in the world worse because it's given voices to terrible people who should shut their mouths at the end of our guns.
They should totally understand that there are allies in this world led by the United States who will put them down.
UN peacekeepers, they don't protect the peace.
They don't protect civilians.
Get rid of it.
There isn't any argument for it.
I'm glad that we've, it appears that the Trump administration has trolled them into doing exactly what he's wanted to do since the beginning, which is defund this ridiculous institution.
They should knock down that building and turn it into the new Trump Towers on the East River.
I think it'd be very beautiful.
I'm flying out to New York tonight.
I'll start scoping out the land.
There's a great cigar bar nearby.
Maybe I'll buy a room when it becomes Trump Tower.
Okay.
Enough on the UN.
We're going to have such a nice show today about the nativity and the incarnation, but they get you so riled up, these awful, awful people.
And it's just really wonderful that finally, after eight years of Barack Obama, who bungled every aspect of American leadership in the world.
we have people with moral clarity, like Nikki Haley, who's sitting at the UN, and incredibly to many, Donald Trump, who has moral clarity on world leadership.
Let's get into the mailbag.
The first question comes from John.
Hey, Michael, a.k.a.
Hillary's third cousin two times removed.
I noticed a common debate among liberals is that the reason there is a cycle of poverty in black communities is because the schools are poorly funded.
What is your take on this?
Can we expect people to rise out of poverty when their education is lacking funding?
And where can this funding come from when the communities are struggling?
Thank you, John.
I've heard this before, too.
A lot of people talk about this.
We shouldn't have any wars.
We shouldn't have any security operations.
We shouldn't build a wall.
We need to fund the schools because there are racial disparities.
Racial disparities in success are caused by school funding.
The trouble with this theory is that it isn't true.
So Columbia University's Linda Darling Hammond claimed this.
The NAACP claims this.
The College Board President Gaston Caperton declared, quote, tests are not the problem.
The problem we have is an unfair education system in America, an unequal education system.
So two things here.
First, increasing school spending has rarely led to better outcomes.
Second, according to the U.S. Department of Education, assumed funding disparities between racial and ethnic groups do not exist.
That's according to the Department of Education.
Ironically, though, so the trope, the myth is that much more money is spent on white students than any other race of students.
Ironically, the opposite is true.
More money in the United States is spent on minority students than white students, nationally and regionally.
This is according to the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics.
So nationally.
Black students get 105% of funding, so an additional 5% of funding than white students.
Hispanic students get 1% more funding.
Asian students get 7% more funding.
When you break it down regionally, in the Northeast, black students get, per student, 16% more funding.
Hispanic students, 17% more funding.
Asian students, 12% more funding.
In the South, even in the South, that awful, terrible rural South, backwards Jim Crow, black students get 5% more funding.
Hispanic students get 3% more.
Asian students get 9% more in the Midwest.
Black students get 13% more.
Hispanic students get 6% more.
Asian students get 11% more.
And in the West, black students get 11% more.
Hispanic students get 6% more.
Asian students get 8% more.
It's a total lie to talk about discrepancies because it's exactly the opposite of what the left says it is.
Now, in perspective, black students receive over $2,000 more than white student in per-pupil funding each and every year.
Why are there disparities in educational attainment or in poverty?
You'd have to – there are many, many factors of this, some historical, some cultural.
But I would look at the culture.
There are – some immigrant groups succeed in the United States.
Some immigrant groups do not succeed in the United States.
Some native groups succeed.
Some non-native group – some native groups succeed at lower rates.
I think culture is the answer.
Culture is what we worship.
It comes from the same word as cult, what we're looking to.
Cultures that emphasize two-parent households and not having children out of wedlock and getting married and saving money and having education and pursuing professional careers will succeed at higher rates.
The single greatest predictor of financial success in the United States is being born to a two-family home.
Now, when it comes to the black community, something like three-quarters of black babies in the United States are born out of wedlock.
This is a major cultural issue.
It's only been happening for the last 50 years or so.
So before the Great Society, before Democrats and LBJ decided that they were going to explode the welfare state to ostensibly help black families, black murder rates were going down, poverty was going down, everything was going right for that community of Americans.
Since that time, all of those trends have reversed.
We have to look at culture and we have to look at perverse government incentives that have ravaged the black community if you want to really be able to explain and fix different levels of attainment.
We've got many more questions to change your life.
But if you're not on dailywire.com, you won't be able to see them.
It's Christmas!
Treat yourself!
We are what?
We're four days away from Christmas now.
Go to dailywire.com.
It costs $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
What do you get for that?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You get the Ben Shapiro Show.
You get no ads on the website.
None of that matters.
We are about to have a blizzard, folks.
This has been an incredible year.
Just a quick little recap.
We've got major tax reform, Obamacare mandate repealed, ISIS defeated militarily, consumer confidence at all-time highs, markets at all-time highs.
We've got 4% projected economic growth, which Obama's economists told us was absolutely impossible.
We have originalist justice on the Supreme Court.
We have originalists, I think 28 originalists appointed to federal courts.
Massive deregulation.
Deregulation that we haven't seen in decade upon decade, probably since Coolidge.
Something like zero net new regulations this year compared to an annual average of 13,000.
We've got pro-energy policies going into effect.
We're going to be looking at drilling in Anwar.
You are going to be covered in a blizzard.
Get your Leftist Tears Tumbler before those salty little snowflakes rain down on you and crush you.
This is very dangerous this time of year.
You can get hypothermia or frostbite or you'll just be dried out from all the salt.
So go to dailywire.com right now.
We'll be right back.
Next question is from Jacob.
Jacob says, Hi Michael, I'm a veteran, thank you for your service, and I've dealt with suicide and mental health issues myself.
How do you think the suicide problem in the veteran community can be fixed?
Because as of now, on average, 22 veterans commit suicide per day.
Very sorry to hear about that, Jacob.
One thing I hope is that you're getting a treatment for mental health so that you're seeing a psychiatrist who can help you.
It's also good to see a priest.
It's also good to see someone who can help you on the spiritual side of that.
But you should see a medical professional as well.
And it's especially good if you see a medical professional who shares your spiritual views as well.
That is a very effective practice.
A way to be treated for these tough issues.
Now, we see this story a lot.
There is a national epidemic of suicide among veterans.
Those numbers are a little misleading, so I hope that you don't feel like you're being washed away in just a tidal wave of suicides, because the situation actually isn't quite as bleak as that.
So the vast majority of these suicides are among older veterans.
National suicide rate among military veterans is 38.4 per 100,000, and this is higher than average.
But nationally, just men in their 50s alone commit suicide at around 30 per 100,000.
So it is higher.
It's significantly higher among veterans, but compared to...
95% of military veterans are men.
The vast majority of these suicides are older men.
So the numbers actually are much more in line with the general population than people would think, mostly because most of these suicides are being committed by older men.
So nationally, also, there's one completed suicide for every 25 suicide attempts.
The trouble is military veterans on average are more likely to have firearms and to know how to use them, so they complete suicide much more than the general population.
This is all really tough stuff.
Obviously, military service can take a major toll, and this culture takes a major toll.
Suicide numbers are up.
After years of declining, suicide numbers are increasing among the general population.
With regard to veterans, obviously mental health access is really important, and the total failure of the Veterans Affairs Administration is to blame for a lot of this.
All of my veteran friends, without exception, have great difficulty accessing the VA. This is awful.
Democrats want to expand this to cover all of our health care, and they shouldn't do it.
Look at the failures of the VA and the failure on veterans and let that be a lesson to everybody when it comes to nationalized or socialist health care.
Right now, one of the reasons that the suicide rate is increasing possibly is that now veterans of the Vietnam War, older veterans, are getting even older and they're entering into this particularly risky age bracket for suicide.
One of the reasons that...
The suicide rate nationally is going up, could be caused by decreasing religiosity.
A number of studies have found that religious people, church-going people, are significantly less suicidal.
Catholicism, in particular, appears to have a correlation with lower suicide rates.
This may have to do with its stance on divorce.
A happy marriage, or really any marriage, is a good predictor Of not committing suicide.
There are also obviously moral foundations, teleological visions to religion that will play into this as well.
An idea that there's a purpose, there's a reason for me to be here.
Suffering isn't the end of the world.
Most people in most of the history of the world have suffered and that suffering can be sanctifying and it can be for a purpose and it can even be good.
It can be refining.
Suffering itself has no moral value to it.
It's only your reaction to suffering that has a moral value.
So if you react to suffering with courage and dignity and perseverance and transcendence and kissing it up to God, that's a wonderful reaction to suffering.
And if you react to it with self-pity and with self-destruction, that's a morally bad reaction to it.
From a policy level is to make sure that veterans and the American people have easy access to mental health services.
The cultural vision is that we need to make sure that we don't persist in a nihilistic culture.
And from your personal experience, make sure you're getting the help that you can.
There are a ton of resources out there for you.
Many of them are free.
Make sure you do that, and thank you for your service, and I hope you get better.
From Benjamin.
Hello, Michael.
I love your show.
Thank you.
I'm a recently retired lobbyist from the Kentucky legislature.
On Wednesday night, Rep Dan Johnson committed suicide, presumably in response to unproven allegations that he molested a teenager, in quotes.
In reading the police report information, who did not press charges because of lack of evidence beyond the he said, she said, what is alleged to have happened is that Representative Johnson had too much to drink and he ended up fondling a 17-year-old girl against her will.
Of course, there are no distinctions drawn here in our media between the difference between a teenager can range a few days over 12 to a few days shy of 18.
I think one important thing that moral thought leaders need to do more of is to speak of the sins of calumny and detraction.
How many among us could withstand in the public sphere a scrutiny and expose of our personal lives?
Whatever the facts of this case, it's my opinion that Dan's wife is right.
This was a high-tech lynching of her husband.
Why do so many people think it is morally licit to spread true information about others to destroy their character?
Thank you, Mike in Louisville.
This is a really tough one.
I did run this story.
I talked about this a little bit, I think, last week, two weeks ago.
This was a really sad story all around, but especially in this climate where we're comparing a guy who gets a little drunk and a little handsy, but no more than that, with a guy like Harvey Weinstein, who's a serial rapist.
A couple thoughts on this.
One, if you run for office, I've worked on a lot of political campaigns.
If you run for office, you have to assume that people will do these sorts of things to you.
You have to make sure that you have the stability and a thick enough skin to withstand the worst sorts of lives or even worse, the worst sorts of truths that are being spread about you.
On campaigns that I've worked on, there have been people on both sides of the campaign, our opponents and on our campaigns, whose job it is to find dirt and oppo and ruin a guy's life so that he loses the election.
Now, there's a rule that I've always tried to keep in my mind.
I think you should always bring it to the other campaign.
I don't mean awful like it's going to kill his campaign or even his career.
I mean awful like it's going to ruin this guy's life and his marriage.
You should bring it to the other campaign first and say you've got 24 hours to get out of the race or we are going to release this.
If they don't comply, it's all fair game.
Politics is a very, very messy, dirty business.
Unfortunately, it often attracts mentally unstable people, people who don't have a terribly thick skin, and it can result in these awful things.
But you've got to be aware of that.
It's easy on campaigns to get carried away and say, oh yeah, we got this dirt, we're going to win this race.
But politics isn't everything, and you're going to have to answer for what you do someday.
So make sure, even when you're brawling, you're bloody, you're tough in politics, which is every single campaign, make sure that you're not compromising your moral soul.
Make sure that you're playing at least in a way where you can look at yourself in the mirror.
That was a really sad story all around, and Probably it was a combination of Representative Johnson not having the understanding of what politics, how dirty it can get, how awful it's going to be, not maybe having that really bone-thick skin, and also a reach on the other side that was just a really vicious, vicious attack.
And they're going to have to answer for that, too.
Next question from Seamus.
Hi, Michael.
Do you think it's appropriate for secularists, atheists, and other non-Christians to celebrate Christmas?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I was talking to Matt Walsh about this yesterday.
Matt, I think, thinks if you don't belong to a Benedictine monastery and say 20 novenas a day, you shouldn't celebrate Christmas.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a little.
I don't think that.
Andrew Klavan is a great example on this.
If you read his book, which is very, very good, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
If you read his book, He converted to Christianity around age 50.
And one of the seeds for that conversion, which was born out of literature and born out of understanding narrative in the world and coming to Christ through that, he was basically converted by a Christmas cookie.
When he was a little kid, he loved Christmas celebrations.
He loved going over to a family friend's house and seeing the decorations and participating in that.
That could have a wonderful effect.
Christmas is the incarnation.
Christ comes.
He's conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.
He becomes man.
Excuse me.
The divine logos of the universe.
In that moment, one of the first stories we see in the infancy narratives are these three wise men.
And they come from the east.
They come from the land of the sunrise.
And they're not Jews.
They are probably Zoroastrians, Eastern priests.
The word magic and magician comes from magi.
But there's a talk in the town, there's talk in the air that the king of the world will be born in Judea.
And so they walk and they walk through and they're led by the star to Christ.
That is always important in our world.
Christ comes into the world so that all of the nations will come and worship him.
And we don't have to make people insist on people doing it on our terms.
Herod didn't say, you have to become Jews before you can go seek Christ.
You know, what he really said was, tell me where he is so I can go kill him.
And they went and they left by another way.
They came to Christ by one way, and those magi left by another way, physically and metaphysically.
So on the physical side, they didn't want to tell Herod where he was and have the kid killed.
On the metaphysical side, they changed their minds.
And a lot of things can change your mind.
A lot of things can bring you to Christ that you wouldn't expect.
It's not within your rational ability to limit what can bring you to Christ.
So absolutely, everybody should break out the Santa Claus and the reindeers and the snowmen and Frosty and Rudolph, whatever.
Just bring them along.
Christmas is a gateway drug to metaphysical truth and the divine logos of the universe.
And it's very fun and enjoyable.
So do it.
From Cole.
Hello, Michael.
I very much enjoy the show and like the beautiful women you often bring on for the panel of deplorables.
You're telling me, buddy.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you.
My question, big shock, regards the Catholic faith.
I never get any of those.
That's so strange.
Okay.
I must admit I've been drawn to it recently, but I can't help but feel the Pope is misrepresenting the faith, I think you mean to say.
He seems more interested in spitting out left-wing propaganda I'd hate to put you on the spotlight with your faith, but the current Pope, for some reason, has made me question becoming a Catholic.
Could you please help me?
Thanks.
You should become a Catholic anyway.
Don't worry about that.
Over time...
A lot of misconceptions have come out of the Catholic Church.
So one is that the pope is totally infallible in whatever he says goes.
And if he says the sky is purple, then the sky is not going to be blue.
It's going to be purple, whatever.
If he says 2 plus 2 equals 7, then that becomes the truth.
But that isn't the case.
The pope is infallible in a very limited number of things.
We've had good popes and we've had bad popes.
The church lady is encouraged to think critically and to think for themselves.
Dante, the divine poet, one of the most important figures who offers one of the most beautiful visions of eternity.
Dante put a couple of popes in hell, so he put them there himself.
That isn't the worst thing in the world.
An important aspect here is to think about the difference between the mainstream media portraying Pope Francis and Pope Francis himself.
So I'm not willing to compare Pope Francis with the various pontiffs who've gone to hell because...
What we read in the media is so often not true.
They don't understand anything about the Catholic faith, so they don't understand anything about what he is saying.
The mainstream media would have you think that Pope Francis is going to get gay married next week and paint the Vatican in rainbows.
But Pope Francis said when he was cardinal in Argentina, he said, do not be mistaken.
Same-sex marriage is not a mere political lobby.
It's a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.
That does not jive with the image that we are presented with by Newsweek of Pope Francis.
But that said, Pope Francis has said some things that are a little strange that we might not all agree with.
Recently, a group of conservative Catholics and theologians presented him with a filial correction for heresy.
So they formally accused him of heresy in a very nice and polite and orderly way.
If you find yourself being drawn to the church universal, as I have been in my life, I would keep pursuing that.
And I wouldn't let one cleric that you don't particularly care for dissuade you.
It's been around for 2000 years.
And there have been some clerics that you won't agree with and some orders that you won't agree with.
You know, very often conservatives make fun of the Jesuits because they lean left and they're a little clever, you know.
So someone was asked the difference between the Dominican order and the Jesuit order.
And they said, what are the similarities?
They said, well, you know, both were formed in Spain, one by St.
Dominic, one by Ignatius of Loyola, and both were founded to combat heresy.
So the Dominicans were formed to combat the Albigensians and the Jesuits were formed to fight the Protestants.
So the guy says, well, what's the difference between the Dominicans and the Jesuits?
And the answer is, have you met any Albigensians lately?
We mock Jesuits all the time.
That's okay.
You can feel free to veer into very conservative aspects of the church.
But come on over if you're interested.
The water is great, pal.
I hope that answers your question.
Dear Knowles, can you prove the Gospels really are authentic and why the Jews don't see it that way?
Well, I don't know that the Jews, writ large, question the historicity of the Gospels.
Certainly they don't believe in the divinity of Christ.
By definition, I suppose.
But scholarly consensus is clear.
The scholarly consensus right now is that the Gospel according to Mark was written within 40 years of Jesus' death.
Matthew within 40 to 70 years.
Luke within 30 to 60 years.
John within 50 to 65 years.
That's on the outside end.
So think about it this way.
Would you trust a biography today that was written about Andy Kaufman?
Andy Kaufman was about 35 years old when he died.
He died about 33 years ago.
Would you trust that or would you say, no, that's absolutely ridiculous.
How could they know about Andy Kaufman?
Well, there are people alive who knew him.
We have movies and we have books about him.
Historians all certainly also agree.
That about Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist and his death by Pontius Pilate.
They all agree that those occurred.
They might disagree about some of the miracles.
Flavius Josephus, the Roman historian, writes about Christ and his followers.
Tacitus, the Talmud, writes about Christ.
I think it's very fashionable now to question the historicity of Christ or to question the gospel accounts.
We know more about him than we know about virtually anyone else of that era.
And we can rely on more than that.
So when you engage with the text on that level, You should just read it.
You should read these accounts and encounter this person.
And then you'll have to grapple with Christ himself.
You'll have to grapple with the person of Christ.
And C.S. Lewis writes about this.
When you meet him, you have three options.
He's either a liar...
He's either just deceiving people, going around deceiving everybody, or he's a lunatic and he's just a total crazy person, or he's the Lord, or he's the person that he says he is.
And I'll tell you, when you read those books, he sure doesn't come off as a liar.
He has no incentive to be a liar.
He doesn't get great rewards for his lies.
That's certainly true.
Infinite torture on a cross.
And he doesn't seem a lunatic.
He does not sound like a lunatic when you read him and you read his From Stephanie.
Hi, Michael.
Can you give me a reference for the Pascal quote you mentioned on Tuesday, aside from it being somewhere in the pensée or in the thoughts of Pascal?
It was something to the effect of being a gentleman instead of being known for what one writes.
Yes, Pascal is one of the incredible geniuses of modernity.
Most people know him by Pascal's wager, so his wager is, you should believe in Christianity because if you're wrong, you lose nothing.
If you're wrong, you'll burn in hell for eternity, and if you're right, you gain all of infinity.
So unfortunately, he died at age 39.
He invented the calculator.
He was a mathematician.
He was a physicist, child prodigy, and a Catholic theologian.
He wrote in his thoughts, which are just the notes that he was putting together for a book that he didn't live long enough to write.
He said, man is full of wants.
He only loves those who can satisfy them all.
He's a good mathematician, say they, but I have nothing to do with mathematics.
He would take me for a proposition.
He is a good soldier.
He will take me for a besieged place.
What I wanted is a gentleman who can adapt himself to all my wants in a general way.
We should not be able to say either that he is a mathematician, a preacher, or an orator, but that he's a gentleman.
This quality of universality is the only one that pleases me.
And it's especially important in our day where everyone specializes, even professors.
Nobody is a professor of literature anymore.
Nobody is a professor of history anymore.
There are professors of gender studies read through Derrida from 1967 to 1967 and a half.
The specialization is so, so intense that you don't have people who have more qualities, who are known by more than just their job, who are known by more than just where they live or their friends.
That quality of being a gentleman is really something that we could look back to and I think it would balance out a lot of the anxiety that people feel today.
From Betsy, Hi Michael, I've often heard you discuss your own path from being basically atheist When you were confirmed to finding God again through evangelists and then finally landing back firmly in Catholicism.
My nephew is preparing to be confirmed Catholic this spring and my sister, his mom, has told me that he's an atheist and she has to drag him to church.
He is an extremely intelligent kid and unfortunately his high intelligence translates to a know-it-all cynicism.
He's 14.
Yeah, I hear about that.
Can you offer any tips Okay.
Yes, I will take this on.
I... Experience this myself.
It's very, very fitting that your highly intelligent 14-year-old nephew is an atheist.
Atheism is tailor-made for people who have the wisdom and the ignorance and the arrogance of smart 14-year-olds.
That is the key demographic.
It makes perfect sense.
When you're a smart 14-year-old, you question everything you're taught, but unfortunately, you're 14.
So you're not smart enough.
You don't have any experience or any maturity or any deepened understanding of the world or even any education.
So you can't get past that hurdle.
Bill Whittle talks about that Island 120.
He said sort of the dumbest people are conservatives and the middle tier are liberals and then the smart people are conservatives again.
And the kind of middle tier is the New York Times editorial board.
This exact thing happened to me.
I was a smarter than average 13, 14-year-old.
So when I was about to be confirmed, I was an atheist.
I said I was an atheist.
And my mother said, Michael, just do it.
Go through the confirmation.
I think you're going through a phase.
You will regret it if you don't go through it with this later on.
So I said, okay.
And she was right.
Smarter than average 14-year-old.
I read all of those atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and all of them, Sam Harris.
Later on, when I was 17 years old, a couple days before Christmas, excuse me, I get a little choked up with this, my mother died very unexpectedly.
And that is an experience that matures somebody.
And it's a very humbling experience.
The experience of death close up, especially if you're young or whatever, the experience of the traumas that we all face in our lives...
Deepen your understanding of the world and they humble you.
And you realize, oh, maybe I don't have all the answers.
Maybe I don't have control over everything in the world.
During Advent, the church spends four Sundays analyzing four mysteries of life.
Death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
These are mysteries that we don't think about all of the time.
We don't think about them every day or every year, even every 10 years.
But they do confront us eventually.
And when we grapple with these things, we can be led up through into some maturity.
You need that humility first, which 14-year-olds are constitutionally incapable of.
Then you need some education.
And as I was educated, I came to meet people who were smarter than me, who made very good arguments for Christianity.
Modern apologists, ancient apologists, the arguments for God are much better than the arguments against God.
I haven't really heard any coherent arguments against God.
Once you reach that point and you've got some humility and some maturity and some education, just even a little bit of any of those, can you reach that point again, I think, and then And after that, I believed that Christianity was true.
And only after that did I have any real, what would be called religious sense or recognition or numinous recognition.
That's probably not the answer you want.
The answer you want is probably not wait 10 years, wait for the kid to experience some of the more difficult parts of life and get a little learning in his head.
But I wouldn't push him.
Do not push him.
You're just going to push him further into his...
14-year-old atheist delusions.
Don't drag him to church.
I didn't go to church for 10 years probably.
You don't have to do that.
Be a little patient.
There's a time for every purpose under heaven.
Just try to guide him a little bit.
Make sure he doesn't go off the wrong path.
He gets a little humility.
He gets a little maturity.
And he will come back, especially if he's a smart kid.
All right.
That's a good Christmas message to end on.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Happy New Year.
I will see you in 2018.
Thank you very much.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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.
