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July 19, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:29
Ep. 187 - Why Won’t Anyone Talk About The Persecuted Christians?

A study undertaken this year shows that the persecution and mass-murder of Christians around the world is worse today than at any time in history, and Western government are failing not only to stop it but even to acknowledge it. The inimitable Fr. George Rutler stops by to discuss. Then, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A study undertaken this year shows that the persecution and mass murder of Christians around the world is worse today than at any time in history, and Western governments are failing not only to stop it, but even to acknowledge it.
Father George Rutler has just inaugurated the first shrine in the world dedicated to persecuted Christians at his church, which is the same church where I wed sweet little Elisa just a month ago, the Church of Saint Michael in Hell's Kitchen.
We will discuss The totally silenced Christian's plight.
Then the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This is going to be a very politically incorrect show.
Not politically correct.
It is a really strange thing right now.
Even I didn't realize it, and I've been kind of tuned into these issues of Christian persecution in the Middle East and around the world.
Right now Christians in the world are the most persecuted faith group that there is.
You wouldn't know that.
If you talk to people in America or in Europe, they always talk about Islamophobia, which Andrew Klavan, I believe, once defined as the irrational fear of having your head cut off.
That's not politically correct.
But that's all you hear about.
You don't hear about the Christians.
It's silenced.
We're talking about how we need to bring Muslim migrants over.
All we have to do is bring the Muslim migrants over.
We bring hardly any Christian refugees over.
And the Christian refugees are the ones who are being utterly decimated by Muslim militants throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.
According to this study by Aid to the Church in Need, they examined Christians in China, Egypt, Eritrea, India, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey.
Only Saudi Arabia has not gotten significantly worse for Christians over the last few years, and that's only because it can't really get much worse.
It's not a thriving metropolis of Christians.
But The Christians have been almost entirely wiped out of Iraq and Syria.
We know, we had Ji Sung-ho on the show, the North Korean defector, just a week or two ago, and he talked about how if you are said to be a Christian in North Korea, you will be executed publicly and on the spot, no questions asked, gun pulled out, shoot you right in the head.
This is a weird thing, and especially in the United States and in Europe, I think we have this sense now, especially lefties here, have this sense that, oh, Iraq and Syria, those are for Muslim people.
The Christians aren't supposed to be there.
Those aren't for Christian people.
But, of course, Syria was the home of Christianity for so long.
Not all of them, but many of the early popes came out of Syria.
Peter is from Bethsaida.
Paul had his conversion.
He had the scales over his eyes, knocked off his...
He knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus or knocked off as he's going up to Damascus.
That's not in Rome.
That's not in Tours.
That's not in England.
That's in Syria.
But we have this idea that that's for the Muslims.
That's for the Muslim people.
All over the Middle East and Africa, there are some summary executions of Christians, torture, crucifixion, all of these things.
Not politically correct to say, but that's why we brought on my priest and good friend, Father George Rutler.
Father Rutler is, how do you even introduce this guy?
A singular figure in my reversion to Christianity.
He is the pastor of the Church of St.
Michael in New York.
He's the author of, I think, 700,000 books at this point.
He's a boxer.
He's a painter.
He's a terrific painter.
He plays piano, plays violin.
He's just a true Renaissance man.
I asked him one time.
He was very kind to display my political tome, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, in his rectory in New York.
And Father Rutler, I asked him, I said, how do you do all of this?
How do you host TV shows and write your columns all the time and write books and do that and that?
And he looked at me and said, don't sleep.
Fair enough answer.
I have to take that advice.
He stopped by to talk about the Christian persecution.
And as, excuse me, as happens with him, the conversation wandered a bit.
Without further ado, here is Father Rutler.
Father Rutler, thank you so much for being here.
Delighted to do it.
Father Rutler, the last time I saw you, you were marrying me off.
Right.
Well, it was a wonderful day.
I really, really enjoyed it.
I estimate, roughly, I've had about 800 weddings, and each one is like the first one.
There's a lot of work involved in it.
People don't realize that, but It's a great joy to me.
It was so lovely, and I was so pleased that you did it and that we did it at the Church of St.
Michael.
And I know some of the viewers of the show have seen photos that I've been posting of it.
And it occurs to me, right before I got married, I'm all nervous, I'm standing in the rectory, I actually saw this shrine, the first shrine in the world dedicated to the persecution of Christians.
And it shocks me in two ways.
There are so many persecuted Christians, you know, and that nobody's really talking about this.
And the other, that it's the first shrine in the world dedicated to them.
How did it come about, and why is nobody caring about the persecuted Christians?
Well, first of all, I have a good friend, a priest from England, although he is actually a priest working in coordinated, as we say in canon law.
That is, he's inscribed...
In a diocese in Vermont.
But he's been on leave now to go and work with the Christian emigres in Iraq.
He works out of England, but he's back and forth to Iraq.
He's taking some documentary films.
It's stunning.
The historic center of Mosul.
It looks like Hiroshima after the bomb.
We don't see much of that.
So, he is raising consciousness.
He's organized a group called the Nazarean.org.
N-A-R-O-E-A-N. And they use the letter N, the Arabic letter, the Noum.
It's called Noum in Arabic alphabet.
Nazarene.
Because the Muslim countries will not allow the use of the word Christian, so they call Christians Nazarenes.
Jesus was from Nazareth.
And these little badges are to raise consciousness.
It's sort of like, you know, a lot of people in the Second World War deliberately wore yellow stars to show their empathy for the persecuted Jews.
And The icon we're talking about was done by an Iraqi from the area of Aradin, which in Arabic means, or Aramaic.
They speak Aramaic, which was the language our Lord spoke.
It means Eden.
His house and the property and everything were confiscated by the ISIS. So he had to take his family in exile to Lebanon.
And the icon shows the Virgin Mary dressed as an Iraqi bride.
The second question is, why has there been such little publicity?
Well, first of all, it's politically incorrect because the Western culture on the whole, I think, is very threatened by Islam.
It doesn't understand Islam A lot of people, I think of a lot of people of naive left-wing sympathies are following, replicating the same mistake that was made in the 1930s by a lot of the Western intelligentsia, who thought, well, Hitler's a kind of crackpot, but at least he's anti-Bolshevik, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And so they looked the other way towards the Nazi atrocities, Kristallnacht.
They thought that led to the concentration camps.
We have to remember that a lot, a lot of the Western media, including the New York Times, ignored all the evidence on the concentration camps.
There was a very noble Polish-Catholic layman professor, Jan Karski, Who eventually went into exile.
He documented the concentration camps, what was going on.
He came to the West.
He went to London.
They didn't want to hear about it in Whitehall.
He went to Washington.
He had an hour with Franklin Roosevelt.
Franklin Roosevelt ignored him.
He was polite, but didn't want to hear this.
He met with Felix Frankfurter, who was the only Jewish member of the Supreme Court.
Who just was angry.
And he walked around the room and said, you know, he couldn't believe it.
And later on he said, I didn't call Karski a liar.
I just said that I couldn't believe him.
Well, that's what these people are doing.
A lot of these people are doing today.
Because to admit what's going on is to admit that with Islam we're dealing with something different from what Western bourgeois Minds think is religion.
We so often hear that these extremists are unrepresentative of the Koran.
Well, read the Koran.
It's right there.
It's not the extremists.
It's the more moderate Muslims, God bless them, who want really to integrate into Western society or adopt virtues of Judeo-Christian society.
They're the They're the eccentrics.
Militant Islam represents the authentic interpretation of the Quran, and that's very politically incorrect to say, but it's a fact.
And to acknowledge what's going on in the Middle East, where you have countries where the Christian populations are evaporating, right in Bethlehem, the population, the Christian population, they're in the birthplace of Christ.
Vanishing.
People do not want to admit it.
And I think, just as in the 1930s, you had people giving the pass to the Nazis because they thought that Hitler and Stalin could fight it out between themselves.
Well, they didn't.
We had the Ribbentrop pack, which upset the leftists in the West.
So, today we have people thinking that, well, the bourgeois liberal progressivists who are anti-Judeo-Christian civilization, they wouldn't put it that way, but they are.
The way they want to fragment the whole Judeo-Christian moral structure, they'll say, well, all right, Islam, these people are kind of nutty, but...
They'll bring down Judeo-Christian society.
Well, again, the enemy of my enemies, my friend.
But as with giving Hitler a path, you don't understand, when you do that, what a bacillus you are unleashing on the world.
Of course.
You know, it's interesting that you mention that, this long-standing conflict between Islam and the West.
Hilaire Belloc, the great Catholic writer, wrote about this in the 1930s.
He said, But within half a century or so, Islam may start rising up against the West again and we're going to have to deal with it.
And I saw there was a study by Aid to the Church in Need and the McLaughlin and Associates which showed that among American Catholics, the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere ranks the lowest among their list of concerns and global priorities.
Ranking higher are poverty, which I believe will always be with us.
It's written in a book somewhere.
And climate change.
Climate change is a greater priority and I think it speaks to what you're talking about.
There has been an ideological displacement or assault on Judeo-Christian morality and Western civilization and that ideological assault is replacing it.
You saw Dianne Feinstein Grilling Judge Amy Coney Barrett and she said, you know, I'm worried because the dogma lives loudly within you.
There does seem to be a real battle here.
You saw this firsthand.
You're in New York City.
You've been there.
You were an eyewitness to the September 11th terrorist attacks.
You were down there at the Trade Center.
Has the culture moved in any sort of better direction in the country, or are we just sliding toward further decay?
No, no, I don't think it has.
You know, the difference between the theological virtue of hope, which is trusting in God, and the humanistic quality of Of optimism.
Optimism is just wishing things will be well.
Hope means knowing things will go well if we trust in God.
In a long time, yes.
I say to my friends, you know, our culture now is very decadent, but as an historian, I would say we can hopefully say that maybe in 200 or 300 years things will get better.
But that's, unless you intend to live that long, that's not so much of a consolation.
I belong to a few, I'm part Scottish, I belong to some Scottish societies, and the Scottish tend to be, you know, some generalization, a little doer.
A little surly, yeah.
Yeah, but the difference between a Scottish pessimist and a Scottish optimist is a Scottish pessimist will say, ah, things couldn't be any worse than they are now, and a Scots optimist says, oh yes, they can.
But I think people are like the ostrich with his head in the sand.
They don't want to admit what's going on.
Europe is learning.
Europe is learning, but the hard way.
I think you have some heroic cultures.
I think of Poland and Hungary.
Perhaps Croatia.
Those countries that have suffered so vividly all through history, but most dramatically in present, they know what they are dealing with.
Others are comfortable.
And as a matter of fact, you know the statistics of all the heads of the EU countries, I think all the heads of the EU countries, at least six of them, Are childless.
Wow.
So, you know, we have, you know, demagogues, and I always, I loathe it when politicians say, we're doing this for our children.
Stop it.
That's demagoguery.
But in Europe, it's for us, because they don't have any children to worry about.
Yeah, we're just doing it for ourselves.
They love a socialist economy, because it's, they can pass the debt on, because they have, you know, their own, they don't have children.
Inherit that debt.
The burden's going to be on the body politic.
So we can belabor the image of the decline and fall of Rome, but the noble Roman Republic was transformed into the Imperium.
All right, you had noble emperors like Augustus later on, maybe Constantine, But most of them, you know, they were like Bill Clinton on a bad day.
And so what happened?
They got soft.
They couldn't fight.
And then you had the Goths, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Huns.
Listen to their names, the Vandals and the Huns.
That gives you an idea of what it is.
Doesn't sound good.
Doesn't sound promising.
It's not exactly the order of Cincinnati.
But they didn't want to admit that the other people were well-trained and they could find a soft spot and they moved in.
And I think that's the way we are today.
When you have a whole culture that are misshaping The younger culture, when you have that whole culture, basically, their fondest memories are Woodstock, and now they're the tenured professors and deans and presidents of universities.
They've misformed the whole generation.
So when an election goes contrary to what they thought it would be, What they were told it was going to be, and the bubble in which they live, what happens?
They have to go into psychiatric treatment, safe spaces and all that.
That's right.
Coloring books and puppies, yeah.
Yeah, but when the barbarian invades, there are no safe spaces.
That is a fearful warning, certainly.
And it is true.
I saw this among my friends who were still in graduate school and college.
And the campuses erupted.
They were so shocked and horrified when President Trump won.
And there is this glimmer of light, I hope, in so much as there has been deregulation.
There has been a greater protection of religious freedom, of individual liberty.
And there are all of these judges.
This has been the great fight all of last week.
Are the judges who are not only textualist and originalist and lean conservative, but dare I say, they're all Catholic.
And this did actually raise a question to me.
When you look back at American history, I think it was Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-Catholicism is the deepest bias in American history, and yet the leaders of the conservative movement have all been Catholic, it seems, or largely Catholic.
You had Russell Kirk.
You had a member of your own flock, Bill Buckley, and you have all of the judges on the Supreme Court.
Why is that?
Why does Catholicism seem to play some role in American conservatism?
Well, because Catholicism is rooted in, pardon the technical language, a realist epistemology.
That is to say, you have concrete truths.
This contradicts relativism, subjectivism, The paramount definer of that philosophy is Thomas Aquinas.
And I've noticed that Justice Gorsuch and now the nominee, Kevin Law, both went to the same Jesuit prep school.
Now, I am not going to risk my life in defense of the Jesuits because I have my grades.
Well, you know, Father Rutler, not to interrupt, but you know the difference between the Jesuits and the Dominicans, don't you?
The difference, of course, is that they were both Spanish orders.
They were both founded to combat heresy.
The Dominicans to combat the Albigensians, the Jesuits to combat the Protestants.
And when was the last time you ever heard of an Albigensian?
That would be the difference.
That's right.
And bear in mind, there's a good example I was talking about, about culturism.
Read about the Albigensians, what they were doing.
They would have destroyed Western civilization.
They had to be put down.
They were put down harshly, but if they hadn't been destroyed, we wouldn't be here today.
It's as simple as that.
It's like, you know, if the Holy Roman...
If you didn't have Andrea Doria and Juan Joblewski and...
Pius V combating the Islamic, Charles Martel even before that, combating the Islamic invasion of Europe, we would not be here today.
But I think the Jesuits are a bit like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
When she was bad, she was horrid.
They were very, very good.
But I'm not sure if they're a dying breed or not.
But there is this respect for classical, Aristotelian, Thomist reality, and that's lost in a subjective culture, which is disintegrating it by its own lack of substance.
So if you live in a subjective culture when truth is whatever you want it to be, What happens?
A boy can go into a girl's locker room and say that he's a girl.
Fine.
Why is this being promoted?
I have to say, I live in New York City.
I see millions of people here.
I live on 34th Street, which is the craziest street in the universe.
I have never encountered a transgendered.
Maybe they're so well cosmeticized that I don't recognize it.
But why?
It's such a minute percentage of the population.
Why is this being promoted?
Why is this the national debate?
Simply because it's another barb in Judeo-Christian moral structure.
The retired head of psychiatry, Johns Hopkins, is not a witch doctor.
He has said that telling a child, a boy, that he could be a girl, is child abuse.
This is a scientific fact.
In the same way, abortion is anti-scientific.
It denies the reality of the humanity of the unborn.
Human life.
Of the unborn.
But now I just mentioned that Casey decision in Pennsylvania that...
Being free means being able to define your own concept of liberty and the meaning of the mystery of life.
You know, that sounds like some cheap opera mystery of life.
The wonderful poet Anthony Kennedy.
Yeah, my beloved friend, Justice Scalia, really devastated that just by the mockery of it.
Who wrote those words?
Justice Kennedy, who's a Catholic.
So just because I'm a Catholic doesn't mean that they're going to be heirs, or they may be heirs, but doesn't mean that they continue to subscribe to a realist philosophy of the moral order.
I mean, Edward Kennedy claimed to be a Catholic.
Go down the list.
In fact, it's almost an indictment of...
Politicians say that when they loudly profess that they're Catholic, there is something wrong with that.
You have to wonder what's really going on.
So there's no great consolation there.
We have an interesting phenomenon now whereby a lot of the evangelicals have been promoting Catholic nominees for the Supreme Court because they see that there's a common bond there.
Theologically, there are problems, but there's a common bond there In their belief in the integrity of Scripture, divine revelation, and objective morality.
But you have a lot of Catholics who are Catholics in name only.
The same thing, we have a lot of Jews who are Jewish in name only.
I mean, this is Ginsburg.
Oh, yes.
Elena Kagan.
Yeah, but I wouldn't like to have her talk to the chief rabbi about her stance on moral issues.
But it's also interesting that the media now just recognizes that the Catholic Church is probably the last voice of realism, moral realism, and that's why it has to be brought out.
You don't hear people, they'll say, well, why are there so many Catholics on the Supreme Court?
Now, what would happen if somebody said, why are there so many Jews on the Supreme Court?
The Jews are over-represented in terms of the percentage of population.
God bless them.
When somebody says that, there's legitimately an odor of anti-Semitism there.
But with Jew, Catholic, Protestant, whatever, there should not be a test of religion.
And the only disappointment I had in that very nice woman, good woman, Barrett?
Is her name?
Amy Coney Barrett, yeah.
Judge Barrett.
Barrett.
She should have just said to that lady senator...
Dianne Feinstein, yes.
...the Senaterix of California.
She should have just, instead of trying to defend herself, to say, I'm sorry, but I am a constitutionalist, and I will not Right, right, of course.
You know, and I must tell you, Father Rutler, I'll have to let you go because I've taken up too much of your time already, but hearing you say that, it really makes me think that the dogma lives loudly within you.
It really makes me echo the senatrix from California's sentiments.
The best way to handle some of these people is just to mock them.
The devil's the prince of lies, and what withers him is to mock him.
If we take him too seriously, then we give him strength.
But I'm told now that there are coffee cups out that say, the dogma lives within me.
That's a good idea.
I'll have to get it on a t-shirt or something.
Yeah.
You know, I must say, I listen to your homilies when I'm not in New York and I can't go to the Church of St.
Michael.
And people can listen to them like a podcast, which I recommend that everybody does.
And they can get your columns, your weekly column, from the Church of St.
Michael and in Crisis Magazine.
By my last count, you've written about 300,000 books in your life.
Is there any new book coming out?
Where can people find more of your writing?
Well, actually, this summer I have five coming out.
Four...
Of a set.
This was not my idea.
A group of businessmen got together.
These are a collection of my pastoral columns over the last 15-20 years.
And they're in a box set, leather-bound with silk ribbons, and the advertisement I read, to my astonishment, celebrating the life and legacy of Father Rutler.
It sounded like an obituary.
I'm glad to hear you're still walking around and talking.
The only thing lacking was, you know, in lieu of flowers, please send...
Please buy this book collection.
And then Ignatius Press is bringing out a collection of...
Of my essays.
But I'm a parish priest.
I'm here in the part of Manhattan called Hell's Kitchen, which indicates something of the culture.
So I only write these things obliquely.
Today I've heard confessions.
That's my job.
But through the wonderful gift now of communications, we can reach a lot of people.
Well, I hope at some point I can match your volume of output.
You have five books coming out this summer.
I had one book coming out in my entire life and it didn't have any words in it.
So maybe I'll be able to amplify my output.
Well, really, the advantage of writing a book without words is it would be very hard to be sued for plagiarism, I suppose.
Father, I kid you not...
Didn't I tell you that I thought on your...
You should do an audio version of that with music by John Cage.
That'll be very nice.
Perhaps you can conduct the arrangement of 433 by John Cage.
You know, I kid you not, there was actually a guy who wrote an anti-Trump blank book.
I use right liberally.
And it was another blank book called Reasons to Respect Donald Trump or something like that.
And he threatened in the Washington Post to sue me for plagiarism, to which I told him, I stole nothing.
I promise you, sir, I stole nothing.
Father Rutler, I've taken up all of your time.
I'm sure there are many masses to say and confessions to give in Hell's Kitchen.
So I'll let you go.
We'll have to have you back because you are famous on this program.
I quote and I'll use the word borrow.
Really, you know, the word is steal all of your insights regularly.
So we'll have to bring you back so that you can give them directly.
Well, hello to everybody out on the wrong coast.
Out in La La Land.
Father Rettler, thank you so much for being here, and we'll talk to you soon by phone, or I'll see you in New York.
All right.
Thank you.
Alright, we're going to have to bring Father Ruttler back because I steal from him so regularly.
I so regularly, maybe I'll say borrow, lines from his columns and talking to him and listening to him.
So I'll have to bring him back and then you get the real thing.
You don't need to go through me.
And maybe I'll have him answer, you know, all my mailbag questions are always Catholic too, so I'll bring him on instead of, you know, this kind of paltry lay Catholic giving you answers.
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, I'm sorry.
We have a lot of mailbag to get to today.
And they're not all Catholic.
Some of them are very important, urgent public policy questions.
But if you're not on dailywire.com, you can't ask questions in the mailbag.
And you can't keep watching.
You can only keep listening.
Go to dailywire.com.
Why?
Well, you get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
None of that matters.
This is the Mark Duplass vintage today that I'm sipping on.
The Mark Duplass 2018.
It's really...
Mmm.
Oh, that's good.
It's a young wine.
It's a new wine.
It hasn't really aged for a while, but something tells me it's going to age just fine.
Get your Daily Wire Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right, let's get into the mailbag.
We're, as usual, tight on time, so we'll just fly through them.
First question, from Garrett.
Who do you prefer, Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton?
Alexander Hamilton.
It's a simple question.
I like them both.
I'm not disparaging Thomas Jefferson.
He's great.
We're Americans because we have both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, but Hamilton's better.
He's the better one.
He's got the better story.
He's got the better thoughts.
He was more important, and I love him.
He's great.
And also, you know, when was the last time Thomas Jefferson got a popular glib musical made about him, huh?
I don't know.
I don't remember that.
From Kyle.
Michael, what is this Alexander Pope quote about nature being art unknown to thee?
Funny you should ask.
I do quote that a fair bit.
Funny you should ask about that quote.
That quote...
The whole quote is,"...all nature is but art unknown to thee, all chance direction which thou canst not see, such that in the logic of the universe as it unfolds, there is providence around us.
Things that we think are coincidences might not be coincidences, or there might be more than coincidences." And that, I first read that on the cover of the first Rutler book I ever read, which sort of introduced me to the guy.
It was pivotal in my reversion to Christianity from vague atheism and vague agnosticism.
And the funny thing about Pope is that he has these great lines, he has wonderful little couplets, you know.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast, these sort of things.
But at the end of all of his poems, there's just like grave heresy.
Yeah.
So he's really good line by line, and then poem by poem, don't believe as much as you would.
But that's a great line.
I use it all the time, and I do believe that that is certainly true.
Next question, from Tan.
Dear Michael, in the current climate, this might be a brave thing to ask and an even braver thing to answer.
But here goes.
Isn't abortion also a natural selection type way to eliminate liberals from our society?
I still feel it's unequivocally murder and will continue to fight for their innocent lives, but perhaps part of the left's problem is that they're okay with killing their progeny.
Please just call me Tan.
Thanks.
Okay, Tan.
Well, alright, so you're saying that it's murder, and then you're saying, but that's not so bad, is it?
I don't know, are you going to go out and murder liberals?
Are you going to go and kill them?
One of the arguments that really brought me over from supporting abortion into being pro-life was from a bioethicist I was having lunch with, and I gave all those stupid freakonomics arguments for why abortion's great, and she said, which of these arguments is not an argument to go wrong.
I said, oh, yikes, that's tough.
So what do you think?
I mean, yeah, there is a sort of irony that these lefties who put all of their hope into politics seem to be killing off their progeny.
But I don't think that's something we should celebrate, you know.
For the left, everything is about politics.
It's their god.
It's the god they worship.
We don't worship that god, hopefully.
We've got other things going on, so we don't want to kill them.
We don't want to see them killed.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast, so where there's life, there's hope, and we should try to bring them up, and that way we'll have more conservatives.
We'll be able to convert them.
One time, Governor Mitch Daniels, I was talking to him, and we asked This was in 2012.
We said, you know, everything's looking so bleak.
Is the West over?
I mean, how are we ever going to defeat the forces of leftism?
And he said, well, there are two ways to do it, Michael.
You can either persuade them, or you can outbreed them, and the latter is much more fun.
Good advice.
You know, we've got to be pro-life, even if...
Even if, I suppose, we could win more elections if we slaughtered all the lefties.
But I don't think that'd be a good idea.
From either Michele or Michel.
I can't tell which one that is.
How do you feel the Bible addresses pacifism?
As a conservative, I have been very curious about this because of passages like Turn the Other Cheek.
Thank you for your time and veritas vos liberabit.
I think there are too many pacifists in the church militant.
That's what I think.
I think C.S. Lewis spelled this out very well in an essay, I think, called Why I'm Not a Pacifist.
One should turn the other cheek.
Of course, this is a very abused line of scripture, abused in particular by the political left.
To turn the other cheek is an act of moral defiance and moral dignity.
That when some man hits you or disrespects you or insults you, he degrades himself.
And he degrades himself because you won't allow yourself...
You will allow your flesh to be mortified and for that suffering to sanctify you.
This is not an instruction to let the cruel rape the earth.
That's not what our Lord is telling us to do.
So C.S. Lewis spells it out in a few different ways.
But pacifism is pretty self-defeating.
In the sort of lefty version of just be nice, man, there was a great theologian who described most American churches and most American sermons and homilies as saying, I would possibly suggest that you try to be nice.
But in that, if you're supposed to love everybody and be kind to everybody, if person A is attacking person B, then to love person B necessarily requires doing violence to person A. If you're going to have pacifism, peace on earth, which isn't going to happen anytime soon, then you need a whole nation of pacifists.
The trouble is, when you have a nation of pacifists, the barbarians come in and destroy them.
As Father Rettler said, there are no safe spaces when the barbarian invades.
Many other good arguments for it.
You should check out C.S. Lewis' essay on it.
It's a pretty good one.
And also, just be aware, you know, it's that Chesterton line, that heresy is not the promotion of vice, it's the promotion of virtue to the exclusion of all the others, one virtue to the exclusion of all of the others.
So you might say, ah, yes, we should be really nice and meek.
That's one virtue, but what about prudence?
What about judgment, the exercise of judgment?
What about, you know, not letting the cruel rape the earth?
You've got to keep these things in balance, and there's nothing...
There's nothing lovely or nice or kind or compassionate about letting poor innocent people be run over.
From Chris.
Good day from South Africa, Michael.
I know you are the conductor of the Trump train.
Chute, chute.
My question is, what action of Trump would cause you to stop supporting him?
Well, Chris, I think at this point if the president were to shoot a man on Fifth Avenue, he probably still wouldn't lose my vote.
And I mean that because he's been so good.
He's been so good.
And I don't really care what lefties think of me.
I don't really care what people at cocktail parties think of me.
I don't care what fancy people who, you know, read really old leather-bound books think of me.
I don't care.
What I care about is the liberty.
And I think some people get, especially, disproportionately, people who are in the media, conservative and left, they...
They're so afraid of supporting Trump because they think they'll be thought stupid or uneducated or uncouth or not classy or not whatever.
I'm not worried about that.
Who cares?
Who cares what CNN thinks of you?
I care about the liberty, and Trump is doing a great job on that.
He's doing a great job protecting life, liberty, And the pursuit of happiness and property is standing up for the country.
So there are very few things.
I mean, I suppose if he reversed his entire agenda, that would get me to not support him, but I don't really see that coming.
He's been a reliable conservative.
He's been much more reliable as a conservative than perhaps some of our recent Republican presidents, which is maybe surprising, but the guy, you know, I don't put my trust in princes.
I don't put my faith in princes.
So I don't really care.
If he reversed his agenda tomorrow, then okay, I guess we'll turn on him.
But it doesn't bother me.
I think for some people who don't like Trump or were never Trump or whatever, they take the presidency so personally.
They say, oh no, I don't care.
The president's not my pope.
I don't worship the president.
I don't identify with the president.
The president is doing good things in his job.
As long as he's doing good things, I think that's great.
If he starts, you know, being a big liberal democrat, we'll get a new president.
Next question from Colleen.
Shapiro didn't take my question for the mailbag this week, so I'll have to settle for store brand Ben.
Thank you, Colleen.
How would you respond if a person called the Founding Fathers terrorists, a la the Boston Tea Party?
I might be tutoring some kids that this person teaches in the coming school year.
What questions could I ask the kids that would give them an opportunity to form a different opinion about our Founding Fathers?
Thanks.
P.S. I secretly like your show.
Don't tell anyone.
I won't tell anyone.
I won't tell Ben.
Yeah, what should I tell them?
I don't know.
The suggestion that the Founding Fathers were terrorists is asinine, so I wouldn't even respond to it because it's so stupid.
You're referring to the Boston Tea Party as some act of terror.
When we think of acts of terror, we think of violating the Geneva Convention, targeting civilians in acts of war, torturing, maiming, killing civilians.
What the American patriots did at the Boston Tea Party is dress up like Indians and throw some tea in the harbor, not even that much tea.
How droll.
What a funny little protest.
That was that terrorism.
By the way, the Americans, because it was a conservative revolution, they had a total respect for decorum, for law, for behaving like a gentleman, for higher virtues, for higher principles.
One time, General Washington condemned a man of his own guard to death because that man robbed some people during the war.
He plundered some people, stole some things.
And he condemned that man to death because he would not be a terrorist.
He would not be a villain or a barbarian.
He was going to fight like a gentleman because he was an upstanding man.
The men who fought for the American Revolution, who won our freedom and won our country, were some of the most upstanding men in all of history.
Compare them to us today.
Compare them to our culture today.
It's far degraded.
We would be the barbarians.
We would be more likely to fit that category.
But no, there's no argument for that at all.
And this is another one of these examples.
I've been talking about it recently with that Chiguavera, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez...
And she, Guevara, you know, and she doesn't know any, it's not what she doesn't know that gets her into trouble.
It's what she knows for sure that just ain't so.
So, when you see this on campuses, I saw this at Yale when I was there, that instead of the old math, history, English, those liberal arts would be pushed out a little bit, and what would start to take over were critical studies departments.
Which are not traditional liberal arts.
They're just ideology, basically.
So you have women's gender and sexuality studies.
Ethnicity, race, and migration studies.
And they were just ideology.
You don't learn a lot of facts or details or names or dates.
You just learn the narrative.
And that's an example of that.
Someone might have this narrative.
This ideological narrative that the founding fathers were somehow terrorists.
One question you could ask is, what's an example of that?
They'll be silent.
Next question from John.
How much more time?
One or two more.
I'll do one or two tops.
That's it, I promise.
From John.
Fair point.
Absolutely right.
Next question.
From Sally.
Dear St.
Michael, guardian angel, during last week's mailbag, someone asked about purgatory and where they could find proof in the Bible that purgatory existed.
You pointed to Mark 3.29 as a piece of evidence that purgatory exists.
You said you didn't have time in the episode to get into why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was unforgivable.
But I was hoping you'd have time in this episode to explain why blasphemy against God or the Son of God can be forgiven, but why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is evil and unforgivable.
It doesn't make sense to me that blasphemy against two of the Holy Trinity could be forgiven, but why it would be unforgivable to commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, especially since the Holy Trinity is co-equal with one another.
Thanks, Sally.
This is a tough question.
It's an enigmatic verse in the Bible, which is when Christ says, you'll be forgiven for blasphemy against me or my father, but not against the Holy Spirit.
If you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, that will not be forgiven.
So why is that?
It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense until you realize that it's true by nature.
By nature, that's the case.
There are not limits to the mercy of God.
But if you deliberately refuse to accept his mercy by repenting, then you're rejecting the forgiveness of your sins, and you're rejecting salvation, which is offered by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit, if you want to try to visualize it, and this is not...
An easy thing to do, and certainly you could never possibly do it perfectly well.
There's a story of St.
Augustine trying to describe the Trinity, and he's walking along the beach, and a little kid is trying to shovel in all of the water from the ocean into one little hole.
St.
Augustine says, you can't possibly do that.
And then the legend goes, the boy is transfigured into an angel, and he says, yeah, dummy, and you can't explain the Trinity.
He says, okay, that's true.
But the way you can sort of try to visualize the Holy Spirit Is that the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son.
So you can even see this in Genesis, in the first moments of Genesis.
The act of creation is an act of speech.
And God the Father speaks the world into existence.
And Christ is the Word.
He's the Logos.
And you can almost visualize it as that Word is being spoken by God.
That bond of love, that Spirit, that breath.
The Hebrew word is Ruach.
Ruach.
Is breath or spirit.
Is that bond of love that proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Which is the bond of love between them.
So if you reject that.
If you reject that advocate.
That paraclete.
Then you are by definition rejecting the forgiveness of your sins.
And that it can't be forgiven because you're refusing forgiveness.
I hope that clears it up a little bit.
Okay.
We've run too long.
Enough of that.
I just figured that's a good question to end on.
On a show where half of the people talking are wearing collars.
Are rather sophisticated and intelligent priests.
Okay, that is the show.
I will see you on Monday.
Have a good weekend.
Try to survive.
Listen to Another Kingdom, because we're getting ready for season two of Another Kingdom, and it's going to be a lot of fun.
So check it out.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you on Monday.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia 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.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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