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April 5, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:25
Ep. 134 - Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory

A Planned Parenthood branch in Pennsylvania has demanded that Disney start giving its princesses abortions, meanwhile our friend Jordan Peterson seems to think that nobody would ever consider abortion a good thing. We’ll discuss with Faith Moore why everything not forbidden is compulsory. Then, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A Planned Parenthood branch in Pennsylvania has demanded that Disney start giving its princesses abortions.
Meanwhile, our friend Jordan Peterson seems to think that nobody would ever consider abortion a good thing.
We will discuss with Faith Moore why everything not forbidden is compulsory.
Then, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Okay.
This is a tweet that came out recently from Planned Parenthood, the butchery in Keystone, Pennsylvania.
The tweet reads, quote, We need a Disney princess who's had an abortion.
We need a Disney princess who's pro-choice.
We need a Disney princess who's an undocumented immigrant.
We need a Disney princess who's actually a union worker.
We need a Disney princess who's trans, which is a prince.
That would make him a Disney prince.
This is intersectionality at its finest.
Intersectionality is the theory that we all need to gang up.
Regardless of our own groups, we need to gang up to attack the white, straight, male, who knows he's a male, devil.
Not just any white straight male, because he could be trans.
There's just one bad guy, and then the rest of us need to gang up and fight that guy.
That's why it all comes in.
Who cares about union workers in the Planned Parenthood tweet?
Because it's this brilliant little ideology.
It's an incoherent ideology, but it's brilliant because it unites all of the aggrieved groups, the allegedly aggrieved groups, against unions.
The bad guy, which is the straight white man who thinks that he's a man.
In the old days, you'd hear Louis Farrakhan yelling about the white devil.
Now it's much more specific.
It is a straight white man who thinks he's a man devil.
The idea that we need to have a Disney princess who has an abortion is a big shift that has happened recently in the view of abortion on the left.
In the same week, we had this video come out from Jordan Peterson.
Who has said that abortion is clearly wrong and nobody would ever consider it a positive good.
Here's Jordan.
Abortion is clearly wrong.
I don't think anybody debates that.
You wouldn't recommend that someone that you love have one.
Nobody debates that, says Jordan.
But...
I don't know if he's saying this for rhetorical effect.
It is clearly wrong.
He's absolutely right.
Nobody would seriously debate that.
But plenty of frivolous people do debate that.
They try to make it a debate even though it obviously isn't.
We know that people debate this.
We know that some people pretend that it's a positive good and not just a bad thing.
Since Hillary Clinton.
You know, Hillary Clinton used to say it should be safe, legal, and rare, right?
Saying abortion's a bad thing, but we should tolerate it for some reason.
We're way past that now.
They can't handle that cognitive dissonance.
The Shout Your Abortion movement encouraged women who...
We're sucked into this awful choice, this traumatic choice that in many cases ruins people's lives.
Not just the lives of the kids, but the lives of the people who do it.
Now you have to pretend to be proud of that.
Here's just the first YouTube result that comes up when you look up the Shout Your Abortion movement.
My name is Sammy Detzer and I had an abortion on May 20th, 2014.
And here are a list of things that happened on that day.
I had a blueberry danish for breakfast.
I walked from my apartment to the Madison Street Clinic.
I received free healthcare from Apple Health on that day.
I sat with my best friend in the waiting room while Let It Go by Idina Menzel played over the intercom.
I took three Vicodin.
I laughed really, really hard.
In the clinic, I cried really, really hard in the clinic.
I had a small glass of orange juice in the waiting room afterwards, and I hugged the nurse who was there watching to make sure I didn't get sick.
I ate an enchilada at the Mexican restaurant across the street.
I took a three-hour long nap, and then I went to rehearsal that night.
And here are a list of things that didn't happen.
I didn't feel sad.
I didn't feel angry.
I didn't feel hurt.
I didn't feel abandoned.
I didn't tell the person who got me pregnant.
And I didn't look back.
It is so hard to watch that because everything about that second part is a lie.
It's demonstrably a lie.
You can tell.
I mean, she's holding back tears in the video.
And, of course, the question is, who are you trying to convince?
Who are you trying to convince with this?
Obviously you're looking back.
That's the definition of what you're doing right now.
Obviously you were sad.
You said that.
You cried.
And she's on the verge of tears even describing this.
Obviously she was abandoned and alone.
She had to hug the nurse.
She had to hug a stranger.
The amount of sympathy that anyone would feel for this woman is awful.
The regret is pouring out of her pores.
It's...
You can tell she doesn't believe it.
She's trying to convince herself to believe these lies that she's saying.
Notice in the beginning, she said, here's what happened on that day.
Everything she acknowledges that happened is material.
It's all physical.
She doesn't say, you know, I felt this, and then I thought about this, and then I had this idea, and I knew that this meant this.
She doesn't.
She says, I ate a Danish.
She says, I ate a Danish, I took a bunch of drugs, because this is a horrible thing, and I knew it was a horrible thing, and I had to numb the pain, and then I ate a burrito.
I ate, I drugged myself, I ate, I did this, but there's no metaphysical She's denying all of the metaphysical.
She said, I didn't feel.
I didn't feel this.
Of course you did.
You can't.
The only way that you could get yourself to have an abortion is to deny the metaphysical.
To say this is just a clump of cells, right?
It's not a person with a soul.
It's not a baby.
It's not a human.
It's just material.
And I ate the burrito and I took the drugs.
It's really, I mean, you just feel so awful for this woman.
And then to be used by the abortion movement, to be used and paraded on there and say, tell them it's a good thing.
And hold back those tears.
We don't want any tears in here.
And tell them you're not looking back as you look back.
In this issue, there are two options.
Repentance or doubling down.
You can change your mind.
You can say, that was a bad thing I did.
I know people who've had abortions.
You can change your mind or you can...
Deny reality.
You can deny, deny, deny.
Deny until you die is the Italian-American expression.
Deny.
It didn't happen.
It didn't happen.
You know how you know, by the way, they talk about pro-choice.
The comments are disabled on this video.
It tells you everything you need to know about pro-choice, pro-freedom, pro-choice.
Comments are disabled because they know what the comments would say.
We know what her comments would be if she were speaking honestly, if she didn't have to hold back the tears.
They have to make this a positive good.
It's not enough to say abortion is an evil, but we have to tolerate it for some reason.
It's not enough to do safe, legal, and rare, which is the old Hillary Clinton example.
They have to move into the totalitarian principle, as enunciated by T.H. White in The Once and Future King.
He said...
Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.
This is a play on the constitutional principle of English law.
Everything which is not forbidden is allowed.
That's what freedom is.
Everything that's not forbidden is allowed.
But the totalitarian principle, a play on that is everything that's not forbidden is compulsory.
That's the sign above the ant colony in the book.
Totalitarianism cannot accept freedom.
Totalitarian frameworks, rather, are too fragile.
So the framework of life, the moral framework and the physical framework of totalitarianism cannot tolerate freedom.
It's too disconnected from reality.
There's a great line about the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union, the future was always certain, but the past was always changing.
They would have to rewrite the past.
They would have to rewrite what reality is because their fantasy is Their delusion was absolutely certain.
And when reality disagrees with that, reality has to be denied.
People have to be erased out of history.
The circumstances of history have to be changed.
There's no room for freedom, and there's no room for free thought.
Absurd moral frameworks that permit abortion, they are too fragile to permit free thought.
So you have to say, I didn't feel sad.
Well, you just said you cried afterward.
Yeah, but I didn't feel sad.
I wasn't alone.
You had to hug the nurse.
No one was with you.
You were alone.
No, that's not true.
I ate a Danish.
I ate a Danish.
I ate a burrito.
I'm not a moral being.
I'm not a spiritual being.
It's just physical.
But no one believes that.
You can tell she doesn't believe.
That's what Jordan Peterson is saying.
There can be no disagreement tolerated on abortion.
And the reason that the pro-abortion movement can't tolerate it is that any rational discussion of abortion shows that it is clearly wrong.
This is At Peterson's entire point, if you think about this for more than two seconds, you'll realize that it's wrong.
So we can't permit that.
Just shout.
Shout your abortion.
Don't reasonably discuss it.
Don't think it through.
Don't think it through for a second.
Just shout it and do it and do it again and shout it.
You didn't feel what you know you felt.
Just shout it.
Shout over people.
On this day in history in 1992...
Several hundred thousand people marched on Washington for abortion rights.
This was really the last major gasp of the pro-abortion movement.
There was another flare-up in 2005 protesting both Bushes, Bush 1 and Bush 2.
Other than that, other than those little flare-ups that come for pro-abortion, the March for Life, the March Against Abortion, is the longest continuous protest in American history.
It grows every single year.
Now it has presidential recognition.
President Trump addressed the March for Life this year.
The opinions have changed dramatically and it's because we have permitted freedom on this topic.
As freedom has been allowed to expand and the totalitarian principle has been ignored, the opinion has changed in the direction of pro-life.
I'll explain those numbers and explain why that happens.
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Back into it.
According to a Marist poll from the end of last year, the majority of women, the majority of American women, support making abortion illegal in 99% of cases.
That's not what you'll hear on television.
That's not what you'll hear on CNN.
The majority of American women, 52%, according to this poll last year, say that women support making abortion illegal in all but rape, incest, life of the mother, in all but 1% of cases.
They support that.
So the pro-abortion fanatics have to shout.
They have to enforce their orthodoxy.
Free thought is not allowed.
They've become much more hysterical.
It's something that we have to hunker down.
We're not allowed to deal freely in these ideas.
We have to gang up with other imaginary victim groups.
They have to further divorce their own deluded visions from reality to discuss that delusion.
We will be joined by the official Michael Knowles show, Disney princess correspondent, Princess Faith Moore herself, who recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called Planned Princesshood.
And coincidentally, on this day in history, Pocahontas married English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia.
Now, of course, if Planned Parenthood and the feminists over at Disney had their way, she'd have just met John Rolfe and then had a one-night stand of casual sex and then gotten pregnant and then had an abortion.
And then, and only then, would Pocahontas be empowered.
But, fortunately, that wasn't the case.
Your Highness, Your Highness Princess Moore, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So why is Planned Parenthood specifically targeting Disney princesses?
Yeah, that is the question.
And the answer is Disney princesses are really influential.
Little girls love princesses and they love Disney princesses.
And no matter how much The feminists in general have tried to stop them from loving princesses.
They still love them.
So now, what they're doing, instead of saying, you know, don't love princesses, love lab technicians, love doctors, love, you know, whoever, sports players, they're like, okay, well, that's not working.
Fine.
Now we're going to redefine what a princess actually is.
And, you know, now it's somebody who So they say, we can't turn your attention to G.I. Joe or whatever, so we're just going to turn the princess into G.I. Joe.
Disney princesses made it a long time before feminists tried to ruin them.
They made them many decades.
What changed and when?
So that's an interesting question.
So the first three princess movies happened under Walt Disney's watch, right?
So they happened You know, from 1939 up until around 1966.
And that's when you get like Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
And then there was what they call the Dark Ages, right?
Disney died.
They didn't make any princess movies.
There were a lot of sort of really terrible movies and some good movies.
And then they came back with the Renaissance.
And the Renaissance are the movies that we sort of think of when we think Disney, like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and all of those movies.
And what happened when they were making those movies is that all of a sudden people were sort of starting to say, like, you know, those earlier princesses, they were kind of, you know, they were kind of damsels in distress.
They sort of were sitting around waiting for men to come and save them.
So we're going to update them.
But the reason that those movies are actually so good still is that they updated them but kept...
The trope of princess intact.
This is what the feminists don't understand.
In a fairy tale, the trope of princess means something.
It's a symbol for the feminine ideal, the perfect woman.
She's not a real person.
She's an ideal.
Everything in a fairy tale is really a symbol.
The forest is a symbol for your inner turmoil and all of these things.
And so that's what a princess is.
And so when those Renaissance movies came back, they updated the princesses to make them more realistic, but they didn't take away the sort of inner goodness of the princess, but they had that idea, that idea that like those other princesses are not okay and we need to somehow...
Um, make them, make them better, make them feminists.
And, and that pendulum just kind of kept swinging, kept swinging till it was like, it was sort of in the perfect place in Beauty and the Beast.
And then it was like, Jasmine's kind of annoying.
And then, you know, then you get Pocahontas, Mulan.
I know everybody loves Mulan.
I'm sorry, but Mulan, um, you know, and then Merida, um, from Brave, princesses that are just basically, um, Just sort of tools for propaganda for a feminist ideology of what a woman should be.
And one of them was elected to the U.S. Senate.
That is a real accomplishment for Disney.
Clearly it's worked in some ways.
I am.
Obviously, I've noticed this not just in Disney, but throughout culture.
And I wonder how much of this has to do with the democracy of it all.
Because we're a democratic culture, lowercase d, and we love, we extol the virtues of democracy all the time.
Princesses are literally aristocratic.
They are the aristocracy.
But the idea of the princess is the idea of the aristocracy.
They appeal to aristocratic ideals, to nobility, to things that are above that which is common.
Democracy does away with all of those things.
Democracy is hostile to those things.
How much of the degradation of Disney princesses can we simply blame on the hyper democratization, steamrolling over aristocratic ideals in our whole culture?
We've lost you.
Oh my gosh.
I'm on the edge of my seat.
I want to hear about this.
Sorry, I'm back.
Princess, you're back.
I thought you were being stolen away by some evil villain and I was going to have to go through the woods and find you.
I don't know.
I haven't watched a lot of these movies.
Do we have you back?
No, you're gone again.
This is really sad.
I am going to have to go...
I'm going to jump through the woods, and I'm going to run, you know, with my sword and turn into a frog, and I don't know what happens in these things, but this is going to be my chance to save the princess.
I'm going to get to put my money where my mouth is.
Am I really just some paltry, you know, lowercase d Democrat in America, some commoner, or am I a virtuous knight, a virtuous prince going to save Drew's daughter...
Let's see.
Do we think we can get her back or no?
Because I'm perfectly willing to give my view of all of this, my very elitist and aristocratic view.
Faith, do we have you?
Yeah, I'm back.
Oh, thank goodness.
I was so nervous that you had fallen asleep and, you know, we'd have, I don't know.
There was a lot going on.
I don't know.
There was some sort of evil witch or something, but I'm back.
I think it was the evil witch of feminism.
Just the evil ideal of feminism is going and attacking.
My question is, how much all of this has to do with the democracy of it all?
You know, princesses are aristocratic.
They're literally the aristocracy.
They appeal to aristocratic ideals, to nobility, things that are above the common level of culture.
And democracy does away with those things.
Our democracy does away with that.
It's hostile to the elite, to the noble.
How much of the degradation of Disney princesses can we blame on the steamrolling democratization, constantly trying to be more democratic, more equal, more egalitarian, over what were once aristocratic and elitist ideals?
Well, I think what we're talking about is basically that But we've forgotten that this idea of princess means something else.
We think it means a princess.
And that's when all the feminists get all up in arms about her tiara and her dress and what that means to little girls.
But that actually isn't the point.
The point is really that a princess is sort of this high-born lady, the highest ideal of princess.
Femininity and womanhood.
And so when we start to think about it like that, like, oh, she's really the princess and there are these serfs and people, that's not what it's supposed to be at all.
But it is when we think about it like that.
That we begin to sort of misunderstand it completely and move away from that ideal that we're supposed to be kind of taking on.
That's absolutely right.
It was predicted by Edmund Burke and others to see that happening.
And I'm very sorry to see that happen.
But hey, at least we have VHS. We can watch Snow White.
That's kind of a cultural observation in general.
We can go retire to our country clubs and, you know, read all of the great books.
That's right.
Turn it off.
Smoke a cigar.
There's always hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Princess, Your Highness, excellent to have you here.
I'm glad we were able to rescue you from the feminist demons of Skype and let us know if you have any more technological troubles and we will go and ride on white horses and save you.
I will come to you first.
Thank you.
Wonderful.
Good to see you, Faith.
Thanks for having me.
Great to see you, too.
Alright, let's try to get into the mailbag a little bit.
I think we can do one or two questions, and then I have to say goodbye to those of you who are on Facebook and YouTube.
First question, from Spencer.
Oh, swarthiest of empty book writers, Knowles, you have said that you enjoy the music of Frank Sinatra and have quoted some of his songs on the show.
What are your favorite Sinatra songs and albums, and what other types of music do you enjoy?
Spencer.
I do love Sinatra.
I've had a Sinatra-esque fedora since I was like nine years old or something.
When I was in fourth grade, I sang with my elementary school orchestra playing.
I did Young at Heart.
I love Sinatra.
I probably know every Sinatra song.
One of my favorites is That's Life.
That's Life.
That's What All the People Say.
You're Riding High in April.
Shot Down in May.
Because it's the most conservative song ever written.
Maybe other than Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson, but I love that.
One of the greatest albums ever made in pop music is In the We Small Hours by Sinatra.
That's one of those moody things when you're driving along the highway, smoking a cigarette, feeling bad for yourself.
You know, it's kind of cloudy around you.
That's a great album.
Really, I guess the first concept album probably in pop music.
As for other popular music, and by that I don't mean Kesha, I mean like post-World War I, all of the American Songbook, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, all those guys.
Elvis, I love Elvis.
I'm a profound Elvis fan.
Some Motown, some soul.
I have a soft spot for Van Morrison.
In pre-pop music, I love Bach and Mozart and Haydn and Handel and all those guys.
For even older stuff, because we get very myopic in our culture.
I talk about how conservatives are Philistines.
And, you know, even conservatives, but college kids today especially, they don't have any culture.
They don't know of anything that happened before yesterday.
I actually think that Tide Pods are the most delicious dessert in history.
And they're very good, but they're not the most delicious.
There are other creme brulee and things like that.
So there's a great album on Spotify.
If you want to go all the way back, basically some of the earliest music you can find.
There is songs from the time of the Crusades.
Yeah.
There's a good one called Abjoy et Abjovens Mapais.
Try that and then you'll get into like a very, very old school sensibility.
You'll start chanting.
It'll be very good for your mindset.
Next question from Clay.
Godfather of troll.
You often say...
That's funny.
That's quite a coincidence.
You often say that some conservatives act like Philistines.
I'm not familiar with this saying.
What does it mean?
Clay, you proved my point, pal.
I'm sorry to say.
Philistines, it means they are uncultured, or they don't like culture, or they're hostile to culture.
The word came into common usage after a confrontation between college students and the locals in Germany in, I think, the 17th century.
Right around that time when the university was getting very, very popular, this was from the Bible.
The Philistines are upon you.
That's the quote.
It's not just these crazy tribes trying to conquer the Israelites.
It's saying you're so hostile to culture.
It's like the barbarians at the gates.
You don't participate in this culture at all.
So don't be a Philistine.
It's good not to be a Philistine.
We're all sort of Philistines because nobody reads books anymore, myself included.
Only Andrew Klavan has read all the books.
So it's good to try to diminish your Philistinism.
Next quote, I'll try to do one more, then I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
From Ben, I've noticed that you've made frequent references to the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides in your podcast, and at least once in your writings, or not in my writings.
What you're referring to is that I dedicate reasons to vote for Democrats.
I use the same introduction to that book that Thucydides did for his history of the Peloponnesian War.
I say this is not an essay to win the applause of the moment, but a contribution for all time, which is true.
It was true for Thucydides.
It's true of my magnum opus as well.
The question goes on.
I find his history of the Peloponnesian War fascinating and relevant to the modern day.
You're probably familiar with how the Greek city-states created a coalition called the Delian League shortly after the Persian Wars, based on the notion that they were strongest when united against Persia.
Unfortunately, over time, that became dominated by Athens, became the Athenian Empire that demanded tribute from member states, used military force to keep them in line.
It was this tyranny against the Spartans that brought on the Peloponnesian War.
However, while I do not believe that modern supranational organizations like the EU have reached that level of malignancy of the Athenian Empire, I can't help but notice similarities.
The one-state hegemony of Germany over the EU, the onerous taxes required by Brussels, the anti-democratic leanings of the EU, suggestions that they form an EU army, the populist backlash like Brexit.
Does the work of Thucydides demonstrate that supranational organizations are doomed to fail?
It does.
It actually says more than that, though.
And this is a very conservative idea, which is that you should keep the government as local as you can.
The more local the government, the more responsive it will be, the better it will be, the freer that you will be.
You have to be very careful.
Now the lesson from...
The Thucydides from the Peloponnesian War is not that supranational organizations are bound to fail.
It's that even national organizations, right?
Thucydides would have said that you keep it in the polis, in just the city-state, because the Athenian Empire united not even all of Greece, just part of Greece.
Athenian imperial democracy wasn't supranational.
It wasn't even national.
So you have to be very careful.
This could apply to national organizations or even regional organizations, too.
We have to be very careful with these organizations.
Some supranational or international organizations have worked out well.
NATO has worked out well, certainly in the 20th century.
Some have not worked out well, like the European Union, which has been mostly a spectacular failure for national sovereignty and for culture.
Like, Germany is the worst country in the history of the world.
I'm going to have to do a whole show on this from the fall of Rome to the present.
But, you know, they tried to destroy the world once in the 20th century.
We beat them.
They tried to do it again 20 years later.
We beat them.
And then we gave them control of Europe.
And they've done it again.
Surprise, surprise.
We have to be very, very careful of these and use them for very specific purposes.
When you have these supranational organizations that just are there, they're just peering and watching you and just...
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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That's what I have to do.
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Next question from Nathan.
Michael, I think you are right about the silent majority in the short term, but your justification proves Ben right.
Nixon's silent majority turned on him after the Tet offensive, thanks to Commie Cronkite, as you point out.
They are flakes who scatter to the wind at the first sign of trouble.
Ben correctly stayed true to conservative values over temporary electoral power.
What good is a Republican Congress of conservatives who aren't true conservatives with a capital T and a capital C and a trademark sign above them?
So I think what we're debating once again is the election of Donald Trump, where I said it was a good idea to do it.
We should, conservatives should take what we can get.
And other conservatives said, no, he's just too awful.
I can't lend him my support.
I think I'm right about this.
I still think I'm right about this.
You're right that the Reagan Democrats, as they were once called, or the silent majority, as Richard Nixon called them, or the Trump Democrats, the populist people, as Trump would refer to them, They are not conservatives.
They don't share our political views entirely.
They're certainly not ideological, and they join coalitions with us for many good reasons, by the way.
Many good reasons that conservatives might want to take a look at, like the preservation of tradition and common sense beyond theory.
Very often, the Reagan Democrats of the silent majority are people who say, yeah, your theory is fine, but...
Let's look at reality.
And then the ideological people say, who cares if it works in practice?
Does it work in theory?
In the long term, we're all dead.
There was a fear that if we elect this person or support this person, then 40 years from now something bad will happen.
Politics doesn't happen in the future.
Politics happens in real time.
Politics is things that happen in the real world.
And it doesn't happen like it happens in philosophy books.
It happens in real time and space.
We should take the wins that we can get.
Because you say that the Trump voters have been proven wrong.
You say that the people who didn't vote for Trump have been proven right because of some big budget.
There was an omnibus budget bill that went through that Trump said he didn't like very much.
Well, okay, but let's look at the other side.
If the people who didn't vote for Trump, who said we shouldn't vote for him because he's too yucky and we don't like him, if they had their way, we would have much more abortion.
We would have no Mexico City rule.
We would have the Obamacare mandate.
We would have massive regulation as opposed to the massive deregulation that we've had.
We would have a radical Supreme Court justice That Hillary Clinton would have appointed, who would have gutted the First and Second Amendments as she promised in her campaign.
We would have had more weakness overseas as we had for the last eight years that Hillary Clinton was personally involved in, by the way, when she was Secretary of State.
we would have had, who knows in the future what would have happened with the federal courts, because it's not just the one place on the Supreme Court.
Donald Trump has stacked the court with federal judges.
We'd have no tax reform.
We would have perhaps higher taxes.
It goes on and on and on and on.
And people say, yes, well, okay, those are some victories.
Okay, Heritage Foundation says this has been the most conservative first year in the history of modern politics.
Okay, President Trump has enacted two-thirds of our agenda, but what about 10 years from now?
What about a big budget?
Come on, man.
This is reality.
Deal in reality.
Politics is reality.
And if you say, well, I don't want to have a huge swath of the American population, the silent majority or the Reagan Democrats, I don't want to be associated with them because I don't agree with them on everything.
Okay, good luck.
You know, go vote for the Libertarian candidate or the Green Party candidate or whatever, and I hope you feel very proud of yourself and very morally pure.
But that doesn't do very much for the country.
It doesn't do any good for the country.
And Lord Acton put it very well.
He said, at all times the friends of liberty are few.
They achieve their ends.
I'm paraphrasing.
He said it much nicer than I did.
They achieve their ends by associating with auxiliaries whose goals differ from their own.
And this involves a lot of moral risk.
You have to risk your own integrity and your own morality by supporting someone who isn't perfect, obviously isn't perfect, is eminently imperfect.
But that's the only way to achieve political good.
In a liberal democracy.
That's the only way to achieve anything.
And I'm more than willing to do it, and I think conservatives should do it too.
I think conservatives ought to be less rationalistic and less ideological and less worried about if it works in theory, who cares if it works in practice?
And they should deal in realities.
And I think we're seeing that bear out.
Is President Trump doing things that we don't like?
Yeah, of course.
That budget was really awful.
It's really terrible.
Why he hasn't defunded Planned Parenthood, why the Congressional Republicans haven't defunded Planned Parenthood is beyond me.
But it's better than the alternative.
It's a lot better than the alternative.
A lot of good things are happening.
And you should keep that in mind and not let the perfect get in the way of the good.
Next question from Sean.
Michael, which left-wing media sources do you think are the least reliable in reporting the facts?
Yes.
I think that's my answer.
Washington Post is particularly awful these days.
It used to be fine, relatively fine, but the Washington Post, as you know, is where democracy dies in darkness.
I'll single them out because the lies that they espouse are in the language that they use.
It's in the language itself.
So obviously the editorial staff picks ridiculous stories.
They only pick stories that will attack Trump.
They don't pick any stories that will support his narrative.
Excuse me.
But the language they use, they use the phrase, not just illegal immigration, which is a ridiculous phrase.
To be an immigrant, you have to be accepted by a country.
You can be an immigrant or an illegal alien or a resident alien, but they're not immigrants.
But they use it to conflate legal immigrants from illegal aliens.
So they'll say, immigration does this.
Trump is bad for immigrants.
Trump isn't bad for immigrants.
Trump is perfectly fine for people who immigrate to this country and observe our immigration laws.
That's a different thing.
That's not an immigrant.
That's a criminal.
And so when you read them, it's very hard, unless you're very precise with your language, very careful with language, it's hard not to get sucked in by the facts because bad language gives away whole premises.
I'm doing a video for PragerU that's coming out soon on this very topic.
That's why I think they're particularly bad, but they're all ridiculous.
It's worth reading them all to see what they're thinking and to get a different perspective, and then you...
Within about seven seconds, I think, can knock down that perspective and say it's completely ridiculous.
From Ryan.
Come on, Michael.
Come on.
Your history of Protestantism is a bit slanted.
There were radical reformers, of course.
Luther and the Wittenbergers, however, never sought to leave the church.
Luther was excommunicated in ex-surge domine in 1520.
Still ten years later, Melanchthon's Augsburg Confession made it clear...
The desire that, one, a council be called to resolve their issues, and two, that it be done so all of us can accept and preserve a single true religion.
This, too, is argued because the Turks must be opposed by a unified Christendom, see the preface to the Augsburg Confession.
The Lutheran polity, in turn, was never formalized like the Calvinist polity.
That's because the Lutherans allowed princes to function as emergency bishops, and they only allowed this to occur when Rome refused to give the German churches priests.
The breakaway church's priests.
Lutherans were not iconoclasts like the Reformed.
Lutheran liturgical reforms were in fact quite conservative.
Now I'm under no whitewashed illusions about some of the flaws in Luther and some of the atrocities committed by Protestants later on.
Some of his later writings in particular make Trump's rants sound tame.
But it's also wrong to characterize the Lutheran Reformation as radical.
If you're interested, my dissertation examines the theology of the body in light of Luther's paradigmatic distinction.
Alright, I'll read that later.
I don't need to read that on the show.
Check it out.
I absolutely will read it because I am very interested in these questions in this time period.
I am very hard on Luther.
Luther is radical because he cracked Christendom.
That's why I attack Luther as being, and because he sucked up to the Muslim invaders.
Those are the reasons I'm hard on Luther.
I'm really not hard on Luther for his theology, because his views were almost exactly the same as the Catholic views.
He believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
He believed in the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
He believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary.
He believed in the sacraments.
And for that matter, Zwingli and Calvin also both believed in lots of these things, the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Virtually everybody believed in that from the first century through very, very modern times.
They accept that as clearly implied by scripture.
So, yeah, I am a little harsh on Luther, but, you know, there are some things that can be said for the guy that can't be said for his followers.
The real problem is that he cracked Christendom.
That's what Hamlet's about.
And so that is a tough one to get over.
But all in all, he's better than a lot of other people.
What's worth pointing out here, I think, is that all heresies, all breaks from the church, this occurred to me the other day, they all seem to try to get rid of mystery, mysteries that they can't really tolerate.
So these days, a lot of A lot of breakaway churches, or very modern churches, they don't accept the perpetual virginity of Mary, because it just is hard to make sense of.
They can't accept the Immaculate Conception.
Early on in the church, there was the Arian heresy.
That was the one that denied the divinity of Christ, because they couldn't understand how Christ is holy God and holy man.
They can't resolve that mystery.
It's not a puzzle to be solved.
It's a mystery.
It's a holy mystery that tells us something about the faith and about God and about ourselves.
The Albigensian heresy, which came later, basically denied the body.
It said that only the spirit was good and the body was utterly depraved and awful and evil and we have to reject it and be ascetic because it couldn't resolve that we are good.
But we have a corrupted body.
It couldn't resolve the mystery of the unity of man.
So they had to reject that.
A lot of others have followed from that.
Islam takes similar issues.
They couldn't resolve how God is God and dies on a cross, so they deny the cross.
They crucified him not is a line from the Koran, and St. Paul writes about this.
He says, many are walking now, and I tell you, even weeping, who deny the cross of Christ.
A lot of modern people have issue with the sacraments.
They can't understand how the physical and the metaphysical touch.
That mystery is too much, and you can't resolve it.
It's a mystery.
It's not a puzzle to figure out.
It's a mystery that tells you about your faith.
I think this is what all heresy comes from, and I'm not really accusing Luther of this.
Luther didn't have trouble, really, with some of those mysteries, other than the guy sitting on the throne in Rome.
He had trouble with that mystery of authority.
But I think when we're considering questions of faith and religion, if you find yourself trying to come up with an easy answer to mysteries of faith, you're probably going the wrong way.
As Dr.
Johnson pointed out, all shallows are clear.
From Craig.
Hi, Michael.
Do we have time for it?
We have time for like one or two more.
Hi, Michael.
I've been smoking a cigar for a few months, and I hope not the same cigar.
You've been probably smoking cigars generally.
As you say, the body is a temple and the temple needs incense.
What cigars would you recommend that I can get at a local shop?
Thanks, Craig.
One I've been smoking lately that's very good is the Davidoff Escurio Gran Perfecto.
It's overpriced, but it's very delicious.
That has an Ecuador Habano wrapper, Brazilian binder, Brazilian and Dominican filler, and it's rolled in the Dominican Republic.
That's a good one.
I smoked a really nice new cigar last week in New York at the Cigar Inn.
Can't remember the name now.
Sorry.
It's one of these new boutiques that's come out.
And the Nat Sherman Timeless is really good.
You can now get it If you're just starting out, if you're not totally into it yet, and you want a good cigar on a budget, Oliva V is great.
My father, Nub Kane, can't go wrong.
Let's do one more.
We'll get one more and we'll close it.
Cut it for the day.
Bradley.
Hi, Michael.
You and Klavan are always talking about the culture and that conservatives generally do not do well on that political front.
Or that cultural front, rather.
My question is, what can the average Joe do to help shift the culture toward conservatism?
Particularly, what can a 30-some-year-old cigar smoker history teacher do?
Hmm, interesting.
Please don't tell me that I have to start watching Roseanne or the Kardashians.
Haha, love the show.
Thanks, Brad.
You're in the perfect place.
You are in the ideal place.
You don't have to watch the Kardashians.
You don't even have to watch Roseanne.
I kind of like Roseanne, but you don't have to watch it.
You're in the perfect place because the culture is formed in those schools.
And you're teaching a highly politicized subject where the left has succeeded in the culture because they invaded all of the schooling, all of the universities, and even younger, and Hollywood and New York, so you have the whole culture.
You are in a prime spot, especially teaching history.
You should teach true history.
You should not be afraid to ignore people like Howard Zinn, which Mitch Daniels, as head of Purdue and as governor of Indiana, called his ridiculous revisionism execrable.
You should teach true history.
You should teach that Christopher Columbus was a great man and a great devoted explorer who founded our civilization.
You should teach that the founders and framers of the United States were great men, wonderful men, who formed the greatest, freest, most prosperous, charitable country in the history of the world, who were much smarter than we are today, who were much better educated than we are today.
You should teach that.
You should teach the true history of science.
The history of science is totally ignored.
People think that science just floats in the air somewhere.
It just popped up one day.
You should teach the religious underpinnings and the religious premises that are required by science and the profound piety and Western culture of the people who founded science, like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.
You should teach all of those things fearlessly because there is an awful movement of historicism and schools of resentment that want to hate our forebears, that want to spit on the shoulders of giants, But we shouldn't spit on the shoulders of giants.
We're not giants ourselves.
We're dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.
Maybe we can see a little further.
It's only because of those guys.
I would teach a grateful history and an accurate history, and you'll be doing the Lord's work.
Okay, that's our show.
Try to survive the weekend.
I know Drew is not only not here, but he's on the road.
Try to survive.
In the meantime, speaking of Drew, you can listen to Another Kingdom, which is his story that he wrote that I perform all the characters in.
You can get that wherever fine narrative podcasts are downloaded.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you Monday.
Bye.
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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