Ep. 169 - Zero Tolerance: Time To Separate Fake Republicans From Their Party
Fake news at the border. Michael analyzes the "Republicans" who swallow MSM bait hook, line, and sinker. Then, theologian George Weigel joins the show to discuss chaos, order, and our turbulent times. Speaking of turbulence, soccer fans in Mexico caused an earthquake during the World Cup. DW2 Sports Analyst Jeremy Boreing joins to discuss the fallout. Finally, Juneteenth on This Day In History!
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There is an important and official announcement today on Michael Knowles' show, Policy.
We have always had a zero-tolerance policy on this show for fake Republicans and totally contrived controversies.
But I haven't always enforced the law, and this has created a perverse incentive for the squishes of our party to gin up fake news.
So today, to show our seriousness about tackling this problem, we will separate fake Republicans from From their party, as well as fake news from reality.
Then, theologian George Weigel joins the show to discuss chaos, order, and our turbulent times.
Speaking of turbulence, soccer fans in Mexico caused an earthquake during the World Cup.
Daily Wire 2 sports analyst Jeremy the God King Boring will join the show to discuss the suburban fallout.
Finally, it's Juneteenth on This Day in History.
history.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Do you know what other time it is?
There's so much going on that we have to talk about.
It's also time to join the conversation.
On Tuesday, June 19th, by my calculations, that is tomorrow at 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific, Ben Shapiro, the big boss himself, will answer your questions moderated by the beautiful and dauntless Alicia Krauss.
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Look, there is so much fake news and so many fake Republicans stabbing their fellow partisans in the back today.
Before we get to that, let's talk about something nice, because it's really frustrating when this happens.
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C-O-V-E-F-E. Happy Father's Day, everybody.
It was Father's Day over the weekend.
We did that roundtable, obviously, Daily Wire backstage.
We were smoking cigars and drinking whiskey and hanging out with the fathers.
You can go check that out online.
Also, I was pleased to be at Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson's His men's conference for his organization, Bond.
We talked about the difference between alpha males and beta males.
I kind of reject that language broadly, but it was a good discussion.
I'm sure you can check that out, too.
Today's also Juneteenth.
Nobody celebrates Juneteenth.
People don't hear about it anymore, especially if you grew up in New York like I did.
You don't really hear about it.
Juneteenth is to celebrate the emancipation of the slaves throughout the Confederacy.
So the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, went into effect right at the beginning of 1863, but because all those Democrat states were revolting against America, they didn't pay much heed to what Mr.
Lincoln had to say.
So on Juneteenth, the 19th of June, Union Army Major General Gordon Granger marched down to Galveston.
He proclaimed all the good news that the Confederate slaves were freed.
You know, there were 3.1 million slaves in the Confederate States and everybody was very happy.
Not as happy as the Mexican soccer fans, but they were happy.
And so, you know, people don't talk about this anymore, I think, because what the Democrats want to do is convince everybody that they're slaves still.
They don't want to let people know that Republicans freed all their slaves.
So they want you to think that there's this awful oppression and that you're really enslaved and you can't do anything.
But it's always important to celebrate emancipation and liberty.
It's essential to the American project.
And God wants you to be free.
And we should remind people that they are free.
Okay.
So I really want to get to the meat of this show today, how these Republicans are pulling their knives out against Donald Trump because they're fake Republicans and they're spreading fake news about the immigration policies at the border and the separation of children and Donald Trump's, you know, he's like worse than Hitler or whatever they're saying.
Before we get to that, though, the huge sports news over the weekend.
I'm sure you were following major, major sports news.
So we turn now to our sister network, Daily Wire 2, and sports analyst, Jeremy the God King Boring.
Bam!
Thank you, Michael.
Jeremy, what happened?
Michael, this weekend saw the most important event in socialist sports since the soup lines at the gulags.
It's the greatest four-year plan since Stalin himself.
I'm talking about the FIFA FOA World Cup.
It's that special time every four years when Americans pretend they care about soccer, even though I dare a single one of them to name more than three retired players over the age of 12 from anywhere on earth.
The big news of the weekend, of course, Mexico, GDP $1.04 trillion, scoring their worst upset over Germany, GDP $3.46 trillion since the Zimmerman Telegram.
Mexico delivered with a 1-0 nail-biter that CBS Sports' Roger Gonzalez called a tense, hectic match that would make anybody shake from the nerves.
Germany, heavily favored to win not only the match, but the entire World Cup before, you know...
Mexico scored one single goal, swore that it will rise up only one generation hence and establish a right that will last a thousand years.
In other notable matches from the opening weekend, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, GDP 393 billion, won only their second match in World Cup history, handily defeating Morocco GDP 1.01 billion in Group B 1-0.
And I thought Iran didn't have nukes.
Am I right?
Right?
Hey, Michael.
Hey, Michael.
Michael?
Hey, Michael?
Michael?
Right?
And finally, in a match that Sportsnet is calling a game for the ages, Portugal, GDP 204 billion, managed to tie neighboring Spain GDP 1.232 trillion in the Iberian Peninsula's most engrossing conflict since, insert Hemingway joke.
Women and beta males all over America responded to the match, which perfectly encapsulates everything they love about soccer, from the complete lack of tension or action to the total absence of any personal narrative or individual accomplishments and almost immeasurably small score with a resounding, no, I really love football.
The whole world loves football.
Why can't you just agree with us about football?
Football players are cute.
Four billion people can't be wrong about football.
America is evil.
This is why you got Trump.
The final score was 3-3, representing fully 50% of the total points scored in the World Cup to date.
And that's your Daily Wire 2 weekend World Cup update.
Be sure to tune in tomorrow or next week or whenever we get around to doing this joke again.
Seriously, this crap's going to last an entire month.
Michael, bam!
Back to you.
Bam!
Jeremy, that was a rousing analysis.
Thank you so much.
That almost managed to keep me awake.
So it's a real advantage.
Thank you so much for watching that.
You know, a lot of big news.
There was that man-made earthquake by the soccer fans.
I didn't watch it, Michael.
Good God, man.
Well, God King, Jeremy Boring, Daily Wire 2 sports analyst, thank you so much for your report, and we look forward to you not watching more World Cup games and coming back to tell us about them.
That would truly be my pleasure.
Jeremy the God King Boring, Daily Wire 2.
It's always great when we can get our sister network in here to start reporting on things like that.
Really, really good, okay?
I don't know how he got through that with mostly a straight face.
So I think I just lost half my audience, by the way.
So now we've got to get to the meat of this.
The GOP, these Republicans, this is what they do.
They go on TV and they're Republican strategists or they're former Republican politicians or whatever.
They are coming out against the Trump administration and against Donald Trump himself.
Here is why Republicans are attacking the president.
at an almost historic low, economies ticking pretty well, stock markets up.
I congratulate South Korea and North Korea on their historic meeting last month.
The United States is encouraged by President Moon and Chairman Kim's stated goal of complete denuclearization in the Panmunjom Declaration.
Guys, this is really undercutting the ridiculous narrative that fake Republicans are trying to create in the mainstream media.
Can we please finally roll the clip of that terrible, horrible thing that Donald Trump is doing on our border?
Illegal immigration down.
Illegal immigration down.
50-60%, that's correct.
Yeah.
I mean, thoughts?
Thoughts?
That's a good question.
That's not the one either, is it?
So why are these Republicans turning on Donald Trump?
And they're getting all these plaudits from the mainstream media.
Listen, I know it has to be happening because the New York Times told me so.
The New York Times ran a headline, quote, leading Republicans join Democrats in pushing Trump to halt things.
Family separations.
Now, what is this?
You've got to go through the language word by word here, because when you read it, it is so absurd, not only that a New York Times writer could write these things, but that an editor could let it go through, that people believe this kind of stuff.
This is what the New York Times says, quote, By laying responsibility for the situation on both sides, Mrs.
Trump, Melania Trump, effectively echoed her husband's assertion that it was the result of a law written by Democrats.
In fact, the administration announced a zero-tolerance approach this spring leading to the separations.
Now listen to that.
They're saying this happened, but really it's this.
So the allegation here is Republicans are saying this is an old policy that was written in part by Democrats and Democrat judges, but really Republicans are now enforcing the law.
Those aren't conflicting statements.
Those statements make perfect sense.
There were Democrat laws.
There were laws passed by both parties that have to do with how we process people at the border.
There were rulings made by left-wing judges on the Ninth Circuit.
And the Democrats refuse to enforce the law because they're an utterly lawless party.
And Republicans are enforcing the law that was passed by our representatives, duly passed by our legislature.
And that's supposed to be in conflict somehow.
That's not in conflict at all.
The Trump administration is just finally enforcing the law.
We'll get to more of that later.
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48, okay.
I want to get to a little bit more of this.
So the New York Times just totally ginning this up out of nowhere.
They're saying there is a law and Trump is enforcing the law.
And the law was passed a long time ago and Trump is enforcing the law.
By the way, other people have enforced it at times too.
And for some reason that's horrible and, you know, he's Hitler.
Because everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler, according to the New York Times.
The New York Times goes on in this piece.
Previous administrations made exceptions to such prosecutions for adults traveling with minor children.
But the Trump administration has said it will not do so.
Listen to that.
Made exceptions.
Now, it sounds like that's a really nice...
Oh, it's so accommodating.
It's so nice and thoughtful and accommodating and compassionate when our law enforcement doesn't enforce the law.
I mean, you know, the people who...
We, the people, still theoretically control this country.
We've passed laws.
Our duly elected representatives have passed laws.
But it's so nice.
Isn't it so nice when the government refuses to enforce the laws that the people have passed?
That's what they're trying to say.
So, what's the difference here?
Rich Lowry has a really good piece on this, on those images of the babies being ripped from their mother, all the stuff Tom Arnold was talking about on the show the other day.
The reason that you're seeing this more now really is just because there's a Republican in office.
But in the old days, most illegal immigration on our southern border was single males from Mexico, and they were coming to get jobs.
Now, over the last 10, 15 years, that has shifted dramatically to be more families, women and children coming from Central America.
Why is that?
Because we've created a system of incentives where we weren't prosecuting families.
So guess what happens?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
All of a sudden, you get more families, more young children being caught up in this awful, depraved criminal enterprise to cross the border illegally.
Another thing that changed is largely in previous administrations, we ignored the law.
We just said, that's okay, it doesn't matter.
We don't need to have a border.
You can come through.
That's fine.
Now we're enforcing the law.
Also, by the way, the reason for this is the courts, especially the Ninth Circuit, but also other laws.
So when these families cross the border illegally...
The parents are taken in by U.S. Marshals because they've committed a crime and they're not supposed to be here.
The children are not taken in by U.S. Marshals because their children, you can't hold them accountable for the crime.
They were just brought along.
So they're taken in by Health and Human Services.
They're put in temporary shelters.
This is not a new policy.
This has been going on for a long time, including the Obama administration.
Now, what happens at this point is there are criminal proceedings for the parents.
This usually happens very, very quickly.
It can happen same day where the parents go before the judge, they plead guilty, they are sentenced to time served because we're a very compassionate country, so we say, it's okay, we're not going to keep you in jail.
You can now choose to leave the country and you'll reunite with your kids today, same day.
The parents have that ability to do that.
Now, where it gets a little wonky is if they start to demand asylum or appeal it or say, we want to stick around for a while, because according to the Flores Consent Decree of 1997, kids can only be held for 20 days.
So after that, they have to be separated.
So, the Ninth Circuit ensured that we can't hold family units together here.
That's the trouble.
There's leftist judges on the Ninth Circuit said that we can't hold them all together because either you're holding them with the criminal parents or you're just going to let the parents go.
Those are the two choices you have.
And everyone who's trying to grandstand on this issue, those are your choices.
Are you going to put the kids in with the criminal parents?
Because then you're going to have to change the law.
Or are you going to just not prosecute illegal aliens and disregard federal law, overturn federal law, say we have an open border, we don't have any border at all?
Those are your two choices.
You have just those two choices.
Now, fake Republicans are coming out of the woodwork to use this as an opportunity to gut the president administration.
Here is a guy named Evan Siegfried.
We'll talk a little bit more about him after.
Here is Evan Siegfried on MSNBC. We were not having this policy.
But on May 10, in an interview with NPR, she talked about the policy and said how great it was and how she was going to implement it.
So she's either a liar or suffering from severe mental or memory loss.
And we talk about how President Trump wants to make America strong and great again.
Our greatness and our strength comes from our morality and our compassion.
And this administration is absolutely devoid of it.
It is absolutely infuriating.
But Evan, how does this help America?
I don't put my hat on from a fiscal perspective.
I put my hat on from a moral perspective.
Anthony Scaramucci this morning was saying, well, the president will probably reverse because it's just bad optics.
Not bad optics.
Mooch, he was in the White House for 11 days, and I know he wants to become the next James Carville, but that doesn't qualify him to recognize or fail to recognize that it's bad morality.
It shows us to be an uncompassionate and immoral people, and it also sends a terrible signal to the rest of the world.
With Republicans like this guy who needs Democrats, this is the worst kind of Republican.
It is so deceptive and so treacherous and so backstabbing.
I refer to guys like Evan as Republican, but not that kind of Republicans.
You know, the ones who all they want is MSNBC's approval.
They're the good ones.
They're not like those bad ones.
They're the good ones.
Like, what do you want?
Are you trying to have liberty?
Are you trying to support liberty?
Are you trying to support the United States?
Or are you just trying to get famous by stabbing your ostensible friends in the back?
Absolutely disgusting.
And as for your moral argument, Evan Siegfried, according to Fusion and Amnesty International, 60 to 80% of women and girls who cross the border illegally are raped on that journey.
What is compassionate?
What is moral about incentivizing and encouraging that system?
Because you have that on your hands, buddy, Evan.
If you are saying that we shouldn't be prosecuting, we should be creating incentives for these young women and young girls to come across the border, then you have moral responsibility for those rapes on your hands.
So I'm going preen on MSNBC. I'm glad at least MSNBC got religion.
Donald Trump seems to have trolled them into reading the Bible on air the other day, so that's good.
But it's absolutely disgusting.
And these guys go on and they preen and they throw moral accusations when they are the ones who are morally culpable.
And we're trying to be nice and civilized about it, but when you hurl that kind of trash at your ostensibly fellow Republicans, you can't let that stand.
Absolutely awful.
He's not making any moral argument.
He's just sitting there and saying, you're bad, you're evil, you're Hitler.
I got two words for you, Evan Siegfried, and they are not happy birthday.
From Susan Collins, the fake Republican senator, she writes, quote, what the administration has decided to do is separate children from their parents to try to send a message that if you cross the border with your children, your children are going to be ripped away from you.
No, they're doing it because it's the law.
They're doing it because it's the law and they're supposed to enforce the law because we are a nation of laws, not a nation of men.
These Democrats and these anti-Trump Republicans attack Trump for being authoritarian.
They are the ones advocating authoritarianism.
He is enforcing the law finally.
He's not trying to be capricious and selectively prosecute certain people and not others.
He's the one saying we need to follow the law and it's these authoritarians are the ones accusing Donald Trump of being exactly what they really are.
Susan Collins goes on.
She says, And this brings us to Mrs.
Laura Bush.
Mrs.
Laura Bush wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where democracy dies in darkness, attacking this administration in the most vicious terms.
So we'll have to talk about it.
Mrs.
Bush said, quote, And I know what you're thinking, because I just read that sentence, and that sounded fine.
And then she said, but.
And you know, you know what's going to follow is a complete negation of what she just said, because buts negate sentences almost all of the time.
She says, okay, yeah, we need to protect the border, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel, it's immoral, and it breaks my heart.
Okay, if it's cruel, then why weren't you agitating to change the law?
Why wasn't, when this was happening under the Obama administration, why weren't you arguing to change the law?
Barack Obama was actually enforcing this at various times in his administration.
I don't remember an op-ed from Mrs.
Bush or others then, do you?
I don't remember that either.
She goes on.
Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children.
Right.
Yeah, they shouldn't be coming into the country and their criminal parents shouldn't be bringing them into the country and opening them up to the horrible dangers that accompany crossing that border with all of the drug cartels who facilitate it and all of the legal ramifications for committing a heinous crime, a truly awful crime, which is...
The first act that one person does when they come into a country is to violate some of its most sacred laws, determining who can come in and who can come out.
That is a real crime.
And some Democrats argue, they say it's just a misdemeanor.
And I suppose technically that's true on the first time.
The second time it's a felony.
But regardless, the crime itself is so cuts to the heart of a country.
To determine who gets to be in the country, who gets to access its taxpayer-funded services, who will have to be dealt with by the criminal justice system, who ultimately could vote in its elections and shape its politics and shape its government.
It so cuts to the heart of the government that it's a really, really awful crime.
Laura Bush goes on.
This is really awful.
She goes, In this case, people are flooding over our border and we're trying to deal with them.
And we're not even deporting them immediately.
We're giving them the opportunity to go back, but we're trying to deal with them as humanely as possible.
Nobody's asking them to come over.
In fact, we're telling them explicitly, please do not.
But policies such as the policies being advocated by Mrs.
Bush and other administration critics here are incentivizing that flow and creating this crisis at the border.
This crisis that they have created themselves.
Totally awful.
And to compare enforcing laws that were on the books during your husband's administration, during the Obama administration, to compare enforcing the law to Japanese internment is really disgusting, really awful.
I can't believe that was allowed to go through.
Finally, she says, I'm going to hold off right here.
Is she now calling them racist?
It's racist now to enforce the law?
Because that's what she's saying.
Tom Arnold called Republicans racist on my show.
I can expect that from someone who's, you know, sort of a more left-wing activist, someone who's doing a show to try to get down Donald Trump.
But this is the former first lady of the United States, ostensibly a Republican, saying, if you disagree with me, you're a racist.
Really vicious.
She then says, we pride ourselves on acceptance.
I don't know what that means.
Like, do we accept Evil?
Do we accept...
Do you accept crime?
Do you accept...
Is that...
That's what you accept?
Do you accept all that awful sexual crime that occurs at the border because of those incentives?
No.
That's an empty statement, right?
If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents and stop separating parents and children in the first place.
Read between the lines.
It means stop enforcing border protections and just let illegal aliens flood our country.
That's what it's really saying.
People on all sides agree that our immigration system isn't working I don't agree with that.
I think if we enforce the law, then the immigration system is working.
We know, actually, we know that illegal immigration dropped dramatically at the start of the Trump administration.
Why?
Because people thought they weren't going to be allowed to get in.
Then, when they saw that this system is pretty hard to change, the numbers ticked right back up and they started flooding over again.
And they started using children as human shields to get into the United States.
But we know that this is voluntary immigration.
We know this is mostly economic immigration because if it were truly all cases of asylum, then those numbers wouldn't have dropped, right?
When they thought that they would not be allowed in and would be sent back, those numbers dropped.
That makes it clear that it's largely voluntary, but not for Mrs.
Bush's sadly demagogic article.
She says, people on all sides agree it isn't working, but the injustice of zero tolerance is not the answer.
In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate, more moral answer to the crisis?
And here she gives away the whole story.
Listen to those words, kinder, more compassionate.
This is a really terrible op-ed, really awful to her fellow Republicans and fellow Americans.
Because she's basically calling people who support enforcing immigration law and having a border racist and comparing them to the people behind Japanese internment.
But this is something the Bushes have always done.
When George H.W. Bush ran for president in 1988, he said we needed to become a kinder, gentler nation.
And Mrs.
Reagan to that answered, kinder and gentler than whom?
What do you mean kinder and gentler?
The Reagan administration lasted for eight years.
George Bush was vice president there.
And then he says, we need to be kinder and gentler.
He's calling conservatives cruel.
When George Bush Jr., George W. Bush, ran for president in 2000, he promised a compassionate conservatism.
As though conservative thought is cruel in the first place.
But he is going to make it compassionate.
The Bushes have never been conservatives.
They came from the establishment wing of the party.
They were brought into the Reagan ticket to tie up the fissures in the Republican Party between the conservatives and the establishment.
This creates awful incentives.
So just a quick little rundown.
80%.
80% of women and girls, 60-80% according to Amnesty International and Fusion, raped and sexually assaulted crossing into the border.
Also, an estimated 78% of the guides who are bringing people across that border are under the age of 18.
That's a little weird when we talk about these detained children.
A lot of them come over unaccompanied.
A lot of them are with adults who are not their parents, who are Who are bad guys, who are trying to bring them over as human shields.
They're under 18.
The drug cartels started to use young children, children under the age of 18, as the guides because they knew that the United States wouldn't prosecute them.
So what do we do with them?
Actually, during the Obama administration, Barack Obama detained a number of them because they were such a key to the human trafficking problem at the border.
He detained 536 of them in less than a year.
Of course, that was never reported on.
If only Mrs.
Bush had attacked Barack Obama in this way.
For anything, not just this policy, but for all of the destruction that his presidency wrought on our country.
But no, during that administration, then it was better for former presidents and their families to stay quiet.
That was the dignified thing to do.
And I sort of respect that, actually.
But now that it's a Republican administration, it's good to start attacking them.
For enforcing the law?
For trying to advance some conservative public policy?
Absolutely awful.
The reason that this is happening, you remember about a month or so ago there were those images of kids being detained by immigration and they're at the border and all the Obama administration officials said, this is awful, this is the end of the world, this is terrible.
Then they found out that those photos were taken during the Obama administration.
All of a sudden, they shut up about it.
They wouldn't talk about it anymore because it's just trying to take cheap points at Donald Trump.
And the reason they focus on this, the reason they have to create this fake crisis is because...
The Trump administration is doing too well.
So the economy is doing very well.
Foreign affairs are going great, going gangbusters.
Even the IMF is admitting that we're helping the global economy rise so much.
So they have to create this crisis.
Is it awful what's happening?
is it awful to see a child separated from his parent in the cases where it actually is a parent and actually is a child?
Yes, that's horrible.
That's terrible.
And that has all been created by the sick and perverse incentives in laws passed in part by Democrats, judicial decisions that have come down from left-wing judges on the Ninth Circuit, and by those squishes and those left-wingers who insist that we not enforce the law, creating incentives that have children taken away from their parents. creating incentives that have children taken away from their parents.
Conservatives and Republicans should not give one single inch on this.
It's just awful.
And the Republicans who come out and use this to take cheap shots against the administration should be ashamed of themselves, and they should have their GOP card ripped away from them, separated at the border of politics.
Okay, we've got to get to George Weigel.
We're running a little late right now, so we got to get to him.
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We'll be right back with the theologian, George Weigel.
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute.
He is a leading Catholic theologian in the United States and an all-around great public intellectual.
He holds the Ethics and Public Policy Center's William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
He has a new book out, The Fragility of Order, Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times.
I spoke to George at the end of last week.
He is always very interesting to talk to.
Here's the interview.
Mr.
Weigel, thank you so much for being here.
Nice to be with you, Michael.
I really, really enjoyed your book.
The book is The Fragility of Order, Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times.
I'd like to begin a little before that, though, in 2016, because I loved a piece you wrote in First Things where you used a quotation to describe your feeling of that election.
You said, do the Germans have a word for euphoric dread?
I think that about sums it up.
Now, you know, almost two years in, have your feelings changed on this?
Are you more comfortable with the presidency?
Or is it still a bizarro world that we're all living in?
I'm very grateful for a number of things that the president administration has done, particularly in terms of the federal judiciary.
Employment situation seems to be considerably improved.
The pressure is off on religious freedom, at least as that pressure was coming from the executive branch in the Obama administration.
But the recent business in Singapore, where the president praised one of the three worst dictators in the world as a very talented guy with a good sense of humor, And all of this.
And then a few hours ago, said, presumably jocularly, well, I wish people would sit up and pay attention to me like they do to Kim Jong-un.
Look, 12 hours before, I had had dinner with six North Korean defectors who are working on human rights issues in North Korea today.
You don't joke about this stuff.
This is not a joking matter.
This is a terrible regime.
And if we don't understand that, we're not going to get a particularly satisfactory deal, if any deal is possible with these guys.
Well, this gets to a point in your book which I really loved in the essay, The Importance of Reality Contact.
Because I think the way that Donald Trump himself has explained his comments and compliments to Kim Jong-un is he's saying, oh, you know, I'm just saying words and they don't mean anything and I'm trying to butter him up for a deal.
And the implication here is that, oh, it doesn't matter what I say.
I'm just using words instrumentally.
You write in that essay...
Public policy that fosters individual human flourishing and the common good must take account of reality and realities.
When a culture loses confidence in its capacity to say with conviction, this is the way things are, its capacity to devise ways and means of addressing the way things ought to be is severely eroded.
And, you know, I had the actor Tom Arnold on my show the other day.
He said with a straight face, there is no such thing as a single objective reality.
I go to college campuses, students tell me all the time, there's no...
Objective truth.
There is your truth and my truth and George's truth and his truth.
How did we get to this point, this disrespect of reality, and how do we get out of it?
Well, we could spend the rest of our time together tracing this back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant, but let's fast forward here and take up your Your college student who says, okay, Michael, there's no such thing as the truth.
There's only your truth and my truth.
The next thing to say to that person is, okay, what happens when your truth and my truth collide and neither one of us recognizes something called the truth by which we can settle the argument?
What happens is you impose your power on me or I impose my power on you.
This is what Cardinal Ratzinger on April 18th, 2005, called the dictatorship of relativism.
It's the end of democracy.
It's a radical constraint on freedom.
And it's a terrible problem throughout the Western world today.
The inability to say that anything is true except my willfulness.
The reduction of freedom to sheer will is the death of freedom.
Of course.
And it creates chaos.
And there have been a lot of calls for order.
You know, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, sold about a gazillion books on the topic of creating order out of chaos.
It does seem like a willfully chaotic time.
And I wonder if there's any way back, you know, the...
It's been so long.
If we can trace this back to David Hume, or perhaps even centuries further back, the beginnings of this, how do we return to that political order?
Or is it just all out of Pandora's box and, you know, the age of chivalry and glory of Europe are all dead?
Well, the age of chivalry certainly seems to have died.
But perhaps we could recover something called common sense.
Good manners.
Some grasp on the truth.
In the essay in the book called A New Great Awakening, I sketch out a coalition, if you will, of people of biblical faith and people who have not been given the gift of faith but who nonetheless recognize That there are truths built into the world and into us,
and that living according to those truths makes for both personal happiness and social cohesion and true freedom.
That was the coalition that made the revolution of 1989 possible in Central and Eastern Europe.
It was built during the 1980s by both believers and unbelievers.
It was inspired in large part by John Paul II, who had a talent for bringing together people of very different backgrounds.
And that's not that long ago.
It's not that long ago.
But unfortunately, I'm afraid we are going to have to experience more chaos, more repression in the name of tolerance.
Before people wake up to the fact that there's a serious problem here.
Well, I loved the essay, A New Great Awakening, and it struck me because our pal Andrew Klavan has been saying that we're on the verge of a new great awakening for a while now as well.
And one wonders always what that would look like.
It occurred to me that the two founders or putative founders of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr., Both share a certain affinity, as do you and I, for smells and bells and Roman things.
In this ostensibly Protestant country, we've got the founders of American conservatism are these two Catholics.
Why does the American conservative movement have this Catholic flavor to it, and does that play any role in our New Great Awakening?
Well, I think Catholic social doctrine ought to play a role in this because Catholic social doctrine, with its vision of the free and virtuous society, another issue addressed in this book, is really based on the natural moral law.
You don't have to believe in the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary to engage Catholic social doctrine.
You just have to be willing to work through an argument seriously.
This was the genius of Leo XIII in the late 19th century, understanding that the modern world needed a kind of grammar for ordering the conversation about the human future.
And Leo's answer to that was, okay, let's find the moral truths inscribed in the world and in us, truths that we can know by reason.
That creates a kind of grammatical system.
By which we can actually talk to each other.
The recovery of that throughout the Western world is really essential in the early 21st century.
But when we're speaking of chaos and order, the Catholic Church as it stands seems to have gone from a period of wonderful order of Pope John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict to a confusing period right now.
And I get all of these questions in the mailbag from Catholics and non-Catholics asking me about the apparent confusion from Pope Francis or from people reporting on Pope Francis.
What are we to make of this, not only as Catholics, but as...
I think people should understand, first of all, that the Catholic Church knows what it believes.
It's in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
That hasn't been repealed.
And Pope Francis recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.
My other suggestion to people is to calm down.
Don't spend your time in the Catholic blogosphere, where it's all hysteria all the time, from all sides.
And to recognize that the living parts of the church, whether you're talking about renewal movements in the developed world, great parishes in America, campus ministries like Focus, Or the vibrant church all over Africa today, one of the great evangelical success stories of the last century.
These are all the parts of the church that have embraced Catholicism in full.
And the dying parts of the church are the parts that are still trying to make the Catholic light project work.
And it doesn't.
Catholic light is boring.
There's nothing engaging and enlivening about it.
And if you want evidence of that, look at the church in the German speaking world today.
Immensely rich.
The Catholic Church in Germany is the second largest employer in the country because of its wealth.
And yet there's five to seven percent mass attendance.
Why is that the case?
Because they keep trying to make Catholic light work and Catholic light doesn't work because it's uninteresting.
That's so true.
I have to say I was a cradle Catholic and then I sort of fell away around the time of my confirmation.
And to me, the liturgy that I knew was acoustic guitars and, you know, the priest says some nice sentimental words about something and then you all applaud at the end and I don't know, they probably have kumbaya added in there or something in all of these suburban churches.
And the experience of a traditional liturgy or of a more traditional engagement with the church itself was totally new.
And I think there's a whole generation of people for whom that is totally new.
But this is what really worries me.
You see these numbers of no religious affiliation rising dramatically.
When you look at millennials and the generation after millennials, you see huge drops in marriage rates and even higher expected drops in marriage rates to continue.
No religious affiliation, very low mass attendance.
Is there any way to not just have a new great awakening with some new coalition, but to create a new religious movement in the United States, or is that a lost cause?
No, it's not a lost cause.
The gospel is never a lost cause.
What everyone in the Catholic Church has to recognize Is that culturally transmitted Catholicism, Catholicism by ethnic inheritance.
I'm a Catholic because my great grandmother came from County Cork or whatever.
Right.
I'm a Catholic because I'm an Italian and therefore don't button all of the buttons on my shirt.
Right.
That's over.
That's over throughout the developed world.
And the church has to become a much more intentionally evangelical and missionary enterprise, which I devoted a whole book called Evangelical Catholicism, to explaining.
The living parts of the church are the parts that have figured that out, and they are making headway even among millennials, who may, before the gig is up, make us baby boomers look good by comparison.
You know, I hear a lot of these millennial conservatives, and they'll say, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious.
I don't want any religious affiliation.
Oh, you know, Republicans should stop talking about gay marriage.
That's over.
They should stop.
I suppose pro-life is actually on the rise, but...
What do we make of an issue such as the redefinition of marriage?
Is that a lost cause from the perspective of American conservatism?
Or does marriage have a definition and we need to keep barreling along defending that traditional definition no matter how unpopular politically it is?
Well, I think it's a bad idea when the state tries to make us all believe that something we know isn't true is true.
I mean, that was the reason to fight that battle.
This was a vast overreach on the part of the state.
The state doesn't define marriage.
Marriage is a human institution that antedates the state, both historically and is prior to the state, if you'll pardon the word, metaphysically.
It's a more fundamental institution.
I actually proposed six or seven years ago Maybe even longer than that, that the Catholic Church in the United States get out of the civil marriage business.
In other words, to stop having deacons and priests act as officers of the state, signing state marriage licenses, because what the state meant by marriage in those licenses and what we mean by the sacrament of matrimony are two fundamentally different things.
My older daughter was married five years ago, and the celebrant was Bishop Jim Connolly of Lincoln, Nebraska.
He asked me to mail back to the state of Maryland the marriage license, which he had signed.
I looked at it the day after the wedding to make sure everything had been filled out properly.
And instead of saying husband, wife, Bride, groom, man, woman.
It said spouse one and spouse two.
And this is signed by James D. Connolly, Bishop of Lincoln.
This is a complete disconnect.
We should acknowledge that.
People can have a civilly registered marriage, but the church shouldn't be saying that what now every state in the United States has been compelled by the Supreme Court To mean by marriage is what we mean by marriage.
It's a falsification of reality.
And as you were saying a moment ago, reality contact is kind of important if we're going to get things right in public life.
Well, I find when I speak to people about political issues these days, especially in the Trump era, where the resistance has turned up their yells and shrieks and gnashing of teeth to a fever pitch, they will get louder and louder the more they are presented with incontrovertible they will get louder and louder the more they are presented You know, you'll just point to the unemployment rate and they'll just start yelling and shouting you down.
How do we bridge this?
There is virtually no common culture anymore.
People don't watch the same TV shows.
They don't watch the same movies.
They don't go to the same church.
They don't believe the same basic things.
They don't even share the same basic love of country.
How will it be possible to bring everybody back under this one reality of, Or are we going to crack up and fall apart?
Well, let's take a look at something you mentioned a moment ago.
The increasingly pro-life views of the American people.
I've been involved in pro-life work for almost 40 years.
I've written a lot of stuff on this.
I've made a lot of arguments.
I am willing to recognize that what has really turned this around is the sonogram, is technology which makes it impossible for the other side to say this is the equivalent of an appendix or a tumor.
This is not that, and you can see that.
So we need to figure out the imagery side of other issues.
We also need to keep calm.
We don't have to debase the public conversation the way this resistance nonsense does.
We have to be the people of lucidity and reason and good manners.
And hope that over time that will have an effect.
People don't like to be shouted at all the time.
And the more the resistance shouts, the more it weakens its case.
There was an enormous difference.
Between that really unspeakably vulgar resistance rally here in Washington a few days after President Trump's inauguration.
The one with the pink hats and all of that?
Yeah, yeah, with all that stuff.
And the March for Life a week or so later.
The first was angry, vulgar, nasty, in your face.
The latter was happy.
Joyful, celebratory, young, increasingly female, and much more attractive by any reasonable measure.
So it's never give up time.
We've been through some very rough patches in this country before.
And I think part of the The shrillness and hysteria of the present moment, particularly among younger people, has something to do with the profound ignorance of history that is now part of the public landscape.
When half of American college graduates last year did not know that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the president during the Second World War, How do we expect them to know that there was a huge mess in this country between 1850 and 1860?
Or that the country was really knocked back on its heels during the Great Depression?
And so forth and so on.
A recovery of the story, the story of America, which includes the story of American renewal.
There are immense sources of renewal in this country.
And we should tap those.
That is such an important point.
The narrative.
All the way from the sonogram to the narrative.
We live our lives in narrative.
We live our lives in a story.
And when you can illuminate that story, then you appear as you say...
Happy and joyful and attractive.
And that's pretty good.
I like a world that's happy, joyful, attractive, and increasingly female.
That's a good world to me.
And a good note of hope to end on.
I've got to let you go.
I've taken up enough of your time.
The book is so, so good.
The Fragility of Order, Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times.
Since nobody is educated these days and everybody has been deprived of reading books during their schooling, start with this one because it's a very good one and will illuminate a lot of what is going on in our culture.
I really enjoyed it.
Mr.
Weigel, Thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
It's very important that you start with books such as Mr.
Weigel's The Fragility of Order so that you can move on to really esoteric, sophisticated books like Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
But you need to start out with theology and philosophy and cultural commentary so that you can move on to the greatest political tome in the history of our republic.
Okay, that's our show.
Come back tomorrow.
Even the soccer fans who I've doubtless alienated from my show now.
I didn't realize how many people like soccer.
But anyway, even them, please come back.
And I'll see you tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
