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Feb. 13, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
38:59
Ep. 104 - The Republican-American Heritage of Anti Racism

Jeff Sessions makes an innocuous, true statement, so the left lost its mind. Michael will analyze why everything now is racist. Plus Teddy Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Galileo, and Saint Valentine on This Day In History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That racist, horrible monster, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said a perfectly innocuous thing that people don't understand.
So he's a terrible racist.
We will analyze all of the hubbub and why everything now, every single thing that you can possibly utter, Is racist, probably even what I just said.
And then we have a very special This Day in History today.
We are going to talk about Galileo.
We are going to talk about St.
Valentine.
And speaking of racism and race relations, we are going to talk not just about the Anglo-American history of law enforcement and the sheriff's office, but the Republican American history of anti-racism with Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
You might notice that I am not in my usual digs today.
I am in this library of books and an office.
I kind of feel like Tai Lopez.
You know, I'm here with all my books.
So I am right now, I'm in Palm Beach.
I am a stone's throw from the president's winter White House, Mar-a-Lago.
I have spoken to many people today who regularly see the president down here.
It's very nice.
I was invited down to speak at the Kuder Institute by Dale Kuder, and I'll be here with Ramesh Panaru and Mike Frank from the Hoover Institution.
just wrote a wonderful biography about Bill Buckley.
We will be talking tonight about the future of conservatism in the age of Trump.
I think I may be one of the few defenders of our great leader, Armando Mussolini.
So we'll tell you more about that tomorrow.
Maybe we'll try to get a video up as well.
We have a lot to talk about today.
This Jeff Sessions story is so outrageous.
It gets to so much of what we talk about on this show, about the light education of our self-appointed elites and the ridiculous abuse of the English language.
And we've got to talk about all of that except providentially.
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That's Mar-a-Lago.
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Now we've got to get back to that racist Jeff Sessions.
I don't even know if I can say it.
I don't even know if I can say such a hateful statement that Jeff Sessions made.
Let's let him say it himself.
The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.
We must never erode this historic office.
The Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement?
This is what we've been seeing for years.
This is what Ferguson was about.
The racist law enforcement is made for the white man to defend the...
Oh, no, that's not what it means at all.
Brie Newsome, a professional activist...
She tweeted this out.
She put the shocked eyes next to it.
Anglo-American heritage of, oh my goodness gracious, Twitter lost its mind.
Matthew Iglesias, who more than anybody, he's one of the writers at Vox.com, more than anybody, I think, or at least as much as anybody, this guy has contributed to the dumbing down of public discourse.
Matt Iglesias tweeted out, he said, Sessions could have avoided a lot of trouble this morning by either saying common law instead of Anglo-American or not having a long record in public life as a racist.
He's a racist.
Matt Iglesias, by the way, he's the guy when Andrew Breitbart died and left four children and a wife at the age of 43.
He tweeted out that the world is a better place because Andrew Breitbart is dead.
That's the kind of person he is.
So he tweeted that out and he used this term common law.
What exactly did Jeff Sessions say?
So he said that the sheriff is evidence and an important part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.
So let's just take a step back.
Let's just go to the wiki page for sheriff.
What is a sheriff?
We all know sheriffs.
We have the local sheriff in town.
A sheriff is a government official, according to Wikipedia, with varying duties existing in some countries with historical ties to England, where the office originated.
That's it.
That's what a sheriff is.
Sheriff is an officer initially responsible for the shire or county, the shire-iff, sheriff.
They're usually elected officials.
So these are great in local elections.
You always see the sheriffs come out, but they don't have them everywhere in the world.
They don't have sheriffs in Italy.
They don't have sheriffs in France.
They don't have sheriffs in places that don't have an Anglo heritage, such as our Anglo-American legal tradition.
The full text of what he said, he said, I want to thank every sheriff in America since our founding.
The independently elected sheriff has been the people's protector who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process.
And this is an important aspect of the office.
Why do we have a sheriff?
Why don't we just have a super captain of police?
Why don't we have just higher ranking police officers?
Well, we have plenty of ranks of police officers.
But the police work for the government.
They're not directly accountable to the people.
But in our common English tradition, we have more accountability to the people.
So there's someone who is a legal officer who's over law enforcement who is elected by us.
And if law enforcement isn't doing a good job by us, we can throw that sheriff out.
This is why it is so disingenuous for people like Bree Newsome or Matthew Iglesias or all of these other people.
People who never even Googled the phrase and never even looked on the Wikipedia, for goodness sake, before they drew their crazy conclusions.
All those people who are complaining that law enforcement is harsh on citizens or the police are being brutal or they're targeting certain citizens or others, they should love the sheriff.
They should applaud Jeff Sessions and say, yes, we need more sheriffs, Jeff Sessions.
We need more civilian oversight and more democratic accountability for that office.
But of course they don't do that because Jeff Sessions is a mean old racist.
Never mind that Jeff Sessions executed the head of the KKK in Alabama.
Jeff Sessions is responsible for the death by the civil authority of the head of the KKK in Alabama.
Forget that.
He's a racist.
Why is he a racist?
Well, because he's got a southern accent and he works for Donald Trump.
And that is enough.
It is such a glib reaction.
The Anglo-American law, another term for that is the common law.
We hear this all the time.
Actually, so if you Google Anglo-American law on Google Scholar, half a million results come up.
About half a million results just in scholarly papers.
This is obviously a widely accepted term throughout case law.
But in 2016, actually, an Obama-era DOJ official, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer, he referred to the Anglo-American common law during a speech in Beijing.
That was an Obama-era appointment.
But of course, you won't hear about that.
It's because there's just this reflex now to call people racist, and it's why the term has lost meaning.
And it's really – they can't just use this with immunity.
We were talking a little bit yesterday about how you can't stretch these bounds indefinitely, infinitely.
There is a point at which they break.
And here's the threat to that side.
Look, if somebody calls a Republican a racist, that goes without saying.
Ann Coulter once told me when a liberal calls you a racist, you know you've won the argument.
If a lefty calls a conservative a racist, well, it doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't say anything about your character.
That's just the tactic they use.
But there are racists.
There are racists in the world.
There are people who judge others primarily based on the color of their skin.
And that's not good.
That has no place in a civilization that comes out of Christianity.
It doesn't make any sense in this civilization.
But the more that the left maligns conservatives as racists...
I guess this is the system we're in.
Pennywise, but pound foolish.
In the short term, they might get some electoral bonus points out of it.
But in the long term, it is going to really undercut their argument.
It could lead to some nasty things.
Because if every right winger is a racist, then Richard Spencer is just the same as anybody else.
If every right winger is a racist, then David Duke is just the same as everybody else.
But they're not.
They have different premises.
They have different policy goals.
They do different things in politics and culture.
A really, really bad idea to conflate those two things.
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Okay, let's move on.
So there are a few other things.
You know, now everything is called racist.
That's just the easy word to throw around.
And there were even more ridiculous things than this.
Some of the other things in recent years, hoop earrings apparently are now racist.
Some Vice magazine writer named Ruby Pivot said that only Hispanics are allowed to wear hoop earrings.
They're part of the Hispanic culture, and if you wear hoop earrings, you're culturally appropriating, which in itself doesn't really make any sense because if you don't do it, then you're excluding the culture.
But if you do do it, then you're appropriating the culture, so you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
It's also historically illiterate, just like the reaction to Jeff Sessions' comment.
Ancient Egyptians wore hoop earrings.
Hoop earrings have been around for a very long time.
The Hispanic race has only been around for 500 years.
The Hispanic race was invented by Christopher Columbus.
It began with Christopher Columbus because of the connection between the old world, Spain, and the new people, the indigenous people of the new world coming together, and it created a race of Latinos.
So the ancient Egyptians came before them.
Hoop earrings have been around a lot longer than 500 years.
But now that's racist.
The movie Dunkirk, I kid you not, the USA Today reviewer Brian Truitt said that viewers may find it troubling that the lead characters of Dunkirk were all white.
There were white men.
There were white men too.
So the lead characters of a movie about a specific battle, a military battle where British soldiers fought off Nazi soldiers, the lead characters were all white men.
And What's racist about that, of course, is that British men are British men.
That's the trouble.
That's what's now racist.
History is racist.
Did you know that?
So this is really – obviously, there are some political and moral and cultural hazards here, but it's also – you just look so foolish when you say these things.
I can't believe that the left doesn't hesitate when they say these things now because it's so demonstrably false when they say them.
You can just Google Anglo-American heritage and you come up with these things.
Everybody should take a break.
When you have a strong impulse in politics, you have a real passion and you're really, really angry, nine times out of ten that's going to be evidence that you don't really know that much.
You don't have all the facts before you.
The people who are screaming and red in the face and wearing the pussy hats and all of that, those aren't the people that really know the political issues in the historical context.
Usually it's the people who are a little calmer, who are speaking a little more calmly and eloquently.
And generally, those guys know a little bit more about what they're thinking.
So maybe a lesson in political humility, because political tribalism has replaced all other divisions among society.
It is now preeminent.
Now, whenever you're about to yell something from the rooftop, maybe a lesson in political humility that we can pass on to our friends is just take a step, step back, search for the thing, maybe crack the spine of a book, heaven forfend, and see if you're right.
Maybe say, oh, maybe that person has something to teach me.
Maybe the attorney general knows a little bit more about legal history than I, some dude, knows about legal history.
That humility, if we had just one extra ounce of humility in our politics, I think all of this rancor and division would be dramatically diminished.
Speaking of rancor and division, I want to touch on this.
We have a lot of this day in history to get to.
I do want to touch very quickly.
The New York Times is now officially drawing moral equivalence between the United States and North Korea.
The New York Times reported on the Olympics.
Vice President Mike Pence, who was leading the American delegation to the Olympics, warned that the North was trying to hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games with its propaganda, they use the quotes, not me, and a charm offensive.
Mr.
Pence mounted a counter-propaganda campaign of sorts, meeting defectors from North Korea and bringing with him the father of Otto F. Warmbier, an American University student who died last year, shortly after he was released, from months of detention in the North.
But his efforts did little to stop the hoopla over Ms.
Kim.
So you see what they did.
There's the propaganda offensive from North Korea, and then there's the counter-propaganda.
And that's just it.
There's just propaganda, counter-propaganda, just what he said, what she said.
And, you know, look, so she goes and she pretends that she doesn't enslave hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps and starve millions of people in her own country.
And Mike Pence goes with the father of an American student who was murdered by that regime.
It's, you know, it's just this one and this one.
It's not...
Who can say who's right?
It's just what he said and what she said.
It's so disgusting.
It has been doing things like this for a very long time.
This is particularly egregious, and we should not hesitate for one moment to rake them over the coals for this.
It's really, really disgusting.
Imagine being the father of Otto Warmbier.
Imagine being that guy and reading in what was once the major newspaper in your country that you are – yeah, you're basically – you're our propaganda, and they have their propaganda.
It's so – So gross.
Okay, I guess that's why Andrew Klavan calls him a former newspaper.
Let's get to This Day in History.
This Day in History.
On this day in history in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech on race at the New York Republican Club.
And the whole tenor of the speech was on race relations.
He had just won his second term.
He was elected the first time in 1901.
Then he entered his second term in 1905.
And he gave the speech in honor of Abraham Lincoln around Lincoln's birthday.
And it's really fitting because everyone is having this hullabaloo over Jeff Sessions' allegedly racist comments that were not racist at all.
Teddy Roosevelt gave a really beautiful speech.
He started quoting Abraham Lincoln's magnanimity upon re-election, and then he quoted—this is Roosevelt— Surely, this is the spirit which all Americans should show now, when there is so little excuse for malice or rancor or hatred, when there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother from brother.
He went on, we of today, in dealing with all our fellow citizens, white or colored, north or south, should strive to show just the qualities that Lincoln showed.
his steadfastness and striving after the right, and his infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right less clearly than he did, his earnest endeavor to do what was best, and yet his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable, his unceasing effort to cure what and yet his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable, his unceasing effort to cure what was evil, coupled with his refusal to make a
This is so profoundly applicable to today, people, especially on the right, sometimes criticize Teddy Roosevelt for not being a real conservative.
He liked the environment a lot, and he called himself a progressive, even though that term was quite different than how we use it today.
But what he just explained is a profound conservatism.
Especially that last line of the first part, there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother from brother.
Today there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother from brother.
We live in the most prosperous time in the history of the world.
There is so little true social inequality, insurmountable social inequality that can't be fixed by going to school and working hard.
There is so little health inequality.
Everyone is living so much longer now.
We do have universal healthcare in this country, regardless of what the lefties say.
We don't have socialized medicine, thankfully, but anyone who goes to a hospital will be treated.
There is so little to divide us that we make up this petty nonsense.
We're not fighting major wars anymore.
There's no military draft.
There are no major religious wars in the United States.
There's just a malaise of secular humanism, a malaise of atheist decadence.
That is not sufficient.
So Roosevelt is talking about this moment, looking back on the Civil War.
We can look back on the early 20th century and say, We have it so much better now but he makes the point to not be utopian to not be rationalist about these things You know, Lincoln had this earnest endeavor to do what was best, but he had the readiness to do the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable.
He wouldn't make a situation worse by trying to do the best.
He would deal in reality.
That's so beautiful.
And a lot of the speech is about the betterment of black people and white people.
These days, that would be called racist, just like everything is called racist these days.
But it was really beautiful what Roosevelt is saying.
Is that black people are socially unequal at this moment because they've been excluded from society.
They've been enslaved.
They've been denied education.
They've been denied human dignity.
They've been denied liberty.
Of course, they're unequal.
How on earth could they possibly be equal in a social measure after all of that, just coming out of all of that?
But the point he was making is that our fortunes are intertwined together if...
We fail in this endeavor to raise up people that have been excluded from society and to involve them in society.
All races will fail.
All people in this society will fail.
And if we succeed in that, all races will be bettered.
He was really good on this point on race from early on in 1901, right at the beginning of his first term.
He became the first president who invited a black person to a meal at the White House.
Black people had been invited to meetings at the White House before that, but meetings are just business.
Black people built the White House.
Black people had a business relationship.
Black slaves had a business relationship with their slave masters from the early days of this country.
But they didn't have social equality.
And a meal at the White House implied social equality.
That's why this was such a big moment.
He invited Booker T. Washington.
We could do a whole episode on Booker T. Washington, one of the great men of his century.
But it took political courage because segregation was the law of the land.
Washington and Roosevelt had become fairly close.
They corresponded.
And this was Booker T. Washington was a former slave.
And he had dinner with the President of the United States.
But Teddy Roosevelt did it because he was fairly impulsive.
Historians say he was given to impulse.
And so he just decided he was going to invite this guy to dinner and he hesitated because he realized what the fallout would be from society to him and also against Booker T. Washington.
And then he was ashamed that he felt the hesitation and he sent the invitation.
And when Booker T. Washington received the invitation, he felt dread and hesitation because he knew what the consequences would be.
But he knew that he was being called on for this major moment in history and he did it.
And he said, I don't know, I don't know.
He said, I don't know.
But that impulsiveness and that not caring about shaking up tradition, which might remind us of some people in the Oval Office today, this is what made this moment happen.
And the selection of Booker T. Washington is even so beautiful.
This is one of the great men.
He created the Atlanta Compromise in 1895.
The agreement of the Atlanta Compromise was that for the time, Southern Blacks would consent to white political rule in the South as long as Southern whites guaranteed Blacks education and due process.
Oh, that doesn't sound pretty.
That's wrong.
It is wrong.
Obviously, it's wrong to consent to that.
And so the utopians ultimately excoriated him for this.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a more utopian and left-wing black rights activist, initially liked the Atlantic Compromise, and then it wasn't good enough for him.
But Booker T. Washington dealt in reality.
And dealing in reality is not a bad thing.
It's not morally icky to deal in reality.
It's really the only courageous choice, because if we just deal in the clouds, we might feel pure and morally pure, but we won't do anything, and we might actually make a bad situation worse.
So the selection of Washington is so beautiful, and this shows the Republican history.
Very often, you'll hear people say, oh, well, the party's switched, and no, he wasn't a real Republican, and this and that, and this and that.
Nonsense.
sense.
The Republican Party, since it was found, the Republican Party was founded in opposition to slavery, but since the beginning, it has stood for human dignity and ordered liberty.
You can trace that conservative tradition through all its meanderings, from Edmund Burke all the way up to Bill Buckley and wherever we are now.
You can trace that thread through human dignity and ordered liberty.
And it's a lovely moment that happened on this day in history when Teddy Roosevelt gave that speech.
I probably have to say goodbye.
I'm sorry.
I have to say goodbye.
We have so much more to get to, though.
We have my favorite subject, one of my favorite subjects, which is why Galileo was a big jerk and the church was right and they should never have apologized to him.
And we'll also close talking about St.
Valentine.
But I'm sorry.
If you're watching this on Facebook, I've got to say goodbye.
If you're watching this on YouTube, you're a liar because they probably aren't letting me stream to YouTube anymore.
I think they're censoring every word that comes out of my mouth, me and every other conservative.
So if you're on Facebook, go to dailywire.com right now.
If you go to dailywire.com, what do you get?
You get me, the Andrew Klavan Show, the Ben Shapiro Show.
You get the conversation.
You get to ask questions, and my conversation is up, and it's up tomorrow at 5 p.m.
Eastern, 2 p.m.
Pacific.
So check it out then.
You can ask me anything.
The love doctor is in the house, baby.
Ask me any question and I'll probably ruin your relationship, but take it for what it's worth.
You'll get to ask questions.
Everybody can watch.
Few can ask questions.
Many are called, but few are chosen.
None of that matters.
What really matters is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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There's a lot more coming down the road, a lot more success out of this administration, the advancement of a conservative agenda.
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We'll be right back.
Moving right along on this day in history, This is a really good day in history.
I'm glad.
We were going to move this show, but there were too many this days in history to do, so I'm sorry we have to do it today, even if we're in, like, the bunker here.
So on this day in history, in 1633, Galileo was called to Rome for questioning.
Galileo was called to Rome.
Terrible Catholics who hated science, the anti-science.
He was just trying to show them the light, and that awful anti-progressive Catholic church shut him down.
Thank goodness we had the Reformation so that we could have some science and enlightenment and whatever nonsense people say.
None of that is true, and Galileo was a big jerk, and he should have been punished more harshly.
That's basically what you should take away from this, with the first charge.
The church is not anti-science.
It's not anti-science now.
It was not anti-science then.
and it never has been anti-science.
During Galileo's time itself, Jesuits ran plenty of scientific endeavors in Rome.
From the early Middle Ages, Bishop Isidore of Seville wrote the Encyclopedia of Natural Knowledge.
Bede of Gero, same thing.
Alcuin of York advised Charlemagne on scientific matters.
Rabinus Maurus, the Archbishop of Mainz, was one of the most prominent scientists of the Carolingian Age.
In the later Middle Ages, the Catholic Church founded the university system.
So really, all of the categorized science, all of the institutionalized science, comes from the Catholic Church.
The Chartres Cathedral School, University of Bologna, University of Paris, Oxford, Salerno, Vicenza, Cambridge, Salamanca, Naples, Padova, it goes on and on and on.
Those were all founded by Catholics.
Georgius Agricola, Georgius Agricola, was the founder of geology, was devoted Catholic.
Nicholas Steno, anatomical scientist and geologist, devoted Catholic.
On astronomy, the church founded the modern calendar.
So we're saying, well, maybe they were good on geology, but they were nuts about the sky.
They just believed in silly myths about the sky.
Not true.
They actually founded the modern calendar because the old Julian calendar didn't match up with astronomical reality, so they started the Gregorian calendar.
Even Copernicus.
So Copernicus was the first guy to propose the heliocentric view of the universe, that the sun is in the center of the solar system and the earth revolves around the sun.
And the same thing that Galileo was talking about.
So Copernicus must have been burned at the stake, wasn't he?
He was tortured, just like Galileo was Allegedly tortured, but he wasn't.
No, that's not true at all.
When Copernicus presented his theories, Pope Clement VII was quite interested in them and received them warmly.
Copernicus actually dedicated his major work to Pope Paul III. Ironically, Martin Luther appears to have made a big deal about rejecting that theory before Catholics did, and his followers, the Lutherans, rejected that model.
Kepler expanded on Copernicus' work.
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
But the evidence at the time came all the way back from Aristotle, who made this point.
If the sun is at the center, then there should be observable parallax shifts in stars' positions.
But the technology at the time, including Galileo's technology, couldn't measure those shifts.
So there actually was plenty of good scientific evidence against the sun being at the center.
Obviously, now we have much more sophisticated equipment, so we can see that that isn't true.
St.
Augustine, by the way, gives great evidence There's ample evidence that the Catholic Church has never stood in the way of science because he liked to observe that the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
He wrote, one does not read in scripture.
I will send you the paraclete who will teach you the course of the sun and the moon, right?
He doesn't teach us about that.
He teaches you how to be a Christian, not how to be a mathematician or an astronomer.
Some within the church at the time of Galileo, admittedly, insisted on too literal an interpretation of scripture.
But that persists throughout the world today, not predominantly among Catholics, but among other denominations.
We hear of Bible literalists, Bible churches, or, you know, the Bible is literal.
But even this, I don't mean to mock those points of view.
It's a subtle and difficult point because literally, the word literally means not symbolically, right?
It's not simply, it's literally, except that the word literally is referring to letters, which are symbols.
So even in literally, you get a A difficult image with which to view the relation of the symbol to the symbolized.
More on that later.
Even with all of this, Pope Urban III allowed Galileo to publish arguments for his theory.
He just said, do not advocate the new position too forcefully, but you can publish all of your arguments and all of your evidence if you like.
like.
Galileo, being a jerk, put those words into the character Simplicio in his dialogue on the two world systems.
Galileo, being a jerk, put those words into the character Simplicio in his dialogue on the two world systems.
So he's basically calling the clergy, he's calling the great high ups in the clergy idiots in his dialogue because Galileo is a jerk.
So he's basically calling the clergy, he's calling the great high ups in the clergy idiots.
So not only does he not do, he does the one thing that he was told not to do, he could publish whatever he wants, but he also alienated all of his advocates in the church so they couldn't support him anymore.
Now, he wasn't tortured.
While the Protestants in New England were busy burning witches at the stake, the Catholics were very nice to Galileo.
He was imprisoned in his very nice home.
He had a servant.
He had everything he could ever want to do scientific experiments.
And then in 1992, for some reason, the Vatican apologized for its treatment of Galileo, which it certainly shouldn't have done.
It didn't really do anything wrong.
Galileo was a big jerk.
Sometimes you got to smack big jerks around and make them stay in their nice house.
And also he wasn't entirely right.
Galileo said that the sun was in the center of the universe, but obviously that isn't the case.
The universe is much larger than we thought it was.
So even looking back on Galileo, it's not like he got it perfectly right either.
Okay, that's enough of my lambasting Galileo.
One last bit I want to leave you on before we hop out of here.
I want to leave you with a little bit of love.
Here's the love doctor.
On to Saint Valentine's Day.
So people ask, what is Saint Valentine's Day about?
Who is Saint Valentine?
What do we know about him?
How did we get from Saint Valentine to giving each other chocolates?
Saint Valentine is apparently an early Christian martyr, had his head chopped off and suffered all manner of torture.
So how do we get from that to giving each other nice candy hearts and flowers and things?
A lot of this does date back to ancient Roman festivals.
So Sometimes people criticize the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church and some of the high Protestant churches for indulging in pagan rituals, you know.
Christmas trees or whatever, celebrating Christmas in December when Christ might have been born in the spring or something like that.
But the church for thousands of years now has made it a cause to take pagan things that were popular and then baptize them into Christianity, which seems fine by me.
That's really the mission of the church, right, is to baptize the whole world, not just, you know, among Jews in first century Palestine, but to all peoples for all times.
So, there was an ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, which was observed from February 13th to February 15th.
It involved cleansing rituals.
It was a festival of fertility.
Sounds like a lot of fun.
Pope Galatius I abolished this at the end of the 5th century.
Sad.
But it's easy to abolish these things.
It's harder to stamp out the rituals, especially when fertility is concerned.
So, the first link between Valentine's Day...
And St.
Valentine, these rituals that came out of Lupercalia and St.
Valentine, was from Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales, and he noted it in relation to the marriage of Richard II and his wife.
Chaucer wrote, for this was on St.
Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.
You know what those birds get up to, those birds and those bees.
So current scholarship suggests that Chaucer actually might have had a different St.
Valentine in mind.
We don't know anything about St.
Valentine really other than he was a martyr who died for Christ.
But we know so little about the guy.
All we know is that he was a A Christian martyr who died for his faith.
But he actually had to be removed from the Catholic calendar because we don't know anything else about him.
That is fine.
We've made it through all of this history, and now clearly the whole holiday has been imbued with the romance and the eros that it had from ancient days.
And so maybe give a nod to those Christian martyrs and think about, as you indulge in romantic love, It's not like the church or St.
Valentine or our civilization says that romantic love is bad or erotic love is bad.
It isn't.
But there is a higher love and there is the love of God.
No greater love has a man than to die for his brothers, for his friends.
So maybe as you get a little saucy on Valentine's Day...
Consider all the variations of love and how the love that we feel for one another and our romantic partners is lovely in itself and an evidence of higher love, which might be even more pleasing, though that's hard to believe.
Okay, that's our show for today.
I will see you for the conversation.
make sure to come on the show at 5:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 PM Pacific and ask some questions.
And otherwise I will see you then unless something happens midair, but let's knock on wood that that won't happen.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
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.
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