How did Christians shift pop music shift from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to themes of faith and devotion? We’ll discuss with Mark Joseph, author of “Rock Gets Religion: The Battle for the Soul of the Devil's Music.” Then, a caravan of over 1,000 illegal aliens want to invade our country, as the MSM steadfastly deny any problem. China strikes back at U.S. tariffs, and finally, hope for the future!
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How did Christians shift pop music from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to themes of faith and devotion?
We will discuss with Mark Joseph, author of Rock Gets Religion, The Battle for the Soul of the Devil's Music.
Then, a caravan of over 1,000 illegal aliens wants to invade our country.
And the MSM, the mainstream media, are steadfastly denying any problem.
China strikes back at UF's tariffs.
And finally, hope for the future.
The children.
Think of the children.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
So much to get.
We've got to talk about Jesus behind the music.
We've got to talk about the Eat True Hollywood story.
We've got to talk about this invasion that's happening.
Oh, no, it's okay.
No big deal.
No one's paying any attention to it.
There's a caravan of over 1,000 people on its way to the U.S. and all of the political implications for that.
China.
Everyone is getting China wrong.
Everyone's getting these tariffs wrong.
They're oversimplifying.
We'll go through what's actually happening.
And then, of course, hope for the future.
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So much to talk about.
I can't wait to get into all of this today because this is something that happens in politics is you get all these buzzwords.
So they'll say, well, this isn't free trade or this is protectionism or this or that ism, ism, ism.
And what's going on in China is much more complicated.
And it actually gives President Covfefe, shines him in a better light.
It puts him in a much better light.
We're trying to put these complex questions into very simple ideological categories.
We'll see what's going on there, and I will defend President Covfefe in some ways on this tariff bill.
And then, of course, the giant invasion that nobody's talking about, the imminent invasion of our country, will shed some light where the mainstream media refused to do that.
But before we get to it, we will bring on Hollywood producer Mark Joseph, the author of Rock Gets Religion, The Battle for the Soul of the Devil's Music.
Hank Hill, on the cartoon King of the Hill, famously observed that Christian rock doesn't make rock better, it just makes Christianity worse.
We will get some perspective in that on this segment, Jesus Behind the Music.
Here is Mark.
Thank you for being here.
Hey, great to be with you, Michael.
Thanks for having me.
So, as you write, rock music was birthed in hedonism, and in the 21st century, it got overtaken by religion.
What changed?
Well, I write in the book how rock and religion got off to a rocky start.
It's like a bad first date, right?
Remember that.
Remember back in the old days.
Right.
You know, so rock begins, first of all, religious people and traditionalists, there's so much, so many things happening at the same time coming at them.
There's the Vietnam War, there's the pill, there's rock and roll, there's Elvis, there's the Stones.
So much social upheaval at one time, and it was hard for them to sort out what is good, what's not good, what can we work with, what can't we work with.
And the kind of knee-jerk reaction was, well, let's just burn records because we don't like the influence this is having on our young people.
So we'll burn records.
We'll call it the devil's music.
We'll come up with these weird excuses like we heard these beats in the jungles of Africa when they were doing voodoo ceremonies.
Like, oh, the craziest stuff you can imagine.
And so there's an overreaction to the power of rock and roll.
And it took a while for especially religious leaders, more conservative figures, to go, wait a minute.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this music.
It's all about what you're singing and talking about.
And so that overreaction then leads to the formation of the Christian rock industry, which is like a parallel universe.
So you have kind of normal music over here, and then you have contemporary Christian music over here that's happening on a parallel track.
And that went on for about 30 years until what I talk about in the book is the mainstreamization of those artists.
So the kinds of artists that you didn't know growing up Bands like artists like Phil Keggy and DeGarmo and Key and all these amazing artists that never really got heard because they were in this Christian music business.
What's happened today is there's been a radical change and the mainstream music business is actually full of a lot of very religious people.
People don't quite realize that people like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and many others are actually kind of, you know, ordinary kind of church-going Americans in the case of Justin Bieber, Canadians.
And these artists have really brought their influence to bear in the mainstream music business, not often the fringe.
What is it precisely that did this?
Because I remember, I'm old enough to remember, the time before Christian rock became basically the mainstream of pop music.
Now, you suggest some possibilities in the book.
Was it perhaps 9-11 that did this?
Was it The Passion of the Christ?
Is this mainstream?
Obviously...
100% Christian movie.
What events do you think pushed these religious undertones that had maybe always been around rock music or coming up from gospel and pushed it into the mainstream?
Sure.
I talk about four big things in the book.
So the first thing is...
Artists like Justin Bieber is a great example.
In the past, and a lot of this has to do with theology, believe it or not, but the way you believe and the things you believe and the way you look at the world really influences how you act.
And so we had a theology of separation back in the day, which was what Christians would separate themselves from the world.
They would use kind of Bible verses out of context and say, come ye apart and be separate.
Because the mainstream rock business is dirty, We have to separate and form a Christian side of it.
You hear it in politics as well.
Politics is dirty.
We should get out.
Let's separate.
So that began to change.
And so Justin Bieber is actually a really good example because his mother is a very devout Christian woman.
And in the past, Justin Bieber would have been guided to Nashville to sign with a Christian music label as the son of a very devout Christian woman.
And then you and I wouldn't have heard of Justin Bieber except for on the fringes of culture.
He goes mainstream.
So that's happened with dozens and dozens and dozens of artists.
The second one that's really significant is American Idol.
American Idol plays a significant role in this process because in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and most of the 90s, basically our rock and pop stars are picked by 10 white guys in Hollywood.
Now, you may think you're an Eagles fan and you discovered the Eagles in 1975, but you really didn't.
You only discovered that because a gatekeeper in Hollywood discovered them for you, and that's how you discovered them.
There were these gatekeepers.
Clive Davis is one that I talk about in the book.
Let's just say that Clive Davis' values were a little bit different than your values, probably, or than Ben's values.
Certain people were getting chosen to be rock and pop stars because the gatekeepers approved of them.
I give an example in the book.
There's a Christian pop star named Keith Green who became a Christian pop star.
Before that, he actually auditioned for Clive Davis in New York in 1976, I believe it was, Didn't get the gig, and so he had to go into Christian pop.
Well, American Idol breaks up the entire paradigm of the Clive Davis types picking our rock and pop stars.
And so for the first time, you know, Susie in Cleveland and Hank in Alabama, they're picking the pop and rock stars in the 2000s, many of them.
So Carrie Underwood is an example, Daughtry is an example, dozens and dozens of artists are not being picked They're in a sense going around the gatekeepers and getting chosen by the American people directly.
And then the third and fourth things are Alice Cooper is an example where in the old days when a rock star would have a conversion to Christianity, he would immediately exit off stage right.
Usually cut his hair.
Never see you again, yeah.
That's exactly right.
Cut his hair and then start singing hymns.
That was like the paradigm.
I'm only half kidding.
It's actually fairly true.
But Alice is a great example where as the theology changes, the activity changes.
So Alice goes to his preacher after he becomes a born-again Christian.
His preacher says, what should I do now?
Right?
Because I'm Alice Cooper and I got this makeup and this crazy stuff.
And his preacher says to him, does God make mistakes?
And Alice is like, I don't think so.
And he says, well, God made you to be Alice Cooper.
So go back out there and be the most God-honoring Alice Cooper you can be.
So that's a third.
The fourth one is bands that were big in the Christian world began to cross over into the mainstream side, for instance, Switchfoot.
Or Joy Williams actually had a career as a Christian pop star before she became half of the Civil Wars, who became this popular band.
So those four phenomena have really changed the landscape.
Speaking of Switchfoot, you write in the book, Switchfoot presented fans and the pop music culture with a winsome group of surf rockers whose smiles, floppy hairstyles, and comforting personae masked a deep message, one that was in some ways far more troubling than anything that Marilyn Manson, Eminem, or Insane Clown Posse had managed to shock the public with.
Rock and roll is all about rebellion.
What does rebellion look like in the 21st century, in 2018?
That's a great question.
You know, I went to a Switchfoot concert at the House of Blues one time, and I looked back up in the seats, and I saw three generations of fans.
I saw grandparents, parents, and kids.
And I thought, this is really interesting, because again, rock and roll is birthed in, I'm going to do something that my parents don't want me to do.
And yet, What does that look like today?
Same thing happens with KISS concerts.
I've heard the same thing as well, that you have three generations of fans there.
Rock and roll doesn't have to be this divisive thing.
It can be a uniting thing.
But also, just in terms of messaging, there has been something of a conservative backlash against the old ways of rock and roll.
I credit part of this, by the way, To the old VH1 series, Behind the Music, if you guys remember that from the old days.
I think that's had a, it's hard to quantify, but it's had an effect.
And the reason I say that is, you know, young bands would grow up when they were teenagers.
They would watch that show.
And every show is like the same story over and over and over again, right?
Rockstar makes it big, makes a ton of money, snorts it up his nose, has five wives, and now he's homeless.
Right.
And I think young rock stars are like, why do I want to do that?
Like, I don't want to do that.
I want to be different.
I want to do something interesting and unusual and not fall into the same traps that happened to my forebears.
I think that's had an impact.
I think it has kind of led to...
Even if you're not religious, there's definitely kind of a clean rock segment of rock music where they just...
I'd never forget going back, going to a Megadeth concert and...
And I went backstage and it was like an alcohol-free zone.
And I'm thinking like, wait a minute, this is a mega-down.
Where am I? What happened here?
There is something that gets a little exhausting about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, right?
You know, if you're just, all you're doing is going out and doing a bunch of drugs and partying all night.
At a certain point, it does get old.
It's not very gratifying.
You do get sex-austed, ultimately.
And that might be it, too, where to say, it's very easy, it's cliche to say, go out and party all night and have casual sex.
There's a time and a place for everything and that place is college.
You have to graduate college at some point.
You have to go on and grow up eventually.
And there's a real rebellion in that.
I think it's why Jordan Peterson is selling a gazillion books now and other people who talk about this.
People say, you know, maybe I should clean my room.
Maybe I should get my life in order.
Maybe there's something rebellious about that.
Well, when the culture is now baby boomers, to be countercultural is, in a sense, going against that ethic.
There was a funny moment I talk about in the book when Justin Bieber speaks out against abortion.
And I just thought it was so odd that I'm watching The View one day, and the old ladies in The View are scolding Justin Bieber for being pro-life.
It's like, something is wrong with this picture, right?
They're like, they're saying, well, he doesn't understand because he's too young.
It's like, when you have a 60-year-old, you know, whatever her age is, Joy Behar, like scolding, whoever was in The View that week, I get who it was.
But it was definitely things are upside down.
And there's an old adage that says to rebel in season is not to rebel.
And so when everybody is of a certain mindset, it's no longer that cool.
And so you are having a kind of a countercultural moment in a lot of cases.
That is such a funny moment where they say, you don't understand, Bieber.
You're not rebellious like all of us 60-year-old women.
You keep using that word.
I think it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Well, you know, as the son of an unwed teen mom, I think Justin Bieber may have an opinion on that topic, shall we say.
His life could have gone in a very different direction had his mother made a different choice.
That's right.
And there has been a shift within even certain musicians themselves, broadly over these musicians.
You would see Janet Jackson, as you write.
She used to sing about chastity.
She sang, Let's Wait a While.
Seven years later, she's singing, That's the Way Love Goes.
Miley Cyrus is this cute little kid and then she has this shift and she's doing heinous and not even terribly scintillating things on stage during the VMAs.
Is this a cultural shift or is this just the way the music industry works?
Well, there is a process.
I give the Janet Jackson story in the book, and it's a great example.
And thank you for reading the book, by the way.
What a shock.
And interviewers read the book.
They never do it.
The only interviewers only ever read my book because it's a quick read.
But I really enjoyed the book.
I recommend it to anyone listening and watching.
No, thank you.
Yeah, there's a certain pressure the music business puts on you.
And Janet's a great example.
I've interviewed her once years ago.
But, you know, her mother is a very devout Jehovah's Witness.
She's sort of a traditionally conservative type person.
But over a period of time, the music business kind of wears you down.
And the other thing that's an interesting phenomenon is a lot of male songwriters write kind of male sexual fantasy songs and then give them to female songwriters and say, here, sing this.
And it's a very odd thing.
As I went back and researched some of the most sexual songs in our history, I found that most of them were written by like middle-aged men, right?
And there just weren't...
I remember thinking about even an old song.
You may remember there was a song, oh, The Divinals, you know, I Touch Myself.
I thought to myself, I looked that up and those are guys that wrote that song.
That's a guy.
Shocker.
Right, what he's hoping a young girl is going to say.
But it really is astonishing.
And so there is that pressure that comes to bear from the machine on these young artists to be hyper-sexualized and to write about topics like that, or to sing about topics like that.
That really is probably not naturally in many of their hearts. - On the question of the product itself, of the pop music itself, and the conservative view on this, the traditionalist knock was probably best summed up by Hank Hill, the cartoon character who said, "Christian rock doesn't make rock music better, it makes Christianity worse.
And you talk about Kanye West in the book, and some Kanye songs Are both good songs and they're quite Christian.
You know, Jesus walks, God show me the way because the devil's trying to break me down.
Others are not good songs and they're very self-aggrandizing and they're vicious and they're just awful.
Is there value to a Christian pop culture if the culture itself is degraded, if the music itself isn't very good?
Does this mean you're not going to be buying Snoop Dogg's gospel albums?
I was waiting to be on it.
I was hoping he would ask me to perform, but c'est la vie.
Tough business.
Right.
Well, you know, seriously, on a serious note, I think what happened in the old days, like when we were kids, you know, your friends would say, well, Christian Rock sucks, whatever.
What I discovered, what it really wasn't the artists, it was the pressures that would come to bear on an artist in the Christian music industry that would make the music kind of boring and derivative and in a certain way.
And the reason I know this for a fact is like an artist like Joy Williams.
So when she did three Christian pop albums, you know, it was Christian pop.
She kind of breaks free of the constraints of that industry and then becomes the Civil Wars.
And now suddenly every NPR-loving, Volvo-driving person on the East Coast loves her and adores her.
It's the same person, but she was now more free to express herself artistically.
She had a better budget.
So I don't think the artists themselves or the music was that way, but sometimes the pressure of that industry caused it to be less than great music.
But in terms of, like, the hip-hop community and the gospel community, there's always been a tension between those two worlds.
And there's always been a temptation on the part of, especially African-American artists, to make one-off gospel albums, right?
So you've got Snoop Dogg doing, you know, kind of R-rated or X-rated stuff.
Then I'm going to do my gospel album now, which is always a little bit weird.
Right.
But, you know, I don't want to judge anybody's gospel album, but I think what we're moving more toward is a cohesive view and a cohesive person who doesn't do one-offs.
I'll get Alice Cooper's a great example.
So he's still Alice Cooper, but his lyrics are different now.
And so you don't have the Alice Cooper does gospel and then does Alice Cooper.
He's one and the same, but he's incorporating his beliefs into his stage persona and into his music.
That's right.
He has a great line.
Alice Cooper writes the introduction to the book, and he has this great line.
He says, What the rocker is really doing is giving a gigantic yell for help.
And it's a good line for conservatives who say, oh, I don't want to listen to this.
You know, the Alan Bloom idea of, like, it's all bad and making the kids immoral.
There is this other side of it, which is perhaps this is a kind of cry for meaning and a cry for God that we all do.
And the most...
Black nail polish, death metal guys are maybe doing it more than anybody else.
My last question, then I'll let you go, is on the future.
You've been around here a long time.
You've written about this.
You've participated in these industries.
You know a lot of the players.
Where is Hollywood headed?
We're in the Me Too era.
We're seeing a rise of Christian music and religious movies.
What do the next 10 years of the entertainment industry look like?
Well, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, and I went back and rewatched a lot of I Love Lucy.
And I thought to myself, now, how is it that, first of all, her maiden name is Lucille McGillicuddy.
Call me crazy, but she's Irish.
He's Cuban, right?
So you have an Irish girl and a Cuban guy that get together.
Call me crazy, but they're probably Catholics.
Now, when did you ever see a Catholic moment of any kind in that entire TV series?
Did they ever go to Mass?
Was there ever a priest?
No, they just slept in separate beds.
That was the only moment.
You know what?
I have to amend my...
That is correct.
That's a Catholic moment.
But the point is, there's no religious moment that I could see in that entire series of two Catholic people who got together and fell in love and got married.
And I think what it is, is we had this obsession in a great part of the last 50 years with de-religializing our pop culture.
And I don't know what the reasons were exactly.
Maybe it was an advertiser saying, hey, don't show them with a priest.
You know, we don't want to take sides in religion.
But the point is, we've tried, we've bent over backwards to create this fake secular culture that doesn't even exist in our real lives.
You know, our neighbors go to church once a week, your neighbor goes to Bible study, whatever it might be, to temple.
And so for some reason, we felt the need to create a fake artificial culture in our media that's not reflective of our lives.
We always talk about, we've got to keep it real.
We haven't been keeping it real.
And so I think those walls are breaking down and more and more artists, consumers are saying, why can't that character go to church on that show?
Why can't there be a song that talks about faith?
So I think if you're a person who wants your entertainment separated from faith and spiritual expressions, I think the last 10 years and the next 10 years will be the ultimate nightmare for you because there's no stopping it now.
The boundaries have been broken down and people are refusing to abide by those old rules where you have to separate your art from your life.
And, you know, I believe in God and I think that The most interesting pieces are the ones that, you know, explore what it means to be human and life after death and life meaning and all those things.
When we can't do that, then it kind of limits and makes art less interesting.
So for me, you know, I think I'm one of 90% that believe in God.
I think it's fine that we have our entertainment with a side thing.
With a strong helping of God in the mix and faith and religion.
And if it becomes divisive, that's another issue that could happen.
But if it's in a way that causes us to think deeply about things in our lives and meaning, I think it's fine.
And that's such a good point.
That secular, that unreligious, that world where there's no faith discussion whatsoever, that's just made up.
That's totally fictitious.
And what are we afraid of?
Why are we so afraid to have our art reflect real life, to quote some rock music?
We're not going to take it.
We're not going to take it.
We're not going to take it anymore.
Yeah.
Mark, thank you so much for being here.
The book is really good.
I recommend it to everybody.
Rock Gets Religion.
Excellent.
Really good to have you here, Mark Joseph.
Thanks so much.
We'll have to have you back again.
Thanks for having me.
How cool is that guy?
That he almost, I'm not a big fan of Christian rock, but he did make a compelling argument that part of the reason that the Christian rock was so terrible is because it was this ghettoized industry.
And now that we've taken over the mainstream, there's something really beautiful about that.
I've been saying this all along that when the gatekeepers go away, a much better culture emerges than the one that gatekeepers in Hollywood and New York have foisted on us for so many We have to talk about the news.
We have a lot more to talk about, how everyone is oversimplifying the China situation, the invasion on our southern border, as well as a moment of hope.
We have to turn, of course, to the leader of the future, our dear leader, David Hogg.
We will look at that as well.
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We'll be right back.
Big headline today for those following the economy.
Of course, nobody really follows the economy.
All we want to talk about is guns and sex and abortion and stuff because those are really juicy.
Mostly sex.
That's all anybody in this culture wants to talk about.
Different bathrooms and things like that.
But the big headline is that China's striking back with tariffs against the U.S. This is the great trade war that we've heard about.
Trump, how could you be so stupid?
No!
Why?
The global trade is about to implode.
That isn't the case.
And there are a lot of people who are saying, we're going back to old economics and all tariffs are terrible.
And we only need freer trade.
And even if the other guy doesn't have free trade, we're going to have free trade.
And the situation is much more complicated than that.
Economics is more complicated than little slogans.
So China's striking back.
They have tariffs targeting soybeans, commercial messenger planes, SUVs, beef, sorghum, a few other things.
The tariffs are really pretty brilliant because they're intended to hit states that supported Donald Trump.
So, yeah, that's cute.
Good move, guys.
They want to hit us and they basically want us to lay off of their steel and aluminum tariffs.
But, of course, the steel and aluminum tariff Which is basically targeted just at China, is a legitimate response to their violations of World Trade Organization treaties.
China is not playing by the rules.
They've been violating the rules for a very long time and in a lot of ways.
So it's a perfectly reasonable response.
You can't say that what we currently have is free trade.
They're cheating and we're...
We're the ones who have to deal with that.
And a lot of these tariffs are really just threats to say, clean up your act and stop treating us poorly.
There are three major ways that China gets its hands on U.S. tech and cheats here.
It's called forced tech transfer.
The Wall Street Journal has a good rundown of this today.
It's not just that they're illegally subsidizing their steel industry and their aluminum industry, though that's not good, and that is in violation of global trade treaties.
They also steal our technology.
And this isn't just a slogan or something.
They do it in very specific ways.
American companies that do business in China have to share technology and data in return for getting market access.
That's not free trade.
We have to give them our technology, which is very expensive to build.
We have to give them data, which includes a lot of information that I think nobody in the United States wants to go over to China.
We have to just hand that over to them in order to have access to the market.
This costs the US an estimated $30 billion each year.
Another way that they do this is joint ventures.
So again, if you want access to the market, you need to partner with a Chinese company and you have to produce things in China.
A good example of this is car companies.
If car companies want to sell in China and they don't want to have massive tariffs, they have to produce the cars in China and they have to partner with a Chinese company.
And why is that?
Is it just to employ a few people at a company?
No.
It's because it gives the Chinese that technology.
So the difference between private industry and the government in China is slim, if existent at all.
So when we partner with these companies, we're just giving them our technology.
And you might say, okay, well, what's the big deal?
With emerging technologies that are very expensive to create, that gives them an insane advantage.
Just think about Tesla.
How long did it take to develop the technology for Tesla?
How much money did it cost?
And then we say, okay, we want to sell Tesla in China.
They say, that's fine.
Give us everything.
You give us everything, then you can sell in China.
That's unacceptable.
And people on both sides of the aisle have been warning us about this for decades.
President Trump is doing something to combat it.
Another way is bureaucracy licensing red tape.
So China forces, just to use one example, U.S. apps, cell phone apps.
If you want access to China, you have to store the data in China, which means you have to give the Chinese government access to this data.
Now, people are losing their minds over this minor Facebook issue.
Lefty heads are exploding because companies used Facebook appropriately and got some of our data.
You know, you upload all of your data to Facebook and then some company gives you a quiz.
You take the quiz and you say, okay, I'll give you all my data to take some stupid quiz.
And then they have their data.
They lose their minds over this, but China's demanding this from US companies and we say nothing.
Why?
Because the left wants to attack Donald Trump.
Also, you have to do research and development on Chinese soil.
What's the purpose of that?
Stealing technology.
This is not some conspiracy.
This is not some secret plan of the Chinese government.
They're openly doing this.
They're doing this through their laws.
This is out in the open and we should do something about it.
This is not to say that we shouldn't be free traders.
Of course we're free traders.
Free trade is a wonderful thing.
It's lifted a lot of people out of poverty.
A lot of people out of poverty in China, by the way.
And it gives us cheap consumer goods and it's a really nice thing.
But people have to play by the rules and we shouldn't allow ourselves to be cheated.
And we shouldn't just use silly slogans and different isms to attack this when the issue is very complicated.
It's been going on for a long time.
And finally, someone has the cofefones to do something about it.
That's not such a bad thing.
Moving on to the invasion of our country.
There's a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, People Without Borders.
And they're leading a thousand person strong invasion of the U.S.
Now, I'll mention, it's called Pueblo Sin Fronteras.
That is in a language that isn't the language of the United States.
So I'm not sure that this group really wants to assimilate.
So I'm no Nostradamus.
I'm no predictor of the future.
But I think if you come in shouting in Spanish, you might not want to assimilate to American culture.
This has been led all the way up from Central America.
President Trump has threatened Mexico to stop it before the caravan makes it to the border.
He's putting a lot on the table here.
He's saying, if you don't stop this thing, we're going to renegotiate NAFTA and end a lot of your economic advantage.
And he's saying, we might end aid to Honduras if they don't deal with this.
A lot of the caravan is coming out of Honduras.
The group, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, responded to these threats.
They said, in the face of this bullying and these threats of mass violence, we continue to stand in solidarity with displaced people of all races, ethnicities and creeds, abilities and gender and sexual identities.
Do-do-do-do.
There's a little tiny violin.
I don't know how they got sexual identities in there.
There's a very simple case of people wanting to leave their country, which isn't terribly nice, and come to our country, which is very nice.
The trouble is they don't want to respect our laws.
So that's it.
That's the end of the story.
Illegal immigration is illegal.
That's not complicated at all.
This group, obviously, is a radical group, and they're trying to eliminate borders.
The group plans to turn themselves over at the border and apply for asylum.
Now, you would think that would be easy, right?
They go, they say, hey, police, we're here.
We've invaded your country.
You'd think we'd send them back, right?
No, we can't send them back.
There's a huge process, and usually they just stay there.
Catch and release is one of the policies that we use.
We just let them stay.
I will say, to not whip everybody up into hysterics, it is ironic that this is getting some play in conservative media.
It's not getting any play in the mainstream media, but it is getting some play with the president, thankfully, and on conservative media.
Because this happens every single day.
This happens every day in America.
We're worried about a thousand people invading and crossing the border.
Border Patrol apprehends 900 people per day coming into the United States.
900 people per day.
300,000 people a year.
If we're just looking at this as a political angle, which is the only way that Democrats are looking at this, that means that between 688 and 807 new potential likely Democrat voters cross into our country every single day.
And all it takes is one push for amnesty, one executive amnesty, one path to citizenship, and those guys are voting for Democrats.
At the conservative end, with data by Pew Research, that's 688.
At the high end, 807 new Democrat voters a day.
Is it any wonder that they keep encouraging these lawless caravans?
Another 2,000 people per day, by the way, overstay their visas.
That group is also likely to vote for Democrats.
Make no mistake about this at all.
People without borders, pueblos sin fronteras, are trying to destroy America.
They are trying to destroy it.
A country without borders is not a country.
It's land, it's something, but it's not a country.
It's not a country that has any respect for law.
It's chaos.
An America without borders is not America.
This is ironic because these people would destroy the very country that they're trying to enter.
They would destroy it.
This is what America believes.
Not people chanting in a foreign language and disrespecting our laws and invading our country and disrespecting the people who have a right to govern themselves.
Americans believe that citizens ought to have the right to govern themselves.
Pueblo sin frontera says, no, to hell with your democratic republic, to hell with your enlightenment liberalism, to hell with you, to hell with Americans deciding how they're going to run their country.
We're going to tell you how to run your country.
We're going to destroy that country.
We're going to destroy the idea of a country if we have to do it.
People Without Borders is indistinguishable from all of these long-standing lefty groups.
George Soros has funded the Open Society Foundation for however long.
John Lennon sang about this.
Imagine there's no country.
Imagine there's no heaven.
Imagine no possessions.
Imagine, imagine, imagine.
It's a fantasy.
It's an absolute delusion.
And it's a delusion that's been tried.
We've tried this delusion for the entire 20th century.
And it has led to a lot of misery.
Death and misery.
It doesn't bring everybody up.
It brings the nice things that have helped the world, that has been charitable and prosperous and free and an ideal and a beacon of liberty that stands, that statue in New York stands with the beacon aiming out to the rest of the world.
It brings all of those down.
It destroys those things.
It's a philosophy of failure.
But it's the delusion.
It's the imagining.
JFK and RFK, great Democrat politicians, lionized Democrat politicians, they frequently quoted a line.
They would say, you see things that are and ask why, but I dream things that never were and ask why not.
And this is supposed to be uplifting.
This is the John Lennon line.
Imagine, imagine.
They tell us to dream.
They tell us to imagine.
They tell us to listen to the children.
What they don't know about that line, by the way, is that they think they're quoting George Bernard Shaw in a play called Back to Methuselah.
What they don't realize is they're quoting a character from Back to Methuselah, which is Satan.
It's the serpent in the garden.
That is the line that he tells to Eve before he tempts her and causes the fall of man.
You know, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
They quote the Shaw.
They don't realize they're really quoting Satan.
Imagine.
Listen to the children.
Imagine, imagine.
This is what we get when we listen to the children.
Well, at this point, it's like, when you're old, it's like, I don't know how to send an iMessage, and you're just like, give me the phone, and you take it, and you're like, okay, let me handle it, and you get it done in one second.
Sadly, that's what we have to do with our government, because our parents don't know how to use a democracy, so we have to.
Coming up, a dangerous new millennial craze that has consumer products giant Procter& Gamble scrambling viral videos of an internet challenge daring teenagers to eat tied laundry pods for fun.
We've got the details.
The winter is over.
Change is here.
The sun shines on a new day, and the day is ours.
Scorching their skin, snorting condoms, and smoking alcohol on YouTube.
Now you can actually get global attention by being an idiot.
If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking.
You're damn right I'm shaking.
That's terrifying.
I don't want people who just scream and yell about nothing ignorantly and then snort condoms and chomp down on Tide Pods.
They shouldn't run this country.
Do not listen to the children.
Do not listen to them.
They are not the future.
Stop imagining.
Stop deluding yourselves and imagining this awful world.
It doesn't turn out well.
All right, that's our show.
Come back tomorrow.
Get your mailbag questions in.
We have got a wonderful mailbag tomorrow and some other stuff, but I don't want to ruin the surprise.
Come back tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles show is a daily wire forward publishing production.
