Ep. 114 - The Legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. ft. Al Felzenberg
We’re joined today for the full half hour by Professor Alvin Felzenberg. Professor Felzenberg is the author of “A Man And His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. We will discuss the founder of the modern conservative movement 10 years after his death, what WFB might have thought of President Covfefe one year in, and what the conservatives of today can learn from our forebears. And if he won’t talk about all that, I’ll smash him in his damn face, and he’ll stay plastered…then, the Mailbag!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
We're joined today for the full half hour by Professor Alvin Felsenberg.
Professor Felsenberg is the author of A Man and His Presidents, the political odyssey of William F. Buckley, Jr.
We will discuss the founder of the modern conservative movement ten years after his death, what WFB might have thought of President Covfefe, One year in, and what the conservatives of today can learn from our forebears.
And if Professor Felsenberg won't talk about all that, I'll smash him in his damn face and he'll stay plastered.
Then the mailbag.
I'm Michael J. Knowles, Sr., and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
You know, later on we're going to get Ben in here to play Michael Kinsley, and I am going to see, as is true to form for this show, I'm going to see how narrow I can make my references until not a single person is with me anymore.
Until it's just to amuse myself, which is really what this show is for.
Anyway, we have a wonderful guest today to talk about Bill Buckley, 10 years after his death.
But before we talk about that, we have to talk about a new sponsor to help keep the lights on in this place, and a really cool app at that.
This is Housecall Pro.
Housecall Pro is a really great service if you have a service business.
So do you have a service business?
For instance, my uncle does hardwood floors.
He'll buff hardwood floors and work on that.
And it's a service business and it gets very confusing when you've got to deal with clients and you're really doing it on your own.
You've got a mobile office.
You've got to work on your phone.
Are you still using pen and paper to run your service business?
Are you constantly chasing down payments from your customers?
Or you're probably the ones being chased down for the payments, if I know my audience well.
But have you maybe missed out on a job because you were away from your phone?
In a mobile-centric world, wouldn't it be amazing to handle all of your business from your phone and also have access to your customer history no matter where you are?
So you're driving in between places.
You don't have to worry about going back to your files or your computer or whatever.
If you have a service business, you have got to use Housecall Pro.
Housecall Pro is really good.
I know a lot of people in my family or people who are friends of mine who have service businesses.
And even for my own political consulting shop, it's really important because I've got this little political consulting shop in New York, and we don't have giant offices or anything like that.
A lot of it is on the move.
We're in different places.
Housecall Pro makes things very, very easy.
It is designed for any service business, anything from political consulting down to any service business that you can imagine.
There's an easy-to-use app.
You can run your business on the go.
There are happy customers every single time.
And that will give you more time with your family, more time doing the things you love, less time being bogged down with paperwork.
And just a lot of times, the wasted time that you spend is just trying to figure out, oh, I was supposed to do that.
I have to contact this person.
Did I send that invoice?
Let me look back through my records and see.
Forget all that.
It's the 21st century.
It's 2018.
Let technology do it for you.
Let Housecall Pro do it for you.
This was voted the number one software to run your business.
It saves time.
It organizes your business for you.
Any service business.
If you do plumbing, carpet cleaning, hardwood floors, HVAC, electricians, yard maintenance, anything, this can really help you out.
It'll do scheduling, dispatching.
It will send customers text updates through the entire process.
So you booked an appointment with Johnny.
Johnny is on his way.
They keep them in the loop all the time.
Online booking, you can connect it to a lot of services that you already use, Websites, Yelp, Facebook, marketing emails and postcards.
It invoices, gives estimates through the app, payment processing.
It's beginning to end.
You can run your business through Housecall Pro.
If you're ready to get your service business organized and streamlined with your customers, go to housecallpro.com slash covfefe.
See C-O-V-F-E-F-E. Tell them that The Michael Knowles Show sent you, and they will waive your $99 activation fee.
Don't say, I never did anything for you.
Save $100 by telling them that The Michael Knowles Show sent you.
Go to housecallpro.com slash cofefe.
C-O-V-F-E-F-E. Let's get right into it.
We have a lot to talk about with Professor Felsenberg.
I'm joined by Al Felsenberg, who has worn many hats in his long career in politics.
Al has served as the Principal Spokesman for the 9-11 Commission, Director of the Communications for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, Special Assistant and Advisor to the National Broadcasting Board of Governors, Consultant to the Secretary of the Navy, Director of Community Outreach and Public Liaison for the office of the Secretary in Defense Department during the George Bush II administration.
Assistant Secretary of State of New Jersey under Governor Tom Keene.
Fellow at the Institute of Politics at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
As well as teaching positions at UPenn, GW, and Yale where Al helped to found the William F. Buckley program and also was my professor.
He is the author of several books, most recently his biography of William F. Buckley Jr., which we will be discussing today.
Professor Velsenberg, thank you for being here.
Hey Michael, it's a pleasure to be with you.
So, to begin, let's begin at the very beginning.
Buckley's siblings burned a cross outside of a Jewish resort in Sharon, Connecticut in 1937.
Little Bill, then 11 years old, quote his own words, wept tears of frustration because he was too young to join them.
Buckley then famously purged the conservative movement that he helped to create of the kooks and the bigots and the racists and the anti-Semites around the time he graduated college.
How did Buckley make that journey in just a little over a decade?
Well, this was a very different era, rather, the 1930s.
Jews were not welcome in various communities.
Blacks were not welcome in many communities.
Other groups were not welcome.
Bill said that he didn't think that anti-Semitism was a congenital disease, but his father did suffer from it.
And he said, as he got older, he began to think for himself.
He began to change many of his views.
Part of it was the army, where the sheltered wealthy young man from Sharon, Connecticut, who had private tutors and many servants and all the rest, had met people from different walks of life for the first time.
It was a bit of a culture shock.
Jews from Brooklyn and Poles and Ukrainians from Chicago and African-American field hands and all sorts of people that he hadn't spent any time with.
And then, of course, he experienced the Holocaust.
Eisenhower, when troops were released from service at the end of the war, insisted on showing footage of the American forces liberating the camps.
They saw the wreckage that Nazis had brought.
They saw the conditions that some of the survivors were in, who were spared.
And of course, all the deaths and costs.
He started thinking about it.
At Yale, he had a roommate named Ginzburg.
And you may know the fencing or the fence club, I think it's called.
I do, yeah.
In a rather prominent Bill was clearly the one they most wanted.
He was the man on campus.
He was the chairman of the Yale Daily News, the champion of the winning Yale Debate Club, and the sense the society really wanted him.
And then he won Ginsburg because at that time they didn't take Jews.
Yale had a restrictive quota on the number of Jews that would accept.
A generation earlier had a similar quota on Catholics.
And Bill said, okay, happy to join the club.
I come with Ginsburg, not at all.
And, of course, they both attended, or both were admitted.
A year later, when Skull and Bones was having its final competition, what have you, both men received an invitation.
Skull and Bones learned from the fenced group, and Ginsburg, to my knowledge, became the first Jewish member.
Of Skull and Bones.
So it was a long journey.
Not that many years, but it was a great deal of self-searching.
Of course.
And now fast-forwarding.
I would like to hop back and forth a little bit, because one thing I love about your book so much is you include a lot of lines that come out of Buckley's papers, Buckley's letters, a lot of correspondence that we haven't seen.
It is no overstatement to say this is by far the most thorough biography of Buckley out there, and certainly everyone should read it.
Let's tackle the 239-pound gorilla in the room, rather.
When Donald Trump nearly ran for president in 2000 as basically a left-wing candidate pushing late-term abortion and gun control among other issues on the Reform Party line, Buckley called him a narcissist and cautioned readers to avoid him.
Eighteen years later, the Heritage Foundation says that Trump is affecting their conservative agenda at a faster rate than even Ronald Reagan.
Buckley called for tablet keepers, conservative elites, to guide American politics to the right.
And he also said that average Americans are far wiser than their leaders or their intellectuals.
Here's the quote from Buckley.
As Franklin Adams once said, I think the average American is a little bit above average.
And under the circumstances, I rejoice over the influence of the people, over their elected leaders, since by and large, I think that they show more wisdom than their leaders or than their intellectuals.
I've often been quoted as saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.
Professor Felsenberg was Buckley schizophrenic.
How do we reconcile these apparent contradictions?
Well, quite easily.
He started out his career very concerned That a liberal elite was taking America down the wrong path.
And that was a path toward moral equivalency between the United States and Soviet Union.
He thought the Soviets were playing for keeps.
He thought all the situational ethics that were creeping into university curricula were weakening our fiber.
And he did think that we were stressing American greatness and American symbols quite well.
But he had also written as a young man that He had seen not the evil effects of what we call populism, but the effects of the mob.
The effects of a mob manipulated by a demagogue who didn't seem to have any ideology except crowd-pleasing and rabble-rousing.
He said he had seen this as a boy watching newsrails on the Saturday matinees.
And he had seen the Nuremberg rallies, and he had seen Mussolini, and he had seen several others.
And he said, There was something about the mob that bothered him, the guttural style of Mussolini and Hitler and others, and the finding of the scapegoats and the finding of the enemies and all of that.
He shuddered at that.
In his own time, he actually called George Wallace, governor of Alabama, at that point at a bad segregationist, who was saying the student radicals sat in front of his car.
It'd be the last time they'd walk again, that kind of thing.
And attacked pointy-headed bureaucrats and all of that.
He called Wallace a phony conservative, a false populist.
He said Wallace claimed to be a conservative, claimed not to want Washington interference, but he took money from the federal government for roads, for hospitals, for schools, for welfare, for everything.
Sixty percent of the Alabama budget came from Washington.
Wallace just didn't want blacks to receive any of the benefits.
And Buckley said he didn't want a program that was full of benefits and entitlements, but if you're going to have them, he didn't want any racial tests.
He ended up by saying, all right, we have to go to the broader mass of the public.
They are smarter than most of the politicians.
I think that's still true.
I think I can prove that to you.
I mean, I still think that statement can be proved empirically.
But to guard against the mob and the fears that he had, he wanted a conservative elite.
And, you know, if you're going to excommunicate people from a church or a movement, you need a curia to do it.
And he went after many people.
He went after Ayn Rand, certainly, not because of her libertarianism, but he thought she'd confuse libertarianism with libertinism.
And there are values.
He also didn't like her atheism.
And he said she was basically a mirror of Marxism, where they were atheists, too.
And his most famous site was with the John Birch Society that had peddled conspiracy theories.
The most famous, of course, was Robert Welch, who was the leader of the Birch Society, most famous of which was Welch's assertion that the American government was in the hands of Moscow, and no lesser light than Dwight Eisenhower, president of the United States, was a conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy.
That was too much for Buckley.
He said that all movements are defined by their opponents, by their weakest link in the chain.
He thought that was a pretty weak link.
He found quite a backlash.
He lost readers, he lost subscribers, he lost donors, he lost speaking invitations.
But he toughed it out.
And he once said that that was the proudest achievement of his life and his greatest legacy.
So you need a conservative elite, which he called the Tablet Keeper, to decide what was in the realm of responsible conservative opinion.
That's where he ended up.
I wonder in that evolution, because we know many friends and associates of Buckley, you more than I, I suspect.
I've asked some of them their thoughts on Trump, on this moment, and what they thought Buckley's thoughts would be on Trump or on this populism, and they seem to split.
I then asked a friend of ours at the Manhattan Institute, and he said he thought that the 27-year-old Buckley, the polemicist, the defender of Joe McCarthy, he might have liked Trump.
And the 60-year-old Buckley, the more mellow Buckley, the no longer defending Joe McCarthy, would almost certainly not have liked Trump.
How did Buckley's views and attitude Not just the racism and the anti-Semitism of his family and his youth.
How did his views, even on conservatism, on the conservative movement and politics, change over the course of his five decades in national politics?
Well, he changed his views on anti-Semitism, which we talked about.
He changed his views on isolationism.
His parents supported the old America First movement, which is a name of which gives some people every 60 years.
Moments to pause when you talk about America first.
That was a movement Charles Lindbergh headed to stop America from helping Britain in its hour of need.
Some of your listeners may have seen the movie Darkest Hour.
And there's a scene where Franklin Roosevelt says that he couldn't help him because Lindbergh was the most popular person in the country.
And some people thought he'd run for president.
Changed his view on that.
Changed his view on segregation.
He was on both sides.
A son of very proud Southerners.
Several of his grandparents were on the Confederate side and other forebears.
But he came to change that when he saw that the genteel Southerners he knew were being replaced by the virulent-type revelbators, people like Wallace.
Well, I would put it this way.
McCarthy was a cause.
McCarthy, one of Buckley's contemporaries, said that McCarthy was doing the right thing in the wrong way.
Buckley agreed with that.
His book on McCarthy came out before McCarthy went haywire, attacked the US Army, and a lot of other things happened.
But what you're asking me, I'll just confront this right on.
I mean, the man was always the epitome of civility.
The man was always trying to get to the higher plane.
The man who Man who introduced Brideshead Revisited to American audiences on public television would have a lot to say about Donald Trump.
And you yourself said there is a 300-pound gorilla in the room.
I won't call him that.
239.
239 pounds.
Is that what he says he weighs?
Okay, 239.
Whatever he says, he weighs.
Buckley did not stir up the crowd.
Buckley did not have too many scapegoats that I remember.
Or as he said about the liberals that he debated, they were misguided, and he wanted to persuade them.
There's no persuasion going on right now.
There's a politics on the part of Trump and honest enemies of mobilizing your base.
The base hasn't grown very much.
We talk about who's going on Matt Rushmore next time, who's going to be the next one, like candidate Reagan.
But once again, what did Reagan say in his inaugural address?
I'm looking at a giant.
What did Trump say?
I'm looking out at carnage.
Well, Reagan said in his last address to the American people, 1992 Republican Convention, I know this is painful for some supporters of Trump to acknowledge.
Reagan said, when I'm gone, let it be said about me that I appeal to your highest hope, not your worst fear.
That I took us to a higher level, that I took us to a higher place.
When he died, he couldn't find a single Democrat to say anything against him.
That's a test of greatness.
Well, what would Buckley do?
Well, all of his life, he was a free trader.
That's one opinion he never changed.
He'd not be happy about a trade war being launched right now.
He never saw a tax cut he opposed.
So he's not going to start opposing it because he might have some problems with Donald Trump's style.
He would support that.
He would support conservative judges.
But above all, I mean, he would talk about the role of the presidency as an inspiring office, a potential to inspire the American people to greatness.
He talked about that.
He talked about presidents do things, like free slavery, abolish slavery, rather.
They do things, like unify the nation in the World War.
They broaden their bases.
They appeal to the country's greatest traditions and highest hopes.
I don't think he would say we have that right now.
And even more than the policy, more than the tax cuts, more than the judges, he said there's nothing more important in our system of government than the separation of powers, the checks and balances, and the fear of an imperial presidency.
That Congress is supposed to be the preeminent branch, James Madison told us, and they should come up with a program, send it up there, And then negotiate with him.
The idea that the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate act half the time like presidential aides would have appalled him.
They were presidents he adored, Ronald Reagan.
They were presidents he liked, George Bush I. He always told them, don't ramp things through.
Negotiate with them, but act like Congress.
Congress should be coming up with programs.
His hero of heroes is Robert Taft.
And Robert Taft did that.
He came up with a program, sent it to the Hill, and we sent it to the White House, rather.
And let's say the show got started.
And I have to say, finally, looking at the CPAC speech, Buckley had four bears skating in County Cork in the 1840s.
Around the time of the Irish Famine, that's not the reason they came, they settled in Ontario and they made their way to Texas.
His grandfather was the sheriff of Duval County, the greatest of this country.
You think of Buckley as rich.
Well, he was quite rich.
His father was a self-made, wildcat oil man.
And he managed to come up with, in the middle of the Depression, a trust fund for each of the ten children.
Buckley would not think that his forebears were snakes.
I think a lot of damage was done by the president to the president the other week, throwing out the red meat.
You know, the other people are watching.
The French have a saying, not in front of the servants or don't scare the horses.
I think a lot of horses got scared.
I do wonder...
Oh, sorry, please go ahead.
I'm talking too much.
Go ahead.
No, no.
I wonder particularly about the CPAC speech because I thought given Trump, given that Trump is the president and Trump is who he is, something I liked about it is that he doesn't...
There's a sort of guilelessness to Donald Trump speaking, whereas other politicians...
Who are not terribly educated, who are not terribly intellectual, who are not terribly civil or well-mannered or well brought up.
They affect something to that effect and it doesn't comport with the reality of them.
Whereas with Donald Trump, in a sense, what you see is what you get.
And I wonder, you know, Buckley was a refined man from a wealthy family.
He said that he never attended a professional baseball game and that was just fine.
He wouldn't pretend that he had.
You know, the occasional threat to punch queer Gore Vidal in the face notwithstanding, he almost always comported himself with grace and wit and patience and erudition.
But Buckley lived before Twitter.
And political discourse today, from the top to the bottom, is generally coarser, baser, more vulgar.
And that said, the culture today is coarser and baser and more vulgar.
CNN anchors call constitutional conservatives gay slurs on national television.
They nod along as teenagers, compare a U.S. senator to a mass murderer.
Is there any path back, as you see it, to reclaim a more dignified politics and culture?
Or is the age of chivalry gone, that of sophisters, economists, and calculators succeeded, and the glory of Europe extinguished forever?
The answer is yes, and the answer is it starts with the president.
It doesn't end with the president.
The president told us that he was one of the best educated presidents when he ran.
He doesn't act like it.
I don't know too many Wharton grads to speak that way.
He was proud to send his children to Penn and to Georgetown.
He didn't send them to Fodick State.
He sent them to very fine schools before they went.
They come across much more sophisticated and fine than he does.
Now, maybe this is how he thinks that working people behave.
This is a nation where working people wanted to join the elite, wanted their children to be better than they, and wanted to rise, not to live in the gutter.
And if you want to raise the caliber of the debate, you start with the president.
William Shakespeare would have had no problem with Twitter.
His summits would still be going around the world doing great things.
Abraham Lincoln would have loved Twitter.
The Gettysburg Address is 10 sentences.
It could fit on Twitter.
It would fit on Twitter.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
The best part of the speech was when he talked about policies.
And he's right.
Conservatives talked for years about the court.
They talked for years about ending the regulatory state.
They talked for years about drinking government.
He did it.
He probably did it in a way that none of the other Republicans running for president would have done, although they would have agreed with it.
But his real message was the message about snakes.
And most of us are descended from immigrants, and the concept of passports and visas and all of that started with the First World War.
I have no idea whether Buckley's forebears were legitimate or not legitimate.
I know mine They had some kind of paper.
You got on Ellis Island.
I didn't know we had visas then.
They were certainly, you know, allowed in.
And I don't think they were snakes.
They produced somebody who taught you.
And I think for the President of the United States to go that road, It's not an example that we want children to follow, and it's not what gets you on about Rushmore.
That's the goal here.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'm crazy.
This, I think, does bring us to the Buckley rule, this question of who we should vote for, what is a bridge too far, what sort of things should qualify.
Buckley, for those who don't know, Buckley famously had this rule for voting.
He said to support the rightmost viable candidate...
And he didn't always abide that rule, though.
He opposed the Eisenhower administration, as we talked about, as a young man, for being insufficiently tough on communism.
He supported Nixon, even as Nixon grew the government and declared himself a Keynesian and founded the EPA and OSHA and Title IX and the Forerunner of Affirmative Action and all of that.
He still supported that president and turned on Nixon only when Nixon went to China, only when Nixon went a bridge too far, and then he opposed him.
Buckley ran for mayor against then...
Nominal Republican John Lindsay, who later became a Democrat, when should conservatives vote for the most right-viable candidate?
And when should conservatives refuse to support the most right-viable candidate?
And when should conservatives turn on candidates that they've previously supported?
Well, first of all, thank you.
Buckley supported Nixon because he thought that Nixon had a better chance of defeating the Democrats than the alternatives, even though his heart was with Reagan.
We broke with Nixon very early on the things you're talking about.
And his endorsement of Nixon in 72 was an argument on behalf of the lesser evil.
And, you know, you vote the lesser evil.
You know what you get at the end is evil, right?
But I would say to you, well, you're asking about the president.
When Buckley died, for all I know, in 2008, Donald Trump was still a Democrat.
He was giving money to Mr.
Pelosi and Mr.
Schumer until he was president.
He didn't have much of a conservative record.
But he's now coming around talking about gun control.
He stood and said he would never cut Social Security or reform entitlements.
Sounds very much like a Democrat to me.
And I would say to you that he did do some great things when I said them.
I'm not talking about what I think.
I'm talking about what Buckley might say.
He did carry the torch in judges.
He carried the torch in trade.
And he carried the torch of deregulation.
He's not, excuse me, he's not carrying the torch on trade.
And I think he's not debasing the culture.
You're brilliant in pointing out.
Culture has been lowering itself by its own bootstraps for decades now.
But Reagan restored hope and promise.
We thought that after eight years of Obama telling us what we can't do and to accept The new norm of a 1.5%, 2% growth in the economy, or George Bush's overaggressive foreign policy, that we would have a president to take us to a new level.
I don't think that's come.
And I, again, would say to you that Buckley even said in the article you're quoting me from, the cigar aficionado piece, that demeanor and constitutionalism should come ahead of policy.
And with the left, you say it comes ahead of health care.
With the right, you say it comes before tax cuts.
You say the republic, and then we can talk.
Peggy Noonan had a column and said the same thing.
She talks to lots of conservatives.
She goes, well, but for this, he's good for taxes.
But for this, he's good for regulation.
But for this, he's good on judges.
Well, you could say that about Caligula's whores, can't you?
I mean, is there any point where that 239 guerrilla...
It needs to be given, of course, in manners and etiquette and how presidents behave.
I think that's what he would say.
Now, of course, you know, a lot of people who were with National Review, we can't predict what Buckley would do.
He's been gone for a decade.
But we know what he did do.
So a lot of perhaps people in National Review are more inclined to go with the person who is adapting the policies they like and forget lots of other things.
I see the religious rights given Donald Trump, you know, a mulligan, something they wouldn't give any other person with a lifestyle that he used to boast about.
But Christianity is based on forgiveness, change, redemption.
I get that very well.
But you really wonder sometimes that where does character matter?
I think it counts.
I think character is destiny.
The Greeks were right.
I'm not saying he has an efficient character.
I'm saying he wants to believe that he is the figure he created of himself as Donald Trump.
He's got to be smarter than that.
He did get into band.
He did graduate.
He had a pretty good record.
And he's got to be better than that.
He just feels that he has to, you know, be this creation, be the role of the Donald Trump or the Donald.
And I think that, again, Buckley, what did he write?
Cult of personality is what he feared the most.
It's in that article.
And we'll have to see what happens now that Donald Trump is signaling trade wars and he said that we have to start confiscating guns and worry about due process later yesterday and then today.
It seems as though he has reversed that mercifully.
But one has to see.
One wonders if the right can keep...
Keep pushing Donald Trump more in line and maybe try to rein in some of his coarser instincts.
But this brings us to the final question, which is about the legacy of Buckley.
As you write in the final chapter of the book, President George W. Bush summarized Buckley's place in history by saying he, quote, brought conservative thought into the political mainstream and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America's victory in the Cold War.
He places Buckley's thought in a particular time and Buckley's fusionist conservatism marrying the traditionalists and the libertarians through their shared anti-communism does become less relevant after the defeat of communism.
We saw huge cracks in the conservative movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Buckley opposed George W. Bush's occupation of Iraq.
There were disagreements over domestic policy.
Can Buckley's conservative vision survive the end of the Cold War?
And if it can survive it, what does that mean in 2018?
Well, I think your summary is quite apt, brilliant even.
A coalition came together for a short time against a common enemy.
And when your enemy is Stalin, libertarians and traditionalists find they have more in common with each other than they do with the enemy.
The enemy would wipe them both out, no question about it.
And without the Soviet Union and a bipolar world, it's perfectly logical that would pray.
In fact, it was George Will, one of the anti-Trumpists, who said long before Trump was a candidate that if you look at the old conservative agenda, as he put it, the dogs are rejecting the dog food.
Well, I think that's an interesting concept.
And others were working on this before he came along.
But Buckley would say, in the end, what matters are adherence to what he called eternal truth.
That all opinions are not of equal value.
That all cultures are not of equal value.
Judeo-Christian traditions are superior.
Thank you.
America is superior and exceptional.
Thank you.
And he would harbor no compromise with those people who question that.
He was a steadfast opponent of political correctness.
If the president really wants to pick up the Buckley mantle, there was an article by Ed Meese yesterday on some of the Obama executive orders that Trump can continue to reverse on political correctness.
I mean, God and Man at Yale was nothing but an attack on political correctness at this time.
It's gotten quite worse now.
And I think that I have students that I'm arguing with me and with others about that they have a right to pick their pronoun.
I don't have a right to correct their grammar.
So they write me notes that, well, I really know that they are, or they is, it's not a good way to put it, but of course I want pronouns that are gender-neutral.
A president can do a great deal to stop this novel.
And he doesn't have to do it by laws or by decrees.
And I think that that would be a great tribute to William F. Buckley Jr., but eternal truth.
Our culture is superior to others.
It doesn't mean that we ram it down people's throats.
We send armies, but if you want to be American, you're expected to accept its creed, which is that, which is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
You could be a Buddhist to be part of that tradition, or any other religion or no religion to be part of it.
And that, yes, American exceptionalism, Reagan's notion that God put this nation here between those two oceans to gather to its brethren people from all corners of the world, and they created more civilization and more growth and more wealth than any great nation before us.
And our job is to pass it on in better condition than we found it.
And it's only ever one generation away from extinction, unfortunately, and which is why it's important to look back on past generations and read books like A Man and His President, The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
Just a point, by the way, for the listeners as we were talking about the pronouns.
My preferred pronoun, of course, is malord or sir.
So you can always, if you're referring to me on Twitter or something, that's a good way to do it.
Professor Felsenberg, they're telling me I have to sign off for Facebook and YouTube right now.
So thank you so much for being here.
It was a very enlightening conversation.
And everybody must go out and read this book, A Man and His Presidents, The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. by Alvin S. Felsenberg.
Thank you, Professor Felsenberg.
Been a pleasure, Michael.
Thank you.
Alright, that's pretty good.
And we actually, we let that go a little bit longer on Facebook and YouTube.
And by Facebook and YouTube, I of course just mean Facebook because YouTube hasn't let us on now ever since CNN started really pinging us.
Well, sad.
Okay, if you're on Facebook, please go to dailywire.com.
What do you get?
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the mailbag, you can ask questions.
We're just about to do that.
And we've got some very good ones in our last minutes here.
You get the conversation.
You can ask questions in the conversation.
Everybody can watch, but only subscribers can ask questions.
Many are called, but few are chosen.
But none of that matters.
What really matters is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You might hear I'm a little bit under the weather right now.
That's why I brought in my special personalized Leftist Tears Tumblr today.
And I tell you, nothing makes me feel better when my allergies are kicking up or I've got a little bit of a cold than some nice, salty, delicious Leftist Tears.
With honey in it, you want to put a little bit of honey so you get the sweet and the savory.
It's a really, really good way to have them if you're feeling a little fluish.
Be sure to go to dailywire.com right now.
right now, we'll be right back.
All right, in our last minutes here, I know we're running a little bit late, but we're gonna try to get some mailbag questions in, and these guys are gonna tell me when I have but we're gonna try to get some mailbag questions in, and these First question from Brandon.
My mother is very religious, and it seems like she can't have a regular conversation without bringing up the Lord.
I personally don't mind, because I have a strong faith and enjoy the discussion.
However, my two older brothers cringe and want to end the discussion as soon as it starts.
I wouldn't say they don't believe in God.
However, it looks like God isn't really a priority in their lives.
I get along great with my brothers, however I almost never bring up the Lord with them and just talk about common interests.
My question is, should I try to talk to them about God?
If so, what's your advice in doing so, knowing that they don't want to?
Should I talk to my mom about dialing it back a little bit?
If so, what's your advice on doing so?
Great.
I would say...
I have a good friend in politics.
He has been a major political operative, and he's been an actor.
He's in the movie The Warriors.
That's the only clue I'll give you.
Cult classic.
And he's had a great career, and he's also a devout, born-again Christian.
And he told me, I asked him how it happened, and he said, well, the Holy Spirit just came on me.
I said, well, what did you think when that happened?
He said, my first thought was, oh God, please don't let me become a Jesus freak.
I sort of see what he means.
You know, there are some people who every sentence they say is proselytizing.
And there's a difference between evangelizing, spreading the good news, and proselytizing, banging people over the head with it.
Saint Francis of Assisi said, preach the gospel, and if you must, speak.
On the subject of common interests, you can always talk about that, but of course, one doesn't simply want to sit there and talk about the food.
Oh, good chicken, isn't it?
Yeah, the chicken's good.
You do want to talk about things that matter.
I think most people hate small talk.
There was a study that came out a few years ago that the majority of people hate small talk.
So you want to bring it in.
There's no reason not to talk about your faith in the way you see the world.
St.
Peter said you should always be prepared to give an explanation of the joy that's in your heart.
And so if they ask you about it, you should be prepared to give them an answer.
But I wouldn't push them away.
I wouldn't clobber them over the head.
In your own life, I think people should be able to look at you and say, Wow, there's something different about that guy.
I wonder what it is, and how do I get a piece of it?
So that is what I would do.
I would evangelize, but I wouldn't proselytize.
Next question from Alex.
Hey Michael, I have a quick question regarding your personal journey back to the church universal.
I am currently an evangelical and I absolutely adore my church.
They helped me to understand who God is after I left the LDS faith.
However, I did just attend mass for the first time and the service pierced my soul.
I understand passages of scripture in a completely new light and was completely taken in by the beauty of the Eucharist.
However, I still love my church.
I feel like leaving them for the Catholic Church would be tantamount to betrayal.
So I would like to know, did you deal with similar feelings on your journey home and how did you overcome them?
Of course, yeah.
It was actually a number of Protestants brought me back to belief in God and Jesus and ultimately to the Catholic Church.
And I totally see your point.
There is something about liturgy, serious liturgy, sober liturgy, that is much fuller than the acoustic guitars and the electric guitars and, you know, like you're going to a cheap rock concert or something.
I certainly think so.
I wouldn't call it a betrayal at all.
You have to...
Look toward the truth above all things.
If you have the sense that the Catholic Church is the Church, it is the Church instituted by Christ, and it's pierced your soul, then go to that.
It doesn't mean you can't be friends with people.
You can still see all of your old evangelical pals and hang out with them.
I probably hang out with many more non-Catholics than with Catholics and have more Jewish friends than Christian friends, probably.
Ben wouldn't call himself my friend, but I would call Ben my friend.
That's just a...
A difference of nomenclature.
But you don't need to worry about that.
I would follow your heart.
Follow what you think is the truth.
The truth above all things.
If you look for truth, you might find comfort in the end.
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.
That's a paraphrasing of C.S. Lewis, and he's exactly right.
From Johnny, what type of hair product does the king of trolls use?
Leftist Tears.
I use Leftist Tears because of the salt.
The salt content is just right, so it allows your hair to maintain the right volume and the right poofiness, and a little bit of rigidity, but it's not too rigid, and it just feels so good when you put them in.
Next question from Samuel.
Greetings and salutations, O'Knolls, the magnificent writer, bishop of the Daily Wire, usurper of titles, and collector of leftist tears.
That is a half of my titles.
Very good use.
My question for you is this.
We're deeply divided.
It seems that the possibility of avoiding a second civil war is closing quickly.
How should we conduct our lives in these trying times when nearly every door is closing faster than we can reach them?
Samuel.
P.S. All we can do is trust in God.
That's true, but you also want to make sure you're living in the world, too.
Trust in God above all things, but if someone's going to start shooting at you, duck.
I'm not convinced that we're headed for a civil war because we're too apathetic.
We're not even cool enough for a civil war.
We're too, like, lazy and apathetic for that.
Especially the left.
Especially the left.
They don't even protest anymore.
They occupy.
They just sit and occupy Wall Street.
And they wear stupid hats.
And they say, what do you want?
And they say, I don't know.
Say, what are you doing?
We're standing around.
I don't know.
So I wouldn't worry about that.
Plus, we have all the guns.
So don't worry about that.
That doesn't worry me too much.
There is obviously a cultural civil war, as Dennis Prager puts it very well.
But in that war, I think you've got to fight it joyfully.
I think you have to fight that civil war, not from the perspective of, oh, these guys are going to kill me.
I hate it.
I'm so miserable.
You have to fight it from the perspective of, this covfefe feels so good pulsing through my veins, and the leftist tears taste so delicious that I want to share that joy with everybody.
And I think that helps a lot, too.
Also, because the lefties, they're the ones that are angry and upset all the time.
And they're always screaming and they don't know anything.
And they don't know anything about history and they don't know anything about philosophy or literature.
So you don't want to be like them.
You're the one who can say, look, this is the way it is.
I've got a little bit more knowledge than you do, perhaps.
And let me explain the world to you and we can share a delicious tumbler of leftist tears.
Do we have to go or do I get one more?
We'll do one more.
Oh my gosh, my phone is even going off.
That's how late we're going.
We'll do one more from Luke.
Hey Mike, hope all is well.
Is it true that most Catholics no longer participate in the practice of confession?
As a new Catholic convert, why should I tell a stranger my deepest, darkest failures?
Thanks and take care.
Yeah, it's really hard.
The confessional is a really tough one.
This is a good question to end on.
A lot of people don't do it anymore.
The communion lines are long and the confession lines are short, which tells you a lot about modern culture and maybe the sense of sin that people have.
One advertisement for the traditional Latin Mass is very frequently they have a confessional going during the Mass, so you get a twofer, you get to go in and you get to confess your sins, and then you get the Eucharist and you're in a state of grace.
Well, it shouldn't be a stranger.
You should see your priest more than once.
You should know your priest.
But you should tell them your deepest, darkest failures because he can forgive your sins.
You know, Christ gives the apostles the ability to forgive sins.
He says, As my Father sent me, so I send you.
As my Father sent me to reconcile people to God, so I send you to reconcile people to God.
Jesus says to the apostles, If you forgive sins, their sins will be forgiven.
And if you retain people's sins, their sins shall be retained.
So this isn't just a broad saying, Yes, the sins are forgiven.
Just because of the good news, there's this ethereal thing.
He is sending real people to do things in the acts of the apostles, not just the words of the apostles.
Christ's sacrifice is perfect.
His forgiveness is perfect.
And he says, I send you to forgive sins.
What sins you forgive are forgiven.
What sins you retain are retained.
That's an important aspect.
Obviously, he also gives the apostles the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.
Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Some people mistakenly think that confession is a product of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.
That isn't true.
The Fourth Lateran Council did codify aspects of the confession, but only because they'd existed for over a millennium.
St.
John Chrysostom talks about the confession.
It's very good One, because of the scriptural basis for it, but two, because it's very hard and because it's very effective at bringing into reality, making tangible, that which is just ethereal.
So we know that Christ conquers death and conquers our sins.
But it's easy to forget that.
In the world, you say, okay, it's just abstract.
Hey, I'm sorry.
Okay, maybe I'm forgiven.
There's something...
We're humans.
We have bodies.
We live in time and space.
There is something very difficult.
Even now, I've gone to confession a lot of times, when you're standing in that line, you think...
You have to grapple with your sin in a very palpable way, and you get down on your knees and you have to tell another person your sins.
There's a way of grappling that is very palpable.
Psychologically, it's very helpful to do that, but spiritually it's very helpful too, because then the priest reiterates God's forgiveness.
He reiterates to you.
You hear it.
It's a very palpable way of doing it.
And then you're in a state of grace.
I highly recommend it.
It's the laundry.
It's the dry cleaners for your souls.
There's a reason that it's been a sacrament for a very long time.
I highly recommend it.
And I wouldn't look at it as some obligation that you have to do.
I'd look at it as a sacrament.
As the unity of heaven and earth coming together in a moment.
Of the unity of the symbol and the symbolized coming together in a moment.
And reminding you of your forgiveness.
It's a really wonderful sacrament, and you should do it.
But don't tell me.
I don't want to hear about it.
Tell your priest.
Okay, that's all the time we have for today.
Please survive the weekend.
If you want some more, listen to Andrew Klavan's Another Kingdom.
We're hard at work on Season 2.
You can get that.
That's our narrative podcast.
Available wherever good narrative podcasts are downloaded.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you next week.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
