The mainstream media are having a field day with the saucy anti-Trump books quotes and President Trump’s giving Steve Bannon the Rosie O’Donnell smackdown. We’ll analyze the claims and separate fact from fiction. Then Fleccas Talks and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Jeff Sessions’s crackdown on pot and how the Virginia House of Delegates highlights the moral error of Never Trump. Finally, the Mailbag!
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The mainstream media are having a field day with the saucy anti-Trump book quotes and President Trump's giving Steve Bannon the Rosie O'Donnell Smackdown.
We will analyze the claims and separate fact from fiction.
Then, Fleckus Talks, Austin Fletcher and Jacob Ehrie will join the panel of deplorables to discuss Jeff Sessions' crackdown on pot, the old Haitian oregano, and how the Virginia House of Delegates highlights the moral error of Never Trump.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This entire show today is going to be page six, basically.
It's just saucy claims and pot and all this sort of stuff.
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Okay, let's get right into all of the sauciness.
Now that I did roll out of bed off my bowling brand sheets and saw all of the crazy scintillating headlines today, let's go through the claims.
We've been talking about this book all day.
There's a hot book that's going to come out over Donald Trump in the White House that's saying he's just awful, everything's chaos.
Steve Bannon got smacked down for this.
Let's go through and see which claims are credible, which are not.
Here they are.
Joe Curl compiled a great list at the Daily Wire.
A lot of other authors have too.
Number one.
He's not only crazy, he's stupid.
Billionaire and Trump confidant Thomas Barack Jr.
told a friend, Barack, Barack, you know, said this is totally false.
Wolf never ran the quote by him to ask if it was accurate.
He also said it's clear to anyone who knows me that those aren't my words and inconsistent with anything I've ever said.
What do we think about this?
I guess he could have said it.
If he did say it, he certainly would deny it at this point.
That said, what motivation does he have to say it?
What motivation does he have to say it to some nobody, lefty reporter or writer?
I don't see the motivation there.
I'm skeptical that he said it.
I'm skeptical that the writer, Michael Wolff, heard this in any credible way.
Number two, Melania was in tears and not of joy on election night.
They didn't want to win the White House.
They just didn't want to be...
This is one...
The author of this book wrote a piece in the New York Magazine and said, Trump didn't really want to be president.
This is hard to believe, guys.
Guys, he's been talking about being president for 30 years.
He has been encouraged to run for 30 years.
He flirted with it in the year 2000, and he almost ran for the Reform Party nomination.
He seriously considered it in 2012.
He's been talking about issues of American policy, both domestic and international, for decades.
Even during the Reagan administration, he took out a big ad in the New York Times to question an aspect of the Reagan foreign policy.
I just don't believe.
But people don't know what it takes to run for even dog catcher or Congress or governor, much less President of the United States.
If you don't want it, you're not going to do it.
He wanted to win.
That's total nonsense.
Number three, when Roger Ailes suggested Trump tap former House Speaker John Boehner for White House Chief of Staff, he said, who's that?
Don't you get it?
Because Trump's such a dummy.
He didn't know who the Speaker of the House was, right?
Ridiculous.
We know...
Donald Trump tweeted about John Boehner in 2013.
He said, quote, Speaker John Boehner, who I like, should never have agreed to raise taxes because the Republicans got absolutely nothing for it.
He sent out another tweet.
Or rather, Don Jr.
agrees with that.
But here's another tweet from Donald Trump about John Boehner.
In 2015, Trump tweeted, Wacky Glenn Beck, who always seems to be crying worse than Boehner, speaks badly of me only because I refuse to do his show.
A real nut job.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't have it and say that all Donald Trump ever does is watch cable news.
He's glued to Fox News morning, noon, and night, but he's never heard of any of the things that are talked about there.
Sorry, guys.
You have to choose a line of ridiculous attack, and Michael Wolff is trying to have it both ways.
It just isn't true.
Another quote from there is, working with the president was like trying to figure out what a child wants.
This was attributed to Katie Walsh, White House staffer.
She denies having said it.
He's done what he said he would do.
That's what has shocked so many people.
You know, it's sort of surprised me as well.
But he has done it.
So trying to figure out what he wants, he's been saying what he wants for 30 years.
This is one of the crazy aspects of Trumpism.
They say he's playing 4D chess.
He isn't playing 4D chess.
He said he would nominate originalists.
He has.
He said he would cut regulations.
He has.
He said that he would lower taxes.
He has.
He's just doing what he said he would do.
And this is confusing a lot of people.
Certainly not like working for a child.
Number five.
Wolf reports that six weeks into office, Donald Trump still had not determined what the new administration's top priorities would be and said that operations in the West Wing were chaotic.
Ditto on the last point.
Exactly ditto on the last point.
We know...
What the agenda has been, he said it during the campaign, and he's fulfilled it.
Now what about Michael Wolff?
We know that this guy has very little credibility.
This isn't his first book.
He's been around for a while.
He admitted to lying in his first book, Burn Rate, which was about his time in the early days as an internet entrepreneur.
You know, the dodgiest profession imaginable.
The dodgiest profession until, like, Bitcoin broker or something.
So what are some of those allegations?
He wrote in that book, quote,"...how many fairly grievous lies have I told?
How many moral lapses had I committed?
How many ethical breaches had I fallen into?
Like any other financial conniver, I was in short-term mode." So this is a guy who has no credibility.
He's admitting he has no credibility as a matter of honesty.
He's saying that he's a liar.
His business collapsed in 1997.
Surprise, surprise, for anyone familiar with the dot-com bubble.
That book came under siege.
He took very few notes, yet he recounted long conversations verbatim.
Judith Regan, a classmate of Wolf's at Vassar, disputed every single thing that he wrote about her in that book and said that she hadn't talked to him in 30 years, and he admitted that he hadn't talked to her in 30 years.
Andrew Sullivan, the political columnist, accused Wolf of fabricating whole quotes of his in 2001.
In total, 13 subjects of burn rate said that Wolf invented quotes from them, whole cloth.
So the guy has no credibility.
The New Republic's Michelle Cottle wrote about him.
Much to the annoyance of Wolf's critics, the scenes in his columns aren't recreated so much as created, springing from Wolf's imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.
Even Wolf acknowledges that conventional reporting isn't his bag.
He's adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.
But of course, none of that will deter the mainstream media, will it?
Absolutely not.
They are having a field day with all of this.
That's because they are less credible than Wolf.
Esquire says, If Michael Wolf's access to Trump surprises you, then you don't know Michael Wolf.
What?
New York Magazine ran, Donald Trump didn't want to be president.
Ha ha.
Vanity Fair wrote, How Michael Wolf stuck a shiv in Donald Trump.
Cosmo, five bombshell revelations about Donald and Melania's relationship from new behind-the-scenes book.
Okay.
All ridiculous.
And by the way, when Ed Klein wrote that book about the Clinton, or about Barack Obama, rather, called Amateur, did we see bombshell, bombshell, bombshell in all of those news outlets?
Absolutely not.
We saw people calling his credibility into question, calling the quotes into question, but not so here.
The story is just too good.
Now, what about the Bannon quotes?
What does this mean about all of the Bannon quotes?
Wolf alleges that Bannon said, quote...
Donald Jr.
is a traitor, that he's treasonous, that he's going to be cracked like an egg on national TV, that the Russia meeting was treasonous, that Breitbart's not a legitimate news source, that son-in-law Jared Kushner is greasy, and that they're sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category 5.
Now, Bannon was apparently the guy who allowed Wolf into the White House.
His access appears to have ended, Wolf's access, when John Kelly took charge there.
Reports came out as early as August that Trump blamed Bannon for the leaks.
David Martosco, a conservative writer, wrote, In case it's not clear to everyone by now, Steve Bannon was the single biggest leaker in the White House in the West Wing until his departure.
Don Jr.
agrees.
Donald Jr.
wrote, Bannon didn't even join the campaign until two
months after the meeting he allegedly calls treasonous took place.
But Trump seems to think that he at least said it, which makes us perhaps conclude that he's right about Bannon here.
At least these Bannon quotes are right.
At least Bannon talked to him.
The writer Michael Wolff said, Says that he has tape of Bannon, so we'll have to see about that.
But the Trumpiness of all of it makes me think that at least some of this is true.
Let's bring on the panel to describe it.
We have Fleckus Talks, Austin Fletcher, and we have Jacob Berry.
Guys, what do you think?
Is this legitimate?
Is Bannon done Fleckus?
What do you think?
I think it is.
I was hoping that we would have heard something from Bannon before everyone started responding.
But once we got all the responses from Don Jr.
and President Trump himself, it kind of seems like what's said was said, and you can't really come back from it now.
It's like when you kind of hold things in the back of your mind when you have a girlfriend or a certain relationship, and then once you say those certain things that you were holding in forever— You can't really take him back, and it's never going to be the same.
So it's sad to see him go, and it's a shame to potentially lose something like Breitbart, a big ally of the president.
Hopefully he goes a separate way from there, and we don't lose Breitbart.
That's true, and it is pretty gross to think of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump as boyfriend and girlfriend up on Makeout Point or something in an old Cadillac, but that's neither here nor there.
Jacob, what do you think?
I think Bannon's pretty much done.
If he finds some way to bounce back, it's going to be in Dick Morris style, you know, where he just kind of makes appearances on Newsmax TV, I think.
And gets caught doing weird things with hookers in hotel rooms.
Sure.
A lot of possibilities here, sure.
Sure.
But I honestly think he's done.
I think that he got fired and he decided to get a little bit of vengeance, but it's really hard to get vengeance on the President of the United States, especially when you don't know anything.
So I honestly think that he's had his time, he had his moment in the sun, and no one really even knew who he was until this election.
The mainstream media kind of made Bannon a name.
So I think that when all this is settled down, when the dust settles, we'll be going, Bannon?
Bannon who?
Absolutely.
I don't know the guy personally, but a number of my friends do.
Some of them sort of like the guy.
Some of them say he's just a monster.
So I really don't care about Steve Bannon.
One thing also that makes this seem kind of legit is that Apparently, Wolf's access ended way back right when Bannon got kicked out of the White House.
So it could have been that he was salty about getting fired, salty about how things were going.
He gave these quotes out, and now they're dropping.
It's really a matter of liberty for me.
That's all I care about, and all of this is the freedom of it all, my freedom in particular.
Donald Trump has enacted a wonderfully effective conservative agenda.
He's done it pretty quickly within his first year.
I like that.
I want more of that.
I want lower taxes, more tax reform, less regulation, more originalist justices who are going to respect the Constitution.
More strength and credibility abroad.
I don't really care who's doing it.
If Steve Bannon is going to help that, great.
Be my guest.
Go on and help it.
But if Steve Bannon is going to undermine this presidency, undermine this administration because of some personal vendetta or because he wants to burn down certain aspects of the Republican Party, sorry, buddy.
See you later.
I don't know.
No, thank you.
No, no, no.
More, give me the freedom.
Give me the freedom.
And if you're going to turn on that and betray somebody and betray a movement and betray your president, your candidate, then you're not going to be able to do it.
It's like, if these quotes are true, and they do seem fairly legitimate, Then that big shoe of Donald Trump just came down and squashed the guy.
He might be trying to crawl out from under it, but it's no good.
We just have to keep calm and make America great again.
Okay, let's get to the news.
This is sort of Trumpy news.
The Virginia House of Delegates now remains in Republican hands because of a lottery in a hat.
David Yancey, a candidate there, beat his opponent, Democrat Shelley Simons, after somebody pulled a name out of a hat.
It was an exact tie.
There were multiple recounts.
And so I guess in the Virginia House of Delegates, the way you resolve that for the first time in the centuries is you just reach into a hat and pull out the Republican, thankfully.
Jacob, is this race the ultimate demonstration of the moral error behind never Trump, behind, well, I'd like Trump to win, but I don't want to vote for him because it's icky?
Um, I don't think so.
I honestly think that this was just, uh, like you said, it was just recount after recount, and I think the people just wanted to see someone seated, so they brought in this old, archaic rule, but as far as, uh, uh, whether never-Trumpers have anything to do with this, I don't think.
Remember, there's two types of never-Trumpers.
They're the, we're gonna vote for Hillary because we hate Trump for some reason, and then there are the David French, kind of Ben Shapiro, and me included in that, who are just kind of like, well, we don't believe Trump is a conservative.
And so far he has been, his first year, I'll give him credit.
The most conservative administration since at least Reagan and possibly Coolidge, sure.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I will say that we're still, this administration is still young, so we could see that lefty side that we know existed in Trump at least for some time.
But as far as this Delegate situation goes.
I think that they just wanted to end this race and they're like, let's just get this over with so that we can seat someone in this house.
I'm not going to let you off that easy.
Jonah Goldberg said that he wanted Trump to win, that if the vote were a perfect tie and it came down to him to decide the winner, he would have picked Trump.
But nevertheless, he will never ever vote for Donald Trump because it's icky, because it would be hard to look at himself in the mirror.
He's not good enough for me, or something like that, right?
His premise is that his vote doesn't matter.
My vote doesn't matter.
This election shows us even one single vote can matter.
And not just in that little House of Delegates election, but it throws the entire body.
Without this guy winning, Republicans would not control the Virginia House of Delegates anymore.
Again, though, I'm not sure what this really has to do with Trump.
I know you're trying to connect it to the one person...
I'll explain to you what it has to do with never Trump.
Never Trumpers were Republicans who said, I would like Trump to win generally because it would be better than Hillary Clinton, but I don't want to actually vote for him.
And it's okay because my vote doesn't matter.
And what this shows is that your vote does matter.
Every single vote can matter.
It can throw a whole election.
You know, I don't think that was actually a Never Trump argument.
That was Jonah Goldberg's argument.
That may have been Jonah Goldberg's.
He was a leading Never Trumper.
Well, okay, he was a big-name Never Trumper.
I wouldn't say he, like, was the face of the movement.
Really, I would probably have to say that Glenn Beck was probably the face of the Never Trumpers.
But I think that, as far as this goes, remember, I voted.
I didn't vote for Trump or Hillary.
So, yes, I disagree.
I think you should vote in these situations.
And maybe Mickey Mouse will win.
And maybe Mickey Mouse will win.
But I know someone who hated Trump, but they voted for Trump because they liked Pence.
And if that argument had been presented to me, hey, if we will at least get Pence as the VP in a more intellectual way, I might have been more persuaded with that argument.
But to me, this Virginia House race just represents just how volatile the elections have become in the era of Trump.
And how important every single vote is.
In the spirit of Republican unity, I will leave it there, but I think that conservatives and Republicans should take a lesson from this election and from the closeness of certain races and the actual stakes for the country rather than for how one looks in the mirror.
Fleckes, is a random hat drawing the best solution to a tied election?
Besides, obviously, recounting and recounting and recounting, I think it's not a...
I don't think it's that bad.
I think the Democrats should find a way to make this the norm because 50-50 odds, I'll take that all day.
That's better than anything you'll ever find in Vegas.
If the Democrats could do 50-50 odds with the whole thing and pull everyone's name out of a hat, I mean, that blue wave might happen.
That's where you're going to get a lot of dead people out of the hat.
They've been trying versions of this strategy for a fairly long time.
Absolutely right.
I also do kind of like the whimsy of it, of pulling the name out of the hat, because so frequently, one of the negative sides of democratic politics, especially in an era where politics and entertainment are exactly the same thing, is that people treat politics like religion.
They treat it like the sole focus of their life, and that's what gives their lives meaning.
Obviously, we don't have a monarch in America, in countries with a constitutional monarchy.
It's sort of the monarchy that embodies the spirit of the country and is the head of state, and the government kind of changes, but there's that stability and continuity.
In liberal democracies like the United States, we don't really have that.
I do like the idea of sometimes it's just going to be pulled out of a hat, you're going to roll the dice, that's your leader, and it's going to be okay.
The government shouldn't dictate every aspect of your life, and if it is doing that, then you have to fix something about your government, more importantly about your culture.
Speaking of the culture, Jeff Sessions' Justice Department is cutting an Obama-era dereliction of duty and finally enforcing federal law on marijuana.
So for years, pot dispensaries have cropped up all over California and other states with legal marijuana, even though those state laws violate federal law.
Now, Fleckes, you strike me as no stranger to the old Haitian oregano.
What should the conservative position on pot legalization be?
Ah, Michael.
My mother watches this show.
I'm sorry, Mrs.
Talks.
Mrs.
Talks, exactly.
I'm kind of disappointed because realistically, I think California was heading towards this liberal utopia, which is also basically hell.
It's a sanctuary state, much of which is on fire.
There's tons of homeless people.
Many of them have hepatitis.
It's not illegal to give people AIDS knowingly anymore.
Every time I leave my apartment, I live downtown, it's basically a Mad Max movie.
I'm kind of disappointed that this final piece that could have gone all the way around, bam, California is officially hell.
I thought it would have been some good action and made it more interesting.
I'm a little disappointed to see it.
Jeff Sessions, you know, tear these back a little bit.
That is too bad.
Yeah, I really enjoy the cinematography of driving around downtown.
All the explosions and fumes.
Jacob, for a long time, the libertarian strain of conservatives and Republicans have said, we need to legalize pot.
Obviously, all the lefties want to legalize pot.
I personally don't really have anything wrong with it.
I just don't care that much, except that the pro-pot people Are so passionate about it and they're so annoying that I really want to make them upset, so I want pot to remain illegal.
I'm really torn on this subject as you can see.
How should conservatives think about it?
Well, I think we should look at it honestly, and we should say, okay, when we see...
Now, I'm coming at it from a conservative perspective, not a libertarian perspective, but I think we should look at the pros and cons of it.
It's not as volatile as even alcohol, but on the flip side, there are people who suffer dire consequences But also, there's the medical aspect of it.
Now, I don't believe that marijuana cures cancer.
I've seen nothing but very subjective gossip that it has any effect on cancerous cells.
But I do think that people who suffer with chronic pain, who suffer with anxiety, maybe it could be medically applied to them.
Now, to be clear, though, I'm against all forms of When you have a grandmother who had a lung transplant, it kind of takes the wind out of your cells as far as smoking itself goes.
But I think if we look at it...
But you're very pro-Brownie.
But I'm very pro-Brownie.
Yes, absolutely.
And like I said, we can always look at the medical aspect of it.
But I kind of agree with you about the pro-pop people.
They just get so insanely crazy.
You just want to go, oh man, just be quiet.
It also, I will say, I won't tell any tales out of school, I might have tried the old Haitian oregano once or twice.
I had a local yogurt when I was in India, and it turns out that local yogurt was very mystical indeed.
We were on the Ganges.
And I just can't get that into it.
I just don't really like it that much.
So as a matter of culture, I don't really want to encourage people to do it.
It's not really that fun.
People say it makes you so much funnier.
That isn't true.
You just think things are funnier because you get stupider and hungrier and fatter.
But you aren't funnier, so I don't like that aspect of it.
It just makes you kind of confused and your heart beats a little faster.
I can't get that into it at all.
I would come to a compromise that we can legalize pot if we first legalize Cuban cigars.
I'm not very hopeful either.
I would support that.
Yeah, sure.
See, that's the spirit of compromise.
We're getting things done.
The art of the deal.
Gentlemen, we've got to move on to the mailbag, but thank you for being here.
Austin Fletcher, Fleckis Talks.
Once again, Mrs.
Talks.
I'm very sorry.
I'm only joking.
And Jacob Aery from The Daily Wire.
Thank you both.
I will talk to you soon.
Look, I know you want to hear the mailbag.
We have some really good questions.
We have some video answers, but...
If you are not subscribed to TheDailyWire.com, we just can't do it, folks.
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I want you to stick around.
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We really appreciate it.
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First question comes from Lucien.
Question is, what is the UN? John, take it away.
The point that I want to leave with you in this very brief presentation is where I start, 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.
You said it, brother.
You said it.
That is former UN ambassador John Bolton.
I couldn't have said it any better.
Next question from Jason.
Hi, Michael.
I work in tech and never learned much history.
What books would you recommend for learning about the history of Western civilization?
I'm trying to avoid the revisionist trash, but don't know where to start.
P.S. Your book is inexplicably good.
Jason.
Thank you, Jason.
You clearly have great taste in literature.
So I always recommend this book.
Whenever anyone says, I don't know anything about the history of Western civilization, I want a kind of recent book to sum things up for me.
You can start with the modern era.
That's from about 1500 to 2000, through the present.
The era that begins with what we would call the Renaissance or the High Middle Ages.
The best book on that to begin, I think, is From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzin.
He's the guy who started great books at Columbia.
One of the reasons this book is so good is he'll just include in parentheses other books you should read as he goes through everything from the Protestant Revolution all the way up through the present.
It's a really good work on modern Western history.
It explains how we got from the advent of Protestantism all the way through the present, just about everywhere on earth.
So it's really, really good.
You should also read maybe the greatest history book ever written, Thucydides.
You might notice I borrowed a line from Thucydides to open up my own magnum opus, "Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide." That's a great ancient history work and really the beginning of, I think, where you should start on ancient history.
If you want other things that are kind of in the news, people are always attacking.
Christopher Columbus is always attacking.
The Pilgrims and the founding of America.
Some good books to start on that that you can breeze through in a day or two, maybe two or three days.
Samuel Elliot Morrison's book on Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, is really good.
He's not a lefty lunatic.
He's a little bit more conservative historian, but a wonderful, highly respected historian.
And Nathaniel Philbrick is pretty even-handed in his treatment of the pilgrims in The Mayflower.
This was a very popular American history book that came out maybe ten years ago.
Start with those.
Dawn to Decadence is where I would begin, and then you can get more into what I think is really fascinating history in the Middle Ages and late Rome.
But I would begin there, and you kind of work your way backward from what you know, from what is familiar, all the way backward into the foundations of your civilization and your culture.
From Garrett.
Hi, Michael.
I would like you to bring light to my confusion with C.S. Lewis's Law of Human Nature.
Lewis states that there are typically two instincts that humans face when looking at a problem, the right instinct and the wrong instinct, and there's a third, there's a conscience.
So this argument tends to work for most people, but it doesn't work for all.
For example, a child who is out of control does what they want to do without regard for a conscience.
The typical response to this predicament is the child has not yet learned right from wrong, but the moral law that Lewis is proposing is saying that right from wrong is built into us.
I do not know if humans would know not to steal, murder, or lie naturally.
Can you please clear this up for me?
Thanks.
Yes, absolutely.
They would know this naturally.
These moral laws have been observed in all people at all times and all places.
Now, Lewis writes, he specifically addresses this.
He says, this law was called the law of nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it.
They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here or there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colorblind or have no ear for a tune.
But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to everyone.
So yeah, there's going to be a random psychopath or someone who has no moral sense.
But these are exceptions that prove rules.
When it comes to the specific example of little children, a three year old is the worst individual on the face of the earth, right?
Three year olds are just awful monsters of selfishness who demand everything and don't really care about anybody else.
But this is because they haven't yet reached the age of reason.
So the age of reason, the Catholic Church says the age of reason occurs around seven years old, but just about every framework for viewing the world has some sense of the age of reason.
Three-year-olds are not reasonable in the way that older children and then teenagers and adults are reasonable.
So a way to think of it is that my ability to reproduce is built into me.
It is a fact of nature.
It isn't something I learned.
I didn't learn how to reproduce.
Trust me, if I were in the woods, I would do it just fine.
And people all over the world have done it.
But I can't produce sperm cells at age four either.
I haven't yet reached an age of maturity.
There is a time to every purpose under heaven.
And so while that law of nature is built into all of us, we must mature.
Even Jesus in the Gospels grows in wisdom, right?
He matures because he's in time and space and he's enfleshed in a body.
So far from contradicting this law of nature, it simply tells us something about our own time and our own space and what we have to do to live as human beings with bodies as well.
From Alex, Hey Michael, I have a bit of a dilemma.
I'm very attracted to the idea of the Catholic Church.
You know, I'm always shocked when we get these Catholic questions.
We never get these, do we, Marshall?
No.
That's wonderful.
I'm very pleased in any case.
I recognize that if there were to be a one true church, the Catholic Church would be the best candidate to hold that mantle.
However, I'm a former member of the LDS church, the Mormon church, that got very thoroughly burned by my whole world becoming unraveled.
What advice would you give to someone who loves God, is currently active in an evangelical church, and would like to know how best to worship him?
Thanks, Alex.
Well, I'm glad to hear that you founded an evangelical church that is bringing you closer to God and that you're also thinking about joining the Catholic Church and you're thinking that might be the next step.
That is a little bit...
A retelling of my own return to the Catholic Church.
I did read a lot of Protestant theologians and evangelical writers and preachers on my way back across the Tiber to my Popish 2,000-year-old institution.
You bring this up with the LDS Church.
This is the risk of dealing in real institutions and it's a real risk of faulty teaching and faulty engagement with the faith.
This isn't just about LDS or some other derivative of Christianity, even Catholic schooling.
I have a lot of people who come up to me and they say, Michael, you're still in the Catholic Church.
Did you go to Catholic school?
And I'll say, no.
And they said, oh, that's why you're still in the Catholic Church.
I know a lot of people who went to Catholic schooling and it just led them, they ran away.
They had bad experiences.
They don't want to associate with their childhood and the pain that comes with being a child or an adolescent.
So this is a trouble.
The thing that you must do is not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Something that might aid you on your journey.
There's a wonderful resource called Catholic Answers, which is the benefit of being around for 2,000 years and having people during those two millennia debating all of these questions.
If you pose to the Catholic Church, what should I have for breakfast on Tuesday morning at 8?
They'll have an answer.
They'll have bacon and eggs and orange juice or something.
You can consult a lot of the questions you might have.
On the institution of the church, on the sacraments, on the magisterium, on the church fathers, whatever, you can search for it and you'll probably find an answer.
If you're drawn to the notion that the God who became incarnate and enfleshed and lived for a certain time and a real time and place chose real people to do real things, who instituted the acts of the apostles and who said, Peter, on this rock I build my church, feed my sheep, you have the keys to the kingdom of heaven, Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.
If that leads you to conclude that maybe there is a real church with a real order and real people running it, then I encourage you in that.
And don't be discouraged.
The devil likes to discourage us.
That's his main tool is to say, no, no, cynicism.
You know, no, no, it's all fake.
People are all fools.
And don't ever commit yourself to something real that will make you vulnerable.
Don't fall into that trap.
Proceed in joy and seriousness, you know, with joy and prudence, and I wish you luck on your journey.
From Preston.
Hey, Michael, I'm 20 years old and I reside in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I just recently received a premium subscription to The Daily Wire.
Well, congratulations.
It means you're going to survive the floods.
That's really good, pal.
I'll see you on the ARC, and the ARC, it'll just be people floating on leftist-tears tumblers.
I'm having trouble finding a major that suits me.
A major in college, I assume.
I enjoy theology and politics.
Any suggestions?
Yes.
I don't necessarily recommend studying either of those.
Undergraduate theology might be good to study.
I don't recommend political science or really any of the social sciences.
I prefer disciplines that are older, that are more grounded in the university.
The social sciences came about relatively recently.
They came about as theories to apply the scientific method to things that don't necessarily lend themselves to the scientific method, such as human affairs, government, history.
I majored in history.
That was one of my majors in college.
I recommend that.
History will give you a grounding for anything that you want to do.
It will give you, in my view, a better political education than political science ever would.
Political philosophy is an interesting field of study, but it's fallen totally out of favor at the university in favor of political science, which I don't have a ton of respect for.
I would study that.
If you're interested in politics and theology, I might study the classics.
I might study literature.
I think literature is a wonderful way to engage in both theology and politics.
Literature basically converted Andrew Klavan to Christianity.
Literature and Christmas cookies.
So that's one recommendation for it.
But an older field of study, an older discipline, I think will serve you well in any of your interests.
From Jessica.
Dear Michael, do you know how the new tax plan will affect freelance musicians?
Thank you, Jessica.
Well, as a former freelance actor myself, you'll probably be fine because freelance artists don't make any money, in my own humble experience of it.
It actually will help you a lot, I think, because of the advantages to pass through entities.
So a lot of freelance artists have an S corporation.
They'll incorporate themselves, so an actor could incorporate himself and then deduct movie tickets, wardrobe, haircuts, whatever.
You can deduct things that feed into the business of that.
If you're a blank book writer like me, then you could deduct blank sheets of paper or pens without any ink in them.
Those could be business deductions as well.
Under the new tax plan, you can deduct, I think, up to 25% of your income.
So that is a real nice benefit.
If you're an artist, I assume you live in one of these godforsaken cities with high city and state and local taxation like Los Angeles or New York.
That part will ding you a little bit, but I think it'll be more than made up for on the S-Corps.
If you haven't incorporated yourself as an artist and you do make an income, incorporate yourself.
There are a lot of benefits to it.
From Nathan, Michael Knowles, King of the Trolls, what is your favorite color?
Nathan, my favorite color is green.
There's no joke.
There's no any addition to that.
I just really like the color green.
Green like money, I guess.
From Marcus.
Hi, Michael.
I love your show.
My question, when should we hit a bully back twice as hard, and when should we turn the other cheek?
Please answer using biblical references.
People misunderstand this all the time.
A lot of people who would just take Christianity to be just some small aspect of it, they'll become pacifists.
They'll say, we should never punch back.
Don't ever fight back.
They've only read a couple lines of the Bible.
And they'll say, see, it says this.
They haven't read the other things.
G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy that heresy is not the promotion of vice.
It's just the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of all the others.
That's what they're getting at.
But don't forget Ecclesiastes.
There is a time for everything and a season for every purpose under heaven.
There's a time for war and a time for peace.
In the same breath that Christ says, turn the other cheek, he also says, if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away.
I don't know that he means that literally.
If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.
I don't know that he means that literally, as we mean literally.
He says, do not say anything other than yes or no.
Everything else that you say comes to evil.
Of course he doesn't mean that literally because he says many other things.
And he tells St.
Paul, takes many oaths, takes many vows.
He says, only pray in your inner closet.
But then Christ prays in public as well.
So Christ also says to the apostles, if you don't have a sword...
He says that very explicitly.
St.
Augustine and St.
Thomas Aquinas both explain just war very well, all the reasons when wars can legitimately be undertaken.
Santa Claus himself, St.
Nicholas, punched a heretic in the face at the First Council of Nicaea.
When we're talking about that Sermon on the Mount, Christ sums up the whole sermon in the next chapter.
He says, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.
That's what he's telling us.
Seek first the kingdom of God, then follow everything else.
And then he gives us these examples, these parabolic examples, these hyperbolic examples.
Do not—you shouldn't strike back at somebody for spite or for cruelty or even really for vengeance.
I don't think that you should be doing it and say, ah, that'll hurt him and that will give me great pleasure and joy.
But our Lord is also not telling us to be doormats and to let the cruel rape the face of the earth.
Christ is speaking of a spiritual strategy to humble the self and to win other souls over to Him, but not everybody is moved necessarily by this humility.
So we should love our neighbors as ourselves, but sometimes we all need a little bit of tough love, don't we?
A priest friend of mine keeps a baseball bat near the door of his rectory because it's not a great neighborhood.
There have been break-ins and burglaries of the poor box.
I one time asked him about this, and he explained it to me.
Sometimes there just isn't time to turn the other cheek.
That's my feeling as well.
That's our whole show for today.
Be sure to tune into Another Kingdom.
It's finally back, my podcast with Andrew Klavan.
The next chapter is up, chapter 11, episode 11, and we're coming to a big climax in this.
If you haven't caught up, listen.
It's a really fun narrative podcast.
That is going to go up tomorrow morning.
Tune in on Monday.
We'll be back to do it all over again.
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.
