On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a new survey by Claims Conference finds that many Americans are forgetting. 31% of Americans and 41% of Millennials believe fewer than two million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, when the actual number is around 6 million. 41% of Americans and 66% of Millennials have no idea what Auschwitz was. And 61% of all Americans don’t know that Hitler was democratically elected. We will take a moment today to recall not just the history of that terrible event but the 2,000-year record of Germany being the worst country in the history of the world. Then, the Mailbag!
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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a new survey by Claims Conference finds that many Americans are forgetting the Holocaust.
31% of Americans and 41% of millennials believe that fewer than 2 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, when the actual number is around 6 million.
41% of Americans and 66% of millennials have no idea what Auschwitz was.
And 61% of all Americans don't know that Hitler was democratically elected.
We will take a moment today, in a very covfefe show, to recall not just the history of that terrible event, but the 2,000-year record of Germany being the worst country in the history of the world.
Then, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
We have 2000 years of history that we have to get to on why Germany is the single worst country in the history of the world.
Before we do that, I got to talk to you about my body.
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Okay.
Let's get into this country.
So a really terrifying report that people are just forgetting about the Holocaust.
This wasn't that long ago.
I guess in a sense it's not all that surprising.
It's been now 70 years since World War II. There aren't a lot of survivors left, either of the Holocaust or of that war, really.
And, of course, Americans don't learn history.
Nevertheless, I have been saying this for a long time.
That people talk about all these terrible countries in the world and these threats and all that.
That Germany is the worst, most evil, most dangerous country in the history of the world.
And Norm MacDonald did a great bit on a specific part of this on Dave Letterman's, I think, on his last show.
Here's Norm.
There is one country that worries me, though.
Not Iraq, not Iran, not North Korea.
The only country that really worries me is the country of Germany.
I don't know if you guys are history buffs or not, but...
In the early part of the previous century, Germany decided to go to war.
And who did they go to war with?
The world!
That had never been tried before.
And so you figure that would take about five seconds for the world to win, but no, it was actually close.
Then about 30 years pass, and Germany decides again to go to war, and again it chooses as its enemy the world. - and again it chooses as its enemy the world. - - And this time they have that guy, scrankly, scrankly, that guy.
I'm not even going to dignify him by saying his name, but I think you know I'm done.
So Norm, as always, is right, and he's just talking about this one little segment of German history.
It actually wasn't just the two world wars.
That is not the only reason that Germany is the worst country in the history of the world.
Let's take a quick look at the scoreboard.
Germany destroyed the Roman Empire.
Germany cracked Christendom and caused the 30 Years' War in which over 8 million people died.
Germany gave the world communism.
Germany destroyed Russia by starting the Russian Revolution.
Germany then sent Vladimir Lenin on a sealed boxcar to make sure that Russia could never recover from that revolution.
Germany then declared war on the world once, killing or wounding 41 some odd million people.
Then Germany declared war on the world again, killing 80 million people and wounding many others.
And finally, Germany succeeded in taking over Europe and flooded the West with millions of unvetted, overwhelmingly young, male, Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, which has caused a radical surge in violent crime on that continent.
That is Germany in a nutshell.
That is German history in a nutshell.
Let's start at the very beginning.
We'll take a quick tour through 2,000 years of German history to remind ourselves what we keep forgetting, that Germany is the worst country in the history of the world.
In 297 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus allowed the Germanic tribe of Salian Franks to settle within the empire.
And to be fair to the Salians, they were actually a pretty good tribe.
They didn't try to invade.
They were mostly loyal to Caesar and to Rome.
They were actually largely forced into Rome by other tribes.
I guess you could call them refugees.
And Rome reached agreements with the tribes and accepted them.
The other Germanic tribes were not so nice.
They were on the outskirts of the Roman Empire.
They started to get a little rambunctious there.
They were seeking a better life, I guess you could say.
And while they were seeking that better life, they invaded whole regions of the empire against Rome's will.
Fast forward a little bit.
In 410, the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe led by Alaric, finally broke through the walls of the city of Rome itself.
So in not that long a period of time, they made it all the way into Rome itself, they sacked the capital, they raped, killed, pillaged, and burned, they torched the entire city, and they kept on plundering the city for three full days.
Germany managed to destroy the eternal city.
city.
It took them three days.
That was actually the first time when the Visigoths got there to Rome.
That was the first time in a millennium, almost a thousand years, that someone other than Romans ran the city of Rome.
Thank you, Germany.
Over this period of time, some of the other German tribes were converted to Christianity.
And it was actually for that reason that the pagan German tribes brutally persecuted them, and even this caused some trouble.
Even German tribes converting to Christianity caused trouble, because they were largely converted to Arianism, which was an early Christian heresy.
It's the heresy for which the guy Arius, for whom Arianism is named, it denies the divinity of Christ, at the First Council of Nicaea he was preaching this heresy, and Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, went up and punched him right in his face.
That's how bad this heresy was.
So Christians from now-sacked Rome actually had to go back and reconvert all the Germans because they had been converted to heresy, so we had to convert them to real Christianity.
This seems like a minor point, I know, but heresy and schism will play a very important role in the rest of our history of Germany as the worst country in the history of the world, so keep that in mind.
That covers the fall of Rome.
That covers plunging all of ancient civilization into chaos and disorder.
Thank you, Germany.
By the grace of God, Europe managed to recover a little bit and grow a pretty nice civilization for a thousand years or so.
Just Germany was itching to screw it all up again.
They just couldn't take it.
So a thousand years was okay.
That brings us to the 16th century and to a corpulent German heretic named Martin Luther.
Now I know I'm going to get a lot of mailbag questions about this because people like Martin Luther's ideas or they say Martin Luther's ideas led to good ideas and to better things and freedom and blah blah.
Okay, fine.
That's fine.
I'm actually not saying that you have to hate Protestantism or something.
I'm just pointing to the historical record.
In 1517, Martin Luther printed copies of disagreements with the Church and certain aspects of Catholic Orthodoxy.
Regardless of what you think about his ideas...
This guy, this German guy, alone, virtually alone, cracked Western Christendom and created modernity.
Luther and the printing press that allowed him to spread his 95 theses permanently cracked the unity of Western Christendom.
He didn't just argue over some minor points or take issue with this doctrine or this doctrine or this idea.
That had been happening for well over a thousand years.
And, you know, Santa Claus punched the heretic in the face.
A disagreement among bishops is a factor and a facet of Christianity.
What Martin Luther did is he claimed that the church did not have authority to teach, did not have the universal authority that it claimed to have.
This is where relativism crept into Europe.
We all talk about how awful relativism is and facts don't care about your feelings and, you know, there is objective truth and there's not your truth and my truth and my truth and this truth.
It begins here.
It begins here in modern Europe.
Martin Luther...
Some people say Martin Luther made Christianity reasonable.
That the Catholics were really unreasonable and the Pope was unreasonable.
And Martin Luther brought reason into this.
The exact opposite is true.
Martin Luther hated reason.
He hated Aristotle and he hated reason.
He called reason the whore of the devil.
Reason itself.
He said, quote,"...you must abandon your reason.
Know nothing of it.
Annihilate it completely." This was a major break from traditional Christianity because in traditional Christianity, in Orthodox Christianity, reason leads you to God.
Reason is one way to come to God.
Martin Luther went on.
He said, Reason is a prostitute, the devil's appointed whore, whore eaten by scab and leprosy, who ought to be trodden underfoot and destroyed, she and her wisdom, throw dung in her face to make her ugly.
He had a way with words, that guy.
He did really...
How inspiring, how beautiful.
On a more practical front, that's just the doctrinal front.
On a more practical front, Luther fully embraced two aspects of the German national character that would come back to destroy the 20th century.
Hatred of Jews and cozying up to Muslim invaders.
And he also caused major wars.
Now this, I want to be fair to Martin Luther.
I want to be fair to the Germans here.
He probably didn't want to start those wars.
One of the wars that he started...
It was the Peasants' Revolt in 1524.
And he didn't like this.
He published a great tract on this called Against the Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants.
One of the most beautifully titled tracts probably in political history.
But back to those other two German national tendencies, Hatred of Jews and the Strange Embrace of Muslim Invaders.
Luther, on the former, published a tract titled, On the Jews and Their Lies, and he said of the Muslim invaders, quote, I would rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.
He also wrote that war against the Ottoman Muslims would be absolutely contrary to Christ's doctrine and name.
So, as I mentioned, he cracks the authority of the European Christendom.
He cracks that central authority, that premise of truth.
You get the Peasants' War out of that.
This led to war between the German Lutherans and the Catholics.
This eventually built into the Thirty Years' War, which was, in modern history, we just think of our wars as destructive.
The Thirty Years' War was one of the deadliest and most destructive conflicts in human history.
Enough about Luther.
Thank you, Luther.
Thank you, Germany.
Let's skip forward again to the 19th century when Germany gave us the single most destructive political ideology in history, communism.
Now, you might object to say other philosophers had worked out various versions of communism and arrangements.
DuPay in France and there were some communal arrangements in antiquity.
The Acts of the Apostles refers to early Christians keeping all of their goods in common, that sort of thing.
Sure.
The German Karl Marx unleashed communism on the world.
He is the singular figure in communism.
He mocked God.
He instituted, to borrow Churchill's words, the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
This distinctly German philosophy went on to kill 94 million people in the 20th century.
Just the 20th century.
There were still communist outposts all around the world.
Also in the 19th century, Germany gave us the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that God is dead.
Nietzsche assailed traditional morality, and he described the philosophy of the future as being beyond good and evil.
People object to this.
They say, oh, Nietzsche, he was just observing things.
He said our culture just got rid of God.
He wasn't calling for anything like that.
That's both true and false.
Nietzsche is proclaiming that God is dead.
He's confronting nihilism with the premise that God is dead.
And he describes beyond good and evil.
He calls it the philosophy of the future.
To this end, in this philosophy, man would not follow conscience or reason, but will to power.
Again, throw reason out the window.
It's the will to power.
My will against your will, and I will will myself up.
This idea would eventually be carried to its logical conclusion by this guy.
Not Norm by the guy that Norm is imitating.
It would be followed to its logical conclusion by the Nazis.
We'll get to that in a short time.
Also in that same century, in the 19th century, German scholars and academics gave us new theories of textual criticism that treated the Bible not as a source of revelation and wisdom as it had always been treated in the West, But rather as a dead scientific document that was of more interest as a historical curiosity to be parsed for contradictions.
And that doesn't agree with that.
And that doesn't agree with that.
Rather than as a source of devotional and divine inspiration.
Further just chipping away at the spiritual foundations of Europe and the West.
Thank you, Germany.
Now in the 20th century, events move a lot faster.
They really pick up pace here.
In 1914, Germany declared war on the world.
They declared war in the world for the first time.
Some people pretend that Germany isn't responsible for World War I. They say, oh no, actually it was Serbia because some Serbian dude killed Franz Ferdinand and this and that and yada yada yada.
No.
The historical consensus places blame at the feet of Germany and Austria.
The historical facts clearly point to German militarism as the cause.
Austria-Hungary was looking for an excuse to aggress against Serbia.
Germany supported Austria wholeheartedly.
They gave them a blank check.
They urged Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia.
Germany alone had the power to stop the war from escalating in July of 1914.
When all of this is happening and Franz Ferdinand gets killed and it seems like all these crazy little agreements and treaties are going to affect, it could have been stopped.
The war actually could have stopped in July of 1914.
Germany didn't want to stop it.
Germany wanted the war.
Didn't do it.
Once again, thank you, Germany.
Now we go back to communism.
This is within just a matter of years, but we're going back to the most destructive political ideology ever invented.
At the same time that Germany is waging war on the world, Germany also decided to unleash the horrors of communism on everybody.
The first step to doing this was using communism to destroy Russia.
And how did it do that?
International Women's Day.
International Women's Day.
How on earth could that?
International Women's Day is responsible for this.
International Women's Day was invented by German communists Clara Zetkin and Kate Dunker, among other people, and that was the first one.
It was invented in 1910.
Those German communists created it at the International Socialist Women's Conference.
When we think of International Women's Day today, we think of it as like a hashtag on Twitter and it's, you know, little pictures and stuff on Facebook and whatever.
But it actually began with these German communists.
It was then used to launch the Russian Revolution.
On March 8th in 1917...
Women textile workers held an International Women's Day protest.
Not with the hashtags and on Twitter, they went out into the streets and they protested.
That one protest launched the Russian Revolution.
Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, wrote of it, Revolutionary actions were foreseen, but we did not imagine that this Women's Day would inaugurate the revolution.
Those German communists set in motion the events that would destroy Russia.
But they didn't just leave it at that.
They didn't just say, oh, wow, that was a pretty good one.
We just set in motion the events to topple the Russian monarchy and to plunge that country into chaos.
They had to make sure that it would be plunged into chaos.
So a month after that, Germany sent Vladimir Lenin himself, the leader of the Soviet Union, the eventual leader of the Soviet Union, who was then in exile in Switzerland.
The German government sent Lenin back into Russia on a sealed train.
They arranged this, the German high command arranged this.
To get Lenin out of Switzerland through Germany into Russia on a completely sealed train.
Germany was then at war with Russia in the first time Germany declared war in the world.
And they knew that it could destabilize the country by sending Lenin back in there.
It's pretty interesting that they did it on a sealed train, too.
Like, he couldn't get off to go to the bathroom or to get a sandwich or something.
It was completely sealed because Germany knew that this ideology and this man were so poisonous...
It shouldn't infect anything outside of their enemy.
So they sent it in there like a heat-seeking missile right into Russia.
And guess what happened?
It worked.
So they go in there.
Within a matter of months, the October Revolution happens.
There's a total overthrow.
The Bolsheviks rise to power.
The Soviet Union then...
And Vladimir Lenin became its first leader.
The Soviet Union would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war and kill tens of millions of people in the 20th century.
Thank you, Germany.
Germany literally sent the beginning of that into the country in a two-prong attack.
So now about 20 years goes by.
Okay, the war's over.
They've destroyed Russia.
They've destroyed a lot of the world.
Europeans at this point, by the way, have gotten the gist of how Germany behaves.
They kind of say, okay, you know, I've been doing this for a long time.
Everybody knows that Germany is going to aggress again, and yet they give Germany this Treaty of Versailles.
They don't mind when Germany is clearly violating the Treaty of Versailles, that it's untenable, that it's peace without victory.
No.
You need victory.
You need clear victors.
When somebody's in the wrong, you need to beat them down.
There's an amazing painting from this era right after the First World War.
There's a painting of all the leaders of World War I and they're there signing the Treaty of Versailles and they're so happy and they're talking and they're all looking at each other.
And then in the center of the painting is Winston Churchill.
He's got his head like this and there's a light on him.
He's the only one that's really lit and he's just looking out at the audience, at the viewer of the painting and just thinking...
This is a terrible idea.
This is not going to last.
It's amazing that that painting was begun in 1919, long before the Second World War.
And you saw this in political cartoons, too.
It wasn't the consensus view that war was inevitable, but there were some political cartoons that said, oh, the class of 1940, it was a little baby at the time, the class of 1940 is going to have to go fight Germany again.
So, shock, wouldn't you know?
Wouldn't you be shocked to hear in 1939...
Germany declares war on the world again.
Now, this was a war declared by scientific barbarism against Christian civilization.
That's an important phrase to use.
Winston Churchill observed that dichotomy in the war, in the First World War and the Second World War.
It's scientific barbarism against the Christian civilization of Europe.
This new science, this will to power, these ideas that had been concocted by Friedrich Nietzsche and expounded on by others of supermen and master races and the idea that our biology is really all that matters and we're going to be in this brutal struggle.
Scientific barbarism.
A science that doesn't make any sense.
An unreasonable science.
A science that's opposed to reason.
Versus traditional Christian civilization, the civilization that built Europe, the civilization that comes directly out of Christianity, of Athens and Jerusalem.
Don't take my word for it.
Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels wrote about this in 1928.
In his diary that year, he wrote, What does Christianity mean today?
National socialism is a religion.
All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place.
We lack traditions and ritual.
One day soon, national socialism will be the religion of all Germans.
My party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery.
That is my gospel.
That's Joseph Goebbels, 11 years before the outbreak of World War II. Then, fast forward, 1939, the year it's all happening, Goebbels wrote then of Hitler, the Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian.
He views Christianity as a symptom of decay.
Rightly so.
It is a branch of the Jewish race.
And you can see here, in this Nazi hatred of Christianity and Christian civilization, the Nazis' particular hatred of the Jews and the Jewish problem, Jewish question, and the final solution.
This is their hatred.
On the metaphysical level, it is a hatred of God.
On the physical level, it is a hatred of Jews, the chosen people of God.
It's a hatred of priests.
It's a hatred of the church.
And on a metaphysical level, it's a hatred of God.
The Holocaust alone took 6 million Jews, killed 6 million Jews.
Around 5.7 million, I think, is the best estimate of Europe.
7.3 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust also killed gypsies and poles and gays and priests.
Lots of people.
But almost all of European Jewry.
Around 80 million people died in that war.
And luckily, finally, Germany was defeated.
So we've made it from, what was that, the 3rd century, all the way to the 20th century.
Germany constantly trying to destroy civilization, usually pretty successfully.
So then what does Europe do?
It's the end of the 1940s, you know, mid-20th century.
What does Europe do?
Not 50 years after Germany twice declared war on the world and tried to take over the world and tried to run the European continent, what did Europe do?
It let Germany run the European continent.
It let Germany do it.
They tried it in 1914.
We beat them back.
They tried it in 1940.
We beat them back.
Then we said, okay, you can have it.
Now you can take it.
What could go wrong?
Germany is the leader of Europe.
There is no question about that.
Germany has the largest population in the EU. It has the strongest economy in Europe.
It's the strongest contributor to the EU. It's got certainly the most stable government.
All the other governments collapse constantly.
Italy has had about 750 million governments since World War II. Germany is centrally located.
Germany crafts policy that affects all of Europe.
And The particular policy that that has implied is the flooding of Europe in just the last few years with unvetted Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, groups that skew overwhelmingly young and male and alone, unaccompanied.
No family, no, they just come in here.
A lot of young men from war-torn countries who don't come from the culture of Europe and don't worship the god that Europe once worshipped.
More than 20% of migrants are teenagers.
Half of them are unaccompanied.
90% of those are male.
90%.
So as a result of this, you've seen the headlines.
You may have read the book The Strange Death of Europe, which we've talked about on the show a bit.
Crime has skyrocketed in Europe.
Places that used to be these little wonderlands with basically no crime at all.
Just a little snowy paradise.
A lot of alcoholism.
You know, it gets cold up there.
But otherwise, not a lot of violent crime.
Now you see huge rises in gang rape, assault, you name it.
That's just the latest from Germany.
Now, there will be an objection.
I know what you're thinking.
You're going to say, I can see it now in the YouTube comment section.
I know you're writing it right now, I bet.
Stop writing it and hear me out.
You're saying, well, what about Bach?
What about Bach, Michael?
What about Beethoven or Leibniz or this?
All these great German cultural geniuses and mathematicians.
Okay, right.
I'm not saying that there haven't been good Germans.
That isn't my argument.
My argument is that Germany is the worst country in the history of the world.
And as a political entity...
From the 3rd century to the 21st century, Germany has incontrovertibly been the most uniformly terrible country in the history of the world.
Now it's trying to control Europe.
That is just unbelievable.
It is insane that we now gave them control of Europe after giving up tens of millions of lives to stop them from doing it on two occasions within 20 years.
Germany also, by the way, is building a giant army.
So, I don't know.
That's never a good sign in history when Germany starts building a giant army, especially when it does it quietly.
The EU, the European Union, has never built its own army because that's a terrible idea.
Europeans and everyone else in the world knows, hmm, maybe we don't want some giant military force to occupy the entire European continent.
So in 2017, just last year, Germany quietly started to integrate the armies of the Czech Republic and Romania into its own forces, into the Bundeswehr.
That just doesn't even sound good.
I don't want there to be like a big Bundeswehr.
I don't even speak German.
That just doesn't sound good.
So what it looks like now we're getting is something that looks like a European Union army.
But of course no one's going to vote on this or talk about it.
It's just going to kind of happen and they're going to do it quietly without treaties and without international cooperation.
Hmm, probably not good.
What is that that they say about how those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?
Good question.
Good question to remember.
Okay, enough about the worst country in the history of the world.
It is time for the mailbag.
Do we have to say...
We have to say goodbye, don't we?
Well, I'm glad we could make it through 2,000 years.
That's not...
2,000 years in like half an hour is not too bad.
I have got to say goodbye.
We have excellent mailbag questions today.
We have to get to them.
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First question comes from, uh, Andy.
Andy writes, They conveniently leave out the fact it happened under Democrats.
However, it is also my understanding that indigenous tribes did not necessarily live under this purified utopia that leftists depict before the arrival of Europeans.
How do I respond to this as a conservative, a future high school history teacher, and someone that firmly believes in American exceptionalism?
Thanks, Andy.
I'll help you out.
They used that as just a slogan.
The Trail of Tears was terrible.
They don't talk about the Indian Wars.
They don't talk about the border wars.
They don't talk about how this is a country and a country can't tolerate other little countries living within its country.
They don't talk about those things.
It's just a slogan.
It's just terrible.
They don't really get into the specifics of it.
And we kind of let them get away with it because we enjoy that Jackson was a Democrat, so we kind of throw it back on them.
But it's ridiculous sloganeering.
Of course, let's go back to Columbus, a favorite subject of mine.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, there were really nice Indians that he met.
He writes about it.
His Spaniard compatriots wrote about this.
And they said, oh, they were really peaceful.
They gave us a lot of nice stuff.
How lovely of them, you know, and they were beautiful people.
A lot of them had cuts and marks all over their body.
Where did that come from?
That came from the Isla de Caribe and other belligerent Indians in the area who would chop them up and eat them, who would attack them, who were belligerent, and there was cannibalism.
There was cannibalism all over the Americas.
The word cannibal only came into our Western understanding and our parlance After Columbus arrived and discovered cannibalism, it comes from Carribe, from Caribbean.
Carribe became cannibal.
And so there was cannibalism all over the Americas.
On some of the natives that Christopher Columbus met when he arrived, the Iroquois in the Northeast were cannibals.
Indians in the American Southwest were cannibals.
It was all over the Americas.
Even the New York Times admitted this in an article quoting archaeologists in like around the year 2000 or something.
The New York Times admitted that this was until What's it called?
Intersectionality.
Until intersectionality poisoned all of academia, people could acknowledge these obvious facts.
Nature published a piece on this called Incontrovertible Evidence of Cannibalism.
Now, certainly, some of the natives had a primitive form of writing in the Americas.
They had hieroglyphics, nothing terribly sophisticated, nothing that we would consider like normal writing.
And human sacrifice ran rampant throughout the Americas.
Human sacrifice was rampant here, particularly among the Aztecs.
Spanish explorers wrote about this after observing it in the Aztec capital.
In the year 1487, which was five years before Columbus, this wasn't in the ancient, ancient past, this was five years before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Aztecs slaughtered 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days.
Four days.
That is 14 murders per minute, just rolling by.
That's the idyllic paradise.
That's the noble savage.
One estimate of human sacrifice in 15th century Mexico puts that number as high as 250,000 per year.
And these were largely human sacrifices to pagan gods.
Now, modern people who don't know anything about anything...
They want to tear down statues of Christopher Columbus, who was a great man, and they want to erect statues of the generic indigenous person for Indigenous People's Day.
The body counts and the cultures that we're talking about here suggest maybe they should reconsider.
From Dave.
Dear master of written brevity, I've always found writing to be a much easier and clearer way to express my thoughts as opposed to speaking spontaneously, especially in front of a group as the group setting makes me uncomfortable enough that I start to second guess my choice of words.
Sure.
As someone whose big break was in publishing, did you find the transition from writing blank books to speaking, broadcasting, public Q&A to be a challenge?
If so, what tips you have for the rest of us?
That's a good question.
Going from doing nothing to doing something is a challenge.
That can be a real challenge.
Going from not writing a book to doing anything is a challenge.
But, you know, in my past life, before I'll never work in Hollywood again...
I was trained as an actor for a long time and, you know, been in acting training for a long time.
And that does help.
I actually do suggest that to a lot of people taking an acting class or maybe just reading a book.
There's a good book called An Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavski.
It's kind of the beginning of modern acting, we would call it.
And it's important to read that.
Even just the title means An Actor Prepares.
If you're going to speak extemporaneously, If you're going to do Q&A or give speeches or whatever, you need to prepare.
You need to read a lot of books, then you need to write out your speech or write out your thoughts and talk through them.
You need muscle memory.
When an actor memorizes a script or learns a part, they don't...
You know, it's not like you're just learning lines.
You build a character, which helps.
But you also, the way actors learn lines effectively is you read them out loud with your mouth.
You don't just kind of go in your head and try to memorize.
You read them because you have muscle memory.
So you make it very exaggerated.
An actor prepares.
Co-fefe, you know, and then it goes in your mouth.
So, that's one thing I would do.
All of these guys, some of the great public speakers of our era, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, they practiced their lines.
They had these lines for 20 years before we heard them in a time for choosing, or before Winston Churchill won the Second World War with speeches.
He'd written a lot of these for years and years before that.
You've got to practice, you've got to prepare, and then it will come easy.
And you're going to make it look effortless and look easy, but it's going to take a lot of effort.
How much more time?
We had a little more time.
From James...
Dear the most handsome man at the Daily Wire.
That's a big compliment.
I'm about to be just absolutely pummeled by the big boss and the leader of the multiverse after this, just for reading that title.
Dear the most handsome man at the Daily Wire, what do you think of the idea about the rise of the imperial presidency?
Does it undermine what the founding fathers had envisioned for America?
Also, would you ever consider growing a mustache?
Thank you.
Oh, handsome one.
I had to grow a mustache for a part one time in a play, and there are probably pictures of that on the internet.
It was a lot.
Because I actually, I can't really grow a beard.
I don't, you know, I'd look like I'm 16 or something and I'm not like exactly the burliest Adonis of a guy.
So I can't get a, but I can grow a mustache in like 15 minutes.
I get a mustache just immediately.
So yeah, maybe I'll consider that.
I mean, I'll do that for like mustache March or Movember or something to the imperial presidency.
This is not something totally new.
People say, oh, since George Bush, we've had an imperial presidency or, oh, since further back, FDR or Wilson or Obama or whatever.
This is not totally new.
This is one of these things where it's much more complicated than we all pretend it is.
In 1793, George Washington unilaterally decided that the U.S. would be neutral in the war between Britain and France.
He didn't consult anybody.
There wasn't like a vote.
It wasn't decided on by Congress.
He just did it himself.
And he prohibited people from interfering.
That seems imperial to me.
That's probably not in the spirit of the Constitution.
People talk about the illegal war of Iraq.
Oh, it wasn't really illegal.
Congress gave George W. Bush the authority to lead it.
But we've actually had over 30 undeclared wars, well over 30 undeclared wars, going all the way back to the First Barbary War.
The First Barbary War in 1805, that's not a declared war, really.
We ended up getting some treaties out of it.
And actually, that war, that gives us part of the Marine Corps hymn.
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
That's an undeclared war.
Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton preferred an elected monarchy.
That's fairly imperial, probably.
So it isn't quite so simple as we pretend.
In the spirit of freedom in which America is founded, we want government to be closer to us.
We want the government to be local.
We don't want the federal government to do very much.
And in order to do that, you need to be a disciplined people, a moral and religious people, and you need to have a common culture so that you have a country, you have something.
And when those things break down, somebody is going to maintain order.
Somebody is going to come in there and keep the peace, and that's going to be the federal government, unfortunately, if we don't get our lives in order and have a common culture.
Next question from Patty.
Not a question, but an answer.
Why are so many middle-aged white women on antidepressants?
As a medicated middle-aged white woman, I feel qualified to respond.
Maybe because we feel like we support so many other people.
Like the world would cave in if we let our guard down for one second.
I'm not sure of the statistics, but I suspect we feel alone in our responsibilities.
Many of us care for and support grown children, grandchildren, as well as aging parents.
Were we ever meant to take on so much?
Your show neglected to mention how many grown children still were quite dependent on their parents or how few siblings we have to share responsibilities for aging parents.
Or how many fathers have bailed on their responsibilities?
It is tragic, but suggesting we take away the pill, which makes it all tolerable, is hardly the answer.
Can you think of a different solution?
Yes, I can.
Stop supporting the grown kids.
I can think of it.
There is a solution that involves taking away that pill.
Stop supporting the adult kids and demand that men act like men.
I totally empathize with what you're saying.
There's something like 75% of millennials have their parents pay at least one of their bills for them.
Millennials, we're like 30 years old now.
It's completely insane.
And our culture doesn't want men to act like men.
We say, oh, men should cry.
Men should be soft.
They don't need to work.
Maybe they'll be a stay-at-home dad.
Don't pick up the tab.
Don't open the door.
Don't act like a man.
If you act like a man, that's toxic masculinity.
And by the way, when they say toxic masculinity, that just means men being men.
That just means manliness.
And they say, oh, it means war and rape.
What you're really saying, nobody disagrees we shouldn't have violence and war and rape and killing and pillaging and burning.
You're really saying you don't like manliness.
Except we need manliness.
We need men to act like men.
You should demand that the men in your life act like men.
That's not easy.
But that's the answer.
You should recognize that life and suffering have a purpose.
This is not easy to say this.
These are hard things to say.
Suffering is not morally evil.
Suffering is morally neutral.
The moral component is how we react to suffering.
You can react to suffering in an ennobling and good way or in a debasing way.
Those are simple answers.
Those are not easy answers, but they're simple answers.
And this culture makes it a lot harder.
There's a reason why these antidepressants have proliferated.
I don't think it's because middle-aged white women and all the other people who are on them just suddenly became depraved drug addicts.
It's a terrible culture, and that's one solution to it.
But it's not the right solution.
I'm not telling you to go off medication.
I'm not telling anyone to go off medication.
I'm not giving any medical advice.
I don't want to give medical advice.
But looking at the numbers overall, only you and your doctor and your family knows your specific case.
But I do know in the aggregate, these medications are over-prescribed.
They're way over-prescribed, and there is a cultural and a spiritual answer to that.
Do we have time for one more?
We'll do one more.
From Paula.
Michael, you all appear to take the assault on decency, democracy, and the republic in stride.
You even mentioned today that politics is not the main focus in life.
Politics and government will always be a pain.
How do you let it roll off your back when you hear outrageous things, unfair attacks, and outright lies going on in this country?
It is like lightning when I hear it.
From Paula.
This is a good one to end on.
We'll try to end on a happily tragic comedic note.
It was ever thus.
Look at what the government did to Jesus.
Look at what the local government did to Jesus and the imperial government.
Look at what it did to Socrates.
The government and politics is always like this.
This is a permanent fact of life.
You can't get too wrapped up in it.
Politics is downstream of culture.
Culture is downstream of the cult, of what the culture worships, of God.
And there are much higher things in life.
Politics only exists so that we can do the higher things in life.
See our families, have nice meals, talk about things that matter, enjoy art and culture and worship and all those things.
You know, I think in America in particular, because we have such a strong civic religion, especially on the right, because we're patriotic, we like the American flag, it's a grand old flag, you know, that kind of thing.
Because we have that, there's a temptation to treat politics as a religion, or the American...
Political idea is a religion.
It's not a religion.
It's downstream of religion.
And things that are downstream of religion are going to get corrupted, and they're going to get kicked around, and they're going to go bad, and they'll get a little better sometimes.
Put not your trust in princes.
You just don't do it.
You're going to end up disappointed.
Jesus knew this and Socrates knew this and Jesus took to the cross so that we don't have to worry about all of this.
And Socrates in the time before the first century drank the hemlock because he understood this too.
So, you know, he didn't want to die, but he was given the choice and he knew politics was always this way.
And there were higher things than politics.
So don't worry about it, man.
Politics is going to be like this.
Lower your political expectations.
Your expectations for everything else will increase, and your life will get better.
Okay, that's our show.
I'm going on the road next week.
I think I will be in the studio on Monday.
Then I'm going to Alabama and New York and Philadelphia.
So I will keep you posted on all of that.
The first talk is in Mobile, Alabama on Tuesday at the Alabama Policy Institute.
So Google them and get some tickets if you're in the area.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you on Monday.
The Michael Knowles show is a daily wire forward publishing production.
