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Dec. 13, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:18
Ep. 268 - How The Left Gets Everything Backwards

New evidence emerges that disgraced FBI employees used ugly if not illegal tactics to entrap Michael Flynn, while Democrats admit they want to censor speech and a mother images the lullaby her child sang to her before she aborted him. Then, the Mailbag! Date: 12-13-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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New evidence emerges that disgraced FBI employees used ugly, if not illegal, tactics to entrap former Trump NSA Michael Flynn, while Democrats admit they want to censure speech, and a mother imagines the lullaby that her child sang to her right before she aborted him, all of which highlights the defining feature of modern leftism.
It gets everything exactly backwards.
We will analyze the inverted, perverted politics of the left, then the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
You know those days when every single news story lines up to illustrate one central fact about politics?
Today is one of those days.
We're talking about the central fact of the left getting everything exactly backwards.
And actually, it was Dennis Prager who gave me this idea last night when we were at the PragerU Christmas party.
We will get to all of that But first...
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So much to get to today.
I was at the PragerU Christmas party last night and Dennis Prager gets up there and he made a very astute observation.
He was talking about his biblical commentary and he said one thing he notices is that God brings things from disorder, from chaos into order.
You see this in the creation.
You see this in the Genesis story.
And what the left does is it takes order and creates chaos out of order.
It's constantly breeding chaos.
It's constantly breeding confusion.
One good example here is that God makes man male and female.
He makes them.
And what the left does is confuses and says there's no such thing as a man.
There's no such thing as a woman.
Men are women.
Women are men.
He's exactly right.
I thought it was a great point.
It occurs to me this goes further than that.
I mean, that's totally right, but the logical conclusion of that idea is that the hallmark of leftism is that it gets everything precisely backwards.
It gets it all exactly backwards.
Nowhere is this more evident than the creepiest, most disturbing news story that I have said.
I don't know how long.
This is certainly the creepiest news story I've seen in months, maybe years.
It is a woman who is singing the lullaby that she imagines that her baby was singing to her before she aborted it, before she killed the baby.
You have to see it to believe it.
In my faith, there is only a thin veil or door that separates the living from the other side.
And so, about two weeks before...
When my abortion was scheduled, I started having visions and talking to the spirit of the child that I believe had come to me.
And I remember in the clinic when I was waiting for the operation or the procedure, A song came to me in my head and out of nowhere and it was a pretty little lullaby that came to me and I just want to sing it to you and I knew it was from the spirit of that child saying it's okay.
So you may recognize the song and it goes Who knows how long I've loved you You know I love you still I will wait a lonely night long.
If you want me to, I will.
Love you forever and forever.
Love you with all my heart.
Love you whenever we're together.
Love you when we're apart.
And I truly felt that it was a blessing from the Spirit to make the decision that I need to make.
It was a blessing from the spirit of the baby that she was about to kill to make the decision to kill the baby.
Just listen to all this.
We're told by the left that abortion, it's a simple surgical procedure.
Oh, it's no different than getting your appendix taken out.
It's all physical.
It's not a religious issue.
It's not a spiritual issue.
This woman sure thinks it is.
Listen to it.
I mean, the only way to describe it is as demonic.
I know that these days in our very enlightened, sophisticated society, we mock all of the smartest people throughout all of human history who have believed in demons and the personification of evil.
But this must be demonic.
This woman says, before I got my abortion, I started having visions.
And in my religious view, there's not much difference between the living and the dead.
They're all sort of the same.
In these visions, the spirit of the baby was singing to me about how wonderful it was that I was going to kill it.
Truly disturbing stuff and the sort of stuff that you read about in narratives of demons, that you would read about in the personification of evil.
So whenever someone tells you abortion, it's just a physical, it's just a little surgery.
It's no big deal.
That tells that lie.
That shows that lie to be what it is.
There is a physical act, but it is a metaphysical and spiritual act as well.
And what's so striking about it is how it gets the natural order of the world totally reversed.
Obviously, we know men are not women and women are not men.
The left tells us men are women and women are men.
The left tells us that good is evil and that evil is good.
The left tells us that strength is weakness and weakness is strength.
And manly virtue is toxic and weak and awful.
It tells us that taking somebody else's money is generous and letting everybody keep their own money is greedy.
And here we see the peak of that, which is in the natural order, parents sing lullabies to their babies to comfort them and to lull them to sleep to wake up the next morning.
And in this perversion and total inversion of that, you have an imagined fantasy, a vision of the baby singing a lullaby to the mother singing To encourage the mother to put that baby to sleep forever so it won't wake up.
An exact inversion of the natural order.
I think this is the hallmark.
I think this is how you know when politics has gone totally wrong.
When politics and things beyond politics, things in the philosophical and religious and spiritual realm, have gone wrong.
As you look at it, you see it's a mirror image of reality.
It's an exact mirror image.
You hear the left, RFK would say this all the time.
He would say approvingly that George Bernard Shaw said, some people see things that are and ask why.
I dream things that never were and ask why not.
This was the democratic ideal, the left-wing ideal.
What he doesn't say is that when the playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote those words, he put them in the mouth of the serpent, tempting Eve.
Those are the words of the devil to say, ignore what is.
Ignore reality as it is.
Imagine fantasies.
Have a vision of your baby singing you a lullaby to encourage you to kill it.
That is a fantasy.
That's a fantasy that comes from evil, and it comes from the personification of evil.
And we can pretend that that doesn't exist.
We can try to ignore the moral order.
But when you see, I know that clip was pretty long, but when you see it in the full length, when you hear that haunting voice, I mean, this is a haunted woman.
This is a woman who is certainly not in her right mind.
And she shows us that in her speech and in her song.
How scary that is.
How much it makes us want to run away from the inversion of the natural order.
It's not always that...
Spiritually clear.
There are also comedic versions.
There are also light versions of the left inverting the natural order.
So Sports Illustrated every year gives away its Inspiration of the Year award.
And this year it's giving it to Rachel Denhollander.
She is the first woman to publicly accuse the U.S. gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of sexually abusing her.
Larry Nassar abused...
Scores of other women.
And so she's winning the award.
Who is Sports Illustrated picking to give this award out to Rachel Denhollander?
I'll let you see for yourself.
Good evening.
I am honored to speak with you from afar about a woman I admire so much.
A woman who suffered abuse as a vulnerable teenage athlete who found the courage to talk publicly to stop the abuse of others.
Her courage inspired other survivors to end their silence.
And we all know the result.
Rachel Denhollander, I am in awe of you and I will always be inspired by you.
In stepping forward, you took a huge risk and you galvanized future generations to come forward, even when the odds are seemingly stacked against them.
The lasting lesson is that we all have the power to create real change and we cannot allow ourselves to be defined by the acts of others.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome this year's Sports Illustrated Inspiration of the Year, Rachel Denhollander.
I'm a totally normal person who doesn't have any designs on getting famous or making money.
I'm just a normal, regular person without a crazy, creepy voice who doesn't constantly seek the cameras in the spotlight.
What a terrifying video.
Also because the video, it's terrifying at least in a comedic way.
way.
It's not terrifying in the way of that previous video of the woman singing that perverse lullaby.
But this is terrifying in a way that mocks the obliviousness of this woman.
So if you couldn't see it, the camera keeps cutting in and out in these really weird cuts.
And the reason it has these weird cuts is probably she needed to do multiple takes of this.
But I hope that this video, I hope the good thing that comes out of Sports Illustrated picking Brett Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, to present this award, I hope that this dispels the ridiculous fiction that this is just a woman who wants to tell her story.
And she doesn't want fame.
She doesn't want money.
She doesn't want adulation.
It was so hard for her to tell her story.
B.S. Total B.S. I don't know if she's a lunatic or a liar, but she's one of those two things.
We know that she contradicted her story countless times.
First, there were four people in the room.
Then there were two people in the room.
Everybody who she named as being there, including her lifelong friend, this female friend of hers, said that it didn't happen.
She never met Brett Kavanaugh.
It didn't happen in her life.
Ford kept changing her story to make it more convenient.
And the line that everybody said to defend her was, what does Christine Ford have to gain from this?
What on earth could she gain?
I don't know.
A lot of fame.
She's got a ton of celebrity.
She is virtually a celebrity.
It's not that she did anything to deserve it other than going and testifying against a good man.
She's also gained a number of book deal offers.
It's unclear who she's going to go with, but a lot of offers.
That can be very lucrative.
And she gained $850,000 in GoFundMe campaigns.
So, I don't know.
She gained nearly a million bucks.
She got a bunch of fame, and she's now got her own little career out of this.
And the adulation of the crowds.
That's what she's got.
So, everybody now...
What an inspiration Christine Blasey Ford is.
Christine Ford, a fraud.
Either a fraud, or a liar, or a lunatic, or some combination of the three.
Demonstrably so.
Contradicted her lines.
Contradicted by the people who, she said, could corroborate it.
She is now given the spotlight over this girl, Rachel Denhollander, who actually is an inspiration.
Who actually did go out and blow the whistle on this guy, Larry Nassar, and get him thrown in the clink.
She is the inspiration, but the left completely flips it, and now we've got this fraud who makes light of people who have actually suffered sexual abuse because she made up some ridiculous story from 35 or 36 or 37 years ago.
We don't know because she doesn't know the date.
That either happened here or there or somewhere, and it might have involved this guy or that guy or who knows, where a guy allegedly pushed her onto a bed.
That totally makes light.
It totally It takes away and detracts from people who have actually suffered sexual abuse like the gymnast at the hand of Larry Nassar.
It only gets worse from there.
But let's take a little reprieve.
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When they're wrong, everything in your home looks cheap and like you don't know how to decorate.
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Um...
You have two ends of the same spectrum.
You've got this insane case of the abortion lullaby.
You've got the frivolous and ridiculous case of Christine Ford.
Now we get into the nuts and bolts of politics and how things go exactly wrong.
We now have pretty decent...
Evidence that the FBI entrapped Michael Flynn.
Michael Flynn, the national security advisor for Donald Trump.
The FBI got him to make a misstatement to them about his interactions with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., who he was perfectly entitled to talk to.
It was part of his job to talk to this guy.
They got him to make a false statement.
They forced him into a plea deal, into saying that he did it, pleading guilty.
And now it's looking like everything that led up to that was a big, ugly campaign.
Andy McCabe, the disgraced FBI agent.
This is all under James Comey, by the way.
James Comey was still the FBI director.
James Comey, who says that he has ethical leadership.
That's in his Twitter bio, ethical leadership.
And just listen to how unethical all of this was.
Andy McCabe, disgraced FBI agent, booted out of the agency in disgrace.
He calls up Michael Flynn, National Security Advisor.
He says, hey, I got some FBI agents want to talk to you.
Look, you really shouldn't bring that White House counsel around.
If you bring a lawyer around, it's just going to mess everything up.
They're going to sit down with you.
It's no big deal.
So Flynn, stupidly, says that he's willing to do this.
Who does he send over?
He sends over Peter Strzok, that crooked FBI agent, the lover boy who was texting how he was going to...
Undo the presidential election, prevent Trump from becoming president, texting that to his adulterous lover, Lisa Page.
So Peter Strzok goes over there and he entraps Michael Flynn in lies.
He had already seen Michael Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador.
How had he seen them?
Because the Obama administration unmasked those conversations.
The Obama administration spying on the Trump campaign, spying on private Americans.
Peter Strzok had already seen that and he gets Michael Flynn to make some misstatements to the FBI. Worth remembering, nothing wrong at all with Michael Flynn talking to this ambassador.
And so what Michael Flynn says is he made those misstatements because he misremembered what had been discussed.
Maybe Flynn's lying.
Maybe that's true.
I don't know.
I could certainly misstate plenty of conversations that I've had on the phone.
The reason we know this is a big deal, the reason we know that this corruption and these ugly tactics are finally coming to light...
You've got to remember, Peter Strzok dismissed from the Russia investigation in disgrace.
Andy McCabe dismissed from the FBI in disgrace.
At the time that Flynn is giving this conversation with the FBI agents...
It's not even public that there is a Russia investigation to begin with.
Judge Emmett Sullivan, who's apparently a pretty straight shooter, is now demanding the documents that were related to Michael Flynn's interview.
He's demanding it to see if the FBI used ugly, dirty, possibly illegal tactics to entrap this guy in making a false statement.
We'll see.
What they did to Michael Flynn was awful.
Why did he plead guilty?
Well, he doesn't have a lot of money.
Michael Flynn spent almost all of his career in the public sector serving our country as a three-star general.
They were threatening to go after his son.
They were threatening to embroil him in legal battles, would have bankrupted him.
So he pleads guilty to this.
He probably shouldn't have, but I hope that President Trump pardons him.
I hope he gets a full pardon.
It was disgusting how the investigation began.
The people who did it were corrupt to their core, all the way up to James Comey, and he should be pardoned for it.
This is the bad news for President Trump today.
The good news, though...
We're talking about the wall.
We've been encouraging President Trump to shut down the government and get the money to build the wall.
So President Trump just tweeted out.
He said, quote, I often stated one way or the other Mexico is going to pay for the wall.
This has never changed.
Our new deal with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, is so much better than the old very costly and anti-USA NAFTA deal that just by the money we save, Mexico is paying for the wall.
Okay.
Okay.
That's fine.
Maybe the U.S. is going to get a lot more money because of this.
Maybe tax receipts to the government will increase.
Maybe.
Whatever.
Okay.
That's fine.
He's trying to twist it around.
Again, nobody cares if Mexico actually pays for the wall.
The wall is not that expensive.
We just want it to be built.
We have a record high number of illegal aliens crossing over.
3,000 a day right now.
We just want the damn wall to be built.
And hopefully President Trump will do that before Nancy Pelosi decides.
It takes over leadership of the House of Representatives.
But what I actually want to point to in this is the name of the trade deal.
You all know NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The new one is called the USMCA, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Now, I was reading some commentary on this, and I noticed left-wingers hate the new name.
Left-Winger, writing on Mediaite, said that he hates USMCA. We should just call it New NAFTA. New NAFTA is so much better.
But listen, there's actually a very subtle but important distinction here.
The USMCA is the better name because it acknowledges what the trade agreement actually is.
The trade agreement is an agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
Three distinct nations, three sovereign nations, who are deciding to have a certain trade regime with one another.
Compare that to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, as though there is some overarching political entity called the North American government, the North American Federation, the North American whatever, that is governing this trade between, I don't know, the North America people, the North Americans.
It's a subtle distinction, but it's an important one.
And it's how the left gets these things backwards.
The point of the free trade agreement is to make all of these countries better, to make them stronger, to make them more prosperous, to make them more equitable and just, to strengthen all three countries, the US, Mexico, and Canada.
The idea behind NAFTA is to invert that, to diminish the importance of the individual countries and to have trade for the sake of trade, to wipe away these national distinctions.
It's It's backwards.
And the Trump administration, I don't know who came up with the name, but they get that exactly right.
That's a subtle point, but it's very good.
They get it in the correct order.
They don't flip it around.
The left, by the way, just in the last day, has tipped its hand on its inversion of free speech as well.
Here is Ted Lieu, one of my favorite Democrats.
He's not quite as good as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but he says pretty stupid things as well.
He's pretty close.
He's up there.
Here is Ted Lieu on CNN describing his view of free speech.
I would love to be able to regulate the content of speech.
The First Amendment prevents me from doing so.
And that's simply a function of the First Amendment.
But I think over the long run, it's better that government does not regulate the content of speech.
I would urge these private sector companies to regulate it better themselves.
But it's really nothing that I believe government can do.
And so that's been my position all along.
Okay, three things here.
One, what does he literally say?
He literally says, I would love to regulate the content of speech, which is great.
I can't wait for every Republican to chop that up, put that in their commercials for 2020.
It's going to look really good.
Ted Lieu's primary opponents, or rather his general election opponents, are certainly going to use that because that is what he said.
Now, two, what is the point he's trying to make?
The point that he thinks he's making is...
We all want to regulate everybody's speech.
I don't want you to say this.
You don't want me to say that.
And the government shouldn't regulate speech.
Because you want to regulate my speech, I want to regulate your speech.
So the government shouldn't regulate speech.
And therefore, private companies should regulate speech.
Because we all ultimately want to regulate speech.
That is what he thinks he's saying.
That's what he's trying to say.
That's the most generous version of what he's saying.
And it's totally backwards.
It gets it exactly wrong.
I don't want to regulate speech.
I don't want to regulate what Ted Lieu says.
I want Ted Lieu to go on CNN and spout his inanity all the time.
It makes it easier to write my show.
It gives me a lot of lols, and I'm here for the lols.
So, fine by me.
He can do whatever he wants.
He genuinely, expressing the true view of the left, thinks that we all want to regulate that speech.
So he's saying the government shouldn't regulate speech.
It's unconstitutional for the government to regulate speech.
Therefore, the companies should.
But what I'm saying is, I don't want to regulate speech.
It's unconstitutional.
The government should not regulate speech.
And therefore, private companies, even though they may regulate speech in many instances, should not because it cuts against the ethos of the American nation and of the American project and of our principles and of our traditions and of our constitutional underpinning of our entire country.
So therefore, the private companies should follow our traditions And not regulate speech.
Ted Lieu says, because we can't regulate speech as a government, therefore the private companies should.
It's a perfect inversion.
It gets it exactly wrong.
We have to get to the most egregious story.
The most egregious story of the last two weeks.
It's about that attack in Strasbourg.
A Muslim terrorist came out and killed people in the streets at a Christmas market right around Christmas time shouting Allahu Akbar, the takbir, the saying that Muslim terrorists say right before they kill a lot of people.
And CNN responded to that by running a piece titled What Allahu Akbar Really Means.
And blaming everyone else for misinterpreting it.
We will explain what Allahu Akbar really, really means.
We've got to do that after the break.
Plus, we have the mailbag coming out.
So if you're on dailywire.com, you're right there.
Thank you.
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If you're not, go to dailywire.com.
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We'll be right back with Allahu Akbar in the mailbag.
A terrorist attack in Strasbourg.
A Muslim terrorist screams Allahu Akbar, kills two people, leaves another one brain dead, injures a bunch more on the run.
And CNN responds by defending the phrase Allahu Akbar.
Here's how they begin.
Contrary to what many people seem to think, the words Allahu Akbar simply mean God is greater.
It is a powerful declaration used by Muslims on many occasions and in many prayers.
It is a celebration of life.
Can't even get through this without laughing.
The first words fathers whisper in the ears of their newborns.
They are used to indicate gratitude when God bestows something upon you that you would have been incapable of taining were it not for divine benevolence.
I assume he means his enemies' decapitated heads.
Maybe not.
He goes on.
It is a prayerful phrase that reminds us that no matter what our concerns may be, God is greater than them.
Okay, God is greater than them.
That's actually a true statement.
This is a constant canard that we hear on the left.
Because what the left does is they defend the literal phrase, God is greater.
God is greater than what?
Allah is greater than what?
They don't finish that statement.
But just on the, okay, sure, to say God is great, of course we all defend that.
Absolutely, right.
But how is the phrase used?
And how tone deaf is this?
A Muslim terrorist has just shrieked this phrase before killing people, as has happened now 70 times in Europe, just in Europe, in just the last two years.
Countless more times around the world and in previous years.
We know that in Europe right now they have 5.5 million largely unvetted Muslim migrants who have come in between 2010 and 2016.
This has obviously increased this massive widespread problem of Islamic terrorism.
Why are they all yelling Allahu Akbar?
What this CNN article would have us believe...
People don't use that in terrorist attacks.
No, it's a celebration of life.
No, it's not this.
That's a fringe.
It has nothing to do with that.
The takbir, the Allahu Akbar, is a battle cry.
That is its earliest usage.
Obviously, we know the modern usages.
The hijacker, Mohammed Atta, from the 9-11 terrorist attacks, had a checklist on him.
The checklist included yelling Allahu Akbar right when the attacks began.
The Flight 93, you could hear them yelling Allahu Akbar as the plane went all the way down.
The first time it was used, it was used by Mohammed, the founder of the Islamic religion.
It was used by him during the Battle of Badr in 624.
It wasn't used when he was greeting his newborn child.
It wasn't used in moments celebrating life.
It was used in battle at the Battle of Badr in the early 7th century by Muhammad himself.
The CNN piece goes on.
Worshippers at a mosque in Quebec reportedly heard the phrase, Allahu Akbar, the very phrase they recite in morning prayers, uttered by their white supremacist attacker just before he opened fire and killed six Muslims in January.
And Muslims at a mosque in Minnesota were reciting Allahu Akbar during their morning prayers when their mosque was firebombed in August.
Is Allahu Akbar sometimes used as a battle cry?
Yes.
Though Senator John McCain has argued on Fox News, that does not make the phrase itself abhorrent.
Well, noting that moderate Muslims also say Allahu Akbar, McCain said the phrase is no more troubling than a Christian saying thank God.
Except it is, because thank God is not a battle cry.
It's not a battle cry.
Christians don't say thank God while they commit terrorist attacks.
It doesn't happen.
That's not how it works.
It is totally different.
Is Allahu Akbar sometimes used as a battle cry?
Yes, from the very earliest usage that we know of it.
Now, have white supremacists attacked Muslims?
Yes.
Is that bad?
Yes.
Should they not do it?
Of course they shouldn't.
Of course not.
Notice they can't even say Christians because these guys who attacked those mosques were not Christians.
And they were using Allahu Akbar as a battle cry then, which is, they were using the battle cry, ironically, when they were attacking these people.
Of course those people should be condemned.
But how obtuse for CNN, just as a Muslim terrorist in Strasbourg, kills people on the run.
To mention the vanishingly few number of white supremacist attacks on mosques and on Muslims.
You say, well, what about that?
That is the definition of whataboutism.
What about the 70 Muslim terrorist attacks in the last two years in Europe?
What about the thousands of terrorist attacks around the world in just the last 25 years, 28 years since 9-11?
What about those?
How obtuse to point that out.
What the left wants to do, though, this is the perfect example of them inverting reality, is they want to make Islam into Christianity.
They want to turn Christianity into Islam, but there is a fundamental difference.
They want to say, you hear this all the time from generally left-wing politicians, they say Islam is the religion of peace.
Islam is, well, no.
Christianity is a religion of peace.
That's true.
Islam is not one.
In Christianity, you have Christ say, turn the other cheek.
Pray for those who persecute you.
In Islam, you say, find your enemies where they pray and hack at their necks and be not friends with the Jews or the Christians, for they are each other's friends.
Don't take my word for it.
Barack Obama thought it was up to him to describe what the Islamic religion really said.
Contrary to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, who holds a PhD in Islamic theology from Baghdad.
No, we don't get to forcibly change a religion.
We don't get to make Islam into Christianity or Christianity into Islam, as the CNN article wants to do.
There is a fundamental difference between those two religions, which is the question of voluntarism.
Voluntarism is the philosophical notion that the will is primary, that my will is primary.
And my willing things to happen is primary.
So in Christianity, our God is a God of will and intellect.
Our God is the word, is the logos, is the divine logic of the universe.
The God of Islam, Allah, is a God of pure will, Don't take my word for it.
Take it from some of the greatest Islamic theologians.
The medieval Islamic theologian Ibn Hazm says, God is not bound even by God's own word.
Nothing would oblige God to reveal the truth to us.
And if it were God's will, God could even will us to practice idolatry.
Because he is pure will.
He is not answerable or bound by logic.
Pope Benedict XVI laid this out marvelously in one of the great orations of our modern era, the Regensburg Address.
Voluntarism is the issue here.
Are we bound by a logic?
Is God the divine logic of the universe?
or is there simply will, pure will, opposed to logic?
Voluntarism is not just a question of Islam versus Christianity.
Voluntarism, I think, is the primary cause of our cultural confusion today.
It is the definition of self-definition.
It is to say there is no logic that I am answerable to.
There is no the truth.
There is only my truth and my will forcing my self-definition.
You say by all lights of logic that I am a man, But I say that I am a woman I will myself to be a woman in the face of all logic.
That is what volunteerism is.
Our historic religion in the West, our religion that our culture is based on, worships a God who is not pure will, but who is divine logic.
There is a huge movement led by the left today to undercut that line, to undercut the notion of truth, of objectivity, of moral standards, of mathematical standards, of biological realities, who says that some people see things that are and ask why, But I dream of things that never were and ask, why not?
There is a world of reality and there is a world of fantasy, of a fantasy that inverts and perverts that reality.
We have to reject that.
We must reject that fantasy.
It leads to horrific outcomes because we are living in the world.
We are living in truth.
If you follow the truth, the truth will set you free.
But if you follow fantasy, you will only drive yourself into madness.
Now let's get to the mailbag.
I know we're going to be running late, but I'm going to burn through all these questions.
From Paulson to the Catholic one who writes better books than the Jewish one.
Why do we use the name Jesus as opposed to Yeshua?
Yeshua being the Hebrew word for Jesus.
I've heard some rather conspiratorial ideas about it from people who use the Hebrew name.
They'll say pagans did it so that they could pray to Zeus.
I just was wondering if you could clear that up.
Yeah, some people are very confused about this.
The word for Jesus in Hebrew is Yeshua or Yesu, and this is related to Joshua.
But the reason that we get Jesus out of that is because when you translate Yeshua into Greek, you get Yezus, and in Latin, Yezus.
J-E-S-U-S. The J is pronounced Ye.
And from that we get Jesus when we anglicize it.
So it's not anything about Zeus.
You're not praying to some pagan deity.
It is simply the translation of Yeshua into our languages.
And that's perfectly fine because in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek nor slave nor bond nor male nor woman but all are one in Christ Jesus.
And so we can translate his name just fine and he's the same guy.
From Michael.
Michael, I hate to continue bringing up Baby It's Cold Outside ad nauseum, but I have a separate take on it.
I find that there are two camps, one that says it promotes rape, and another that it's a wonderful song that should be celebrated.
I find the lyrics to the song, while not a rape song, is certainly about promiscuous behavior and almost certainly outside the context of marriage.
Shouldn't we find the song to be morally objectionable on those grounds?
Thanks so much, Michael.
Well, it's promiscuous, certainly.
But is your suggestion that pop music is promiscuous?
Oh, heavens, grab my pearls.
No, that's just the way it is.
And it's not necessarily promiscuous.
Get your head out of the gutter.
I don't know what they did when he convinced her to stick around.
All we know is you've got a man and a woman canoodling by the fire, and the woman is teasing the man and saying, Oh, I really should go because my mother's going to wonder where I am.
I really shouldn't stay here by this cozy fire and canoodle with my little honey.
And then the guy says, oh please, let me seduce you.
Please stick around.
But I don't know, they might have just canoodled, maybe necked, maybe kissed in the French way.
You don't know what they were doing.
Get your head out of the gutter.
Maybe they took it a little further than that.
But romance is not a terrible thing.
Romance is a very good thing.
Doesn't mean we should be getting wild outside the confines of marriage, but romance is something that leads us into marriage.
Romance is something.
The attraction of a man for a woman and a woman for a man is an essential fact of our lives, an essential fact of the world.
I'm very glad that we live in a world where I can say, hey baby, it's cold outside, come on over here, and that can lead to marriage.
Then some Puritanical world where we have to pretend that men are not attracted to women.
Forget about that.
Give me a baby, it's cold outside all day.
And then once you do, when the girl sticks around, I mean, that's on you and your soul, and that's between you and your confessor and God.
But, you know, have a nice time.
It's cold out there.
The fire feels really nice.
Just have half a drink more, you know?
From Rodolfo.
Hi, Michael.
How do I defend my stance against illegal immigration and myself when my family illegally entered the U.S. when I was two?
Now 27.
Me and my whole family are U.S. citizens.
I love the U.S. and swear my allegiance to it over my native Mexico.
I think I'm an Uncle Pablo now.
I guess that's the Mexican version of an Uncle Tom.
Thanks.
Love the show.
Do you think illegal immigration is good?
Do you think it's a good thing?
Do you think a country has the right to its borders and to decide who comes in and out?
Do you think it's good that 60 to 80 percent of women and girls who cross the border illegally are sexually assaulted or raped?
Do you think it's good that in certain areas illegal aliens commit crimes at higher percentages than native-born citizens?
Do you think it's good that nationally illegal aliens take from the welfare system at a much higher rate than native-born citizens put a burden on what people pay in taxes?
Take people's labor from them illegally?
No, of course you don't.
Of course you don't do that.
Did you benefit from an illegal immigration?
An illegal immigration at a different time, I should point out.
At the time, it sounds like 25 years ago when your family came to this country, it was less of a problem.
There were fewer people here.
They were crossing the border.
At a much lower rate, the country was able to absorb them more easily.
The awful ideology of multiculturalism had not totally taken hold, so there was the encouragement of assimilation.
That was before the terrorist attacks of 9-11, which raised major national security concerns.
I'm not saying it was good when your parents did it, but they did it, and they committed that crime, and now they're American citizens, and that's a good thing.
They did what they were supposed to do afterward to become American citizens.
You're an American citizen.
You watch my show, which means you must be a great, brave, patriotic American.
You seem to have vaguely conservative, patriotic leanings, at least, and maybe very much so.
So that's a good thing.
You know, Bad activities can be turned to good.
And I wonder for every one of you who comes out and loves America and becomes a citizen and is rah-rah patriotic as apple pie, how many illegal aliens are not doing that, don't want to assimilate, don't want to learn English, continue to commit crimes, continue to prioritize their native country over the United States?
Probably very many.
It's fine to turn a bad thing for good, but we shouldn't pretend that the bad thing is now a good action.
As Rochefoucault says, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
That's perfectly fine.
You can have those standards and you can celebrate that you're in America.
And I'm glad you're in America because you're clearly a good patriotic citizen.
From Carlos.
My friend keeps saying that God only brings good things.
And therefore, any sickness, tragedy, or bad event has nothing to do with God.
That, to me, makes no sense.
If he created everything, does not that mean he created the bad things too?
What are the theological arguments for the existence of tragedy and evil?
Any book you recommend would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Yes, people think that the existence of evil and suffering is an argument against God's existence.
And...
It's true that it's probably the best argument against God's existence, but actually it's an argument for God's existence.
The reason that evil is permitted to exist is because of freedom, because we have free will.
There is the grace of God, but there is also free will.
And so God creates man with free will, and man can choose to obey God or choose to disobey God.
And in the creation story in Genesis, Adam disobeys God.
He eats of the apple.
The way that John Milton paints this in Paradise Lost is a pretty beautiful way to visualize this.
How does death and suffering and sin come into the world?
The way that he pictures this is that Satan births from his own head sin, sin.
And that sin comes into existence in that way.
Satan being the rebellious angel who turns away from God.
And then Satan has an incestuous affair with his begotten sin.
And the product of that is death.
And this is how we see this described by St.
Paul.
We see it in the scriptures.
Because of the disobedience toward the will of God, we find sin, and because of sin, death pervades all of humanity.
And this is an imperfect world.
Now, why might God permit evil and suffering to be in the world?
Maybe it's for a greater good.
Maybe it's because life isn't a tragedy after all.
Maybe it has a happy ending.
The Latin phrase to describe the fall is the felix culpa, the happy fall, because there is redemption in Christ, in the incarnation and the resurrection of Christ.
I think it was Pope Benedict XV died.
He quoted Pagliacci, the opera Pagliacci at the end.
He says, La comedia è finita.
The comedy is finished.
This life has a happy ending.
Dante writes, The Divine Comedy, that it has a happy ending.
That maybe the world in which there is total perfection but no free will is a worse world than the one in which there is freedom and therefore sin and therefore suffering and therefore death.
But maybe that world ultimately is the greatest possible world after all.
This is not an argument against God's omniscience.
It's not an argument against God's omnipotence.
It's not an argument against God's omnibenevolence, that God is all good.
It's an argument for this full, wonderful world that we have, where even evil can be turned for good, that God does not create evil, but he permits it to even give us the greatest possible world.
That's certainly what I believe, and I think that is, if you follow those ideas to their logical conclusions, that you must conclude that.
From Chuck.
Michael, is it unconstitutional for partisan government insiders to target people based on ideology?
If they were targeting people based on skin color, it would be rightly called racism.
How is the Mueller probe not an unconstitutional partisan probe by actors trying to push a partisan conclusion?
Great question.
Isn't that a great question?
They were able to do it.
They were able to start the probe.
And they were able to use the mechanisms of our government laid out in the Constitution to do it.
But I do think it's illegitimate.
I think the entire Russia investigation is illegitimate.
I think it was based on lies.
It was based on partisan...
A truly partisan evidence because the Steele dossier, which was the basis for starting to surveil the Trump campaign, was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and by the DNC. We know that the FBI would not have gotten the FISA surveillance warrants without the Steele dossier.
We know that over 40,000 FISA warrants have been granted.
Only 85 have ever been denied in the history of the FISA court.
And the warrants to tap the Trump campaign were denied, so they must have been totally weak, before they got that unverified report, which James Comey himself has admitted was unverified, even during the Trump administration.
They never took the time to verify it.
I think it's illegitimate, and I think that people who have been caught up in this ridiculous partisan witch hunt should be pardoned.
It's been permitted to go on because of the mechanisms of our government, but we should not respect it.
It's not worthy of respect.
One more before we go, from Jacob.
Hi, Michael.
My wife and I have been married for just over a year, and we also had the pleasure of welcoming triplets in September.
My wife and I are both very fortunate to have great parents that are nothing but supportive.
My parents even offered to let us move in with them, which we hesitantly accepted, realizing it was our only realistic option financially.
My wife and I feel bad about creating an extra burden for my parents.
Is my guilt justified or should I go easy on myself?
Thanks!
First of all, congratulations.
Congratulations on the triplets.
That's a wonderful thing.
Your guilt is justified.
It is justified.
But everybody needs help sometimes.
That is the purpose of family.
That is what family is for.
And babies are a blessing.
You shouldn't feel bad that you had one kid or two kids or three kids.
That's a wonderful thing.
You shouldn't feel bad that your family is helping you out in a brief period of time when you need a leg up.
That's not the cause of the guilt.
The reason that you should feel, if not guilt, then an urgency is that now you need to figure out how to support them.
Now it's on you.
You should do it.
You should not persist in this forever or even for much of a time at all.
You've got to figure out how to make more money.
You've got to figure out how to work harder.
You've got to figure out how to get a better job.
You just need to figure it out.
This is okay.
This is what happens to many parents.
I think people now put off having kids because they want to have a ton of money before they have kids and that's why the West is dying and nobody is having children at all anymore.
But...
It's perfectly fine.
Have the kids.
Go do it.
We need more babies.
That's a wonderful thing.
And now you, like so many people before you in our civilization, needs to figure out how to make more money and work harder and support your family.
I'm sure you can do it.
Believe in yourself.
This is a big country.
We've got more jobs than people looking for jobs right now.
The economy is doing well.
Go out and do it, buddy.
I believe in you.
Go support those kids.
Okay, that's our show.
We now will not see you until next week.
That's fine.
You've got to catch up on all of Another Kingdom.
All of Season 2 is out.
It is really good.
I can say that because I didn't write it.
It is superb.
It's excellent.
Go check out Another Kingdom.
All the artwork is beautiful.
The writing is great.
So go check it out.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you next week.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Borey.
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.
Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Walsh Show today, we're going to be talking about the government shutdown.
The media wants us to panic over it, but I'm looking forward to it, only I'm disappointed that it's partial and temporary.
Also, I'm going to explain why superhero movies are stupid, and I'm sure that everybody will agree.
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