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Aug. 2, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:02
Ep. 194 - Cry Me A River, Jim Acosta

As confidence in the mainstream media drops to record lows, President Trump’s approval rating hits a new high. We’ll analyze why the media’s crocodile tears aren’t working. Then, why the midterm elections are the most honest elections we’ve had in a long time, and why God isn’t a socialist. Finally, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Now you say you're sorry for being so untrue, huh, mainstream media?
Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river, cry me a river, Jim Acosta.
As confidence in the mainstream media drops to record lows, President Trump's approval rating hits a new high of 50%, five points higher than Barack Obama's at this point in his presidency.
We will analyze why the media's crocodile tears are not working.
Why these midterm elections, 2018, are the most honest elections that we've had in a long time, and also why God isn't a socialist.
Finally, The Mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Just got back in from our nation's capital.
Had a good time.
Walked around the Gold House, you know.
Got to visit with YAF, Young America's Foundation.
Gave a speech there on owning the libs and how wonderful it is.
I think you can probably catch that online.
YAF might be streaming it somewhere.
I left my compatriots there in D.C. We were like ships passing in the night.
Didn't get to see one another.
I don't know if I'm more tired because I just got off the airplane and I came here or because I closed down Shelly's back room with Allie Stuckey last night.
It was one of those two things.
I'm not sure which one.
But a lot of fun anyway.
I really enjoyed seeing YAF. And, you know, we're doing this tour in the fall with YAF, Covfefe on campus.
So if you would like me to come spread the simple joys of Covfefe to your campus, put in a request through the YAF website, yaf.org.
I think there should be a link for my tour there.
And you can just put in a request and we'll set it up.
We're going to be picking those schools and dates soon.
So get that in pretty fast.
But there's a This was really fun.
Talk about a good news cycle to be hanging around D.C. We have the one and only Jim Acosta.
If Jim Acosta did not exist, conservatives would have to create Jim Acosta.
The future Daily Wire White House correspondent Jim Acosta, he got into a little heat because he was at a Trump event.
He was at a Trump rally, and some Trump supporters were heckling him.
I wonder why.
I wonder why they would do that.
That seems so crazy.
So then Jim Acosta went on television and started crying those mainstream media crocodile tears.
Here is Mr.
Acosta.
He's covered countless of these and has become one of the president's favorite human punching bags.
CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta.
Jim, we've seen your videos and I've been to these events too.
I've met with countless Trump supporters.
Even I was shocked at the level of vitriol that was aimed your way last night.
Give us an idea of what it felt like to be in the middle of it.
Well, Essie, I mean, honestly, it felt like we weren't in America anymore.
I don't know how to put it any more plainly than that.
Americans should not be treating their fellow Americans in this way.
But unfortunately, what we've seen, and this has been building for some time since the campaign, I've been talking about this as an issue since the campaign, When the president during the campaign referred to us as the dishonest media, the disgusting news media, liar, scum, and thieves, and so on, and then he rolled that right into the Oval Office and started calling us fake news and the enemy of the people, he is whipping these crowds up into a frenzy To the point where they really want to come after us.
And, you know, we have these bike rack-like barriers around the press cage, as we call it, to protect us, essentially, from people who might take things too far.
It's unfortunate because, and I try to calmly talk to a lot of these folks at the rally last night to say, listen...
Hey, you know, tell me what you want to talk about here.
Why are you guys so upset with us?
And they would kind of go through a list of questions.
Most of the questions were about, why don't you guys report positive news about the president?
And I said, hey, you know what?
We do that.
We were reporting on this positive job numbers in the economy last Friday.
And my sense of it, Essie, is that That these opinions that these folks have at these rallies, they're shaped by what they see in the primetime hours of Fox News and what they hear from some conservative news outlets that just sort of give them this daily diet of what they consider to be terrible things that we do over here at CNN. It's very unfortunate, but it's a pitting of American against American.
And honestly, it needs to stop.
Honestly, it needs to stop.
And I'm Ron Burgundy?
I'm Ron Burgundy.
I'm Jim Acosta, Ron Burgundy.
You never see him and Will Ferrell in the same room at the same time, do you?
So he felt like he wasn't in America anymore.
And this is...
I actually kind of like Jim Acosta.
I'm very serious.
Someone asked me if the Daily Wire could send a representative to the White House, who would it be?
They would have to be Jim Acosta.
Because there's this sort of guilelessness to him, you know?
They report...
The most absurd fake news all the time.
And by fake news, I mean certain dishonest lines, certain actually inaccurate stories.
And then also they just harp on constant negative nonsense.
President Trump has the most negative press coverage In modern presidential history, despite the fact that his approval rating in the country is 50%, it's actually quite, quite high.
Despite the fact that we have a booming economy, that we've got peace abroad, that we've got low unemployment, record low joblessness, crime down, hate crime down, all of these great statistics that we can tick off.
But the mainstream media harp on issues that the American people don't care about.
They harp on the Russia investigation.
They harp on these issues that Americans rank in the bottom percentages of what they care about, what matters to them, what should be newsworthy, what should be politically newsworthy.
But the other thing to point out here is you've got this video of Ron Burgundy, Jim Acosta, standing there in the press cage.
And you've got all of these Trump supporters just making fun of him, you know, because they don't like the mainstream media.
The mainstream media are unpopular because they're liars.
They carry water for Democrats.
They're dirty, rotten liars.
But they're not, like, punching him in the face.
They're not climbing over the cage to stab him or something like that.
There haven't been political attacks on journalists in America in recent history.
There have been some where there are personal gripes between people and certain local journalists.
That's happened a handful of times.
But there isn't an epidemic of Trump supporters going out and physically attacking members of the mainstream media.
That doesn't exist.
What does exist, however, is members of the media and also lefties riling up and inciting violence against Trump supporters.
Everybody from media types in the Democratic Party and on the left all the way to elected officials ginning up attacks on Trump supporters, on people who work for President Trump, Just look at a few of these tweets.
Talk about dehumanizing.
From PBS and NPR composer Christopher O'Reilly, quote, calling them deplorables is euphemizing them.
Maybe better to euthanize Get it?
We shouldn't euphemize them.
We shouldn't give them a little nickname.
We should kill all of them.
You don't really see that with Jim Acosta, with Trump supporters to Jim Acosta.
We make fun of Jim Acosta because he's eminently mockable.
But you don't see that sort of, let's kill them all, let's euthanize them.
How about TV host John Murray says...
This scene, referring to Jim Acosta's experience at the Trump rally, this scene looks like a modern day Ku Klux Klan rally.
Amazing to see that Donald Trump, the man occupying the White House, is so comfortable in this atmosphere of hateful hostility, bigotry, and deplorable language.
God bless America!
Where's the hostility coming from, sir?
Where is that?
How is this like a Ku Klux Klan rally?
Because that's the easiest.
That's the easiest insult.
It's the worst thing you can say about a person to say that they're bigots, that they're racists, that they're...
It's the worst thing you can say in modern America.
What's the evidence?
What's really funny is in the clip, in that clip of Jim Acosta there, the first group of people, the most prominent group on camera, is a big group that says, Blacks for Trump.
Right?
Just like all those old Ku Klux Klan rallies, blacks for the Klan.
You don't see that a lot.
That's not true.
It's just an insane slander.
It's insane libel to say that about Trump supporters.
And it really does gin up hatred because what you're saying is...
These Trump supporters are domestic terrorists and we've got to take care of them.
Obviously, they're oblivious to what they're saying themselves.
How about Will Potter?
The author of Will Potter, he said on Twitter, quote, I'm truly ashamed that this is what America has become.
Replace the MAGA hats and Trump signs.
And this is straight out of any number of authoritarian regimes where journalists are killed.
I feel like a foreign correspondent in my own country.
Okay, just replace the MAGA hats and the Trump signs and the president and the press and the country and the era and the location and the weapons.
And if you replace everything, then it's like another thing.
Okay, that's fine.
That makes sense.
I feel like, what does he say?
This is like when journalists are killed.
Which journalists have been killed because of Trump supporters?
Which ones?
Any?
No?
Okay, that's what I thought.
From author Khaled Diab.
Diab?
Diab, Trump's endless vilification of the media will almost certainly lead to vigilante violence against journalists.
If Trump succeeds in weakening American institutions sufficiently, he could wage an Erdogan-style crackdown on his media critics and independent journalists.
Did you know that?
Did you know that Donald Trump is like the dictator of Turkey, the Islamist dictator of Turkey?
I didn't know that.
I didn't even know Trump was an Islamist.
That guy really can slip through the cracks, you know.
He really pulled the wool over all of our eyes.
That's what you're seeing from the supporters of Jim Acosta, the people who believe these crocodile tears, the supporters of the mainstream media.
Does any Trump supporter want there to be violence on media figures?
No.
Trump supporter in the media, an elected office, call for violence against the mainstream media?
No, you can't.
You can't show me an example of that.
And there's no epidemic.
Point to the epidemic.
Point to the incidents.
Doesn't exist.
But have you heard even elected Democrats calling for violence against Trump supporters?
Absolutely you have.
Maxine, baby, take it away!
We want it done now.
We're going to insist on it.
If you think we're rallying now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Already, you have members of your cabinet that have been booed out of restaurants.
You have protesters taking up at their house.
You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.
You're evil!
Did you hear that?
You're evil!
And that's why we've got to go to Republicans' houses so that we can keep them up and terrorize their families and swarm them in public.
Go out, you know, I think of Mitch McConnell and his wife when the swarming mob goes up there and starts screaming in Elaine Chao's face.
That's what they're asking for.
That's what the left is saying.
They're the ones turning up the rhetoric.
It's unbelievable to see these headlines.
They say, President Trump...
Won't condemn rhetoric.
He won't stop rhetoric against journalists.
Sarah Sanders won't stop rhetoric against journalists.
What about Maxine Waters?
What about Cory Booker?
What about all of these major Democrats?
What about the people who are actually swarming, physically intimidating, attacking Trump supporters while Jim Acosta sends out his crocodile tears?
Cry me a river.
Absolutely ridiculous.
And how else, by the way?
We're talking about this culture of hatred, ginning up hatred and attacks against our fellow Americans because These news cycles are almost parodies of themselves at this point.
The New York Times has just hired a new member of the editorial board, Sarah Jung.
They just hired Sarah Young, and all of a sudden, some old tweets are coming to light.
But when I'm talking about old tweets, I'm not even saying like James Gunn, you know, tweets from 2006, 2005, over 10 years ago, 13 years ago.
I'm talking about tweets from just a couple years ago, a few years ago, where this woman, this reporter, this journalist, who was hired by the New York Times to be on the editorial board, says horrific things about white people.
Not individual white people.
Horrific things about white people as a category.
Here are just some of the quotes.
And I'm going to have to censor them.
I'm going to be silent for half of all of these quotes because they're really profane.
Dumb, effing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs urinating on fire hydrants.
I guess that's what I'm doing right now.
I'm just marking up the internet with my opinions.
Sorry.
Another one.
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?
That was actually Ben's justification for putting me in the broom closet.
He said you're only fit to broadcast like a groveling goblin.
Maybe Sarah Jong is onto something here.
Another tweet.
Hashtag cancel white people.
Actually, well, Ben was using that justification to get rid of this show.
I don't know.
Maybe there's really something to her media strategy.
She goes, quote, Yeah, I think that is sick.
She goes on, Is it?
Well, maybe we'll try that later.
Next one, quote, White men are BS. Next one.
I guess that is just statistically true, because whites don't have a lot of kids.
So, alright, maybe one of those is almost defensible.
She just spews all of these.
This is just a handful.
This isn't even all of them.
The really incredible thing, so we've seen this concerted effort for some people to just attack their character, go back, find some joke they made ten years ago and try to get them for it.
This is not that.
This woman is being hired for her opinions.
She's being hired for her writing, for the writing that she's put out publicly.
And in the very recent past, these are the opinions that she writes down that she thinks are worthy of publication and of being put out for the public.
And they're horrific.
I mean, they're really, really wicked.
I dare you to read all of those tweets and just replace white with black.
Just go through and read them.
Now, I know some lefties are going to object to this.
They say, oh, stop it, Michael.
There's no such thing as reverse racism, which is true.
There's no such thing as reverse racism.
There's just racism.
That's all just racism.
Because they break everybody down into these racial categories and sex categories and all of this.
And they say, no, no, no.
Racism is when you are mean to a certain race, you judge a certain race categorically, and you have power and privilege.
So, you know, they always rank them.
They say, okay, Native Americans have this amount of privilege, and Mexicans have this amount of privilege, and black people have this amount of privilege, whatever.
But the irony of this is that Sarah Jong, this woman who was just hired by the New York Times, It checks every privilege box, right?
If you're going to use the logic of the left, she's Asian in America.
And statistically, that puts you at an advantage, right?
because Asians in America categorically do better on an academic standing in universities.
That's actually why there's discrimination against Asians in universities is because they do so well.
This is what this Harvard lawsuit is about now.
Harvard was discriminating in part against white people, but even more so against Asian students because they didn't want to fill up the whole class with Asians, many of whom were qualified to go to Harvard.
How about, where else did she go?
Oh, she went to Harvard Law School.
That's probably a pretty good privilege checkmark.
She's written for The Atlantic.
She's written for Motherboard.
She's written for Washington Post.
She's written for New York Times Magazine.
If you're going to use the logic of the left, the privileged logic, it does not get more privileged than this girl, than this woman.
And she is saying these horrifically racist statements.
So what does the New York Times say?
When this all comes to light, first of all, obviously they knew about these tweets.
They're not that stupid at the New York Times, I don't think.
They've seen what she's been writing for the past few years.
And what do they do?
They hire her anyway and then they defend her.
They sent out a statement about this.
They said, look, she's a victim.
She's really a victim.
This is always what they do.
Whenever you find somebody, some leftist bully, and you call them out for being bullies, they play the victim.
So they said, oh, Sarah Jong was being harassed by people for her gender and her race and her this and for that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so she responded and it wasn't good.
It wasn't nice.
But, you know, she's really the victim here.
No.
No, she's not.
She's a vicious racist.
She said horrible and indefensible things, and I don't want to ruin her life for that.
She can still go get another job, but she should not have a job spouting these awful opinions.
The one job she is now prevented from having is offering her opinions in a mainstream publication.
So this offers a couple directions.
One, the New York Times can fire her if they want to remain a mainstream, not terribly radical organization.
Or by keeping her on staff, by saying, no, Sarah Jung is part of the editorial board.
They are saying, we are radical.
We are radical.
We are racist.
We defend all of these things.
That's who we are now.
That's who we are.
And I think most of us have known that the New York Times has been this way for a long time.
So it's not surprising at all.
But I guess now they're just forced to be honest.
This is a really incredible aspect of the Trump era in politics, in culture, in politics.
People are being more honest.
You know, for years, how long have we said that Democrats are socialists, they're functionally socialists, they're embracing socialism?
And they said, no, we're not.
I remember, I was advising a campaign in 2010.
And there was a rumor going around that our opponent, the incumbent in the race, was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Just a rumor.
Someone sent it in.
We researched this like crazy because that would have killed his whole campaign.
It would have killed it.
That would have been the end of it right there.
He came out strongly against me.
He said, I've never been part of the Democratic Socialists.
No way, no how.
Don't you dare say that.
Now they're being honest.
Look, that candidate did advocate socialist policies.
Now they're being honest about it.
They say, yeah, we're socialist.
You got it.
You got me.
Yeah, yeah.
We at the New York Times, this girl Sarah Jong, yeah, I hate white people.
I don't like white people.
I want them to go extinct.
I don't like them.
At least she's being honest.
She's not harboring her biases and her prejudices and being deceitful about it.
She's putting it out there in the open.
The New York Times is saying, yeah, this is the kind of stuff we are.
These are the people we hire.
These are the opinions that we put out there.
Okay, that's fine.
We've known that for years, that they've been subversive and awful and just a radical left rag.
Now they're being honest about it.
And even Vox.com.
Vox.com is being pretty honest about...
About their socialism.
So there was a writer at Vox.com, Megan Day.
She writes in this piece, quote...
I'm a staff writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and here's the truth.
In the long run, Democratic Socialists want to end capitalism and we want to do that by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality in the United States.
The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone's needs rather than to produce massive profits for a handful of citizens.
That last part is not how it's going to play out, but she's being honest.
And I really appreciate that.
You can knock her for holding just a pernicious and awful ideology, but you can't knock her for being deceitful.
At least she's putting those ideas out there.
That's really what they're saying.
Yeah, we...
No, no, no.
Democratic socialists, we're not just regular old liberals.
We're not even regular old American lefties.
We want to undo capitalism.
We want to fundamentally transform America.
I'll give her credit for that because that is going to make this election...
Honest.
You've got 42 candidates right now running state, local, federal in the United States with the official endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America.
They're being honest.
They're saying these are the ideas, a real battle between markets, between economic freedom, and between socialism.
Rudy Giuliani, the excellent mayor of New York and also now the lawyer for the president, he is saying that this investigation, the Mueller investigation, is all about impeachment.
And therefore, the midterm elections are about impeachment.
Alan Dershowitz came on the show the other day.
He said the Democrats won't be able to impeach Trump because they can't accuse him of a real crime.
There's no evidence of a crime.
But the Democrats who are now running for office are running on an impeach Trump ticket.
They think that impeachment is simply a political matter.
It's not a legal matter.
And they're going to run for that.
And those are the stakes.
I really like it between Megan Day at Vox.com and Rudy Giuliani.
They're saying, look, these are the stakes in this election.
Impeachment and socialism.
There's the political aspect of it.
Do you want to lose Trump?
Do you want to impeach Trump?
Or do you want Trump to keep...
Remaining in office and keep making America great again.
And then the political and the philosophical side is, does America want to go down in the direction of socialism, down the direction of big government telling you what to do, having control over your life, being able to give you anything you want, and therefore being able to take away everything that you have?
Do we want to go down that path, or do we want to go down the path that we're currently on, of deregulation, of economic freedom, of strength abroad and peace through strength?
Do we want that Making America great again.
Going back to essential aspects of our American tradition that have made this country great, that have made this country prosperous, that have made this country charitable.
Do we want to go to that?
Well, if we want to go to that, then we need to vote for Republicans.
Because they're not socialists and they're not going to impeach Trump.
If you don't want that, if you want to become a socialist, there's an easy way to do it in this election.
Vote for the people who are honestly telling you they're socialists.
Vote for the people who are honestly telling you they want to impeach Trump.
You've got a real choice.
Barry Goldwater, at the beginning of the modern conservative movement, Barry Goldwater said, you need a choice, not an echo.
You don't want there to be Two parties that basically resemble one another.
There isn't much of a philosophical or ideological distinction.
What you need is a choice.
If you give Americans a choice, conservatives have a much better chance of winning.
When we nominate squishy people, Mitt Romney comes to mind or John McCain comes to mind, when you nominate squishy Republicans, not very conservative Republicans, they lose because you're not giving people a choice.
It's Democrat or Democrat-like.
But now there's some real honesty here.
Barack Obama ran as a moderate.
He wasn't a moderate guy.
He's a radical guy.
He painted the White House in rainbow lights.
He is a radical guy.
He wants to fundamentally transform America.
But when he would say those things, he would always back off them.
He would always try to explain them away.
These guys today, I think in part because of the raucousness of President Trump, are being honest for the first time in a while.
That's a beautiful thing.
I've got to get to the mailbag pretty soon, but I don't want to lose that aspect.
Because the only people now who are still being dishonest are the mainstream media.
They're the ones who are crying.
They're the Jim Acostas who say, wah, wah, wah.
Stop doing this.
Stop inciting violence.
The violence is against Trump supporters.
It's not Trump supporters against the media.
The violence is the left wing, the violent left wing against Trump supporters, media figures, and elected officials, and activists.
I mean, there are so many examples of this.
Just one that I read before the show is there was an angry Trump critic who allegedly punched a homeowner in Boynton Beach, Florida for having a Trump flag in his front yard.
He punches this guy right in the face and then he drags the homeowner 30 feet while driving away.
That is real violence.
And that's not people saying mean things to Jim Acosta and some people heckling him while he's doing his stupid report for CNN. That is actual violence.
And...
It's also not just the crazies.
Because even if there were some crazy Trump supporters at these rallies who were making threats to Jim Acosta, you might say, well, those are just the crazies and we should deal with them, but they're just the wackos.
They don't represent anything.
But for the left, the people calling for violence are elected officials.
They're Maxine Waters.
Cory Booker saying that if you support Judge Kavanaugh, if you support the most staid constitutional aspects of this administration, you are evil.
You are complicit in evil.
It's all on them.
When the Democrats and when the left accuse you of something...
They are projecting.
This is almost always true.
They're projecting.
They call you a racist.
They're projecting their own racism.
Just read Sarah Jong.
Just read who the New York Times is hiring to be on their editorial board.
When they're yelling at you to tone down the rhetoric, listen to their rhetoric.
When they say, stop being so hostile, notice that their face is red.
They've got veins popping out of their neck.
They've got steam coming out of their ears.
They say, stop being so hostile!
I'm just trying to sip my covfefe over here.
What would make you think that I'm being hostile?
They are projecting all of that.
And when they say, don't get violent, so you're the one who's dragging the guy 30 feet in your car.
You, lefty!
It's not the Trump supporters.
Trump supporters have jobs.
Well, everybody in America has jobs now because we have record-low joblessness.
Things are going very well, and we have an honest election, and we're getting conflicting reports in.
A lot of reports from esteemed analysts are saying that Democrats are poised to take the House.
They very well might take the House.
Historically speaking, they probably should take the House, and we could expect that.
But President Trump's approval rating, amidst all of this, amidst all the constant harping, 92% negative media coverage of Donald Trump, harping on issues nobody cares about, amidst all of this Russia, Mueller, collusion, evil, amidst all of that, President Trump's approval rating is at 50%.
Record highs much higher than Barack Obama's at this time in his presidency.
Five points higher.
That is really big.
That's really big news and I hope it bodes well for the future.
The one thing we need to know is that Republicans have stakes in this election.
It's an honest election.
It will determine the ideological future of the country to some degree for some period and everything is on the table.
Impeachment to socialism to The future of our country.
So you've got to get out there and vote because a lot of times we think, well, our guy's in office.
We don't need to get out there.
You really do.
This is an honest election.
History is going to look back on this election and say, wow, they were really being pretty honest about what they wanted and it would be a real shame if we lose it.
Okay, I've got to get to the mailbag.
If you are on DailyWire.com, thank you very much.
You help keep the lights on.
You keep Covfefe in my cup.
You keep Jim Acosta's crocodile tears pouring out and him crying me a river that I can lap in and bathe in and drink.
So, if you're not there, if you're on Facebook or YouTube, go over to DailyWire.com.
You will pay $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
What do you get?
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.
That's coming up, too.
And then you get a life raft.
That's what you get.
You get a life raft amidst this deluge of Jim Acosta tears.
Don't miss the vintage.
The Jim Acosta vintage is a really beautiful one.
It's the Jim Acosta Will Ferrell vintage of leftist tears.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right, let's get into it.
I always run so late in the mailbag that today, let's try to burn through it.
Let's try to see if we can get some more questions in.
First one, from Evan.
Dear great distributor of covfefe and drinker of leftist tears, can you explain what separation of church and state means for Americans?
I find it hard to explain that this separation doesn't and shouldn't mean that government workers and elected officials cannot be religious or influenced by their religion.
But I am being told by my leftist uncle that people should keep their religion between them and God.
I find this absurd.
What was the original intention of this concept for our country?
Has it gone too far?
Thank you, Evan.
Yes, the The establishment clause, the First Amendment says there won't be an established religion in the United States.
We can refer to this as the separation of church and state, though I think that's a little misleading.
The purpose of that separation is to protect the church from the state.
It is not to protect the state from the church.
As John Adams said, the United States is built for a moral and religious people.
It is unfit for the governance of anybody else.
It is to protect the church from the state.
You saw in other places, in other revolutions, the French Revolution is a good counterexample of this.
The separation of church and state meant the destruction of the church.
They knocked down churches.
They confiscated church property.
They built temples to reason.
They practically insisted on atheism as a matter of course and as a matter of law.
And look what that did.
The people who say, keep your religion to yourself, Look, you can be religious.
I'm all for people being religious.
But don't ever let that affect anything that you do.
This is absurd.
St.
Francis of Assisi said, preach the gospel and if you must, speak.
What is he saying?
It means that if you've got the gospel, if you believe in Jesus, if you're a Christian, this affects every aspect of your behavior.
This affects everything you do, and it should affect everything you do.
It should transform your soul.
St.
Paul wrote, it is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.
Well, St.
Paul, that's fine, but don't let him live publicly.
Don't let us see him living in you.
That's crazy.
This gets to the other canard that people throw out.
They say, look, we can't legislate morality.
Stop legislating morality.
Get your religion out of these politics.
All political issues are essentially religious issues because they come down to first principles and they come down to virtues and they come down to values and they come down to morals.
The question of raising taxes or lowering taxes is a moral question.
The question of healthcare certainly is one and you hear religious language about it all the time.
Human rights.
What do human rights come from?
Human rights come from natural rights.
Natural rights come from the natural law.
Where does the natural law come from?
They come from the natural law giver, the person who created nature, the person who created that natural law.
They all come from a religious background.
You know, St. Andrew Breitbart, the patron saint of modern conservatism.
He said politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of the cult.
It's downstream of what we worship.
It comes through all of that.
I talked about this a little bit yesterday at YAF.
For the left, politics is religion.
That's what they worship.
It's why they use these phrases, erasure.
When you disagree with a conservative, they say, okay, you disagree with me, you don't like my opinion.
When you disagree with a lefty, they say, you're erasing my identity.
This is a real phrase they use on campus and in other circles, and you're going to hear it become more mainstream.
You're erasing my identity.
You're invalidating my identity.
And in fact, you are because those politics are their religious identity.
Why do we need to put caps on certain carbon emissions?
Why do we need certain fuel standards in cars?
To save the planet, that's religion.
Should we tell the left to get their religion out of politics?
No, of course you can't do that because it's all downstream of religion.
And it's a really shallow understanding of religion and philosophical thought and the religiosity that built the West to say, We need to separate church and state.
You can't do it.
This form of government that we have comes out of the very religious convictions that built Western civilization.
So you tell your lefty uncle, not quite right.
From Alex.
Hello from Detroit.
This Tuesday is the primary in Michigan.
I'm torn who to vote for.
I'm a libertarian conservative for the most part, and none of the Republican candidates align as such.
In fact, there is a large gap for the leading Republican candidate who is endorsed by Trump, so I feel like my vote wouldn't matter.
I am, however, tempted to vote on the Democratic ticket because there's a woman running as a very centrist Democrat, against Medicare for all, that's just socialism, and wants to reduce taxes on those in retirement.
The second place candidate on the Democratic ticket is a very progressive individual.
Endorsed by Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will both be in Michigan campaigning for him this Sunday.
Okay, so you've got the Republican candidate, and then you've got the moderate Democrat candidate, and then you've got the socialist candidate.
I'm tempted to vote for the centrist Dem in the primary solely to do my part to ensure the progressive does not win and redistribute pudding to all.
What are your thoughts?
I am all for strategic voting.
I am all for strategic voting.
Some people say this is unprincipled.
That isn't unprincipled at all.
Your vote is not primarily a religious action.
We're just talking about religion and politics.
Your vote is not primarily about you feeling really good about yourself.
Your vote is not primarily about you showing your virtue to the world.
Your vote is an instrument for governance.
That's all it is.
It's a way for you to participate in your government and try to get the best government that you can.
I don't know the details of this race.
From what you've told me, though, if the real threat here is that the super left-wing progressive candidate is going to win, win the primary, win the general election, and the only way to stop her is by voting for that centrist Democrat, Fine, if that's really the case.
I don't know the particulars of this.
But if that's really the case, do that.
Your vote is not a statement of your own virtue.
Your vote is a way to participate in governance and try to get the best governance that we can.
You should use it practically.
You should use it realistically.
This is not a moment to grandstand and tell everybody how wonderful and pure and great you are.
Now, if the Republican can win, vote for the Republican.
Absolutely.
But if this is really about somebody who's going to be a socialist and try to get rid of all of our freedom, and somebody who's going to stem that tide a little bit until we can get a Republican in office, do that.
Do that.
Absolutely.
It's about the freedom.
It's about preserving liberty.
It's about preserving the country.
Do what will work, and don't worry about seeming super-duper pure to all of your other friends.
From Matthew, how much time do we have?
We have a little bit more time.
From Matthew.
Hey Michael, do you like the Latin Mass or the Novus Ordo?
What do you think?
I'll give you one guess.
I want an Aramaic Mass.
I want it to go real traditional.
I really like the Latin Mass.
I don't relatively care for the Novus Ordo or the new liturgy that you've had after 1965 with all of the acoustic guitars and eagle's wings.
It gets really frustrating.
Why is that, though?
Some people ask me about that.
They say, why...
Why do you want the priest speaking in a language that we don't really understand and facing away from you?
It's about the purpose of the Mass.
What is the Mass?
Is the Mass there to entertain you?
Or is the Mass there so that you, led by the priest, can worship God together?
What is it?
What is it about?
Being in communion with God or being entertained?
Obviously, it's about communing with God.
That's why the priest will face at Orientum, so that he's leading you and you're all looking together toward God, rather than him getting up there and doing a little soft shoe and telling jokes for people.
And during the homily, he comes down and he says, hey guys, hey, so listen, here's the thing.
No, here's the thing.
No, hey guys.
One should treat this seriously.
Especially in the Catholic Mass, you've got the real presence of Christ right in front of you.
You've got God right before you on the altar.
Don't behave like you're at late night comedy.
Don't pretend it's open mic night at the comedy cellar or something like that.
It's not.
This is serious.
Father Rutler, who was on the show the other day, he had a great line about this.
I think I'm quoting it almost perfectly, where he said that there are some priests...
Who, like actors in a dying vaudeville show, tell jokes from the altar.
And those priests should limit their repertoire to the jokes that St.
John told the Blessed Mother while her son bled on the cross.
That is my feeling on the traditional liturgy and the Novus Ordo.
What's interesting is that with the newer, more modernizing, more acoustic guitar masses, the pews empty.
People are not going to those.
But as beginning, I guess, really with Pope Benedict...
Beginning with the reintroduction of the popularity of Latin Mass, those pews are filling.
That's where people want to go.
Mostly because those guys have like 15 kids.
You look in the pew, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
They are really filling in.
And that doesn't seem like a coincidence to me.
That seems like there's a real connection between that faith and an exuberance and a pro-life attitude and an embrace of God and a looking toward God.
So I highly recommend.
You can go to ecclesiadei.org.
And they will list some of the Latin masses if there's one in your area.
Even if you're not Catholic, even if you've never been to one, you should check it out.
Going to serious liturgy is a shocking experience.
And it fills you with awe, which is the beginning of wisdom.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
From Jacob.
I'm having trouble with my faith and hoping you can offer some insight.
I was in the army for five and a half years, serving as an infantryman.
My job was to hunt and kill people.
I know that a lot of translations of the Ten Commandments are wrong when it reads thou shalt not kill, when it should be thou shalt not murder.
But in war, the line between murdering and killing is blurred.
Some of the times I shot someone, it was not clear if they were enemies or just civilians at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I often wonder if I murdered one of these people, and if I did, do I truly deserve to live and seriously doubt I deserve to go to heaven even though I try to live my life according to the Bible?
I've attempted suicide twice since I left the Army, and I'm often depressed.
I do go see a counselor when I can get an appointment at the VA and take antidepressants, but I can't seem to shake the guilt that I may have murdered innocent people.
I guess my question is, does God give leeway to soldiers for what we do in war?
Thank you, Jacob.
The answer is yes.
Yes, he does.
I'm very sorry to hear that you went through that.
Thank you for your service.
Thanks for protecting our freedom and our country and I'm sorry that you're having these psychological afflictions afterward and these feelings of guilt.
Yes, God does give leeways to soldiers in times of just war.
Absolutely.
To quote General Patton, I don't need to tell you this, but I believe it was Patton who said, War is a bloody, killing business.
It's a really awful thing.
War is a terrible, evil thing.
And it will never be eradicated so long as human hearts are beating, because that is the fact of life.
That is the worst, most extreme extension of politics, and it is a defining feature of civilization.
There is war.
So in war, you can either choose to fight and protect your country and protect your freedom and protect your family, or you can lay down arms and let the cruel rape the face of the earth.
And fortunately, we don't do that in the United States.
We don't do the latter.
We defend our freedom, and we do it because people like you are willing to do that.
And in times of war, there is collateral damage.
There are blurry situations.
It's unclear sometimes if someone's a bad guy or if someone's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That It is not going to damn you to hell for that.
That does not happen.
And on that point, I should also like to point out, St.
Paul was a murderer.
St.
Paul wasn't participating in a just war.
St.
Paul was a murderer who killed Christians and persecuted them.
And he is the apostle.
He's the great apostle who spread Christianity.
I can't begin to imagine the psychological difficulty that that comes with.
I'm not trying to make light of that.
But you asked me a question so that I can give you an outside perspective, so I can give you a little bit more distance and a little bit of a more objective perspective here.
Of course God gives leeway for that.
It's a wonderful thing to defend your country.
Defending your country involves doing things that hurt and that might be wrong and that make mistakes because war is an evil, evil thing.
But you did the right thing defending your country and you're not going to go to hell for doing the right thing.
I hope that helps.
From Noah.
What's crackalackin', my homie?
I bet this is going to be a lighter question than the last one.
What's crackalackin', my homie Michael99?
I haven't yet read, but was given a copy of Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States, by my more liberal parents.
Obviously, you're not a fan, but I've heard relatively conservative history podcaster Dan Carlin describe it as having been intended to provide a counterbalance to a hyper-patriotic narrative that was found in other textbooks of the time.
He also expressed a belief that it is a college-level textbook in terms of what it expects from its readers, as well as that it should be read in conjunction with the works it was intended to counter and considered with a heavy dose of critical thinking to provide a complete picture of history.
How do you feel about the validity of this position?
If it were used strictly in this fashion, do you believe it should be a useful part of an education about American history?
Thanks, Noah.
No, it's just trash.
It's an absolute trash book.
To use a word that Ben uses to describe me, Mitch Daniels described that book as excruple.
The former governor of Indiana, current president of Purdue.
It is an excruple book.
A truly excruple book.
It is awful.
First of all, I believe it was voted by a number of historians to be the worst history book or the second worst history book of modern times.
It just...
Really awful, but it's awful for a few reasons.
One, it distorts the truth.
It presents a very perverse distortion of the truth of American history.
But also, what it does is it instills in its readers a hatred of their country, and it also ideologically instills in its readers an idea that leaders don't matter, that Great men don't matter.
That men who make the individual decisions that guide history, they don't matter.
All that matters is the great unwashed masses who have been oppressed and put upon.
It is an ideological, polemical work of trash.
If you want to read it, that's why I read plenty of trash.
And it's sort of interesting to read it as an intellectual exercise to realize just how viciously anti-American the left can be.
But it should not be considered part of a history education.
It is not a serious history book.
It's a left-wing ideological polemic, and it's trash, and it shouldn't be on a curriculum.
Because when I've seen it assigned in classes, and I've seen that firsthand, or excerpts of it assigned from classes, it's not there to provide a counterbalance.
It's there for the meat.
They tell you, oh yes, this was to provide a counterbalance, but you're not really exposed to those primary and more serious and classical texts.
You just read this and you say, this is the counterbalance.
No, forget it.
It is trash.
Do we have more time?
We've got time for like one or two more.
From Dale.
Dear Mr.
Knowles, hey man, I'm for abortions.
Yup, I'm an evil left-wing crazy who likes killing the unborn.
Not really, but I wish I could get on the Right to Life train.
Here is my problem in a nutshell.
Without abortions, unwanted children will be born to women who hated the idea of having a child so much that they're willing to remove the fetus from their body.
So my question is...
Who will take care of the unwanted?
The children being born from young girls make that children themselves.
You know, girls 14, 15, or 16 years old who thought that the young, handsome man was going to take her away but only left them pregnant.
What place will they end up at?
Because adoptions will at best take in 10%, reasonable guess.
Who will raise the rest?
By the way, your reasonable guess is you've plucked that out of thin air.
That does not come from anywhere.
Single moms or state-run orphanages.
Who will pay for all care?
And who will love the children?
Dale.
It keeps going on, but this is too long.
No.
So you're beginning with all of the objections that one would have to these babies.
You're beginning like three stages down the line.
Well, but what if no one wants them?
What if they're not raised right?
What if they're not loved?
That would all be terrible.
Would that be worse than murdering them?
No.
Nobody honestly believes that it would be worse than murdering them.
The question you have to ask yourself is, is this a human?
Yes, it's a human.
It's not a duck.
It's not a dog.
It's not a dinosaur.
It's a human.
Is this an individual or is this just a part of the mother?
It's an individual.
It has individual DNA. It grows individually.
It grows separately from the mother.
It has its own organs.
It's not a part of the mother.
And is it alive?
Yes, it's alive.
It's growing.
It's consuming nutrients.
It will be its own person.
And left unimpeded, it will grow to a very ripe old age unless something terrible happens or unless somebody murders it.
That's it.
So do you have the right to kill it?
No.
Should you kill it?
No.
Is it perverse to have a mother kill her child?
Yes.
Mother Teresa said that's the greatest source of evil in the world, and I'm likely to agree with that.
Now, if you say, well, the mother considered abortion, and so therefore she'll be a terrible mother, first of all, that's not necessarily true.
If you're a 14 or 15-year-old girl and you're scared because you're pregnant and the thought crosses your mind, that doesn't mean you can't be a good mother.
People have fears all the time.
People think perverse things all the time.
People have temptations to evil all the time.
That doesn't mean you can't do good.
That's ridiculous.
As for adoption, there are a lot of people trying to adopt babies in the United States.
And to adopt American babies in the United States.
I don't think the options are kill it or leave it on the doorstep of the fire department or something.
That is not the case.
But you're so far down the line.
Ask yourself the question.
Would you kill that person?
Would you kill that little baby?
No.
Should you kill a little baby?
No.
Which of these arguments could you not use to take out whole other populations, elderly populations, to use one of the examples that turned me pro-life, to kill ethnic minority young men, 18 to 24, in urban areas?
Which of these arguments?
Well, they'll create problems for society.
Well, it's hard for the mother.
Look, life involves suffering.
Is it worth killing that kid?
Absolutely not.
Unfortunately, we've got to go there.
We've got even more questions, but sad.
We'll get to it next time.
Okay.
Very good to see everybody.
Make sure we got a second season of Another Kingdom coming up.
And, you know, Another Kingdom is the last time I'm ever going to work in Hollywood.
The only people who hire me anymore are Dennis Prager for his movie, Andrew Klavan for Another Kingdom, and Ted Cruz for his commercials.
So, you know, go out there and make sure you check it out.
Binge.
And we've got an episode, by the way, coming out tomorrow.
Just a little treat.
I know you're also...
Because I was gone in D.C. for Wednesday, we've got another episode tomorrow.
So, listen to Another Kingdom, and then in the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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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