A horrific sex scandal shakes the Catholic Church from Pennsylvania up to the Vatican. We will analyze why it happened, what can be done, and why so many people get it wrong. Then, the dumbest article on the Internet this week, care of Slate. Former Bush administration drug czar John Walters stops by to discuss the opioid epidemic, legalized Haitian oregano, and why libertarians are wrong. Finally, the Mailbag!
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I disappear for two days and the world falls apart.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro graphically and meticulously details decades and decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests against children and teenagers in a grand jury report.
The scandal has had effects all the way up to the College of Cardinals.
This is a once-in-a-century problem, if not more, and there's going to be a lot more pain.
We will analyze why it happened and what can be done about it.
Then, the dumbest article on the internet this week, Care of Slate.
I'm shocked.
Totally shocked it was Slate.
Then, former Bush administration drug czar John Walters stops by to discuss the opioid epidemic, legalized Haitian oregano, and why libertarians are wrong.
Some of my favorite topics.
Finally, The Mailbag.
bag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Okay, so if you can notice the bags under the bags, under the bags under my eyes, it's because we got in last night pretty late from Phoenix.
We were out in Dallas and Phoenix for the Ben Shapiro live shows, and it was so much fun.
It was great.
I got to meet a lot of people in both cities.
People were flying down from Canada.
They were flying in from Boston and just all over the place.
One guy came from Alaska.
So it was really cool.
It was so good to meet everybody.
And one thing that is...
Not surprising, I knew it just from the mailbag and from meeting other people in different cities, is that the Daily Wire listeners and viewers are so much smarter than the average people.
Certainly than your average New York Times reader or NBC viewer or CNN viewer or something like that.
But they're really smarter.
Some of these questions were extraordinarily erudite.
The people that I met are interesting people.
They've got excellent education.
They've got interesting jobs.
They work in interesting industries.
And they're just really smart.
I mean, there were questions about...
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, and it was really great.
I really enjoyed that.
And even, you know, we go to college campuses, and you would think that would be the smartest audience.
These are people who are in the throes of studying, who are being educated, and really it was the people at these events, many of whom I've also met on college campuses or am going to meet this fall, who were clearly they've continued their education after they've got out of leftist indoctrination who were clearly they've continued their education after they've got out Maybe they've begun their education after that.
So it was really nice, great to meet everybody out there, and I hope that we come to a city near you soon because it was a lot of fun.
We've got to get to just the Catholic Church imploding and all the horrible things that have happened since I've been gone for 48 hours.
Before we do that, we could all use a little coffee to get into all of that.
I could use a little covfefe, which I think now is legal.
Or maybe that's illegal.
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And you probably wish that they spent less time making the bathrooms acceptable to all 75,000 genders.
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Okay, now that I've got my coffee, I've got my covfefe, I'll take one last sip.
Let's get into this absolutely horrific news cycle.
And we'll have to talk about the Catholic sex scandal because it is...
So egregiously horrific.
I was sitting backstage last night for the pre-show in Arizona at Ben Shapiro Live, and I was reading the thousand-page grand jury report out of Pennsylvania that details decades and decades and decades of just the most horrific abuse you can imagine or that you can't imagine, which is not a great way to get ready for a show.
It doesn't really put you in the entertaining spirit, but you've really got to You've really got to read this.
I highly recommend you read this.
You can skim it.
It's not like War and Peace or something.
A lot of this is in legal language.
These things are really horrific.
And it's great work from Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
We'll put this in broader context.
Everybody knows the sex scandal of the early 2000s.
This was the first real breaking of the widespread abuse in the Catholic Church.
Which should not be taken to mean that there isn't widespread or widespread abuse in other churches, in other denominations, in other religions, or in non-religious institutions.
We'll get to that later.
But it really broke in the Catholic Church.
And it's really horrific.
I can speak to this a little bit personally.
I always wanted to be an altar boy when I was a kid.
And the sex scandal broke around the time that I could have become an altar boy.
And I wasn't allowed to become an altar boy, and I wasn't allowed to...
I wasn't allowed to know why.
I mean, it's not like your parents explain this to you when you're 8 or 10 years old.
They say you can't because there's this widespread sex abuse problem.
You just said I couldn't do it.
And this was a couple years before I became an atheist for a decade, but it did coincide around the same time.
And I'm not saying that the sex abuse problem caused my atheism.
I certainly had no conscious thought of that.
But, you know, evil begets evil.
Evil spreads and pervades the environment.
So there is coincidental timing there.
It has real effects because it turns people against God.
It turns people against their church and against God.
Whole generations.
I mean, it's so, so wicked.
So that's a little bit of the context here.
Last month or a couple months ago, a major cardinal, Cardinal McCarrick, resigned from the College of Cardinals because of sex abuse allegations.
And this guy, he was a lefty cardinal, but he was a member of the College of Cardinals and a very well-known figure.
And he was kicked out mostly for abusing seminarians.
I think there was one or two allegations that he abused an altar boy who was 16 decades ago.
But from priest friends of mine, I've talked to them, they knew about Cardinal McCarrick, not about abusing a 16-year-old boy, but about pressuring seminarians and other priests and sexually abusing them.
I had a priest pal of mine say that Cardinal McCarrick hit on him when he was a seminarian.
And he didn't know it.
These things are a little ambiguous, so you don't know.
But it was well talked about that he was...
Not that he was abusing boys or teenagers, but that he was pressuring priests and seminarians.
Like the Me Too movement of the church, you know.
There have been rumors about this guy for a while.
Then they came out.
This was the first cardinal to resign from the College of Cardinals since 1927, since a monarchist cardinal resigned for political reasons.
Once in a century sort of thing, a major incident.
And that sets up this past week where we've seen this attorney general report, a thousand child victims, child and teenage victims, over about 60 or 70 years by 301 priests.
And the attorney general says they don't think they got all the priests.
They clearly got a lot of them.
Probably most of them or the vast majority, but a thousand victims.
Now, the photos that are described, the rituals that are described, the incidents that are described are so horrific.
I'll just give you a few of them because they give you a sense of the character of this.
These priests would correspond and collude with one another.
In one case, they took a boy and they had him pose naked as Christ on the cross.
So it's not just that they had him pose naked and they created child pornography.
It isn't just this fleshy thing.
And this is the aspect of this that I think a lot of people are not quite registering.
If it's just some sexual deviant priests, some perverts, who want to satisfy the flesh, I can kind of...
I can at least comprehend that.
I can understand, okay, there's sexual deviants and they use their opportunity to get what they want.
What's...
Even more horrifying is the spiritual component of it, the utter sacrilege, the satanic character of this.
It wasn't enough to take photos of this little boy.
They had to take photos of him mocking Christ on the cross.
There was one case of a priest who abused a boy and then washed his mouth out with holy water.
Didn't use bottled water, didn't use tap water, holy water.
The satanic character of all of this.
One priest used a crucifix, a seven inch long crucifix, to abuse a boy.
Why that character?
The question of why and the answer to that question gives us an unpopular answer, but it gives us the answer to why this is going on.
So why is this going on?
First, I always look for the bright side of things.
It's hard to find a bright side or a silver lining in this, but if there is to be any good news in this, it's this, that the vast majority of these priests are dead.
They're already dead.
That's a very good thing.
They're dead because I think the headlines make us think that there have been a thousand kids abused in the last few years.
This hasn't really happened very much at all in the last few years or even the last decade or two.
These incidents go back to 1947.
So if a priest abused somebody in 1947, chances are they died a long, long time ago.
Many, many of these priests died decades ago.
I was talking about this with a friend of mine.
He said, so they escaped their punishment.
I said, I don't think so.
Something tells me they're getting their punishment right now.
And you can't predict these things, but I bet those priests knew they were getting their punishment too.
So there's a silver lining in that at least, that the vast majority of them are dead or have been defrocked or whatever.
These cases also took place in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of them.
There were some that were more recent.
There were some that were earlier than that.
But the big bulk of these were in those decades, those decades around the sexual revolution, which I suppose should not be surprising.
And it's good that the vast majority of them happened a long time ago.
So what is the issue now?
What is to be done now?
What do we blame for this?
A lot of people want to blame celibacy.
This is the gut-wrenching answer, the simple answer, the intuitive answer, that, well, priests can't have sex, so they're going to become sexual deviants.
This doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
All of the social scientific data show that celibacy, not just in the Catholic Church, but in other religions, doesn't have a link to sex abuse against children or against anybody else.
There's really no correlation.
There have been a number of studies about this.
There was a major five-year study By the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
Another possibility is that it's homosexuality.
I say, well, there are all these gay priests.
From priests that I've spoken to, there are a lot of gay priests.
I talked to one priest, he said, well, if we just simply get rid of all the gay priests, there won't be any priests left.
We won't have any priests in the church.
And the question, I don't think, is about priests who are attracted to members of the same sex.
It's obviously priests who are acting out their sexual desires.
There are plenty of girls and women who are mentioned in that report in Pennsylvania, though the majority were boys and young men.
So, again, that study and other studies shows that there's not really a link between homosexuality and sex abuse against children.
Now, the majority of the victims are boys and teens, teenage boys, but that might suggest that there are a lot of gay priests.
I don't know.
It doesn't seem to me that the answer quite lies there, though the mainstream media want to run with this.
The Washington Post ran a headline, the Catholic Church is enabling the sex abuse crisis by forcing gay priests to stay in the closet.
G.K. Chesterton said the Catholic Church, the way he knew it was the church, is because it gets attacked for opposite reasons.
So on the one hand, they're saying that they force gay priests in the closet.
On the other hand, people are criticizing it and saying they're allowing gay priests to be open and to flourish.
Okay.
Again, I don't think that quite gets to the problem.
By the way, it's also worth pointing out that...
There's this question of, is it just something about Catholics?
Is it just something about the Catholic faith that breeds child abuse or pederasty or whatever?
The data don't really back this up.
One study shows that this problem of child abuse is no more widespread in the Catholic Church than it is among the general male population.
The rates are actually lower.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children backs this up.
They say there's nothing particular about the Catholic faith.
They see the same rates of abuse among other religious groups and other Christian denominations.
Insurance companies that cover many denominations say that the problem is not especially Catholic.
They see it in Protestant denominations.
They see it in evangelical churches and denominations as well.
So I guess we can't pinpoint it on that.
Also, there was a report prepared a number of years ago for the U.S. Department of Education that shows that sex abuse by school teachers is 100 times more prevalent than sex abuse by Catholic priests, which makes perfect sense.
We see those headlines all the time, although, frankly, the media do focus more on it when it's religious figures and especially when it's Catholics.
Okay.
But still, shouldn't we expect more of our priests than we do of the general male population or than we expect of school teachers or something?
Of course.
And this is worse for reasons beyond that.
Why is this so much worse?
We just know that this is so much worse.
Well, one, certainly because it breaks people's relationship to God and it breaks people's relationship to their church forever.
It poisons people against God for generations.
But it's just the evil character of it.
It's that it's so wicked.
The evil seems so gratuitous.
Why does the little boy in the picture have to mock Christ on the cross?
Why do the priests make him do that?
Why do they have to use holy water?
Why do they have to use crucifixes?
Why is this so evil?
Why is it so sacrilegious and satanic and evil?
That's the answer.
It reminds me of Ephesians.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
That's the issue.
Spiritual wickedness.
And this gets to the answer.
Father Gabriele Amorth, who was the Vatican's chief exorcist for a quarter of a century, he wrote a number of years ago that the devil resides in the Vatican.
And we're seeing the consequences of it now.
We are seeing the consequences of it now.
What does it mean for the devil to reside in the Vatican?
It means that evil exists.
Evil has a personality.
You know, there was this couple, this American couple who decided that evil doesn't exist.
The boyfriend wrote on his blog, he said, evil is just make-believe.
We've just invented evil to describe people who have different values than we do and different opinions, but evil, it's not really real.
And they went on this bike tour of the world and they say, we're going to go to Africa and North Africa and the Middle East and nobody's going to be evil because it's all so nice and we're living in Kumbaya land, right?
And on day 369 of their journey, they were going through Tajikistan, and a car passed them.
The car did a U-turn.
The car mowed them down, and then Muslim terrorists got out and stabbed both of them to death.
The boyfriend and the girlfriend stabbed them to death.
Because evil is not make-believe.
Evil is real.
And most importantly, evil has a personality.
Evil has a personality, and that's the devil.
That's the person that we call the devil.
And people scoff at that these days.
Self-styled sophisticates scoff at the devil.
Antonin Scalia did this great interview with New York Magazine, this flippant little girl reporter.
And she said, oh gosh, you believe in the devil, huh?
That's got to be awful scary.
And he said, do you know how out of touch you are?
Not only with the majority of America who believes in the devil, but with the majority of people throughout history, everybody's believed in the devil.
and here's the money quote: "Many more intelligent people than you and I have believed in the devil because the devil's real and the devil resides in the Vatican.
Where else would the devil be?
Where else, if you were the devil where would you stage your attack?
Where else but the Vatican?" Scalia was right about many things.
It reminds me he gave this quote to Leslie Stahl one time on CBS.
Do we have it of Antonin Scalia explaining his point of view?
Anyway, that's my view and it happens to be correct.
My view and it happens to be correct.
That is the view.
And if we deny that, if we continue to deny the existence of evil and the personality of evil, we'll never get to this.
You're going to hear calls for a lot of reform movements.
From the left, you're going to hear calls that...
We need to let priests be gay, openly gay and sexually active.
We need to let priests marry.
We need to let priests whatever, this and that.
You're going to hear from the right that we need to just simply getting rid of gay priests, that's going to solve the problem, or priests who are attracted to members of the same sex, or just getting rid of these bad cardinals is going to solve the problem.
And look, getting rid of bad bishops and cardinals will help the problem, but it won't solve the problem.
It won't get to the heart of the problem, because Everybody, especially in modern society, they want some policy.
What's the policy?
We're going to do one little policy and then all of this evil is going to go away.
That's not how it works.
There's no policy.
There is no policy to fix it.
There can be attorneys general in the states who can follow the lead of Josh Shapiro and that would be very good for their political careers and it would be morally good because it would root out these guys who should hang from a rope.
That would be good.
Or who are already getting their eternal desserts down below.
That would be a good thing to happen.
But there's no policy.
There's no easy switch if we're treating this as a problem of the flesh.
This isn't a problem of the flesh.
It's a problem of spiritual wickedness in high places.
It's a problem of evil, and it's a problem of the person of evil.
It's a problem of the devil.
If we deny that, we're not going to not only fail to fix the problem...
But the evil is going to fester.
We're running late, so I'm going to have to skip the worst, stupidest article on the internet.
But I really did want to address that because it's a problem in my church.
So I figured we should talk about it.
Let's skip that.
Let's get right to another issue going on, which is Americans who want to legalize every drug.
And you hear this from libertarians all the time.
Legalize everything!
And then you hear, I look and I see billboards that say, get Haitian oregano delivered directly to your door.
You know, a little Peruvian parsley coming right to your door.
Click of an app.
And people are celebrating this.
And meanwhile, we have an opioid epidemic wreaking havoc all across the country.
I got to sit down with a good friend of mine and a former teacher of mine and the former drug czar for the Bush administration, John Walters.
He's now the COO at the Hudson Institute.
He's the head of the Hudson Political Studies Program.
And he's just a brilliant guy all around and especially on matters of drug policy.
So here, John Walters dispels all of the stupid slogans that we hear about drug policy.
Without further ado, I sat down with John Walters.
Mr.
Walters, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Michael.
Good to see you.
So your skills and your expertise are more in demand now than ever.
There's the opioid crisis is taking over the whole country.
The statistics are really horrifying.
Just sort of seemingly random statistics.
Pregnant women who are addicted to opioids has quadrupled in the last eight or nine years.
You know, it's spread coast to coast and all throughout the middle of the country.
From your position, having shaped so much of national drug policy, what can the government do?
What can the government not do?
What are the limits of government reach?
And where did everything go so wrong?
Well, we're in territory we've never been before.
The biggest numbers we have are overdose deaths, and those lag in reporting.
The last full number we have is 2016, over 60,000 overdose deaths.
We've never had that kind of carnage in this country before.
The numbers have been growing at almost 20% a year.
And that's just the deaths.
That's not the addiction.
That's not the use.
That's not the overdoses that don't result in death.
We're not even tracking that effectively.
So we are so asleep at the switch on this that it's very difficult to craft a response because you don't know where it is now.
You don't know what the magnitude is.
And there are things we can do, but we have to do the things at the place where they're going to make a difference.
And we're not even measuring that.
So this got very bad after The first wave was added to a second wave, was added to a third wave.
The first wave being, in terms of opioids, pain medication that was diverted beginning Well over 10, 15 years ago, a failure of medical institutions to properly look at the research and to respond quickly.
When I was drug policy director for President George W. Bush, we started to see some of this, and we tried to work with FDA to get some control on the misuse and diversion.
The argument at that time was, Pain was a new human right.
To be free from pain was necessary, and if we didn't do that by giving people powerful medications, we were doing something immoral.
When it became clear, as it should have been earlier, but when it finally became overwhelmingly clear that these were being misused in large numbers, then we began to kind of change the dimensions of some of the threat.
But, you know, in the absence of that, it was simply More and more people getting sicker and sicker.
Added to that was, subsequently, about 2010, a doubling of heroin production in Mexico.
Then it continued to grow.
That added additional deaths and additional addiction.
And then added to that, again, not receding and then added, but added to that was the fentanyl flow into the United States.
Most of it coming either directly from China through Mexico or through parcel post.
Some of it through precursors that were then cooked in Mexico.
We have simply had institutions that failed, failed to protect us at the border, failed to protect us from foreign sources and criminal networks, failed to protect us with health and treatment data that can be used effectively.
We're still not there.
And when I talk to government officials here in the administration in Congress, the first thing I tell them is you have to get better information so you can focus resources.
Otherwise, the harm simply grows.
You focused a lot on the production side of it.
And I wonder how much is supply and how much is demand?
There's, you know, heroin, there's fentanyl coming over from Mexico.
There are these apparently lazy doctors or not very conscientious medical professionals who are letting these drugs be misused or they're being overprescribed or they're being diverted.
But how much of this is a demand issue?
You know, you see suicides skyrocketing in the country.
You do see a sort of cultural trouble.
There's a cultural issue.
It seems like people are anxious and nervous, and there seems to be a pervasive subjectivism or nihilism or just some cultural problem.
How much of this is being caused by the demand of people who just want to apply themselves with more drugs, and how much can we just blame on bad guys and criminals producing more and poisoning our country?
I think that's a central issue, Michael.
And I think we are obviously in the midst of something where people initiate this by beginning to use drugs, obviously.
It starts by use, it continues.
This is a disease phenomenon, but it's a disease phenomenon where the victim has to continue to take the drugs in order to be victimized.
However, Having done this for a long time, and I started out in the Department of Education during the Reagan administration working on drugs with Bill Bennett.
I worked in both Bush 41 and Bush 43.
I don't think there's a living person who successfully argued for more prevention and treatment money than I have in my lifetime at the federal level.
But, having said all that, my view now, looking at the terrible situation we are now in, which, as I said, is historically without precedent, is We have embedded in our culture a tolerance of this that is impossible for us to eradicate.
That is, going back to the baby boomers, my generation, it's now been kind of accepted that while everybody tells you not to do this, your parents or people at home, you go on the internet, you watch popular culture, you hear what people say, and you're supposed to experiment with this.
This is the edgy thing to do.
And we actually, I used to run an anti-drug media campaign when I was in the Bush administration the last time, and we did a lot of surveys of youth, and some of those were for kids to keep track of the messages they got about drugs for a two-week period, write them down every time it happened.
Essentially, the findings of that was, it was 12 to 1, use drugs, everybody uses drugs, here's how to use drugs, here's why it's cool, versus don't.
So, I think the problem we have is, When people say we have to stop demand, I don't think we have a viable way to stop demand.
Moreover, these drugs, these substances can addict anyone.
Our biological nature makes it such that these substances can cause addiction and dependency, not only for humans.
We know that it does it for monkeys and rats and mice.
We addict them for research purposes.
So when these poisons, I think it's much better to think about this as A mass poisoning incident.
When these poisons are in our culture, they make victims.
And they're aggressively marketed by criminal organizations that are network phenomenon like terrorist networks.
They have to be torn down.
And in fact, if you look back at The meth epidemic here when we had small toxic labs, people cooking it themselves.
It wasn't until we stopped those labs.
It wasn't until we reduced the flow of cocaine out of Colombia when President Uribe was president that we reduced by 60% cocaine use.
It wasn't until we stopped the heroin coming out of Colombia and reduced the heroin coming out of Mexico that we reduced heroin use.
It wasn't until now we're controlling some of the prescription diversion that we reduce the prescription victimization, which is still too high.
My argument is, if you look back historically, we've only been able to stop this when we stop the poison.
And we should encourage prevention.
We obviously want to treat people who are victims.
But this is like, if you say just prevention and treatment, it's like trying to stop terrorist attacks by building shock trauma wounds.
You're not going to stop them.
We need to treat people, but we need to stop the poisoning first.
That's a great point, and it injects some reality into the drug discussion and the drug debate.
So often it seems to be had at this utterly abstract, ethereal level.
But we're talking about real poisons on the ground coming in through real borders and real ports of entry and real places and from real criminal gangs.
Now, you're a very busy guy.
You've always kept busy.
And one of the many things that you do is run the Hudson Institute Political Studies Program.
And when I was a student of yours in that program, I remember a lot of young people, libertarian types and conservatives, They would frequently tell you everything about drug policy.
They probably hadn't studied it ever.
They probably didn't have a lot of experience.
They'd say, no, don't worry.
I know this very well.
We should legalize everything.
Freedom, freedom, freedom, baby.
One, why is this view so widely spread on the right?
And two, why is it wrong?
Well, it's interesting.
I was talking to a conservative columnist.
I won't name that person because they're known, but at a Fourth of July event.
And in the course of it, they mentioned to me that, well, of course, I believe we should legalize drugs.
And I said, really?
At 65,000 deaths a year and climbing, you think that we need more of this?
I said, look, yeah.
Young people, because they live in a culture where drugs are pervasive and they see a lot about it, they believe they've seen what they need to make a judgment.
I've smoked pot one time, so now I know about drug policy.
I know people that use it.
President Obama used it, used cocaine, said it was a bad habit.
He was President of the United States.
What's the problem?
Well, of course, these are phenomenon where It doesn't harm you every time you use it, but it harms a significant number of people when they use it on a repeated basis or when they use it in the normal course of what use looks like in the United States today.
It can start frequently with marijuana and it does for most people.
If the bottom of the funnel is overdose death and the middle of the funnel is addiction, The top of the funnel is experimentation, and most of that starts with marijuana.
And the danger that we're facing now is we already have a worse death rate than we've ever had in this country, and we're aggressively expanding the top of the funnel by making marijuana ubiquitous in more and more places at the time when it's being marketed with more potent variety.
So I think the precise part of your question is, The libertarian position presumes that a rational person should take responsibility for the decisions that they make.
The problem with these substances is they impair reason, they impair choice, they make people subject to a chemical dependency that they lose control of their lives.
The reality of this, I think if you really want to look at the reality, is look what people do to themselves.
Their lives collapse down into using drugs, seeking drugs, they'll do anything.
They'll degrade themselves.
They'll steal from their own family.
They'll become involved in criminal activity for the purposes of seeking these drugs.
The power of these drugs over individuals varies.
It varies over time.
It varies by genetic factors.
But everybody could be victim, and those that are, are not rational, independent actors.
That's my argument with my libertarian friends.
I don't want a nanny state.
I've worked a lot in Republican agencies and government administrations to improve education, improve the programs of disadvantage, by getting some of the bureaucratic bloat and the enemies of freedom away from the people who are vulnerable.
Substance abuse, what our libertarian friends don't seem to understand is, substance abuse takes away the power of freedom.
It's the opposite of liberty.
It's the opposite of independent self-government.
That's such a good point.
It creates slavery.
And so when the 18-year-old kid says, I've smoked pot one time, I know about national drug policy, they're missing all of the effects of drugs on the person.
Regular use, habitual use, it does degrade liberty.
You're not in control of yourself.
Not only are you not in control of your faculties, you're not in control of judgment, you really lose this.
Even Jim Morrison, no anti-drug guy himself, lead singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison did an anti-drug PSA one time, and he said, well, when I'm on this drug, I can't think at all.
If Jim Morrison can gather that, maybe other people should too.
Before I let you go, I look around.
I'm in Los Angeles, La La Land.
I see giant billboards, Look,
I think you just look at the science here.
It's just a biological fact that human beings, if they use these substances enough times, become dependent.
It's also true they go from one substance to another substance because they get used to being dependent.
You ask about the so-called deaths of despair.
I think a lot of that is actual drug use.
If you drain the drugs out, I'm not saying nobody will have despair.
I'm not saying suicide will drop entirely.
But the parallel in the places where this is happening are the places that have been infected with drug use, including marijuana use.
All the science about marijuana over the last 15 to 20 years, not when I was young, when people were touting this as, hey, it's not reefer madness.
It's really harmful.
It's natural.
It's It's a way of expanding your consciousness.
It's as good as alcohol and better.
All the science has shown greater dependency, causing and triggering serious mental illness, depression, thoughts of suicide, psychosis.
Regular and heavy use in young adulthood can cause a permanent IQ loss of seven points.
Now, for smart people that went to Yale and Harvard, Seven probably doesn't make much difference.
Maybe you could have been an honor student at a state college instead of Harvard or Yale.
Although I don't know, Mr.
Walters, I don't know.
If you've looked around the Yale campus these days, I don't know.
It's a little dicey.
It's a little shaky.
Well, for an average IQ, that's the difference between being able to get a reasonably nice job or maybe a white collar job, and being somebody who has to mow lawns for the rest of their life.
So, the consequences for this, we're not even seeing, we're not even measuring what's going on here, but all the science, science that's been done, research, longitudinal studies with twins to control for genetic differences, have shown in other countries as well as the United States, have shown the dangers here are even greater as we are expanding marijuana, And we're expanding cannabis use.
We're allowing it in concentrations never seen before, not three, four or five, but 20%, 30% more addictive, more dangerous.
So the problem that we have is how many people are going to become victims before we see what we've done and begin to undo it?
I think we need to be able to get more information to people right now about what's happening for this.
But I am fearful about what's happening in California and other places because I've spent more time in treatment centers than most people talking to the victims here.
And I can tell you that the law, I can I have a sense of the lives that are being put at risk, the families, the futures that are being compromised here, and the people who go on to become casualties and statistics, and the devastating effect of that.
When you go in to places in Ohio or Pennsylvania and other places where this has progressed, where opioid deaths are overwhelming, they don't really want to talk about inequality of income.
They don't really want to talk about foreign policy.
They don't really want to talk about what happens to deregulation in the United States or what happens to self-freedom.
They want to talk about how do we stop losing our neighbors and our family members.
So I think that's going to make this come back.
And the fact is, many of those are battleground states.
And politicians, and I think both President Trump and I think Secretary Clinton, were educated by this by having to go into those states.
But the problem is, we have not come to grips with the fact that we need to stop this substance from coming in.
And I will say one last thing.
The thing that shows you we can and should do something, and this is a failure of institution, is most drugs killing Americans today are coming from outside the United States.
Most of those pass across the southwest border, and most of those pass within six feet of a uniform federal agent.
That's a monumental failure of intelligence and operations.
And we can do a much better job.
I'm not saying we go to zero.
But this isn't a needle in the haystack.
This is a pickup truck in a haystack.
That is such a good point.
And of course, it's an important point from an electoral perspective as well.
It's great to talk about reforming entitlements.
It's great to talk about all of these things that we really care about.
But people are seeing people die.
I know multiple people who have been caught up in the opioid crisis and unfortunately died.
And I'm from the coasts, you know, and I'm not from the places that are hardest hit by this crisis.
Well, it's really important.
It's so good to get some actual knowledge on this topic because people are just talking in nonsense and ignorance.
So it's so good to get some expertise.
And we're going to have to bring you back because another question Thank you, Michael.
I spend half my time on the American dream and half on the American nightmare.
That's a very good point.
Mr.
Walters, good to see you, and I will talk to you soon.
Thank you.
All right, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Obviously, we're running very late.
I've got like, I don't know, seven or eight minutes left.
I want to get through seven or eight questions, so we're going to fly through them.
You've got to go to dailywire.com if you want to watch that.
By the way, our next episode of The Conversation is almost here.
Tuesday, August 24th.
August 21st, 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific.
I'll answer all of your questions with our host, Elisha Krause.
The live Q&A will be available on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask me questions at dailywire.com.
Go there right now.
Look, you'll get me, you get the Andrew Klavan Show, you get the Ben Shapiro Show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag, which we're about to get to.
None of that matters.
What really matters is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Look, you know, this is the only...
We were just talking with the former drug czar of the Bush administration.
This is the only FDA-approved vessel for leftist tears.
They are overflowing these days.
Make sure you go.
Dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
Hold on to your seats, baby.
We are about to fly.
I want everyone in the room, hold on.
We're about to fly.
If you're driving, pull over.
This is going to be a lot.
Your heart is going to flutter.
First question from Bridget.
Michael, I've been chatting with an atheist online about this nation being founded on Christian principles.
One of the things he brought up is the Treaty of Tripoli.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
May 26, 1797, Article 11, which states, He argues this is proof positive that we're not a Christian nation or
a nation founded on Christian principles.
I believe this is more proof that the founders did not want to ensconce a state religion but isn't evidence at all against our nation being founded on Christian principles.
Thoughts?
Yeah, it's not proof of either of those.
It's proof that we wanted Muslims to stop stealing and enslaving our sailors.
That's what it's proof of.
If this were true, if this were really the founding philosophy of the United States, you wouldn't find it in the Treaty of Tripoli, which was to make sure that Muslim pirates off the Barbary coast wouldn't keep just stealing our goods and our people and our ships.
You'd find it in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution or in the Federalist Papers.
You'd find it somewhere there.
You don't find it there.
You find it in this treaty, this obscure article of this obscure treaty that was just designed so that this other religion would stop capturing our people.
Obviously, this nation is founded on Christianity.
All of the people who founded it were Christians.
They came from a Christian culture.
Some of them were a little deistic, but even deism, even enlightenment deism comes out of Christianity.
The pilgrims at Plymouth were Christian religious zealots.
John Adams said our country was founded for a moral, religious people.
It's wholly unfit for anybody else.
He's not talking about Muslims.
He's not talking about Hindus.
He's not talking about Buddhists.
He's talking about the religion that they come out of.
Christianity.
He's talking about a shining city on a hill.
The shining city on a hill that we talk about when we refer to America.
The speech is not called a shining city on a hill.
It's called a model of Christian charity.
Anybody who is citing Article 11 of a treaty to save our ships and our sailors from Muslim pirates To prove that this country isn't Christian is being disingenuous.
They're obviously being disingenuous.
Look at all of American history.
Next question.
Nicholas, dear best-selling author Michael, my friend is in the process of converting some high school girl to Christianity.
Just like a random high school girl?
Just like trolling high schools, cruising high schools to win souls?
I guess that's...
Not terrible.
Might get a little weird, but not terrible.
They are close to accepting Christianity, but they're still having some doubts about the existence of God because they believe that science conflicts with the existence of God.
How would you go about explaining that science doesn't disprove the existence of God?
Thanks, Nick.
It doesn't.
I don't know.
How are you going to prove that there isn't a giant UFO outside waiting to zap you when you walk out?
There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
So the burden of proof is on the people who say that.
Just ask them questions.
This is the way to deal with people who say stupid slogans such as that but can't really back any of that up.
Okay, you say that science disproves God.
How so?
And then they'll say some nonsense and then you disprove that.
It doesn't.
It simply doesn't.
If anything, natural science speaks to the creator.
It speaks to the creator of nature.
So tell them, you've got to give me something, guys.
I can't prove to you that there isn't an elephant waiting out to crush me when I walk out the door.
You can't disprove all the stupid ideas in the world.
It's the burden of proof is on them.
from Benjamin.
Hello, Michael.
I was wondering what your take is as a religious person on ghosts walking the earth.
I used to dismiss the idea of spirits and ghostly events due to silly TV shows and whatnot.
I've been rethinking my position, however, after hearing stories from a close friend whom I don't believe to be crazy about his old house.
Also, as I become more religious and believe in the afterlife, I'm questioning if there is an afterlife, if it can somehow collide with our life here.
What are your thoughts on ghosts and does believing in ghosts contradict Christianity or Catholicism?
Thanks, Benjamin.
Well, to quote Mr.
Shakespeare, there are more things between heaven and earth that are dreamt of in our philosophy.
That's certainly true.
There's a supernatural world, a metaphysical world, a world beyond just the flesh.
Absolutely true.
I don't think that ghosts are around here haunting me.
But demons are.
There are demons.
There are devils prowling the earth trying to ruin souls.
And this is a traditional explanation for what people would think are ghosts or something like that.
Is that there's evil.
There's spiritual evil in the world that seeks to lie to you.
The devil is a liar and a murderer from the very beginning.
And we're seeing that very clearly these days.
And so that's what I would suspect.
The devil proscribes going to seances or doing astrology or trying to talk to spirits, not because it's all bunk, but because it's evil.
It's evil and compromises your free will and you're talking to some bad hombres to quote President Trump.
I wouldn't try talking to ghosts or anything like that.
Talk to God and fear not the demons of this world.
From William.
Michael, my girlfriend goes to Bentley in Boston and is currently helping out there with orientation.
For her introduction to new freshmen, she's required to say, Hi, my name is Peyton.
My pronouns are she, her, and hers.
Well, you're very lucky that those are her pronouns.
I'm pleased to hear that for you.
Pronouns are also on the name tag.
She isn't comfortable saying this because she believes there are only two genders.
What would your advice be to her?
I would never say that.
I would just cross it out on my name tag and not say it.
But look, I'm pretty honest with my views.
She might get some lower grades because she does that, but I wouldn't do that at all.
And if they really make an issue out of it, I'd transfer to a more sane school.
That's insane.
It's an assault not only on reason, but on the English language.
And if the English language is being battered at your university...
Without any safe haven, perhaps you should leave that university.
I would be very honest.
But again, there's a cost to that, especially these days in this culture.
So if she doesn't want to deal with that cost, then she's got to tow the party line.
But I would sleep very soundly at night if I said no to that and didn't pretend that there are 75 genders.
From Aaron.
How many more?
I'll try to get through a couple more.
From Aaron.
Dang, Knowles, you viciously excoriated Peter Strzok on your show this week.
While I fully approve, I don't think I've ever seen you hulk out like this.
Given the rampant hypocrisy and negative press, covfefe from the left, why was Strzok, of all people, the one to finally push you over the edge?
When can we expect a visit from Hulk Michael?
Right now, baby, that's when you can.
Because Strzok is such a little twerp.
Such a little wimpy, disgusting twerp.
That's why.
It's so egregious.
Look, he cheated on his wife.
A lot of people cheat on their wives.
It's not good, but that wouldn't be enough to make me rip my shirt off and turn green.
What drives me crazy is that he used a bureaucratic position of the public trust, he abused it, to threaten the most obvious example of my freedom.
The biggest, most public, most widespread national example of my political freedom is that I get to vote in major elections, like the presidential election, for instance.
He threatened and boasted about subverting that from his weaselly little...
Power as a bureaucrat in the administrative state.
And then he put his hand out, after taking taxpayer money his whole life, he put his hand out to get on the dole again.
I don't know, he's probably raised millions of dollars at this point.
He kept upping it.
The left is giving him a trust fund to own the cons.
It's so egregious.
But the thing that really got me about him is that his weaseliness both abused the public trust and threatens my freedom.
And I don't like that.
From Matt, Michael, where do you draw the line between being willing to change your mind based on new facts versus standing firm in your beliefs?
How can we avoid confirmation bias, skewing the way we interpret new information, and is that even a bad thing?
I'm always open to new information.
That's how I've arrived at most of my views, or views that I didn't hold before, and then someone convinced me.
There is no...
There's no idea.
I won't think about this.
I'm open to entertain any book, any idea, any argument.
And that's how I've arrived at my views.
We should be perfectly willing to do that.
And you'll become smarter and you'll become firmer in your views to do that.
I'm very open.
I come...
Two questions with a point of view, with a vision of the world as I see it.
So I'm honest with myself about that because then I'll do my best to disprove, to argue against my own point of view.
If those arguments succeed, then I'll change my point of view.
Otherwise, I'll keep going and keep being right.
Another question from Aaron.
Is that the same Aaron?
Maybe.
Dear Dr.
Kofefe, I usually listen to your show on audio only, but today I happen to watch the video, and I notice that you wear your watch on your right hand.
Good God, man, are you left-handed?
I am spawn of the devil, absolutely sinister, and I die two years earlier on average.
I'm hoping that's just because of mechanical accidents and not because of something in our handedness, but yeah, it's really rough.
I also, the main reason I've been doing it these days, because I've worn my watch on my left before, is it seems too blingy with my wedding ring.
It seems like really blingy to have all that stuff on one hand, so I'm balancing it out.
I need a lot of balance.
We'll do one more than I've got to get at here.
Stephen, Michael, do you think Father Rutler would be a good guest for Ben Shapiro's Sunday night interview?
Yes, Father Rutler is a national treasure.
He is one of the greatest guys in the country and has more insight than virtually anybody I've talked to.
He definitely should be on there.
And I've got to bring him back on my show more as well.
Okay, that's our show.
I'm exhausted.
This is what happens when you don't do any work for two days.
Then you've got to do a lot of work.
Great to be back, everybody.
I'll see you on Monday.
In the meantime, by the way, you've got to start binging the first season of Another Kingdom because we're recording season two, and it is real cool.
So, in the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you on Monday.
The Michael Knowles Show is 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.
