Barack Obama has unveiled plans for his presidential library and museum on the South Side of Chicago. According to Obama aides, the presidential library will have a children’s play garden, sledding hill, green spaces for picnics and outdoor gatherings, basketball courts and a recording studio. What the library will not have are any books or documents. Is there any more apt metaphor for the Obama presidency? We will explain Barack’s empty library and legacy. Then, the Mailbag!
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Barack Obama has unveiled plans for his presidential library and museum on the south side of Chicago.
According to an Obama aide, the presidential library will have a children's play garden, sledding hill, green spaces for picnics and outdoor gatherings, basketball courts and recording studio.
What the library will not have are any books or documents.
Is there a more apt metaphor for the Obama presidency?
We will explain Barack Obama's empty library and legacy and then the mailbag.
A lot to talk about today.
Got to go through Barack Obama's empty legacy and dance on the grave of his political priorities.
Before we get to that, we have to talk about Skillshare.
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We don't want to just bring people down.
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I think this is true in the economy right now, especially for younger people.
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So it's really important to build up skills in a wide variety of areas.
One area in particular, by the way, if you're watching this, you probably use social media.
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I fritter away all my time on Twitter.
I Twitter away all my time.
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Okay.
There won't be any learning going on, by the way, at the Barack Obama Presidential Library because there aren't any books.
Martin Nesbitt, the chairman of the Obama Foundation, explained, The Obama Presidential Center will be a global community center, a place of life and vibrancy, That showcases the south side to the world.
So there's a basketball, possibly a yoga room, test kitchen to teach visitors about the, quote, full production cycle of nutritious food.
There's a recording studio and auditorium, a sports facility, a 235-foot-tall tower for some reason, something I don't know what they do in there, $350 million to build 22 acres of land.
The only thing it won't have are books or documents.
Now, I didn't realize how old I am.
It's a new year.
It's 2018 already.
I am so old that I actually remember when libraries contained books and documents.
Now, presumably, there will be computers at this library, or iPads or something, so they can at least Google some of the terrible things that Barack Obama did.
But, if the lights go out, that means that the Obama Library will be identical to the Obama legacy.
And perhaps that's really the brilliant artistic engineering here.
Form and content in perfect harmony.
The Obama Library marks the decline of our politics and culture, just like the Obama administration showed the decline of our politics and culture.
Even the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown newspaper, Not Exactly a Bastion of Conservatism, ran a headline asking, without archives on site, how will Obama Center benefit area students and scholars?
The foundation's CEO, David Simas, explained.
This is going to be completely different.
What the President and First Lady said is they simply did not want a museum that served as a mausoleum, a way to look back.
This is typical Obama.
Typical Obama-ness.
Arrogant and ambitious enough to want constant change.
Constant activism, turning presidential campaigns into a permanent campaign, fundamentally transforming America.
But it's completely ignorant of history, philosophy, culture, disdainful of the past, of the present, and of tradition itself.
Obama's papers, by the way, are currently stored in a private facility in the city and suburbs of, not Chicago, Washington, D.C. They sent them all to Chicago, spent They spent a lot of money doing it, and they said, no, we actually don't want them at this fake library, so they go right back to D.C. This gets perfectly to my theory of the left.
The left always wants the appearance of the thing, but without the essence of the thing, like decaffeinated coffee, or they want hashtag activism.
So they'll wear lapel pins to the Golden Globes and dress in black, but they won't stop raping people.
Even their resistance movements are lazy and hollow.
Do you remember, they didn't march or protest or even really petition anything after the financial crisis.
They occupied Wall Street.
They sat around and they did nothing.
They didn't even stand.
They occupied it.
These lefties will disrupt Ben Shapiro's speeches.
Civil disobedience, man!
But they won't show their faces.
They'll wear masks.
Because if they showed their faces, they would have to experience consequences.
They want to have libraries without any books.
So anyway, here's Barack Obama.
Almost beyond parody, talking about his document-free library.
I won't stop.
In fact, I will be right there with you as a citizen for all my remaining days.
The single most important thing I can do is to help prepare the next generation of leadership to take their own crack at changing the world.
More than a library or a museum, it will be a living, working center for citizenship.
We'll have projects all over the city, the country, and the world.
Our work has inspired so many young people out there to believe that you can make a difference, to hitch your wagon to something bigger than yourself.
Those poor kids, I feel sorry for them if Barack Obama is teaching them leadership because his legacy has been utterly destroyed.
And think about that messiah complex, too.
I will be with you until the end of days of time.
Okay, Barack, go away.
That's fine.
We had you for eight years.
You can go away.
Now, his legacy is gone.
He says this is going to show them leadership.
It's going to show people activism, how to make a change in their community.
But his legacy is over.
His legacy is as empty as the library.
On health care, just a quick recap of all of Barack Obama's wonderful legacy.
On health care, Donald Trump and the Republicans have repealed the individual mandate, the funding mechanism of Obamacare.
Obamacare was already in a death spiral even under Obama.
The repeal of its funding mechanism has sped that up considerably.
In October, Donald Trump rolled back the mandate forcing employers to pay for abortion drugs after Barack Obama took the little sisters of the poor to court because he was so fanatically insistent that nuns pay for abortions.
Trump also ended some Obamacare subsidies known as cost-sharing reduction payments and he signed an executive order opening up competition in health insurance and allowing some people even to purchase health insurance across state lines.
Unfortunately, they haven't yet whipped the votes to fully repeal Obamacare, and they should, and they should do it as quickly as possible.
The U.S., by the way, has never once repealed a major entitlement program passed through Congress.
But the White House and Congress have chipped away at it considerably.
We may still yet make history.
On immigration, Trump is looking to phase out Obama's unconstitutional executive amnesty, known as DACA.
Even if the U.S. doesn't deport 800,000 of the most press-friendly illegal aliens made for television, and probably we won't, DACA still could be used as a bargaining chip for wall funding and other immigration reform.
Trump has cracked down on sanctuary cities.
Illegal immigration has dropped within the last year to a 17-year low.
Republicans have scrapped every single bit of Obama's environmental legacy, including the disastrous Clean Power Plan, the Paris Climate Accord, bans on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
We've also opened up more federal land to private use.
Trump's EPA is on track to cut finance.
47% of all employees by the end of its first term.
Almost half of the EPA employees will be gone just through retirement and attrition by the end of the first term.
On campuses, Betsy DeVos has repealed Obama-era regulations giving universities absurd control over student sex and the investigation of sex crimes.
Obama regulations forcing schools to let men into the girls' bathroom are gone too.
Remember how for like a year or two we had to just talk about the bathrooms because Barack Obama didn't want to focus on the economy, which he couldn't manage to recover even after eight years.
Obama's policy of net neutrality, remember that one?
Government regulation of the internet has been repealed, ironically, by an Obama appointee at the FCC. We're good to go.
We still need to finish off Obamacare when you scrap the Iran deal, but overall, not bad for one year.
The legacy-destroying lesson Obama learned too late, too late for his library, too late for his legacy, and it's a warning for President Trump and Republicans.
That which can be enacted by a pen and a phone can be repealed by a pen and a phone.
So get working in Congress.
And speaking of deals, we're talking about all these deals.
We've got to talk about a new sponsor.
We have a new way to keep the lights on around here, which I'm always very pleased about.
But this is a product that I've actually used for years, so I was glad to see them come on board.
This is an app called Honey.
It's a browser extension.
It's completely free.
I like things that are free.
That's why I've been using it for years.
My stepbrother, who's very involved in internet ad space and ad exchange servers, he's always up to date on the newest browser extensions.
He showed me this.
Honey just saves you money.
You pay nothing, and Honey will get you money automatically.
It's a free browser extension.
It's used by millions and millions of people to save money every single day.
So it's the single most popular money-saving browser add-on.
It works on all major browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and it's always free.
You don't put down a credit card.
You don't put none of that.
It's just saving you money.
So how does it work?
Takes two clicks to add honey to your browser.
Literally, just two.
Then it starts working in the background right away.
So while you shop, you go on wherever, Amazon or wherever you do your online shopping.
Honey scans and tests millions of coupon codes all over the internet to find you the biggest discount on everything you buy.
So, you know, in the old days, you would Google, you'd be on whatever website.
I go on to, like, stogies.com or whatever, and then I Google.
I say, where is the coupon that I can find?
Okay, 20%.
Does that work?
Oh, no, that only worked until yesterday.
Oh, to type it in, you end up wasting 15, 20 minutes trying to find a coupon.
Honey just does all of that.
So, no more Googling.
The best part is, whenever you're ready to check out, Honey automatically applies the best coupon to your cart.
So it's just running in the background.
That means you'll always get the biggest discount to the best price available, even without having to do anything.
Almost 10 million people use Honey every day to save millions and millions of dollars.
Why not you?
If it sounds too good to be true, Time Magazine agrees with this.
They call honey basically free money, and it is.
I've used it for years.
I continue to use it all the time.
This Christmas season, I couldn't tell you which ones I used with honey.
It'd probably be easier to know which purchases I didn't make with honey because you get so many of these coupon codes, especially during Christmas.
There are a gazillion ones over the Internet.
No one has time for that.
It's the 21st century.
Just get the browser extension.
There's no reason not to add Honey to your browser.
It's free.
It will save you cash on everything that you were going to buy anyway.
If you're not using Honey when you shop, you're missing out on free money.
So do it right now.
Join Honey.com.
And how are you going to get it?
You have to go to Honey.com slash Covfefe.
C-O-V-F-E-F-E. Honey.com slash Covfefe.
C-O-V-F-E-F-E. What is it, Marshall?
Honey.
Okay, we've got to get to the mailbag.
Before we get to the mailbag, I do have one news story we have to talk about.
I have to point it out because it's a personal one.
Google is really going after us right now.
This report came out on Tuesday.
The Daily Caller reported Google is now displaying left-wing fact-check websites in a fully separate sidebar on our Google results.
So when you look for Daily Wire, these fake fact-check websites come up and try to debunk all of our stuff, article by article.
And they don't do this for the left.
They don't do this for Vox.com.
For Vox.com, they have a sidebar, and what does it list?
Vox.com articles, what you would expect.
For us, they have a sidebar listing articles from only leftist websites.
So Google is so far only targeting four websites, all conservative.
It's us, The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and The Federalist.
They aren't targeting left-wing sites like Huffington Post or Slate or Media Matters or ThinkProgress.
And coincidentally or not, the top left-wing fact check on Daily Wire as of yesterday was rebutting claims made by the worst heretics, the global warming skeptics.
People like Richard Lindzen, the MIT atmospheric physicist that I had on the show on Tuesday, deniers as the left calls them.
And speaking of Lindzen, YouTube owned by Google demonetized that video.
I don't know if you caught the conversation.
It was the entire conversation that I had with Professor Linzen was dry.
It was academic.
It was about statistical inaccuracies.
It was one of the drier episodes that I've ever done.
There wasn't a whole lot of covfefe.
It was really analyzing science.
But a physicist from MIT is too much wrong thing for YouTube and Google.
So we contested this when they demonetized it.
We called them up and we said, you have to turn this money back on.
This doesn't violate any of your standards.
We argued with them back and forth and back and forth.
But they said, no, okay, we'll turn it on for the episode.
But for part of the episode that you broke out separately, now we're going to demonetize that one.
They also demonetized an episode we did.
I did one called Jake Tapper, Mean Girl, in which I explained that Jake Tapper, who used to be a journalist, is a mean girl.
And I dare anybody to prove my argument wrong.
I think I gave a lot of scientific evidence for that.
They demonetized that, too.
Why?
Well, you know, we can't be making fun of these left-wing hacks and these left-wing journalists.
No, no, no.
So this means Media Matters or some other leftist group that is advising Google has put up flags even on tenured professors whose...
Statistical research it deems dangerous.
James Damore, the guy who wrote that Google memo, he alleges that Google managers would blacklist conservatives and even propose trials for people who hold conservative views.
Now Google has a virtual monopoly on information on the internet.
Prager University is already suing them for discrimination.
Conservatives should consider a united front.
It is really getting pretty oppressive out there.
Okay, let's get into the mailbag.
Before we get into the mail, Marshall, you're so cruel.
You're so rude to them.
I want to keep the mailbag on for you guys.
I wanted it to remain public.
But unfortunately, if you're not at TheDailyWire.com right now, you can't see it.
So if you're on Facebook and YouTube, go over to DailyWire.com right now.
If you're already a member, thank you.
You help keep the lights on and keep Covfefe in my cup.
If you subscribe, this is a good deal, folks.
Make a New Year's resolution to approach Appropriately store your leftist tears this year in 2018.
You don't want there to be fallout.
You don't want your family to be hurt by the radioactive leftist tears.
Make sure that you have the proper vessel, the leftist tears tumbler.
Oh, and you'll also get me and Andrew Klavan and the Ben Shapiro Show and no ads on the website and you get to ask questions in the mailbag and conversation, blah, blah, blah.
But you really need this.
This is just a matter of safety for your family.
So go over and get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
It is going away soon, by the way.
You will not know the day or the hour, but very soon we're going to end this and then no more folks.
You're going to be trying to get into our bunker to escape the fallout.
So go to dailywire.com right now.
Okay, our first question comes in from, let's see, from Christian Silva.
Yes.
The question is, hey, Michael, I'm working on a campaign running to take the seat away from Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
I know you've worked on campaigns before.
Any advice?
Sure, absolutely.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the disgraced former head of the DNC who got caught giving the whole thing away to Hillary.
So, yeah, I have a little bit of advice.
The district you're looking at, I think that's Florida, Florida 23 or something like that, so...
I forget the exact name of her district.
That district is D plus 11, last time I checked.
So things aren't looking great for you.
It means that leans heavily Democratic.
That said, the district has gotten more competitive, mostly thanks to Debbie Watzerman Schultz.
So Democrats from 2002 to 2010.
Never got below 74% of the vote in that general election.
Schultz has performed considerably worse than her predecessor, Alcy Hastings.
Even in 2012, Schultz only got 63.2% of the general election vote there.
In the election prior, Hastings got 79.1% of the vote.
That's a big drop.
Schultz's popularity keeps decreasing in 2014.
She dropped to 62.7%.
Next year, she got 56.7%.
So it's still quite a hard race to win, but the trend is in your favor at least, and her total implosion last year on the national stage will help you.
Now, I guess for the advice, you can't just run negative.
So it's easy to just run negative on former Congresswoman Jar Jar Binks.
You should partially run negative.
You should point out her ample flaws, but nobody votes against somebody.
They don't just vote against somebody.
It doesn't work.
You need to have a clear message and offer voters something.
So Mitch Daniels, One of my favorite politicians.
Mitch Daniels in Indiana.
He won by large margins as a Republican, even as Barack Obama won by large margins as a Democrat same year in that state.
He had a clear message.
His campaign slogan was, I want to increase the net disposable income of Hoosiers.
That's very clear.
I know what I'm voting for when I'm going to vote for that.
And yeah, you can knock the other guy.
You can run a little negative.
I suppose you have to.
But that's the message.
Offer them something concrete.
On the national stage, the politicians who offered something concrete and serious, strong messages, those are the ones who win.
Some other advice for the congressional.
Ignore whatever Washington, D.C. tells you.
Whatever the consultants and the party people, just ignore it.
Rudy Giuliani gave us this advice on a congressional campaign that I worked on a number of years ago.
The people in the district are going to win you the seat.
Them and the donors.
Then DC is going to swoop in and they're going to screw everything up.
So DC can get you some money.
You should take the money, especially if some of the campaign committees are going to offer it to you.
But if they offer you advice on the operations, they're going to give you cookie-cutter operations that know nothing about your district, and they're going to lose you that campaign.
It's all about the people.
Another thing you can do is constantly innovate.
So just a short story.
I was on a congressional campaign when I was 18 or 19, and it was a challenger race against a Democrat incumbent.
The incumbent, his name is John Hall, and he had been in the rock band Orleans in the 70s.
They're the guys who did like, "Still the one that do do do," and they did "Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see?" So I decided as a lowly staffer on this campaign, we would start the Young Voters for an Orleans reunion tour to get John Hall back on stage and out of Congress.
And we read this whole website.
I was writing up and performing in these music videos.
You know, I kind of ripped off his song and made it, Vote With Me, Let's Make John Hall Leave Washington, D.C., and all this.
It was just really funny and cute.
We killed these guys.
So they couldn't resist.
They threatened to sue me.
EMI Music threatened to sue me.
The band, John Hall himself, did.
And it got us a ton of press.
It made us look innovative and cool.
And we ended up winning that campaign.
We won the campaign on the strength of the candidate and on the movement and the Tea Party movement behind her.
But it did help.
It gave us a nice bit of momentum.
And it gave us good press.
So...
Be innovative.
Don't just think, hmm, how can we not lose this?
What's the thing that we're supposed to do?
Forget what you're supposed to do.
Politics is not one on what you're supposed to do.
You've got to be really innovative here.
So also keep the campaign lean.
Campaign bloat sucks up a lot of energy and drive.
I know this is unenjoyable, making some pittance of a campaign salary.
I've made plenty of those.
But it does align incentives to make sure that you win.
And the incentive there is you get a victory bonus or you get a legislative job.
So run hard, run to win, don't waste your money, and ignore the experts, please.
Including maybe me.
Uh-oh, maybe that was self-defeating.
I'm no expert on this.
I'm just a guy who's been on campaigns.
That's my advice.
Next question from Andrew.
Hey Michael, I'm 20 years old and I've been Catholic since birth, but for the past four to five years I've become less religious.
I don't pray anymore.
I don't read the Bible.
I haven't been at confession in a very long time and I'm starting to skip Mass every Sunday.
But worst of all, I've let more sinfulness into my life.
My question to you is how do I come back to the Catholic Church and what are some steps for me to get out of constant sinfulness?
Thank you and God bless Andrew.
Just do it.
Just do it.
That's the Nike advice.
Just do it.
I'm with you.
I was completely out of it for probably a decade or at least the better part of a decade.
I think a full decade.
And so the thing that got me back in is I was convinced that God exists, and then I was convinced that Jesus is who he says he is.
And it all followed from there.
I was convinced of that by a few things.
Some by arguments, the arguments for the existence of God.
Some by writing, apologetic writing, like C.S. Lewis and like Chesterton and others.
And then there is the numinous experience.
You do have the experience of the world.
I remember once, I didn't remember this until just now, I was smoking a cigar and looking at some plants in my yard when I was, I don't know, a teenager.
And I thought...
Something clicked into my mind that pure rationalism, that my ideological view of the world and my atheistic view, it didn't explain these things.
It didn't explain my experience of the world as I knew it to be.
So that's a little bit more of the religious or spiritual or numinous experience that you would have.
But do it.
Andrew Klavan has a good YouTube video on how to find God in 60 days, which is to behave as though God exists.
If you do believe all of that, then that is going to work on your body.
Now, plenty of saints went through great periods of darkness.
Mother Teresa herself writes about a lot of these things.
So I wouldn't let the constant emotional feeling of God, I wouldn't let that discourage you.
You know, the angel Gabriel came down to Mary.
It said, Mary, you're blessed above all women.
God himself is going to be born out of your womb.
Isn't that great?
She says, well, I'm the servant of the Lord.
Let it happen.
But then the angel went away.
And then Mary went on with her life.
And it's not like God was constantly saying, rah, rah, rah, and this is great.
Mary went on with her life and had much difficulty and had to cry as her son bled on the cross and died.
So we see this throughout the Bible.
It's not like God is just constantly chit-chatting with us.
But he does intervene at times.
So I wish you luck on your spiritual journey.
I would say keep your eyes in some of these words.
For me, because the temptation of my age and my place in the United States was this intellectualized temptation.
The temptation of being at a university and being young and from the Northeast.
So I kind of found my way back a little bit through analytical philosophy and philosophy.
Very intelligent apologists.
Go where your temptation is.
I would say, you know, whatever your temptation is, find the Christian and the Catholic answer to that.
And I think that'll put you right back on the right path.
But I wish you luck, pal.
God bless.
From Nicholas.
Dear Michael, I am a Catholic.
I'm shocked we're getting these Catholic questions.
We never get these.
I am Catholic.
My girlfriend is a Protestant.
She's been asking me many questions about the many different things that are important to the Catholic faith, like why the Virgin Mary is so important and why priests are able to forgive sins.
I have a very basic understanding of why these are, but I want to learn more.
Do you have any books that you would recommend reading so that a simpleton like me can get a deeper understanding of topics like these so I can answer my girlfriend's questions better?
Thanks for all that you do, you handsome Italian.
Thanks, Nick.
Appreciate that.
Priests can forgive sins because Jesus says so, most clearly in John 23 and Matthew 16, 19, but in other places too.
And Mary is so important because she's the mother of God.
I suppose we could talk more about that, but I think those answers are sufficient.
If you're looking for a good resource, I don't think you're simple-minded, especially because you called me a good-looking Italian.
But if you do want a simple and direct resource, there's a great one called Catholic Answers.
So if you want answers to Catholicism, Catholic Answers is a good name for it.
And they have the answers to everything.
The Catholic Church has been around for a very long time, and so they've thought about a lot of things.
You can go there.
And then I recommend also reading as much as you can of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, some of the Church Fathers in that patristic era.
And you'll see, you know, a lot of people just start reading things that were written after the Protestant Revolution.
So they learn a lot of things that aren't exactly so, and they're responding to arguments from only one particular time.
I think the Church Fathers are...
They're presaging.
They're seeing in advance some of the arguments that will come up that we see in modernity, and they'll explain to you why practices and rituals and theology has developed as it has.
So the easy answer is Catholic answers, and the probably more edifying one in the long run is that patristic era in Augustine and later Aquinas.
from Benjamin.
Hey Michael, this was a long time ago, but I noticed you catching flack from a lot of Philistines on Facebook regarding the movie Lady Bird.
People were upset that you endorsed what they thought as lewd and pornographic as a Christian movie.
Not to rail against my fellow Christians and conservatives, go for it buddy, as I'm sure they mean well.
But do you think attitudes like these contribute to the inability of Christian and conservative art to break through the culture?
Sorry for bad wording.
I'm an engineer, not a writer.
Let's face it, movies like Fireproof and God's Not Dead flat out are not very good, despite the talent of those involved.
Why can't we make good art?
Why can't we have nice things?
This is a very long question.
Let's answer what we have so far.
So, this is something we struggle with all the time.
We struggled with it even.
I'm doing Another Kingdom with Andrew Klavan.
His book that he wrote that we're now releasing as a podcast, and I'm performing it, but it's got naughty words and some saucy scenes, and we have people write in sometimes, and they say, you call yourself a Christian.
I really liked Lady Bird.
I thought it was the best movie of last year, and relatively, it was quite a good movie.
And it is quite Christian.
I mean, it's Christian throughout, beginning, middle, and end.
The protagonist's name is a reference to Christ.
But for those people who think that Christianity is just good manners and being polite and listening to some of that god-awful acoustic guitar music that they play at modern churches, you've got to read that Bible.
You've got to go back and read your Bible.
The scenes from just Genesis alone would never fit that criteria.
You could never produce Genesis by those criteria.
There is sex and incest and fire and brimstone and cheating and lying of the protagonists.
It's the protagonists doing a lot of this stuff.
So you have to perceive reality as it is.
The truth above all things.
Christianity is not just some little sect and some nice feel-good philosophy that doesn't have a reference to truth.
It's true.
It perceives the world.
And so if we try to change the world, we're going to fall into a saccharine, sentimental religion that is no good.
C.S. Lewis said, if you look for comfort, you might find truth.
If you look for truth, you might find comfort.
But if you look for comfort, you'll find neither truth nor comfort, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
So don't be brought into the saccharine and the sentimental.
I think of those paintings that were popular in the 2000s, Thomas Kinkade, the painter of lights, everything so nice and sentimental.
I like all that stuff too, but you've got to perceive reality.
Our Lord lived in reality, and he dealt in reality, and he dealt with the woman at the well, and he dealt with prostitutes, and he called...
You've got to deal in that reality, and I hope some Philistines get on board with it, but hey, we can just keep making the art, and another kingdom has done very well.
We're having trouble in Hollywood, not among the popular audience, so I think maybe the culture is changing a bit away from that sentimentalism.
From Laura Huber.
My fiancé and I are in our mid-20s and excited to start a family together.
We recently watched a movie called Eyes Wide Shut, hedging our bets that Kubrick might be worth watching.
Turns out it's about a wealthy men's sex cult.
The next day, I serendipitously came across an article from Vanity Fair called, Oh My God, This Is So F'd Up!
Inside Silicon Valley's secretive, orgiastic dark side, which details popular sex and drug-fueled parties that wealthy tech founders host.
The author, on feminist, not moral grounds, denounces the orgies, but the male participants claim this is another great way in which their great minds challenge convention and it makes up for their late entry into sex life.
So there's a lot on YouTube about polyamory.
What do you say of the future of this undercurrent in society and of monogamous marriage?
You've just got to do you.
I mean, these things always come up, especially in decadent cultures like ours, cultures where the moral strictures go away, but they've always existed.
There was plenty of weird sex in the Victorian era, and certainly on college campuses, that's always been the case.
Lord, make me chaste, but not yet, is an ancient tradition.
What I would say, though, having been out here in La La Land, in the heart of darkness, I have noticed this.
I know a lot of people who have open relationships, open marriages, polyamory, and they cheat on their girlfriend and the girlfriend cheats on them, whatever.
I've never met anyone who does that who's happy.
I've never met anyone who does that who's fulfilled or pleased.
It seems like you would be until people get sex-austed.
This is a phenomenon I've observed.
It's sex-austion.
Meaningless, trivial sex with a bunch of random people isn't fulfilling in the long run.
So as a matter of culture, it will ebb and flow and you'll get some of that.
I think smart people will realize it's not good in the long term and not fulfilling to them.
But But that will always be around, and hopefully we can hope for them and pray for them and try to teach them, people who do that, that it just doesn't turn out well, so maybe to avoid it.
But good luck to you and your fiancé.
From William.
Hey, Mr.
Knowles, my name is Bill, and I'm a young, practicing Catholic.
However, my girlfriend of two years is a practicing Mormon.
I get a lot of different comments on whether or not our marriage will work in the future, but I personally feel like it won't be an issue.
With the exception of the question of what to raise our children if we have any, we really have had a good and healthy relationship and openly discuss our differences in belief.
What I'd like to know is, do you think that a marriage can be successful if the two individuals have a strong faith in two different religions?
Sincerely yours, Bill.
Yes, with a caveat.
Yes, it can be successful, I think, with people who have strong religious views.
I've seen it work very well in that case.
And by the way, your views might change over time.
People's views change over time.
I have friends who have converted from religions, who have converted from Mormonism, actually, or friends who have become atheists, or people who have gone out of being an atheist.
I was sort of an atheist for a long time.
So I wouldn't worry about that.
Except for the kids, except for the raising of kids, that issue is going to be probably intractable.
And you don't want to confuse the kids and have them one day think one thing and then be told that the opposite is true and, you know, this parent is going to go to hell or this parent is going to go to hell.
You really should decide with the children first.
That doesn't mean that you or your fiancé need to convert to anything, but you should decide.
And if you...
Think that you have the correct vision of reality, then do it.
A lot of my Mormon friends say, you know, this is just a version of Christianity.
Maybe you raise the kids in what C.S. Lewis calls mere Christianity.
There are ways to work around it.
I think you can work through everything else.
From Norman.
Dear Archbishop Thomas Michael Knowles, I have been giving a lot of consideration to the Catholic faith and already, to some degree, consider myself a small c Catholic.
So your argument about God creating a particular church with a particular clergy resonated with me.
But I have also heard the opposite side argued well from members of my evangelical family.
They say that God's particular people was Israel and that the church is described by way of contrast as universal.
Jesus, the particular man, fulfilled the messianic prophecies to Israel, whereas Christ, the universal logos of the universe, is head of the church.
They quote two...
I'm like Donald Trump.
They quote two Corinthians.
They quote 2 Corinthians 5.16.
We once regarded Christ according to the flesh.
We regard him thus no longer.
What do you make of their claim against the particularity and for the universality of the church?
What do you think Saint Paul is saying in that verse?
I think you're confusing universality for abstraction.
There is a universal church.
The word Catholic means universal.
But the church is not an abstraction.
Christ is not an abstraction.
The paragraph you cite reads,"...for we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.
If indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked, we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh, even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.
Ah.
We regard no one according to the flesh, because Christ's conquest of death gives us the hope of eternal life, of being eternal beings.
But that does not mean Christ can be abstracted from his incarnation.
This is the temptation of rationalism.
It's a political temptation, and a philosophical temptation, and a religious one.
Martin Luther wrote,"...in matters of faith, each Christian is for himself pope and church." It's no coincidence that rationalism arose out of the Protestant Revolution.
By rationalism, I mean that elevation of each man's capacity to reason.
Now, one man's reason, his intellect, and his will are perfect.
That man is Christ.
But the rest of ours are not.
We see the themes of emancipation and revolution running throughout modernity.
But we should be careful when we overthrow in these revolutions what we emancipate ourselves from.
So the rationalist exercise continually distinguishes the symbol from the symbolized.
It separates them.
You can only comprehend abstract things, so the rationalist thinks in ever more abstract terms.
But Christ is not abstract.
There is no separation between Jesus the man and Christ the logos.
Christ is that unity.
He says it is the Spirit who gives life, and he says this bread is my body, and this is a hard saying, and only those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have life in them.
He is heaven-touching earth, the perfect junction of the symbol and the symbolized.
We groan to throw off this life, but we are not merely spirit or merely flesh.
Our particular selves comprise inextricably body and soul.
This is therefore the claim of the Church.
There is no disunity between the particularity and the universality of the Church.
As the Nicene Creed states clearly, there is one holy Catholic and apostolic Church.
And her bridegroom is Christ, a man who was born 2,000 years ago to a woman named Mary in Bethlehem and who existed before all ages, who in the beginning is with God and is God.
I do want to go back just one bit.
It just occurred to me on the question about the Mormon.
Yes, so I'm sorry.
I was confused.
I thought that Bill is a practicing, in that previous question, Bill is a practicing Protestant and his girlfriend of two years is a Mormon.
Bill is actually a Catholic and I should note in this answer, the Catholic Church, before it will give a dispensation for interfaith marriage, requires that you say that you will raise the children Catholic.
And there isn't any getting around that.
So you'll either have to do that or lie to the church, which is probably not a good way to start your life together in the sacrament.
That does make it harder than if you were a Protestant or a mere Christian, as C.S. Lewis would write.
But you should be aware of that.
I don't want to spread any fake news on this show.
From Jeremiah, Mr.
Austin Lively Knowles, King of Trolls, I'm enjoying Another Kingdom, but it has raised a couple of questions in my mind.
Do you have any standards when it comes to acting, I have no standards at all when it comes to acting, of what you will not do, be it language or nudity for a role?
For example, if you were offered a role in something like Game of Thrones, but it required graphic nudity and sex scenes, would you do it?
Why or why not?
Thanks, Jeremiah.
I have no standards at all.
No, that's not quite true.
I would take a role in Game of Thrones in a second.
I would do nudity, I would do language, I would do whatever, if the art were good art.
I would do it if it served an artistic purpose and were beautiful and showed something to the world beyond just little Michael, just Megaluzzo.
So...
I once was on an audition out here in LA for, I don't know, some indie film, and the role required a nude bathroom scene.
And I said, okay, that's fine, I guess.
The guy doing the interview, or the audition rather, said, okay, and it's going to be a gay scene.
I said, okay, if it serves the story, and the story's a good one, let's do it.
He said, okay, and I'm going to be playing the other guy.
I said, well, you know, that's a bridge too far.
That's...
I've read about these stories and the Hollywood Reporter and Me Too and all this.
So I wouldn't do it if it were gratuitous and stupid and pornographic.
But as long as the story is serving a purpose, then obviously it's important to do the beautiful thing and to create the art and to show reality as it is, which is not always beautiful.
But that's where the purpose of it really matters.
And it has to go story by story.
And Game of Thrones, I don't even care for it particularly because But that's an artistic show.
There is quite a lot of art there, so I'd do it in a second.
If you're watching casting directors, give me a call.
I'm here for you.
Okay, next question.
Oh, that's the last question.
Okay, great.
So we're going to end on, yes, I will be naked on camera.
I can't wait to do it.
Give me a call.
That is our entire show.
I hope that you survive the weekend.
Speaking of the Clavenless weekend, the penultimate episode of Another Kingdom comes out Tomorrow morning, Friday.
So tune in for that.
Things are wrapping up.
It's a lot of fun.
Things are coming together.
And please send it to your friends.
It really, really pleases me and makes me so happy when we can stick a fork right in Hollywood's eye.
So please, please go over and do that.
Download it wherever.
Good narrative fantasy podcasts about schlubs in Hollywood who make it into another universe with bloody daggers and dead damsels.
Wherever those are downloaded, you can get Andrew Klavan's Another Kingdom, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Have a good weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
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.
