Ep. 146 - Child Sacrifice, Undead Pigs: Time For An Exorcism?
Pope Francis praises exorcism as demand for casting out demons skyrockets. Meanwhile, a new archeological dig has uncovered the largest mass child sacrifice in the history in Peru. These days, governments rely primarily on socialism to murder their citizens’ children, but the UK has promised to study the pagan bloodbath for helpful tips. At Yale, scientists have resurrected a decapitated pig. At a NC prison, a transgender inmate sues to practice witchcraft. We cast out cultural demons, ancient and modern. Then, the Mailbag!
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Pope Francis praises exorcism as demand for casting out demons skyrockets.
Meanwhile, a new archaeological dig has uncovered the largest mass child sacrifice in the history of the world in pre-Columbus, Peru.
These days, governments rely primarily on socialism to murder their citizens' children, but the UK's National Health Service has promised to study the pagan bloodbath for helpful tips.
At Yale, scientists have resurrected a decapitated pig.
At a North Carolina prison, a transgender inmate is suing to practice witchcraft.
We will cast out many demons, ancient and modern, then the mailbag up.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Man, that's a big change from yesterday, huh?
It's a very schizophrenic week.
We started out talking about all this death and destruction.
Then yesterday was the most covfefe day probably in the last year in American politics.
Kanye West just becoming a hat-wearing MAGA supporter.
And now today we're back to demons and death and decapitated pigs and the undead and destruction.
Very difficult week.
Before we...
Before we get right into it, plus the mailbag, I have got to tell you about something.
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So, we've got a lot of demonic possession going on.
We've got the undead pigs.
We've got transgender witches infiltrating our prisons, and we're subsidizing all of it.
And we have child sacrifice today, and child sacrifice 500 years ago.
Let's turn now to a live stream of the soul of our culture.
- Oh, make it stop! - I mean, take it! - Get on! - I'm sick! - Take it! - Now, this comes after some good news In 2016, we were able to cast out one demon in particular, which was very important.
We were able to cast out Hillary Clinton and all of her works and all of her empty promises, but there have been some aftershocks from all of this.
We're still writhing a little bit as the demons are purging.
And, you know, the devil was very upset when Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, so we're seeing some cultural aftershocks.
And now there's actually a shortage of exorcists, and the demand for exorcism is on the rise.
No less a figure than the Pope.
Pope Francis talked about this in his weekly address.
He urged Christians to drive out evil.
And he said, people have this, I mean, the version of exorcism that everybody thinks about is that, you know, the movie The Exorcist and the girls writhing on the bed.
But exorcism has been around for a very long time.
And you see Christ and the apostles cast out demons throughout all of the scriptures.
So if you're a Christian, this certainly shouldn't be anything crazy to you.
But what exorcism says, like, the reason we have exorcism is because we know that there's evil in the world and we know evil has a personality.
This isn't some crazy superstitious thing.
This isn't like worshipping random nature gods or something.
We know that there is evil, and evil has a personality.
So what the Pope is urging is saying that baptism is the key.
The Pope said, quote,"...we know from experience that the Christian life is always prone to temptation, especially to the temptation to separate from God, from his will, from communion with him, to fall back into the webs of worldly seductions." Baptism prepares and strengthens us for this daily struggle, including the fight against the devil, who, as Saint Peter says, like a lion, tries to devour and destroy us.
And demand is way up for exorcism.
There are actually half a million cases in Italy alone every year that need investigation.
And again, this is always caricatured by the mainstream media and by the secular left.
They have these images of crazy, superstitious Christians going around and doing all sorts of voodoo to cast out demons.
That isn't the case at all.
The Vatican is actually quite clear that in a great many of these cases, of these half a million cases, the issue is mental illness or some other psychological issue.
But nevertheless, that's why the Vatican investigates these so thoroughly.
And all of these cases need to be investigated.
And it is a little strange that the numbers keep ticking up of people demanding this.
Even as religiosity declines, nevertheless, there seems to be an uptick in accounts of demonic possession.
Maybe that's not so surprising that those two things go together.
Now, there are two major news stories today which involve child sacrifice.
And this might be a sign that the exorcism is a good idea.
This might be a sign of the times that things aren't going so well on a spiritual level.
It cannot be a good sign.
There's a new archaeological dig which shows that the largest mass child sacrifice in human history took place on Peru's northern coast.
This is according to National Geographic.
This exceeds the previous record-holding Aztecs who lived in modern-day Mexico.
The Aztecs murdered 42 children at Templo Mayor and possibly a sacrifice in Carthage, though that's unclear.
The one in Carthage, it's not clear if this was actually child sacrifice or some other reason why all these kids were dead.
But the one here, more than 140 children and 200 young llamas were ritually sacrificed around 550 years ago within the Chimiu Empire.
550 years ago.
This might make you say 550 years ago.
That is before a certain Spanish...
A certain Italian sailor sailing for Spain made it to the Americas 550 years ago.
That's so strange.
I thought all the bad things came to America with Columbus.
Because that's why we're taking down his statues, right?
Because he was a really bad guy and all of the natives were really good guys.
Except that the natives, before Columbus got there, committed the largest mass child sacrifice in the history of the world.
Within the Chimiu Empire.
The Chimiu would be conquered within a few decades by the Incas.
And the Incas would be conquered 100 years later by the Spanish.
We know that human sacrifice was very common to these pre-Columbus cultures.
The Aztec, the Maya, the Inca.
We know there was cannibalism in the Caribbean.
We know there was cannibalism among the Iroquois.
What we didn't know is how widespread child sacrifice was.
It seems a little worse.
If you're going to sacrifice somebody, better to do it.
An adult has lived something of a life, you know, rather than a poor little kid.
The majority of victims at this site are estimated to be between the ages of 8 and 12 years old when they were killed.
Their faces were smeared with red pigment, their chests were cut open, and their hearts were removed.
Same thing with the llamas.
So the question is, why did they do it?
Well, the reason they did it, archaeologists and historians believe, is that they were negotiating with pagan nature gods.
So there were El Nino storms that were coming in, and it's a very human temptation.
Sacrifice is a...
Natural part of humanity where we see bad things happening around us that we can't control and we want to offer something to appease the forces that are greater than us that are doing it.
So I guess the adult sacrifices weren't working and they decided to start sacrificing children.
Presumably the flooding kept going on.
We see this today.
We see this sort of sacrifice going on today.
We see it in abortion.
In abortion, we sacrifice our children to the gods of sexual freedom and materialism.
It's the same thing.
We are sacrificing our children to our own gods.
Uh, and in some cases now we, we actually are sacrificing children to nature gods.
How many of your lefty granola crunching hippie friends say, man, I can't have kids.
I don't want to have kids, man, because it's bad for the environment.
I, how could I bring a kid into this world?
You hear those from environmental extremists.
They say it's awful.
It's a sin against nature to bring children into the world because of overpopulation and deforestation and all of these random sacrifices to nature.
And in Uganda, by the way, child sacrifice to nature spirits in the more traditional sense is still going on.
It's still practiced today.
We see it all around.
We like to say that, oh, you know, we're in modern times and we're so much more civilized.
We don't sacrifice our children anymore.
We don't do these awful barbaric things in the bad old time past.
But we absolutely do.
We do it on actually a much larger scale when you consider abortion.
And just look at the case right across the pond now.
Because the Chimu Empire is very impressive.
In the civilized West, we mostly don't sacrifice our children to the gods of the weather.
Rather, we sacrifice them on the altar of socialism.
We sacrifice our children to socialism.
That's what this Alfie Evans case is all about.
All about in the UK. Alfie Evans was given Italian citizenship because Italy is perfectly willing to have Alfie come over and receive further medical treatment.
The Pope has asked to bring Alfie into Italy to the Bambino Gesù hospital for treatment.
Alfie was taken off life support by the bureaucrats, the socialist bureaucrats in the UK, denied oxygen, denied food, denied water.
Alfie's father had to give him mouth to mouth because even though he's in a hospital, the bureaucrats there refused to give him medical treatment.
And not just that, they refused to let him home.
They refuse to let the parents bring him elsewhere for further treatment.
They're holding an Italian citizen hostage until he dies.
The parents are pleading.
The people around the world are pleading.
And the Pope is pleading.
And the bureaucrats, the socialists of the UK, will not do it.
The National Health Service will not do it.
The federal judges there will not do it.
And they won't give a reason.
The reason that they give, they say, it's in Alfie's interests.
It's in Alfie's best interests, don't you know?
Well, what interests?
What interests does he have?
What they're saying is he doesn't have much of a life left in front of him.
He's terminally ill.
He's going to die very soon.
Okay, so then I guess there isn't much interest in the rest of his life.
Why not let the parents take him on the glimmer of hope that he could live a little bit longer?
Oh, it's not in his best interests.
This is the altar of socialism and it will crush you.
This is not about providing care.
This is about the government telling you what you can do with your own children, with your own lives.
This is why this would never happen in the United States.
Not in the near future, at least, because we have a second amendment here.
And if the government said we are going to insist on murdering your child, Americans have a second amendment and they would return the favor.
They would absolutely go back and return the favor.
You see this a little bit.
This is always the socialist tendency.
It's just about control.
You see it with e-cigarettes.
So, you know, in the early 2000s, they decided that you couldn't smoke indoors anymore.
And so you can't, no longer can you smoke in restaurants smoking.
Some people don't like the smell.
Okay.
But then it became, you couldn't smoke outdoors.
Why can't I smoke outdoors?
If I'm sitting, this happened to me in New York.
I was smoking a cigar in a park, and a cop came over and said, you can't smoke that here.
I said, why not?
I'm outside.
He said, no, it's not allowed anymore.
I said, do you ever smoke cigars?
What do you mean I can't smoke a cigar outside?
And he was embarrassed, but he let me go away.
And, you know, if you're sitting in a park in New York, you're inhaling many more toxic fumes from the buses all around you than you are from the cigars or anything like that.
But it's about control.
Now you see it with e-cigarettes.
They say you can't smoke e-cigarettes indoors.
You say this is just water.
Water vapor.
Say, no.
Control, control, control.
We know what is best for life.
We know what is best for you.
And listen up.
So enough about the dead and the dying.
Let's talk about the undead.
Because we can move over to Yale University in other equally ghoulish news.
Scientists at Yale have resurrected a decapitated pig.
Here is a live shot from the laboratory in New Haven.
Look, it's moving.
It's alive.
It's moving.
It's alive.
It's alive!
It's alive!
That is definitely an improvement over Shrieking Girl.
Clearly the caliber of people at Yale is increasing, even if it's Dr.
Frankenstein.
So what they've done now at Yale is taken a pig brain that, you know, they cut off the pig's head and they plugged it into a bunch of little gizmos and they resurrected the brain.
So the brain had living cells.
It was a living organ.
And this is very horrifying.
So they've created this zombie pig, but it's just a brain in a bucket, basically.
It doesn't have a body or anything.
And they've made it come to life again.
Now, there's no evidence that it was aware, that it was quite conscious, but there's also no reason that they couldn't make the brain conscious.
They asked one of the lead doctors on this study if the brain could be conscious.
He said, yes, but...
We're in uncharted waters here and we didn't know how to do that.
Because you'd be in the ultimate sensory deprivation tank.
There's no reason that you only could do this with pigs.
You can obviously...
There's no logical reason that you couldn't do it to human brains as well, and you'd be locked in an utter prison.
There'd be no way really to communicate, but this is all part of a quest for eternal life.
So we're now truly creating zombies, and it's hard to imagine that now that this has been proven possible, that scientists won't continue to try to do this At a far greater pace.
Because people have always wanted eternal life.
People have always tried to live forever, especially the rich and the powerful and the famous and the decadent, which describes America in 2018.
This can't be good for the culture.
This cannot be good.
One, if you could live forever, would you?
If you could live on earth forever, would you?
There's a good reading of Genesis, a good book by Leon Kass called The Beginning of Wisdom, where he points out maybe when, you know, Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden and they're not allowed to eat from the tree of life.
And this is considered a punishment by some, but really this was probably a great gift because if we had to live in this fallen, crummy world, which has pervasive evil, if we had to live here forever, that would probably be terrible.
That would be hell on earth.
Maybe mortality is actually a gift for fallen creatures.
Nevertheless, we're tempted to try to live forever.
And because there is a cultural madness, a cultural madness has pervaded us.
And you see this no more clearly than at North Carolina prison.
A transgender prison inmate in North Carolina named Jennifer Ann Jasmine is suing the Lanesboro Correctional Institution.
Jennifer, who is a man, Jennifer is upset because he wants to practice his religion of witchcraft.
Now, ostensibly, he can practice whatever spells and things he wants to do all on his own, but he's not being allowed to have a strict vegan diet.
He's upset that the prison is not giving him a strictly vegan diet.
Now...
I would try to find what crime this person committed, but it wasn't readily available.
If you commit a crime and you violate someone's life or property or whatever, and then you have to go and be punished for that in a prison, you don't get to pick your strict vegan diet.
You don't get acai bowls and smoothies and frappuccinos.
You should be punished.
We don't really pursue the death penalty anymore, even though we should, because it has a lot of health benefits to it.
Maybe I'll go into that on another episode.
Talk about decadence.
We have now prison inmates who decide to change their biological sex, and now presumably we can pay for that, the taxpayer can pay for that, and is demanding some gourmet diet that he isn't being given.
Perhaps he belongs in another sort of institution.
That's another aspect of it.
He's obviously a crazy person.
But his madness is not just personal.
It is a madness of the culture.
We are living in cultural madness.
There is some sort of fun and covfefe aspects of cultural madness, like a kind of good exuberance and exhilaration, like we saw yesterday with Kanye.
And after Kanye came out and said that he supported Donald Trump, Chance the Rapper came out and he said, black people don't have to vote for Democrats.
And this is a big revelation because Democrats think that black people do have to vote for Democrats.
There is something very nice about exuberance, but in this exuberance, underlying a lot of it, there is a madness to our culture.
And this brings us to an important point, which is superstition.
The witchcraft, the, you know, using decapitated pigs for our own sort of edification and child sacrifice, child sacrifice old and child sacrifice new.
What is the role of superstition in this society?
A lot of shallow people, a lot of the anti-religious writers and thinkers like Sam Harris or Bill Maher, they say that religious people are superstitious.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Superstition is the opposite of true religion.
You'll find that the most religious people are usually the least superstitious, and the least religious people are usually the most superstitious.
Now, how is that?
True religion plays a part in it.
You have to have the right religion.
But consider the people, I live in LA, so I have a lot of people like this, who say, I'm not going to do a business deal or go on a trip or anything when Mercury is in retrograde.
I'm not going to do it.
Listen, you kooky Christian.
What with your church and your morals and your worship?
Listen, you kooky lunatic.
I'm not going to do a business deal with you because there's a planet that is a gazillion miles away and it looks like it's going in a different direction at this one point of the year.
That is...
The absence of religion breeds superstition.
People who knock on wood and sort of worship their ancestors and don't walk under ladders because everybody's got to serve somebody and we know that there is a metaphysical world.
We know that life isn't just flesh and meat.
We know that because we know anything, right?
Because we have thoughts, because we have consciousness, because we know that symbols symbolize certain things and represent things that are beyond the physical world.
So what we do is when there's not true religion, we fill it in with superstition.
When we turn away from a coherent theology, we fill it in with superstition so we sacrifice our children.
We sacrifice them to false gods.
We sacrifice them to gods of the weather or gods of sex or gods of freedom, whatever.
Apparent freedom, licentiousness, really.
That is a madness.
And so ultimately, you know, a lot of times people will write in and say, can you talk about politics in a less religious way?
Stop relating politics to religion.
Give me a secular answer.
We need a secular answer on the culture.
There's no secular answer on the culture because culture and cult come from the same thing.
And because politics is downstream of that and it's all downstream of religion.
There is no secular political issue.
Even low taxes is ultimately a question of theology.
What is your relationship to yourself and to God and to nature?
What is your relationship to those things?
Why is freedom good?
Why do you have freedom?
Can you be trusted with freedom?
Those are religious questions.
And as we continue to have a shallow view of religion...
We're going to have superstitious answers.
So we're going to chop off pigs' heads and we're going to sacrifice little children and we're going to continue to sacrifice children all at the altar of false gods.
Very bad stuff.
Okay, I want to get into the mailbag.
I want to be able to answer a question or two before we move in to the rest of the show.
Do I have to sign off on Facebook and YouTube or can I get...
I can get one or two in.
All right, I can get one.
They're being very nice to me today.
From Emily...
Hey, Michael.
My husband and I are pursuing adoption from the foster care system.
I've noticed on the profiles of some children that social workers will say they prefer a Protestant family.
We're Catholic.
I really don't understand the use of the word Protestant.
If they said Baptist or Lutheran, I would understand, but they're essentially stating Catholics need not apply.
We are pursuing a group of kiddos whose worker stated that.
We aren't far into that process, but I assume it will come up soon.
How do we make it clear that we are just as Christian as any Protestant?
Am I right to feel like this is rather blatant anti-Catholic prejudice?
Thanks, Emily.
Sure, it's anti-Catholic and I suppose anti-Orthodox, anti-Eastern Orthodox.
I will say on your point that you're just as Christian as any Protestant.
Sometimes you'll hear Protestants criticize Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, and they'll say, that's not in the Bible.
Those things that you're doing are not in the Bible, and my church...
We just read the Bible.
We read what's in the Bible.
And what you can tell them is that's good, but your church wrote the Bible and compiled the Bible.
So maybe that gives you a little advantage or leverage there.
It's weird.
I don't really even blame...
I don't think that this adoption agency or foster agency has ill will.
I don't know that they're malicious or anything.
There's just a lot of misinformation about Catholicism.
And it's because people don't learn history, and also because history is written by the winners.
And in the Anglosphere, in much of the West, and certainly in the English-speaking world, the Protestants won.
They won in England.
The Protestants founded the United States in most ways.
And so there's just a lot of misinformation, a lot of hagiography and myth and legend about Martin Luther, a lot of There's ridiculous false legends about the alleged misdeeds of the Catholic Church.
So I would approach it and just explain to them that you're a Christian and what Christianity is and what the Catholic Church is.
And I say this with lefties too.
You have to treat them like children.
Treat them like children.
That doesn't mean torture them.
That doesn't mean smack them in the face.
That's not what good parents do.
You just treat them like children because they don't know anything.
They're ignorant and they're not educated.
So you need to kind of bring them up and hopefully you can make adults out of them too.
And then you can raise a lot of different children.
The real ones that you're adopting and the intellectual children that you're educating.
Okay.
Alright, I've got to sign off.
That's fine.
I've got to sign off.
No, I can do one more.
Oh, this is like...
This is because today's all about death and destruction.
We can do one more.
From Jason.
Dear store brand Ben...
That is the single funniest name that anyone has used in the mailbag.
I'm like the...
I'm the Ralph's brand to Ben's Oreos or something.
Dear store brand Ben, I get what you were saying about God owning people.
This is saying, we don't own our own lives.
Our lives are a gift from God.
But wouldn't the fact that he gave man free will indicate that he is passing ownership of them to use or misuse themselves?
Wouldn't it make more sense to say that a man of faith reinvests the ownership in himself to God by choice, whereas those who continue to own themselves are, by the very nature of turning away from him, proving their own ownership of themselves for good or enormous ill?
And would you not also grant that from a legal viewpoint, men certainly own themselves and the product of their work when considering only worldly forces?
And doesn't that distinction matter?
Best, Jason Willis, use of my last name, encouraged.
Okay, so I'll use your last name.
Thank you.
I see what you're saying.
Not quite, though.
I think the better way...
Obviously, all of these analogies are going to be imperfect.
The better way of thinking of your own life is not that you own your own life, but that you're leasing it.
It's a gift, but it's a gift with an expiration date.
You won't have it forever.
You might have it forever, but you won't necessarily have it forever.
You are given this gift of life, and we know that we're going to die.
We know that we have an earthly death.
And you have choices about what you can do with your life, one of which is to choose eternal life.
That's the good news.
That's the promise of Christianity.
So you have this gift, and you're using it.
But this is discussed frequently in the Gospels.
This is the parable of the hedge fund manager, or the parable of the talents, as it's commonly called.
I call it the parable of the hedge fund manager, where the master gives his servants these gifts, these talents, to invest and to do something with.
And to the servant who does a lot and gets a great return on his investment, he gives him even more.
Even more will be given to him who has much.
And to the servant who just buries it underground and doesn't use it and he's afraid to use the gift that's been given to him, even that little which he has is taken away and he's cast into hell where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Which means that you don't own your life.
Your life will be...
There will be an accounting for your life and what you've done with it.
It isn't yours.
The mistake of the libertarians is they pretend that they own their life.
They didn't create their life and they don't get to keep it forever.
They'll have to turn it in at some point and they're going to have to Either in the bleakest perspective, they'll just turn into worm food.
Or in the traditional and Christian perspective, there will be an accounting.
There will be a judge.
In the perspective of all of the great religions and virtually all of the great thinkers in history, there is an accounting.
There is a judgment.
There's something that you'll have to answer for.
That's...
How you have to view your life.
I think it's not to take away your free will, and it's not to take away the grace of God that gave you your life.
Heresy hates mystery.
Heresy cannot tolerate mystery, so it has to just pick one or the other.
It has to pick mercy or justice.
It can't tolerate that God is both fully just and fully merciful.
It can't tolerate free will and grace.
It has to pick one or the other.
The Calvinist tradition chooses Grace entirely to the exclusion of free will.
The Pelagian tradition chooses free will much to the exclusion of grace.
But the truth is narrow, right?
The truth holds these things in balance.
There must be a balance here, and I think you should view your life in a balanced way or else you're going to go mad like the rest of our culture.
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Again, none of it matters.
We're going to rename this just the Kanye Cup.
Forget the leftist ears tumbler.
This is the Kanye Cup now.
It just collects all of the leftist ears that flowed forth and freely when Kanye put on the MAGA hat.
So go get the Kanye Cup right now at dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with more Mailbag.
From Patricia.
I like your show.
Thanks, Patricia.
You did well in saying why you do not like the word genocide to explain the murder of so many Christians in Armenia because of the etymology of genocide.
So do we need to put a new word into use such as "thriskeloside" from the Greek or "religioside" from the Latin for the murder of many people because of their religious belief?
As an aside, I feel the word "martyr" has been corrupted in terminology because of the difference in the idea of a martyr in Christian and Islamic thought and therefore not useful to this purpose.
Yeah, that's a good question.
This is about the Armenian Genocide.
I wrote a piece the other day and I talked about it on the show of how the term Armenian Genocide...
It really isn't quite right.
There was a genocide of Armenians, but the thing that we refer to as the Armenian Genocide really includes at least three genocides, maybe more.
Genocide of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians by the Muslim Ottomans.
And the reason that it doesn't make sense is geno, gen, refers to the race, or to your genes, to your genetics.
It's from the Greek word genos or race or ethnicity or heritage group.
And so that actually isn't what it's about.
It's easy to use that term because it's much easier to say, okay, this ethnic group wanted to purge this ethnic group because you can't choose your ethnic group.
People are just born into it.
It's a fact of life.
And it's much harder to say this religious group.
This religious empire, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, slaughtered millions and millions of Christians because they were Christian.
Because they had an idea called Islam, and another group had an idea called Christianity, and the idea of Islam made them kill the people with the idea of Christianity.
That's much harder to say.
That's very Islamophobic.
Which is obviously the irrational fear of getting your head cut off.
The irrational fear of millions of people being killed during the First World War.
So, I actually don't think either of those terms are great.
The Greek one or the religio side.
Because I don't like any of that jargon which seems clinical.
How do you turn the slaughter of millions of people by one religious group of another religious group, how do you turn that into a clinical thing, into a social science term, this side or that side?
I don't think we should use those terms.
I think we should not use jargon as much as possible.
George Orwell suggested we use good Saxon words.
We don't use words that have Latin roots, that have the side and that have, you know, they sound very like you could hear them in a doctor's office.
We should use words that have power to them.
You know, the bodies in the New Testament, when they die, they stinketh.
They stink.
That has power.
But if they possess an odor, that's not as evocative.
And I think we should refer to the Armenian Genocide as the Muslim Ottoman slaughter of millions of Christians.
I think that makes it clear what that event was.
And other terms will just make it blurry.
We still have time for a couple more.
Next question from Nick.
Mr.
Knowles, I just asked Ben this same question and was wondering what your stance was on global warming, now called climate change.
Climate change is still a hot topic between my friends and I and also among most conservative groups.
Thanks, Nick.
I'll quote George Orwell, or George Orwell, George Will.
Both good writers, but I'll quote George Will.
Global warming and climate change or whatever, it's just an excuse for socialism by the back door.
That's what it is.
It's socialism by the back door.
We read some statistics yesterday, some predictions from the first Earth Day in 1970, predicting that all of...
The human race would be extinct within 10 or 15 years if we don't pass a lot of socialist laws.
And we didn't pass socialist laws, and the world's doing just fine.
Better than ever, some say.
And it's an excuse.
And by the way, it's a religion.
It's a replacement of religion.
It has the sale of indulgences, even, in the form of carbon tax credits.
It has sin, which is pollution, and it tries to work through its own redemption.
It has a messiah, which is Al Gore.
It's a pretty sad messiah, this bloated former failed presidential candidate.
But it's a replacement religion.
People who have true religion don't worry about those things.
St.
Francis loved nature, but he wrote about sister nature, sister earth, not mother nature.
The people who have these weird superstitious pagan environmentalist religions talk about mother nature, and they worship the nature.
We don't worship nature.
We have dominion over nature.
And we talked to Richard Lindzen, the atmospheric physicist from MIT. We talked to him on the show a month or two ago, and He's a dissenter.
He's a denier.
He's one of the great climate experts in the entire world.
And he says there might be some modest warming.
We don't know how much, but if there's modest warming, there's no evidence that it will be catastrophic or even disadvantageous.
And we don't know what the cost of controlling for it is.
The economic cost could be anywhere from $0.40 to $48 per ton of carbon.
That's a pretty wide range.
There's no solution to this problem.
There's no...
It's a real prediction of what the problem will cause, and we don't really know how widespread the problem will be.
So I don't think we should upend global economies to do it.
It's very convenient.
It's not an inconvenient truth.
It's a convenient narrative to pass socialism, and you shouldn't worry about it.
There's this idea, they say 97% of scientists, first of all, that survey is total bunk, but also, science isn't made by committee, dummies.
Science isn't made by democracy.
It's the relentless pursuit of truth that occasionally the best and brightest among us can glimpse and say, hey everyone, you're wrong.
The truth is arrogant.
It's not democratic.
It's aristocratic.
Okay, from Thomas.
Dearest Pope Knowles.
Ooh, that's a good promotion.
I'm 31 years old and am ready to settle down.
Here's the problem.
I work 55 to 65 hours a week.
I'm in school a few nights a week.
There aren't any single ladies in my age in my church.
I won't go to a club, but bars are okay.
Should I make time for bars, or should I wait for the Almighty to drop my future wife into my busy day, Tom?
Listen up, Tom.
I'm going to give you some very important advice.
You should always make time for bars.
You should always.
You should.
Are you crazy?
I don't.
I occasionally make time for work, but I always make time for bars.
So, yeah, you should go to bars.
Also, what you should check out, this is a little bit of a plug because they sponsor the show, but they're a great company, is eHarmony.
We did a read for eHarmony yesterday.
That's a fabulous service.
And if you enter the promo code COVFEFE, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, you'll get some incentives or free time or something like that.
I forget exactly what the promotion is, but it's a very good deal.
You should use that because right now all dating happens online.
So it's all just apps and it's like swipe, swipe, swipe.
And it's mostly casual hookups and shallow hookups.
It sounds like you don't want that.
It sounds like you want a long-term relationship.
And there's really only one I don't use it, but I know that it's totally pervasive.
And if that's the culture, you can't avoid the culture.
You just have to use a good version of the culture.
So I would try that out.
And go to bars.
Maybe not to pick up chicks.
It's great.
It's a really important thing to do.
You can smoke cigars.
You can drink.
You have some camaraderie.
You've got to do it, man.
From Patrick.
I've got time for a couple more.
To Michael Knowles of Another Kingdom fame.
One thing I keep hearing from others is about the supposed military-industrial complex that is in some way responsible for the U.S.'s continued involvement in conflicts around the world.
How would you explain it?
Is there any proof toward its existence?
Any rebuttals?
Thank you and love the show.
This is one where the right gets a little kooky sometimes, and they get a little conspiratorial.
And by the way, I defend conspiratorial thinking because it means that you're a contrarian, and it means that you have an active mind.
It doesn't mean that conspiracies are right.
Virtually all the time they're wrong, but at least your mind is working.
That's actually a good thing.
When lefties say, the right is conspiratorial, you say, good, that means we're using our minds.
You guys are like those pigs plugged in in the bucket, you know?
You're just like, it's just like...
Synapse is moving, but no thoughts are occurring.
So, anyway, that's on the conspiracies.
This is a conspiracy.
It comes from Dwight Eisenhower.
And what Eisenhower did is, when he left the presidency, he said, beware the military-industrial complex.
And what he was saying is that there's a very cozy relationship between the defense contractors who build all the weapons of war and the U.S. government and the At the extreme of this, they say that we're actually pursuing wars and military conflict to keep buying weapons from the defense contractors.
When Dwight Eisenhower was warning about this, a military spending accounted for 10% of the entire economy, 10% of GDP in 1961.
That number has fallen to about 1%.
That number is way down.
So it is possible that at the time...
There really was a military-industrial complex.
That really was quite a fear.
But right now, I think by 2016, the military spending shrunk to 3.2% of GDP. Now, that's all military spending.
But a lot of military spending is just on training and housing and accommodations for the troops.
So actually, when you look at just weapons, just at what would be the military-industrial complex, the defense contractors, it's only 1%.
That's only 1%.
The whole federal budget is only 22% of the economy, and defense is only 14% of the federal budget.
People have this idea that we spend all of our federal budget on military spending.
We spend very little of it on the military, actually.
We spend the majority of it on entitlement programs that are bankrupting the country, on welfare programs and entitlements.
14% of the budget on...
On military spending.
So 1% on weapons.
Do you really think the national policy of the United States would be driven by a few companies because of 1% of GDP? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
It seems very inefficient and conspiratorial.
So, I don't know.
Maybe Ike had a point at the time, but certainly not anymore.
From Dave.
Hey, Michael.
Love the show.
Why do you think it is that generally speaking, artistic or creative people are firmly on the far left, yet the very same people who pride themselves for outside-the-box thinking and nonconformity couldn't be more inside-of-the-box politically?
I asked a lefty artist friend of mine this question recently and was met with a blank stare, so although your literary reputation precedes you as a master of blankness, I suspect you have a much more insightful answer than did my lefty friend.
Thank you and keep up the great work.
So, I do notice that, broadly speaking, for all of history, artists are lefties.
There are some examples, like Sophocles, I wouldn't call a lefty.
Exactly, you know.
Left and right are kind of hard to apply to...
Times outside of our own.
But they're kind of crazy spirits, generally speaking.
I know this.
I have worked as an artist at various points in my life.
Hopefully we'll be doing season two of Another Kingdom shortly.
And so I know this because when you're an actor, you sleep until about 2 p.m., You kind of roll over.
Maybe you go to a rehearsal or whatever.
You go on auditions.
It's high diddle-dee-dee the actor life for me.
And so you don't have a schedule.
You don't have responsibility.
You don't have accountability.
Usually, 99% of the time, you're not making much money, if any money at all.
And so you're just really out there, man.
You're really irresponsible.
And I think that lends itself to a left-wing lifestyle.
Whereas when you get a little bit more accountable and you can see things in perspective and not in the wacky, Crazed perspective of a narrow view of art, then things come into line and you stop being so left-wing in your politics.
But most actors never get there.
It's why they live such insane lives and why they're in perpetual childhood is because they behave like children.
One or two more from Joel.
I know Shapiro is a proverbial music Nazi, only enjoying classical music and older music.
As someone very critical of modern music, what are your thoughts on EDM, electronic dance music?
Is there a possibility of creating new genres, instrument sounds, to innovate away from having only one genre considered correct music?
This is not to say that EDM or pop should be used in churches.
I'm an Orthodox Christian for the record.
Yeah, it probably shouldn't be used in churches.
Although in LA, a lot of churches do it.
They have like strobe lights and all this stuff.
Yeah, I'm with Ben in that I like Bach.
You know, Bach is basically as good as music gets.
It doesn't get a lot better.
There's good music before Bach and there's good music after Bach.
There is a real perfection there and a real excellence that happened in the 18th century.
But it doesn't mean there's not good music.
Some very good friends of mine for years are a pretty popular electronic R&B, jazzy kind of band.
And I won't say their names so that they keep, you know, having a good career.
But they're friends of mine, and I think that their music is very good.
I like to listen to it sometimes.
But it's all about what you're in the mood for.
So if you're going to go out to a club, I'm not going to listen to Bach.
But if I'm sitting around having drinks, I might listen to certain kind of music.
And if I'm in the car, I might listen to other kinds of music.
But that doesn't mean that they're all equally good or that they're all equally important or excellent.
There was an excellence achieved at certain periods of music.
And Plato and Alan Bloom write about the dangers of music.
Because music puts you into a different mindset.
It's really important.
Hearing is the most important sense.
People always hear God.
It's not that they see God, really.
It's always feel Him, necessarily.
Primarily, they hear God.
They hear the Word of God.
They hear the voice of God.
And it's because hearing so affects how we live and how we work.
If you are listening to crazed rat music, you're going to be in a different mindset than if you're listening to certain other kinds of music.
Music with rhythm and melody and harmony.
So you've got to be careful of that and not pretend that you're getting the same thing out of all of them.
Some genres of music are degraded, some are better for when you're about to go into battle, and some are better for when you're trying to fall asleep or do work or something like that.
But it is very powerful.
It's not just a little joke or a snobbishness or a minor distinction.
Music is quite powerful, and you've got to listen to it carefully.
From Dave.
Hi, Michael.
Like what you do.
Keep it up.
Question.
Where do you see the U.S. 50 years from now?
Isolationist superpower or waning in the face of China's explosion on the world stage?
Well, I don't know about 50 years from now.
500 years from now, it's probably unrecognizable because all things die, except for pig brains, apparently, but all other things die.
I will say on this, nobody can predict the future.
If you'd asked me this during the presidency of Barack Obama, I'd say we're going to be waning in the face of China.
But we're not doing that now.
We're going to survive today.
We're going to fight back today and we're going to have an exuberance today and hopefully an ascendance today and tomorrow and the next day.
So in the next two years or maybe six years or who knows, I think we'll be alright.
But it's all about today.
That's all you can focus on.
Don't despair.
That's what the left tries to do in the polls during elections.
They say, oh, the polls are so bad, you're definitely going to lose.
Don't show up.
No, we can fight back.
Today's a day.
It's a beautiful day.
Go outside and fight for it.
And we might be able to keep this thing going longer than anybody is giving it credit for.
From George, dear Mr.
Knowles, what does it truly mean not to be a bigot?
To be truly open-minded, do you have to be open to any idea coming from anyone and consider it logically and rationally, or can you take the shortcut and close yourself off to certain ideas when they have not had a decent new fact added to the discussion in a prolonged period of time?
Does the shortcut still fit most practical definitions of being a bigot?
You're talking about the open mind and the closed mind.
And they say, you're a bigot if you close your mind.
But Chesterton wrote about this beautifully, as he wrote about most things.
Chesterton wrote, merely having an open mind is nothing.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
You need it to be on solid ground.
So, I'll use the alt-right guys as an example.
Guys like Richard Spencer or something.
Why is he a bigot?
Why are those guys bigots?
I have a closed mind on certain things.
I'm open to new information if someone can convince me of something else, but I have first principles that I'm fairly confident are true.
The difference is your premises.
The difference is God.
So what makes them bigots is they have a view of the world that is essentially atheistic.
They might call themselves Christians or whatever, but their view of the world is atheistic.
They say, no, there isn't a spiritual equality of people.
No, the racial differences are terribly important and we need to treat people differently and have societies organized differently.
And...
My view says that there is God and that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek nor slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus.
That's why I'm not a bigot.
It's not that my mind is so open.
I'm pretty convinced that that's the bedrock.
But it's a good idea.
It's an idea that is not bigoted.
There are bigoted premises.
There are not bigoted premises.
Drew has a great point on bigotry, which is that the bigotry is always because you're looking at someone else and not at you.
So you can see the flaws in someone else, but you don't see the flaws in you.
There are a lot of groups that I can point out the flaws of, but you've also got to be aware that you yourself have flaws.
And so, that's what I think.
I think bigots have bigoted premises.
And those bigoted premises are just not true.
Premises that say, they're these kooky ideas that some race of people is metaphysically better, or even physically much better than this.
They have very confused and superstitious ideas.
And so, the non-bigoted point of view is on solid religious foundation.
Everything else comes from that.
Alright, it's too bad.
There was another great question.
We can't get to it.
We'll get to it next week.
That is our show.
I will see you on Monday.
In the meantime, 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.
