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Feb. 21, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:00
Ep. 302 - Jihadi Dreamers In Search Of A Better Life

Western women who left the U.S. and Great Britain to join ISIS and slaughter innocents now want to return home after Western warriors killed their terrorist husbands. Then, leftist ignoramuses try to burn down a statue of the wrong General Lee, Jussie Smollett surrenders, and the Mailbag! Date: 02-21-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Western women who left the U.S. and Great Britain to join ISIS and slaughter innocents now want to return home after our Western warriors killed all of their husbands.
These poor terrorist jihadi dreamers are just looking for a better life, and we will analyze whether or not they should be welcome back in.
Then, leftist ignoramuses try to burn down a statue of the wrong General Lee, and Jussie Smollett surrenders to cops for his hate hoax, and the mailbag.
So much to get to.
to.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Those poor terrorist women, they're just dreamers.
They just want a better life.
How could you, you heartless conservatives, not want to let them back in?
They have kids with their terrorist husbands who we killed because they were in ISIS. They've got little kids, little dreamers!
Other jihadi dreamers.
Come on.
How dare you?
We will get to all of this.
We'll talk about Oda Muthana and Shamima Begum, Western terrorist ladies who are trying to come back into our country.
And fortunately, we have proper leadership in those countries right now to try to keep them out.
But who knows what would happen if the left were in charge.
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So now you had...
We actually talked about this about a year or two ago.
you had this influx of women, these radicalized Islamic women in the United States, in Great Britain, throughout continental Europe, who during the rise of the Islamic State actually left to go fight, not to go fight the Islamic State, but to fight on behalf of the Islamic State.
So now, because President Trump promised we would crush ISIS militarily, and we have, now these women don't have a state.
ISIS barely exists anymore if it exists at all, Now they want to come back and say, whoopsie daisy, let's pretend that nothing happened.
Here is a woman, Hoda Mutana.
She left at the age of 19, left Alabama, the good old USA, moved to Syria, married an Australian jihadi who died within three months.
Then she married another jihadi, had a child with him who's now 18 months old.
That guy got killed as well.
Good job, Western forces.
And now she wants to come back to Alabama.
Here she is.
When I was 17, I had an account on Twitter, and we were all just normal Muslims speaking together, and we were just learning off of each other, feeding off of each other.
We heard the caliphate was announced, and we interpreted ourselves that it was obligatory upon us to go.
In November of 2014, she left her family and friends in Alabama, crossing into Syria.
We didn't see much, but what we did see when we did see it, we would see dead bodies in public.
You know, they'd see dead bodies, but they knew that they were going to see dead bodies because they were on these Twitter threads and in these internet groups that were talking about this.
That's why they left.
Who wants to stay in boring, peaceful, free, just Alabama when you can move to Syria and help Islamic militants slaughter innocents, which is what this woman did.
And by the way, it's not like she was eight or nine years old here, was captured, brought over there.
She was 19 years old when she left the United States.
She helped to spread ISIS propaganda on Twitter.
She tweeted out, quote, Americans wake up, go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood.
We have a hard time in the West.
Believing that people can think this way.
Because we live in a basically decadent, secular, liberal society.
So we have no conception of why people...
Look at this cute little girl.
Oh, what is she now?
21, 22 years old?
She seems normal.
She's talking in a normal way.
We have no conception of anyone truly believing that people should go on drive-bys and spill all of the blood, as this woman said, on Twitter.
We have this vulnerability.
We don't have a natural defense against these people who are vicious, vile terrorists, who want to burn down everything that we have, who want to spill our blood in the street.
Her words, not mine.
What we want to do is just let them come back in.
That's the compassionate thing.
That's the nice thing to do.
That's the imprudent thing to do.
What does this woman, Hoda Muthana, what does she think her punishment should be for leaving the United States and going to fight for ISIS? Maybe therapy lessons, maybe a process that will ensure us that we'll never do this again.
Jail time, I don't know if that has an effect on people.
Yeah, jail time, I don't think that's, no, nobody, what effect would jail time, let's not even consider that one.
How about just some nice therapy?
Maybe, you know, honestly, maybe a good day at the spa, kind of let me get some of my troubles out of here, just relax a little bit, de-stress.
Maybe that would help.
The gulions on this girl to be able to look an interviewer straight in the face and say, yes, I called for the spilling of American blood in the name of the Islamic State.
I left and renounced my country.
I joined a major international terrorist group and helped people slaughter innocents throughout the Middle East.
I think I probably just need a little touch of therapy.
She does need some therapy.
She also needs some prison.
We've talked about this.
This is an issue actually on the left and the right.
You remember before Christmas, President Trump signed that major Spring the Criminals Out of Prison bill, the First Step Act, and some people on the right cheered this on because nobody anymore has a sense of what prison is for.
This woman asks, she says, well, we don't really know.
What is the effect even of prison on people?
What could it possibly do?
Why would we ever punish jihadi criminal militants and enemies of the state?
We shouldn't punish them.
We just need to rehabilitate them.
There's just some therapy.
That's fine.
No.
The purpose of a criminal justice system is justice for criminals.
It's not therapy.
It's not rehabilitation, primarily.
It's not even deterrence, primarily.
Though those are important things.
It is punishment.
It is retribution for a crime.
This woman, she says, oh, I'm sorry, I regret it.
Yeah, I shouldn't have done it.
But she clearly doesn't have real remorse.
She doesn't understand that she has committed a crime and she needs to accept punishment for that crime.
Unfortunately, we in the West don't understand that either.
And I fear that when you don't have knuckle-dragging right-wingers like Donald Trump in charge or conservatives in charge in Britain, you're going to have people say, oh, come back in.
I bet you if you ask this question to the Democrat primary field, Should we let this poor young woman back in?
This poor young woman of the Islamic faith who was just, she got caught up, she swept up in something.
Her husband died, her terrorist husband.
Her other husband died, her other terrorist husband.
We just let her back in.
I bet you, if you ask the Democrat presidential field, all of them would favor letting this woman come back in.
Maybe give her a little therapy.
Maybe put her in a program to rehabilitate herself.
This is a big fear because it's creeping into the right wing and it is infiltrating our Western thought.
The West has been slowly destroying itself, committing suicide, a masochistic society.
And I see this not just as one particular political ideology, but infecting the whole society.
And down the road, I totally see a world in which we let these people come back in.
In Britain, there's a question as to whether a totally unrepentant British jihadi lady could come back in.
Her name is Shamima Begum, and she sees no reason why the United Kingdom shouldn't welcome her back with open arms.
Kind of heartbreaking to read.
I thought it would, my family made it sound like it would be a lot easier for me to come back to the UK. She got a letter saying she's probably not going to be allowed back into the UK. It's heartbreaking.
Heartbreaking to read.
I mean, why?
Her family told her.
By the way, did you hear that little line?
This line hasn't been getting covered very much.
Her family told her it would be easier to come back into the UK. So did she have her parents' permission to go over to Syria and join the Islamic State?
Certainly sounds that way.
How is that family still permitted to stay in the United Kingdom?
How has that family not been summarily arrested and deported and sent back to whatever godforsaken ISIS hellhole they apparently support?
Now, this woman left the United Kingdom at a slightly younger age than the other one, than Hoda Mutana.
This one, Shamima Begun, left the UK at age 15.
She became a poster girl for ISIS in Europe.
Women from Europe who go over and join the Islamic State.
She married a Dutch-born or a Dutch resident jihadi over there.
He was later killed too because we have done a very good job at killing these jihadis.
And now she has no remorse.
She has shown no remorse.
I regret it because it's changed me as a person.
It's made me stronger, tougher.
I married my husband.
I wouldn't have found someone like him back in the UK.
I had my kids.
I did have a good time there.
She had a good time, you know?
Listen, for some people, having a good time is not their idea of having a good time.
You know, maybe they prefer to work or they prefer to be productive.
Very few people would consider slaughtering innocents all around the Middle East as their idea of a good time.
But that's what she calls a good time.
And she says she wouldn't have found someone like her husband back in the United Kingdom, which I'm not even sure if that's true anymore.
According to top European Union terror officials, the United Kingdom is home to some 25,000 Islamist extremists.
Why Rome when you could go find a beautiful husband at home?
A beautiful jihadi terrorist husband, which is apparently what she was looking for.
Totally unrepentant.
She wouldn't have had her kid.
We shouldn't allow her or her kid to come here into the West either.
There are so many in the West who would let these people back in.
We will analyze why in a second.
Then we've got to get to, obviously, Jesse Smollett, who, speaking of criminal justice, has just turned himself over to the Chicago police.
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You know, the liberal Western motivation or inclination to accepting back anyone who, even if you're unrepentant, even if you're unremorseful, to say, no, come in, it's okay, terrorist lady, it's, look, You've been oppressed.
We welcome you with open arms.
This actually comes from a good place.
This idea comes in part from Western civilization.
It comes from our seven heavenly virtues.
Prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and charity.
And it explicitly comes from charity.
We want to be compassionate.
We want to be perfectly merciful.
But the trouble creeps in when you choose just one virtue.
And you take it to its perfect extreme, to the exclusion of all of the other virtues.
What is virtuous about that?
Adam Smith, the moral philosopher and the economic philosopher, said that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
That's another way of looking at it.
And let's not forget that one of our virtues, one of the heavenly virtues, is prudence.
To say nothing of justice.
Prudence.
Is it prudent?
For the United Kingdom to allow 25,000 likely Islamist radicals to live in their country, is that prudent?
That doesn't seem prudent, and prudence is a virtue.
Is it just to allow someone who dedicated herself to slaughtering innocent people in Syria, to fighting against what is ostensibly her own country?
Is that just to just let her come back in without any sort of consequence whatsoever?
Maybe a day at the spa, maybe a little therapy, and then, okay, we're all evening.
Of course not.
It is a totally inverted culture that would consider it good and just and virtuous to take in these unrepentant terrorists who have betrayed their countries.
But we've just totally lost our balance of the virtues.
And so now, when people virtue signal, they're usually vice signaling.
They're usually, maybe they're signaling one virtue to the exclusion of all the others.
And because our moral discourse has been so degraded, there's very little way to open their eyes to convince them otherwise.
They just don't possess the vocabulary for it.
I mean, you still have some people today, even on the right, defending Jussie Smollett.
Is it Smollett or Smollett?
I don't know.
I've never watched the show.
I've never heard of him before this ridiculous incident.
So I guess it worked in so much as he got some publicity out of it.
Jussie Smollett, you know, he staged this hate hoax.
He pretended, he sent a hate letter to himself.
When that didn't get enough attention, he paid these two Nigerian buddies of his to come attack him and pretend to be white racists.
Then he went on television crying, indicting half of the country as awful racists, indicting the whole country as hopelessly bigoted.
And then he got found out.
I, even in the last few days, have urged caution on jumping to conclusions.
Now it seems the conclusion has been reached.
Here is the Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson talking about their findings now that they've finally booked Jussie Smollett for a false police report and a hate hoax.
How can an individual who's been embraced by the city of Chicago turn around and slap everyone in this city in the face by making these false claims?
Bogus police reports cause real harm.
Of course they do.
They cause real harm.
There were some people, you know, I really like Seth Mandel, so I don't want to attack him.
I don't want to criticize him too much.
But he sent out an absurd tweet the other day.
He said, you know, he's a right-wing.
I mean, he's firmly ensconced on the right.
And he says, I just think that Jussie Smollett, it's clear he's got a lot of psychological problems.
And he's just, maybe we should go easy on him.
Maybe, come on, let's not be so harsh.
Actually, even his wife, Bethany, who's been on my show, called him out for this and said, no, sorry, Seth.
No way, pal.
And a lot of people on the right just then came out and said, absolutely not.
You've got this one wrong.
It comes from a good place to say, oh, let's be the bigger person.
It comes from genuine empathy, by the way.
Which the right has in far greater abundance than the left has.
The left is not terribly empathetic.
They were saying, stone those Covington kids, tar and feather them.
They're awful.
We need a coup d'etat to take Trump out.
I mean, the left wing is vicious without any sense of compassion or empathy.
The right has a lot of empathy.
Why?
Because studies show that the right understands the left better than the left understands the right.
And I do have empathy for Jussie Smollett.
Actually, I don't have empathy for him as a matter of politics.
I have empathy for him as a sometime actor.
It's real tough out there for actors, and you've got to, even if you can get a hit for a little while, it's not too long before you're in obscurity, and he's feeling that he might get written off the show.
He said he wasn't happy with the amount of money he was being paid.
Being an actor is a tough life.
I have a lot of empathy for him.
However, We cannot go easy on this guy.
We cannot let him get off the hook for this.
We cannot let him avoid prison.
We cannot let him keep his career.
Why?
Because in this case, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
And mercy to the guilty in the Jussie Smollett case is cruelty to real victims of real racially motivated crimes.
Or sexually motivated crimes or whatever.
The real victims of these crimes will now be looked on with skepticism.
That's unavoidable.
And it's right.
I mean, there's no way around that.
It's inescapable.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Actions have consequences.
Jesse Smollett's actions have consequences.
This is why crimes, once they're revealed, must be punished.
Because let's say that we don't punish Jussie Smollett.
Let's say we're really just all compassion, all mercy, no sense of justice, no sense of prudence.
Well, what does that do?
It gives everybody license to fake their own hate crime, to try to steal for themselves the social currency of victimhood.
And what else does it mean?
Are no longer going to trust people who claim to have been attacked, even if they really have.
They just won't believe it anymore.
If there is no punishment, this will create a perverse incentive and the hoaxes will multiply.
They will multiply to no end and the victims will not be treated seriously.
They won't be taken seriously.
That's just reality.
And we can lament that.
I think conservatives are uncomfortable with that even.
The left is certainly uncomfortable with that.
We want to say, oh gosh, we're all fallen, we're all broken, we should have just total mercy, total compassion.
Well, that's fine at a personal level.
That's a good thing at a personal level.
But as a matter of society, as a matter of civil government, you simply cannot let that Persist.
Order will totally dissolve.
Anarchy will be loosed on the world.
It will totally distort our culture more so than it even has been.
You know, even some members of the mainstream media are aware of this.
Even people like Don Lemon on CNN. They're unrepentant.
Nancy Pelosi didn't apologize for her tweet, where she indicted the whole country as bigoted and believed Jussie Smollett's lie hook, line, and sinker.
But she did slowly take it down.
Now Don Lemon on CNN is trying to change the story.
He's trying to say that CNN was, "No, they never, what are you talking about?
They never suggested that the Jussie Smollett story should be believed immediately." Here's Don Lemon trying to rewrite history. - You know, it's been, Interesting trying to report on this particular story, and we've done several reports on this show, just the facts, straight, here's what we know, here's what we don't know.
Because you don't want to get into a place where you're just sort of speculating about things.
Right.
And we don't know what happened.
And a lot of the media did that, and in politics, too.
A lot of the media.
If you look at every single report on this show, it'll show you that it was just straight things.
No, CNN was just all facts, right?
Except they weren't.
And Newsbusters pointed this out.
Newsbusters out of the Media Research Center.
Great resource.
They showed that Don Lemon's colleague, Brooke Baldwin, reacted with horror to the story.
Bought it hook, line, and sinker.
And by the way, even to Don Lemon's claim, we just reported the facts.
If CNN didn't buy the story, then why did they give it so much airtime?
They breathlessly talked about this Jussie Smollett thing for days and days.
Well, if they said, well, we're going to hold our fire here, why didn't they hold their fire?
Because obviously they were creating the narrative and perpetuating the narrative that he should be believed, that he was right, that he was telling the truth, and that America is a bigoted place.
That's all it was.
When the Jussie Smollett story came out, if you look back at the archives of my show, I didn't cover it.
Now, why didn't I cover it?
Because it wasn't news?
No, because it would have been irresponsible to cover it at that time.
I didn't want to jump the gun and say that the guy was a hoaxer, even though I knew with 99% certainty that this was a hoax, because Chicago is not MAGA country.
But it would have been irresponsible to do it.
What CNN did was act irresponsibly.
What Nancy Pelosi did was act irresponsibly.
And now they're trying to rewrite history.
Okay, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Perhaps we should be happy at least that they're trying to rewrite history now rather than double down.
I think some other people are doubling down and being completely acquiescent to Jussie Smollett.
I think it's actually better to do what the media are doing than Not take responsibility, lie about how you covered it, but at least say, this was wrong, this is terrible, this guy's got to be punished for it.
We have to take a lesson from a social level, from a level of government and society.
Crime has to be punished.
We have lost this sense entirely.
We don't punish any of our criminals anymore.
Both parties are giving into this.
This is from a moral perspective.
Failure, a crack-up of our ethical discourse that makes us not understand what the words criminal or the words justice mean.
And people on the right need to hear it just as much as people on the left.
But when the people on the left get this stuff wrong, it's much more hilarious because the left so misunderstands reality.
This is one of my favorite stories in the news today.
We have to get to it before the mailbag.
So you know that I'm in South Bend, Indiana right now.
I'm outside of Notre Dame.
I'm going to be giving a speech tonight at Notre Dame because the university at Notre Dame has these beautiful 18th century murals from Luigi Gregori.
He was a Vatican portraitist.
Beautiful murals of Christopher Columbus.
And the university now, up to and including the university president, Father Jenkins, Has decided they're going to cover up all of the murals so that nobody can see them.
They can't move them because they're painted on the wall so they'd have to go full Taliban and just knock the whole walls down and destroy art entirely.
So what they're going to do is just cover it up so that nobody can see them.
And this hatred against Christopher Columbus is based not only on moral idiocy but on historical ignorance.
They don't know what Christopher Columbus did.
They accuse him of things he never did.
They accuse him of things that other people did.
They don't understand the significance of Columbus in history.
They have no gratitude for what he did and how they stand on his shoulders, the shoulder of that giant, and think that they don't realize that they're dwarfs.
They think that they're just giant people themselves.
And this ignorant activist, It's reared its ugly head again in North Carolina where vandals have destroyed a statue of General Lee.
But not that General Lee.
These guys went out and destroyed a statue of General William C. Lee, who was a soldier in World War II. He's considered the father of the airborne.
And these idiots thought that it was a statue of General Robert E. Lee, and they thought that it would be right to destroy that statue.
So now they went after this poor guy from World War II. Here is Mark Johnson, who's the curator of the William C. Lee Airborne Museum in Dunn, North Carolina, explaining the vandalism.
There's a hometown grown boy here that turned out to be an international hero in World War II. So to come and try to destroy his statue is just an insult to everybody.
I think it was a big mistake.
Why would you do something like this?
It's really just to irritate people at you.
This is not a civil war museum.
This is not Robert E. Lee.
This is General William C. Lee.
So I was hurt.
Sorry guys, you got it wrong by a century.
You were off by 80 years.
What did they do?
Someone doused the statue in a flammable liquid.
They set it on fire.
By the way, we've been talking about genealogy a little bit recently because I found I'm very likely a direct male descendant, albeit a bastard, of Henry VIII. William Seeley has no relation whatsoever to Robert Ely.
There is no...
There's no philosophical connection, no historical connection, no family connection.
Completely different people.
And this is what the left does all the time.
This is why they attack Christopher Columbus.
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
They've been told, they've been programmed by their re-educators, by the people who have indoctrinated them.
Columbus bad.
Columbus genocide.
Columbus mean.
Columbus bad.
And so they just, they go beep, beep, boop, beep, boop, Columbus bad, beep, beep, beep, boop, bop, bop, burn down statue, boop, bop, beep, hate history, hate art, beep, boop, load Taliban program, beep, bop, beep, beep, boop.
And that's what they do.
And then they set statues on fire.
But they get it completely wrong.
They don't even say, obviously it would be indefensible even to set it up.
Statue of Robert E. Lee on fire.
That's also indefensible.
But it's both indefensible and hilariously stupid.
This is a statue of William C. Lee on fire.
This is what happens when you don't know history, when you have no humility, and when you are frequently wrong but never in doubt.
This is what happens when you have no sense of veneration, when all you have is intellectual pride, the sense that anything that happened before me is bad and wrong.
Anybody who lived before me is stupid and wicked.
I alone, in my beautiful enlightened modernity, am the only person who has ever seen with clarity the moral landscape, and everything else will be knocked down, covered up with tarp, or set on fire.
We'll be covering this tonight at Notre Dame.
I sure hope that we're allowed to stream the speech.
I sure hope that there are no shenanigans that go on at Notre Dame.
So hopefully you'll be able to watch it at Daily Wire.
If you're around South Bend, I sure hope that you can make it out there.
I told you there has been some shenanigans.
Antifa has threatened to come and protest.
So it might be lively, gear up for anything tonight, but I will be making a robust defense of art, history, liberal education, and in particular, one of the greatest men in history, Christopher Columbus.
We've got to get to the mailbag, but first, go over to dailywire.com.
It is $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag, which is coming up.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
We had that yesterday.
Ben's is going to be next month.
You get to ask questions backstage.
You get another kingdom.
You get everything.
But do you know what you really...
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
I actually do fear for my safety tonight.
I do think that I'm in a bit of danger because I've been on the road.
You know, TSA screening, and you've got to minimize everything you travel with.
So I'm on the road, and I'm just here with this.
I just have this...
Little plastic coffee cup that I'm drinking my coffee out of.
I left my leftist tears tumbler in Los Angeles.
And looking at the RSVPs from Antifa tonight, from the university's reaction, the administrators, all the people who don't know anything about Columbus but hate Columbus, I might drown.
I'm not afraid of Antifa clocking me.
I'm not afraid of the university censoring me.
I'm afraid of drowning.
Don't let this happen to you.
Go get your Leftist Years Tumblr.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
From Judy.
Hey Michael, is this a good opportunity, Jussie Smollett's false attack, for our sports players to let go of the disrespect for the American flag and the people who have sacrificed to give us freedom?
Seems like much, not all, of recent acts of racism and homophobia are false, but widely believed due to the dissemination on the part of the media.
An astute and excellent observation, and yes, this is what we would call a teachable moment.
Because so much of the hatred, the wild anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism that we see all around us is based not even on people's skewed moral landscapes, though that's part of it, but on just flat-out historical falsehoods.
If the mainstream left-wing narrative about America were true, then America would be a pretty terrible place, wouldn't it?
If America were a country that were founded simply to benefit one minority group of people defined by their physical characteristics, not at all based on ideas, not at all based on a transcendent moral order,
not at all based on liberty or self-government or veneration or our tradition that has allowed so many freedoms, so much equality, such justice, If it were just based on an illusion, on deception, on slavery and misery, yeah, this would be a terrible place, wouldn't it?
If America were responsible for all of the misery around the world, instead of, as it really is, responsible for greater alleviation of that misery than any other political force in history, If it were really that bad, then it would be a terrible place.
And I think a lot of the idiots, I don't like to call people names, but let's just call them ignoramuses, in the National Football League, who are kneeling for the flag, are doing so because they don't know anything.
And it's not just that they don't know anything, it's that they know so many things that aren't so.
That's what Mark Twain said, it's not what you know that gets you in trouble, or not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for sure that isn't so.
And the left, the NFL players, the Antifa protesters, the administration of these universities, they just know for certain so many things that aren't so.
And I think if we could show them this Jussie Smollett incident and say, look, here you knew for sure, you believed, as this guy said with pure certainty, that he was attacked by By these racist bigots and half the country hates black people and it's a bigoted place and it's a dangerous place.
That wasn't true and that is not true.
It's a lie.
It's a lie being told by cynical people trying to divide and destroy the country and they're trying to deceive you.
If we can take this moment and just shake some people and say, look, it isn't true.
I know you still believe the narrative, but the narrative is being exposed as false.
That would go a long way, and I think it would correct a lot of this behavior.
If people find out that the narrative is false, the disrespect will likely fall away.
From Daryl.
Dear Sir Maddow, do you believe God can forgive suicide?
Thanks.
Love the show.
A fan in Ireland.
Of course, God can forgive whatever God wants to forgive.
Suicide is a grave and terrible evil.
It is an unqualified evil.
It is horrific, and it deserves eternal punishment in hell.
Dante, when he describes people who have committed suicide, he puts them in hell, having cast off their bodies.
And at the resurrection of the body, they will not get their bodies back.
Because they cast it away.
There's actually a great poem.
I'm going to look this up right now.
This is a wonderful poem by a formalist poet named A.M. Jooster.
And A.M. Jooster wrote this poem about suicide that I just read the other day.
It's a short poem and it tells you everything you should know.
The poem goes like this.
No.
No, not this time.
I cannot celebrate a man's discarded life and will not try.
These knee-jerk elegies perpetuate the nightshade lies of class.
Why glorify dissenting to a solipsistic hell?
Stop.
Softly curse the waste.
Don't elevate his suffering to genius.
Never tell me he will live on.
Never call it fate.
Attend the service.
Mourn.
Pray.
Comfort those he lacerated.
Keep him in your heart, but use that grief to teach.
When you compose a line, it is a message, not just art.
Be furious with me, but I refuse to praise him.
No, we have too much to lose.
We have too much to lose by embracing a culture of death, by saying suicide is okay.
Oh, it's okay to end the suffering.
Oh, he was really just a tortured genius.
Jeannie, you're free, as the Academy tweeted out on the suicide of Robin Williams.
That is horrific.
Suicide is an unqualified evil.
That said, people who commit suicide are often not in a stable state of mind.
They're not thinking clearly.
They are not being rational.
And so it is perfectly legitimate to pray for the salvation of people who have committed suicide.
I do it all the time.
Friends who have killed themselves.
I regularly pray for them and we can have hope of their salvation because their being out of their right mind mitigates some of the moral gravity and some of the culpability for committing that grave sin.
The sin remains horrifically and unqualifiedly evil.
But we can hope for the salvation of those souls, and we should be very clear and very cautious and very careful as we make that distinction.
from Brendan.
Mr. Covfefe, what is your view on marijuana legalization?
Brendan.
I don't care at all.
I do not care whatsoever.
I basically oppose marijuana legalization, even though I don't care if people smoke pot.
I've smoked pot on a number of occasions in my life.
I don't really like it.
I've I really want to frustrate the political ambitions of people who are obsessed with legalizing drugs.
First of all, why would we?
What good will be accomplished by legalizing pot?
Very few people go to prison for simple possession.
The people who go to prison for simple possession of pot are people who have pled down because they're drug dealers and peddlers of poison during the worst drug epidemic in our nation's history, certainly in modern history.
So I have no care about that sort of thing.
Well, a lot of people smoke pot.
Okay, that's fine.
A lot of people do a lot of illegal things.
A lot of people speed.
Does that mean we shouldn't have a speed limit?
I don't think so.
Well, but, you know, weed is really not any worse than alcohol.
It's actually better for you than alcohol.
Yeah, okay, fine.
Alcohol is not good for you either when you abuse it.
But alcohol has been with our civilization forever.
Christ's first miracle is turning water into very, very good wine for people who have been drunk already for several days.
This has been around our civilization forever.
Why would we introduce something new?
Just doesn't make sense.
It seems like a further sign of an increasingly decadent culture, and there's no reason to encourage that sort of thing.
And also, I'm not a libertarian.
Come Grow up, guys.
Come on.
Come on.
Hey, I'm a cool conservative.
I like pot.
They're not going to like you.
Stop trying to be hip.
You're not hip.
There's nothing hip about being conservative.
From Jesse.
Dear Michael, what is your opinion on media that is sacrilegious?
For example, I've tried to stay away from video games that involve using things like angels as enemies or Jesus pretty much in any way.
I just tend to err on the side of caution and cut certain things out.
But again, curious, your thoughts on the matter.
Thank you for your time.
Well, one of the great modern works, The Screwtape Letters, treats angels and God as the enemy.
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis is a demon writing to his nephew.
Talking about how to confound the enemy, who is God.
Surely you wouldn't disapprove of the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
Paradise Lost treats hell as heaven, and heaven is hell.
And the main character of Paradise Lost is Satan.
Surely you wouldn't call John Milton unacceptable media.
No.
What matters is context.
If...
If a work of art is presenting sacrilege or presenting blasphemy, Dante presents blasphemy and sacrilege.
If it's presenting it in a broader picture of a larger moral universe or to make a point that is anti-blasphemous, then that's a wonderful thing.
But if it's just some video game where you're gratuitously slaughtering angels, that's probably a bad thing.
And I would stay away from that as well.
As always, what matters is the context.
What matters is the Point of the art.
What matters is the larger artistic realm that is being portrayed.
And so I wouldn't be surprised at all if some video games are gratuitous and wrong, and you should stay away from them.
But don't stay away from Lewis and John Milton.
From Patrick Knowles, can a person believe in God and evolution without contradicting themselves?
Thanks.
Yes, absolutely.
Of course.
It was a Catholic priest who discovered the Big Bang and I don't see any...
I mean, it depends also what you mean by evolution.
There are now so many competing and contradicting theories on how evolution takes place.
We don't really have a good explanation of how a species turns into another species.
There's not a ton of evidence for that.
But we certainly know that genetic mutations take place.
And so keeping an open mind to the various ways in which evolution God has created the creation.
I mean, that just seems to make sense to me.
And cynically citing parts of scripture out of context as a way to disprove some discovery of natural science also seems ridiculous to me.
As Cardinal Baronius said, the scripture tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
From Michael.
Michael, I need your advice.
I'm here to give up.
I'm a 28-year-old former bartender and will graduate this year with a degree in poli-sci and philosophy.
I also live in a congressional district where the current rep has been in office for 22 years.
My advice is about what I should do after school.
I'm leaning toward law school, but I obviously meet the requirements to run for Congress.
What should I do?
Thanks.
Michael, well, I guess you could move to Queens and then you would become instantly the congressional 28-year-old bartender, that's all you need these days.
You could be the darling of the Democrat Party, but I don't think you could be the darling of the Republican Party.
I'm very skeptical of...
People who want to run for office the second that they possibly can without any life experience first.
I think that's a bad idea.
I think it will make you have a bad life.
I once was driving around with a governor.
I won't say which governor.
I won't put him on the spot.
But I was driving around with a governor on the campaign trail.
I was pretty young at the time.
And he said, so, you interested in politics?
And I said, well, I'm driving around with you on the campaign trail.
What do you think?
And he said, well, here's my advice.
Don't run for Congress.
Don't do it.
I said, well, I'm a young, politically interested guy.
That's what everybody wants to do.
He said, do not do it.
When you do it as a young man, you lose your friends, you're constantly just raising money, you don't stand for anything, you don't have any experience, you don't have any perspective, and you leave with nothing but a bad record, because every bill is designed to make it look like you voted for some terrible thing.
That's just the nature of Congress.
What is the point?
Why do you want to run for Congress?
What do you want to do?
What do you think you can accomplish in Congress?
If it's just that you want to start your political career young, do something else first.
I'm not saying don't run.
I think it's a perfectly wonderful thing to run for office for the right reasons, but do something else first.
Law school is a good idea.
Law is a wonderful profession.
But don't just run to try to win a popularity contest or something.
If you really think that you can accomplish something in Congress as a 28-year-old with little experience from your district, okay, I'd be willing to hear that argument, but you'd have to make a pretty convincing case that you can actually accomplish something.
From Nalani.
Hi, Michael.
A leftist tried to argue that America is inherently racist and pointed to the founding fathers.
They claimed they were racist because they owned slaves.
Any help responding?
Lani.
Yeah, tell them that we kill a million babies a year right now.
And the entire culture basically seems fine with it.
Obviously, there's a major pro-life movement, but there were abolitionists among the founding fathers.
There were many of the founding fathers, even those who weren't outright abolitionists, strongly disapproved of slavery.
In fact, they had to reach many compromises in writing the Constitution, or the country never would have been built.
How will history look on us?
A culture that slaughters a million babies a year where elected governors of states call for babies to be killed as they're being born or after they've been born.
Outright post-birth infanticide.
Something tells me that the founding fathers who tolerated for a time the institution of slavery will look far more morally advanced than we will.
Alright, last question.
From Rodolfo.
Hi, Michael.
Easy question, I hope.
A lot of my wife's family converted to some form of Christianity where they're forbidden from drinking alcohol and dancing or listening to music other than religious music.
This seems really bizarre to me because as far as I know, there's no explicit scripture about engaging in these activities.
Can you explain where this comes from and why it's incorrect?
Thanks.
Came for Ben's day for Knowles.
I don't know where it comes from because it is incorrect.
Jesus, as we just said, Christ's first miracle was turning water into wine for drunk people.
Good wine for people who had already been drunk for several days, because at that time, the Jewish wedding ceremonies went on for more than just three hours.
They went on for days at a time.
I don't see anywhere in scripture where you're not allowed to dance, and I certainly don't see anywhere in scripture where it tells you to listen to modern religious music.
I'm pretty sure that's a sin, actually, because that music, that saccharine trash is so awful that I think God is grimacing every time you play one of those insipid, stupid hymns on eagle's wings or with the acoustic guitars or getting a drum kit.
Go do some penance for that.
Go to confession.
What it comes from is people looking at the profundity of the Christian tradition, the profundity of Scripture, looking down, as I've used this image before, looking down a deep, dark well.
But they've got blinders on.
They won't use any They won't take in the grand thoughts of all of the great church fathers, the great doctors of the church, the great Christian leaders, spiritual leaders, thinkers in all of history.
They just have their own narrow ideology.
And so what happens is they look down that well and they see nothing but their own reflection on the surface of the water.
And so it's very easy for people who have a prejudice against or a bias against dancing or booze or Whatever.
Or good music.
And they have a bias against that.
So they say, oh, that's in Scripture.
It's not in Scripture.
It's not in the Christian tradition.
It's coming out of your own head.
That's fine if you want to prevent your friends and family from doing those fun things.
I guess it's your prerogative.
But don't try to put those words in God's mouth.
They aren't there.
Okay, that's our show.
I hope that you're able to tune in tonight at Notre Dame.
We'll have to see what happens.
In the meantime, I'm sure it'll be very wild in any case, and I'll be able to update you tomorrow.
Till then, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about this case of the ISIS bride, the woman who ran off, left America, joined ISIS. Now she wants to come home.
She's learned her lesson, and she wants to come back.
Donald Trump says, nope, can't come home.
Is that the right choice?
We'll talk about that.
Well, it is, by the way, but we'll talk about it.
Also, Jussie Smollett is under arrest, so we'll look at the details, the updates on that story.
And finally, I'm going to explain why Bernie Sanders is a power-hungry, hypocritical, cowardly, morally deranged communist fraud.
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