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March 27, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:08
Ep. 320 - Democrats’ Worst Week Ever Gets Even Worse
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Democrats, already in the throes of their worst week since 1865, now suffer a further indignity.
A federal court has just invalidated Obamacare in its entirety.
Russia collusion is a hoax, Michael Avenatti is headed to prison, and now the last vestige of Barack Obama's legacy is headed for the dustbin of history.
Coincidentally, the New York Times insists this week that an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God is logically impossible.
They make a bad argument, but after a week like this, who could blame the New York Times writers for losing their faith?
All of that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This was basically the New York Times' reaction to finding out that there was no Russian collusion, Donald Trump is fully exonerated.
The headline basically might as well have said, God does not exist.
Fair enough, I understand.
We will examine a very bad opinion piece in the Times by Peter Atterton.
We'll get to that later.
First, we just need to do a little bit of a roundup because I think we're losing some of the good stuff in the craziness of the news cycle.
We found out We found out yesterday, the day before, Robert Mueller files his report and it totally exonerates Donald Trump.
Mueller himself totally exonerates Donald Trump on Russian collusion and then the Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein exonerate Trump totally on the question of obstruction.
Then, at that very same moment, Michael Avenatti, the Democrat celebrity lawyer, Trump antagonist, is arrested for extortion, not 24 hours later.
That all happened.
Then, I was on the air doing Ben's radio show yesterday.
As I'm on the air, there is breaking news.
Apparently unrelated, although there are no coincidences these days, that the world's fastest melting glacier, which is in Greenland, is now growing in size.
It is now gaining ice.
So as all of this is happening, as every aspect of the Democrat narrative over the last two years is cracking and falling apart, at the very same time, global warming falls apart, too.
The example, the main ice glacier example that they're pointing to as evidence of global warming starts growing ice all over again because all nature is but art unknown to thee.
And then, then on top of all of that, A little story comes out.
The DOJ is officially agreeing with a federal court decision in December that invalidates all of Obamacare.
This story is particularly interesting.
You'll probably remember the Supreme Court famously upheld Obamacare on some dubious reasoning.
Now the federal government, the federal court, and the Department of Justice are...
Agreeing that Obamacare is invalid.
This is going to go to an appeals court and we'll see where it goes from there.
And then, and then finally, maybe the best news of the week.
I'm going to have to check to see if we get any updates on this.
Mitch McConnell, cocaine Mitch himself, is ordering a vote in the Senate on the Green New Deal.
Oh, oh, how good this is.
How could anyone doubt the existence of God?
Let's get to Obamacare first.
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How has Obamacare been invalidated?
The news today is the filing of the Department of Justice to side with a federal court judge, Reed O'Connor, who in December invalidated Obamacare.
So now this was a district court.
That means that this issue is going to go up to the appellate court.
You say, I thought we've already adjudicated Obamacare.
I thought Obamacare was already upheld.
Yes, except now circumstances have changed.
Now this decision is going to go up to an appellate court, and it's going up to a very conservative appellate court, so it's going up to the Fifth Circuit, which means very likely this is heading for the Supreme Court again.
What is the argument here?
The argument when Obamacare was upheld, thanks to that traitor John Roberts, is that the individual mandate, you know that you have to pay the penalty when you don't have health insurance under Obamacare, the individual mandate was appropriate to Congress's powers of taxation.
That was the argument to uphold Obamacare.
Now it was even a little more clever than that.
It said, well, the Obamacare mandate is a penalty for the purposes of hearing this case, but it's a tax for the purposes of adjudicating this case, and because it's a tax, it's valid, it's constitutional, and it will be upheld.
Okay.
The argument was always too clever by half.
It was a weak argument.
However, what has changed?
What's changed is that the individual mandate has been repealed.
So we've been a little upset with President Trump because he didn't repeal Obamacare, right?
He said, you said you were going to repeal Obamacare.
You had two years to do it.
You didn't do it.
Well, whose fault was that?
Senators like John McCain, who said they would vote to repeal Obamacare, then ultimately voted not to repeal Obamacare.
Very frustrating.
However, you'll also remember in 2017 we got that tax cut.
We got the tax reform law from the Trump administration.
And what was hidden in that tax law was the repeal of the individual mandate.
Now this seems appropriate because the reason that Obamacare was upheld in the first place is they said that the mandate was a tax.
It wasn't really a tax, it was a penalty.
But by saying it was a tax, then in the tax reform law they get rid of the individual mandate.
Okay, what does that do?
It removes the taxing mechanism of Obamacare.
So it removes the justification for upholding Obamacare as constitutional under Congress's powers to tax.
If Obamacare no longer includes a tax, then the chief justification for upholding Obamacare goes away.
Now, the individual mandate is essential to the law.
It's inseparable.
The mandate is the mechanism of the law.
You have to make sure that everybody buys insurance or the law falls apart.
So now what is going to happen?
Now the argument for Obamacare is under the Interstate Commerce Clause or something like that.
The argument to uphold Obamacare is no longer taxation.
They'll say, well, it's regulating interstate commerce.
But first of all, it would have to be regulating interstate commerce that the government mandates, which is highly dubious.
But does that argument hold up once you get rid of the taxation?
No.
So the DOJ has now pounced, to use the language of the mainstream media, they see an opening here, they see that this is headed for a conservative-leaning appellate court, and they're going in with a brand new argument, and you could see, down the line, we're not going to see it anytime soon, the overturning of Obamacare.
The adjudication that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
And it's only Tuesday.
We got the Mueller report on Friday.
We got news that there were no new indictments, which means the Russian investigation was just done on Friday.
Then on Sunday we got the letter from A.G. Barr saying that Trump was exonerated on everything.
Then on Monday we got news that Michael Avenatti got arrested.
And then on Tuesday we get news that Obamacare might finally be declared unconstitutional, years after it was wrongly declared constitutional.
How can this week get any better?
How can it possibly get any better?
Now, we're still having fun.
I told you yesterday, I said we should have fun, we should celebrate, then we should be furious.
We're still having fun.
Look, the prospect of losing Obamacare in its entirety is really, really great.
But we do have a reckoning coming.
There is a reckoning.
We should start moving toward the reckoning.
The reckoning is in two parts.
Just like the Russian interference was in two parts, just like the scandal of the Russian collusion hoax investigation had two parts, the reckoning has two parts too, the media and the politics.
Some people in the conservative wing say that we need to just move on.
Just move on.
No more investigations.
We've had enough.
Come on.
Don't be a bigger man.
Be a better person.
Just take the high road.
There is nothing moral about just moving on.
There is nothing on the high road about just moving on.
This is not water under the bridge.
It would be very wrong to just move on because they haven't apologized.
And they are just going to do it again.
All these people who lied through their teeth, people who were entrusted with the federal government, people who had the public trust, people who had the public trust as members of the media, lied.
They didn't just get it wrong.
They lied through their teeth.
And they are totally unapologetic about it, and they will do it again.
Here is what we've seen for the last two years.
Breaking news.
A bombshell.
Today is a turning point.
Today was historically bad for President Trump.
Today was a turning point.
A turning point.
We're at a turning point here.
The beginning of the end for the Trump presidency.
We have another bombshell.
Mike Pence might have to assume the office of the presidency.
Rumblings of the word impeachment.
Breaking news.
Another bombshell out of the White House.
I believe this is the beginning of the end.
It's really the beginning of the end.
He may be feeling the walls closing in on him.
All the walls closing in on him.
The walls closing in on him.
Breaking news, a new bombshell.
One astrologer says this means the beginning of the end for President Donald Trump.
Trump will resign.
Trump is going to resign.
Is this the tipping point?
I know we've said it over and over.
So we've heard that for two years.
Do we think that we're going to get apologies for this now?
Do we think that we're going to get them admitting that they were totally wrong?
Do we think that we're going to get some self-reflection from them?
No, absolutely not.
What we're getting is a doubling down.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Collusion, collusion, collusion.
I sound like Maxine Waters.
Walls are closing in.
The noose is tightening.
Donald Trump's going to jail.
Don Jr.'s going to jail.
Jared Kushner's going to jail.
It's all happening.
It's all Russian collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion.
It's not just that we are mocking them for their bad reporting.
It's that we are fighting a battle of the truth against pure propaganda.
And the propaganda has a lot of institutional support.
Because for all of this bunk, garbage, totally fictitious reporting, It's not just that these guys were on your airwaves and printing your newspapers.
They won awards for it.
The New York Times and the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for publishing lies.
Here is for their Russian collusion reporting...
The New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes, the highest prize in journalism, for, quote, Well, I can give you all the understanding you need of Russian interference as it relates to the Trump campaign.
There, I did it.
Did you catch it?
I'll do it again.
Ready?
That's it.
That's going to be my next book.
All of the evidence of the Russian interference and collusion with the Trump campaign.
That won them a Pulitzer Prize.
And this is why it's so important to go after these guys with everything we've got.
To bring more investigations, to bring them before judges, and to put them into orange jumpsuits.
Because it's not just a bunch of idiots on CNN. It's not just Jim Acosta.
It's not just Ron Burgundy on CNN. It is a conspiracy.
I don't know how else to put it.
Is it a conspiracy when it's true?
We know that the federal government and the Democrats and the media conspired together to push a lie.
We know that for a fact.
Who exactly committed what improprieties is the next question.
That's what we'll find out with investigations.
We know that for a fact.
With such institutional support, all of the print media, all of the mainstream media, the Pulitzer Prizes, all of the accolades of this popular culture, all the way down to our pillars of government, the DOJ, the FBI, all the way down to the longest continually extant political party, the Democrat Party.
All the way down to the Barack Obama administration spying on his political opponents, trying to prevent the Republicans from winning the next election.
All of these institutions working together to subvert the rule of law and to lie and to push lies through their teeth.
It would be so wrong to just let this go as water under the bridge.
The Washington Post bragged when they won that Pulitzer Prize that its reporting, quote, helped set the stage for the special counsel's ongoing investigation of the administration.
They're bragging that they set up a hoax, sham investigation.
Now they're unapologetic.
And do you know the CNN president, Jeff Zucker, came out.
Did he say, whoops, we got it wrong.
We got it dead wrong.
We got it wrong for two years.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
No, this is what he said.
He said, quote, we are not investigators.
We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.
That sounds like a line from Dr.
Strangelove.
That sounds like the punchline of an SNL sketch.
We're not investigators.
We're journalists.
There's no fighting here.
This is the war room.
That's what he's saying.
There's no investigating here.
This is a newsroom.
What an amazing statement.
I don't think Jeff Zucker is an idiot, so I think he's just trolling us at this point.
We are not investigators.
We are journalists.
And our role is to report the facts as we know them.
How do you know the facts?
The way you know the facts is that the Democrat Party sends you talking points and you spout them shamelessly.
The way you're supposed to know facts is to investigate.
Journalism requires investigation.
Reporting requires investigation.
I suppose, broadly speaking, an opinion writer is a journalist, a commentator is a journalist.
They have to do some investigating.
They have to do a little research.
They have to have coherent arguments based on sound premises and evidence.
You have none of that, and you're proud of it.
You're joking about that.
You say, no, no, no, we're investigators.
We have the facts, but you don't need to investigate the facts.
It's like AOC. Listen, it doesn't matter if you're factually correct as long as you're morally right.
That's what we're saying.
That's what CNN is saying.
Wholly unapologetic.
Now they are denying their jobs as journalists.
This is what we were talking about yesterday.
All the various responses to this.
This is the example of gaslighting.
So we did a good job.
We did our job.
Oh, you thought, okay, I see.
You thought that because we're news reporters that we're supposed to investigate the news.
No, no, I get it.
I was a misunderstanding.
No, we just say whatever we want to say.
We say our truth.
I mean, that's basically what he's saying.
He's saying, our role is to report the facts as we know them.
But you have to know them first.
And you can't know them if you don't investigate.
What he's really saying is, our role is to report our truth.
You can't...
You don't know our truth.
Who are you to say what our truth is?
We're CNN. Bananas.
Apples.
Remember that stupid commercial they use?
This is an apple.
This is a banana.
We're real news.
We're bananas here at CNN. And in this statement, he's saying, no, no, it doesn't matter.
It's just our truth.
Our truth is what...
Bananas.
We love bananas.
Bunch of bananas over at CNN. Wholly unapologetic.
Now they're denying it.
So I found this.
This came from the New York Post yesterday.
I hope that you've got your brackets.
This is Mueller madness.
There's Mueller madness right there in the center.
There's Bob Mueller's head.
And then you've got all the brackets.
Okay, so we've got the cable news bracket.
We've got the network news bracket.
We've got the print news over here.
We've got the Twitterati over here.
And so then they go head to head.
You've got Rachel Maddow and Anna Navarro.
You've got John Oliver and Donnie Deutsch.
Morning Joe versus John Brennan.
We'll get to John Brennan in a second.
Former CIA director.
Now he's basically just a flack on CNN. Don Lemon and Chris Hayes.
So they're going to go head-to-head.
Who's going to win between Don Lemon and Chris Hayes?
Don Lemon said the walls are closing in on Trump.
But Chris Hayes said a cornered president storms out as the Mueller probe closes in.
Then they're going to go head-to-head.
And these are four segments, distinct segments of people.
And it's very telling, by the way, that John Brennan is in the cable news segment because these guys are all working together.
I mean, that's what's so damaging about this.
That's what's so corrupt about how this whole hoax investigation started.
It wasn't just the Democrats funding some oppo research.
If it were the Democrats funding some oppo research, whatever.
Republicans fund oppo research, that's what it is.
It's that the Democrats funded oppo research, and then the oppo research firm used a foreign intelligence contact who had ties to the U.S. intelligence agencies.
And the U.S. DOJ had ties to the OPPO research firm.
not just loose ties, ties of marriage that were never disclosed as a conflict of interest.
And then once the Democrats paid for that oppo research using the foreign intelligence, then they tipped off the federal government and the federal government used that bought and paid for oppo research to launch an investigation to surveil the Trump campaign.
And then once they did that, other people within the federal government handed it off to the media because they're all in bed together.
And then the media created a ton of public pressure and hysteria based on nothing.
That then pressured the federal government and the politicians to launch an even greater investigation that gave us two years of lies that were then parroted again and again and again by the mainstream media.
791 consecutive days for an average of three minutes a night spreading a lie.
A whole investigation.
And they're still spreading lies.
And they're still unapologetic.
That's what's so corrupt about it.
If it were just one segment, you could isolate it.
If it were just CNN, you'd say, okay, you're a bunch of clowns.
Tune them out.
If it were just the federal government, you could fire the crooks.
If it were just the electeds, you know, they're electeds.
You vote them out of office.
But it's not.
It's this sick cabal working together.
That's the problem.
That's why we need the investigation.
John Brennan.
Is he a cable news talking head or is he former CIA director?
I don't know.
He certainly never should have been the CIA director.
Now he just goes on as a flack for Democrats.
He said that Donald Trump, quote, is wholly in the pocket of Putin.
Not mincing words.
Not just making an insinuation or implying something.
He says Trump, quote, is wholly in the pocket of Putin.
Now, here's how he explains himself.
I'm just curious, Mr.
Director, how surprised were you by the findings yesterday, by the conclusions that were drawn?
And I'm just curious, did you receive bad information throughout this process, like so many of us did, that there was more there than ended up in the report regarding collusion?
Well, I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected that there was more than there actually was.
And I am relieved that there has been determined that there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.
I think that is good news for the country.
And so I still point to things that were done publicly or efforts to try to have conversations with the Russians that were inappropriate.
But I'm not all that surprised that the high bar of criminal conspiracy was not met.
I am surprised at that second part of the instruction of justice in terms of how it came out.
I don't know whether or not Bob Mueller wanted the Attorney General to pronounce on that issue or whether or not Bob Mueller felt that it would be best for Congress to the American people to determine Whether the weight of the information indicates that Donald Trump did try to obstruct justice.
So there are some surprises there, and that's why I think getting to the full Mueller report is the best way to get some of these, if not all of these questions.
First of all, that last part he said is just BS. That's just total BS. To say that I don't know if Robert Mueller wanted the Attorney General to pronounce on the question of obstruction of justice.
He certainly did want Barr to pronounce on the question of obstruction of justice.
That's the only possible outcome that could have happened when Bob Mueller did not come to a conclusion.
So Bob Mueller is analyzing obstruction of justice and he presents arguments for both sides.
He doesn't complete his homework assignment.
He turns it in.
The AG has to come to a conclusion because There's a potential crime here.
If the AG just said, well, I don't know, I don't know, he wouldn't be doing his job.
Because let's say Donald Trump did obstruct justice.
Then they would have to go after him.
Let's say members of the Trump administration did obstruct justice.
They would have to indict them.
The AG has a job.
The AG is not a cable commentator.
The AG is not a pundit.
The AG has a job to do, to enforce the law.
So Bob Mueller, by leaving that open for his boss, whose job it is to come to the conclusions, he is saying, you have to come to the conclusion because I am not going to do it.
So that's just BS. And then he said, well, yeah, you know, I'm all glad.
Glad that Russia didn't take over our country.
But I still stand by a lot of what I said.
You said Trump is wholly in the pocket of Putin.
That was a lie.
That was obviously not true.
Apologize.
Or shut up.
That's fine.
If you don't want to apologize and you get everything completely wrong, then shut up.
Because your opinion is worth nothing.
And your judgment is worth nothing.
And you have no humility at all even to admit that.
But he can't shut up.
So we might want to play into that a little bit.
That's fine.
If he doesn't want to shut up, maybe we should bring him in for some investigations.
Maybe we should find out what his role was in all of this.
Maybe we should find out what John Brennan knew.
Maybe we should find out what the intelligence agencies knew during the Obama administration when they launched these illegal...
This illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign.
Maybe we should find out who was talking to whom.
That sounds like a good idea.
John Brennan doesn't want to shut up?
Fine.
Run your mouth, buddy.
Run your mouth all the way into an orange jumpsuit.
Or at least tell us what we need to know to figure out who was behind this major political scandal so that we can get to the bottom of this and have some justice.
Not water under the bridge.
Not, oh, too bad.
They're going to do it again.
They're still trying to do it.
And there needs to be consequences to show them that they can't get away with these sort of things.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got Lindsey Grahambo coming out for a new investigation.
We've got a pretty dumb article in the New York Times, and we've got the Green New Deal.
But first, go to dailywire.com.
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We'll be right back.
Pacific Time, 10 p.m.
Eastern Time at the University of Redlands, I will be harvesting delicious leftist tears.
If there are any left to be cried out during my latest speech on my Young America's Foundation tour, come on out, bring a friend, bring some questions, and as always, bring your empty tumblers.
It is going to be a very fun night.
So, the media aspect takes care of itself.
These guys are a bunch of schmucks.
They got it completely wrong.
They have no credibility.
We shouldn't listen to a word they say.
All we need to do is tune them out.
The people we need to investigate are the current and ex-government officials who perpetrated this hoax, who perpetrated this crime.
We need to investigate them immediately.
Lindsey Graham Bowe agrees with me.
What makes no sense to me...
As all the abuse by the Department of Justice and the FBI, the unprofessional conduct, the shady behavior, nobody seems to think that's much important.
Well, that's going to change, I hope.
I've been calling since the end of 2017 for a special counsel to be appointed to look at whether or not the FISA warrant process was abused for political purposes.
Whether or not a counterintelligence investigation was opened up regarding the Trump campaign as a backdoor to spy on the campaign.
That's what we need to know.
We need to know it.
I'm glad that Grambo is coming out there and calling for it.
That's what we need.
I know we say we're done with the investigations.
It's so tedious.
I know it is.
I know.
That's the hard work of government.
That's the hard work of politics.
And we've just got to do it.
Now, speaking of the hard work of government, some of the lighter and more fun side of this.
Mitch McConnell, Cocaine Mitch, is currently, it may have already happened, calling for a vote for the Green New Deal.
This is what he said.
I'll try to do it in my best Cocaine Mitch voice.
I could not be more glad that the...
No.
Nope.
Sort of like Cocaine.
That's what I imagine when I see Cocaine Mitch.
It's just, say hello to my little...
But this is what he said.
He said, quote...
I could not be more glad that the American people will have the opportunity to learn precisely where each one of their senators stands on the Green New Deal, a radical, top-down, socialist makeover of the entire U.S. economy.
And then you know he had that little cocaine smirk right there at the end because I just love him so much.
So, the Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialist from New York.
It would ban planes, trains, and automobiles over 88% of the American energy industry.
Obviously, because of that, on day one, it would kill 5.8 million jobs.
But because it's taking out the energy industry, it would take away all of the other jobs.
Shortly thereafter, it calls to knock down every building in the country and then rebuild every building in the country within 10 years.
That's just the beginning.
I could go on about this.
I'll probably be speaking about this at the University of Redlands this evening.
Okay.
Cocaine Mitch says, all right, Alexandria, we'll bring this up for a vote.
When she proposed it, there was a Green New Deal resolution in the Senate, and it was co-sponsored by everybody.
Democrat, who is currently running for president from the Senate, Liz Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, all coming out to say, yes, this is what we want, because they're all running to see who's the craziest radical leftist for 2020.
It's okay.
They're all behind it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this is what she's asking for.
All these senators, this is what they're asking for.
So Cocaine Mitch says, okay, we'll bring it up for a vote.
And do you know what they said?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is furious.
This just broke.
I'll just read it straight from the breaking news articles.
She said, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, Mitch McConnell doesn't want to save our planet.
He's bringing up her legislation.
He says, Cocaine Mitch thinks, I don't think she called him Cocaine Mitch, but Mitch McConnell thinks, quote, we can all drink oil in 30 years.
What?
No, he's, no, no, no, no, Alexandria, he's bringing up your legislation for a vote.
No, no, it's okay.
No, unless your legislation is going to have us all drinking oil in 30 years.
What Mitch McConnell's doing is that he's trying to rush this bill to the floor without a hearing, without working through committee, because he doesn't want to save our planet.
She is so upset.
Why is she so upset?
Because the Green New Deal is a joke, and everyone knows it's a joke.
Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows it's a joke.
Even her handlers know it's a joke, and every single person in the Senate co-sponsoring it knows it's a joke.
You can't do it.
The price tag is $93 trillion.
You would have to cut off all government spending.
I mean, abolish the military.
Cut off every department of the government, except I guess for the IRS. And then after collecting taxes for 30 years, maybe you could start to pay for it.
Except obviously the economy would crash before then.
It is not serious.
But AOC wrote draft legislation for this thing.
It's their bill that Cocaine Mitch is bringing to the floor.
And what he's doing is calling out their hypocrisy and their childishness.
And they are whining and screaming and crying like children.
This is a great bit.
I mean, I guess Cocaine Mitch had just been waiting for the GOP's greatest week ever because Because you've got, boom, Russia collusion's down.
Boom, Trump is totally exonerated.
Boom, Michael Avenatti's going to jail.
Boom, Obamacare's invalidated.
Boom, the glaciers are growing.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!
Get every single Democrat senator on the record for the Green New Deal.
It's beautiful stuff.
It's going to come back to haunt them in the general election in 2020.
Cocaine Mitch does have a view of the long game.
That's clearly what he's playing here.
This is a really impossible situation.
In politics, you always want to put your opponent in an impossible situation.
And that's exactly what he's doing here.
All of these people who have co-sponsored the Green New Deal draft resolution...
Have to vote for it.
They would be rank hypocrites if they don't vote for the Green New Deal.
If they vote for the Green New Deal, that actually might help them in the primary, though honestly it might not.
Who knows how this primary is going to shape out.
But it is going to kill them in the general election.
Every GOP ad in 2020 is going to be about this stupid thing.
And they're going to be furious at AOC, and this might cut AOC's career short too, which is why she's fighting so strongly against it.
Really, really great stuff.
Before we get out of here, I want to, one, I'd like to thank the good Lord for this wonderful Newsweek that has been so greatly enjoyable and very good for our nation.
But I'd also like to call your attention to the New York Times.
There was an op-ed in the New York Times by Peter Atterton, and the op-ed was called A God Problem.
Perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing, the idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent.
Okay.
If I were the New York Times and I had a week like they just had, I would probably be questioning God's existence too.
But this is really important because virtually every question I get in the mailbag when I go to these speeches is religious in nature.
Either it's religious in a tangential way or it is directly religious.
And it's because you have an entire generation, I guess now two generations, millennials and Zoomers, who were raised without religion.
Who are raised religiously unaffiliated or in some milquetoast quasi-religion, cafeteria Catholic, whatever.
They were raised, even at the most religious, they were raised with the idea that there is a God without wrath leading a people without sin to a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross, as a theologian who escapes my mind famously said.
Most people I think are attracted to some sense of meaning.
They need meaning.
We have this misery crisis in the country.
Young people are more miserable than they've ever been.
Anxiety, stress, suicidality are all skyrocketing.
Teenage suicide is up 70%.
millennials more than any other generation are looking for purpose in their jobs.
And we kind of joke about this.
We say, shut up and do your job.
Stop trying to make everything about social justice.
But the reason they want that is they don't feel purpose anywhere else in their lives.
They need to feel purpose somewhere.
They need to feel meaning somewhere.
And this crisis is, I think, well, it's obviously caused by the devil ultimately, but what it's caused by in a more proximate way is the lack of education, the lack of culture, and the degradation of not just our universities, and the degradation of not just our universities, but even our journalists, even our news sites.
And this is a prime example of that.
This is a very bad op-ed.
It's not compelling.
It deals in a very shallow way with big ideas.
And it makes a terrible argument against God.
It reminds me of...
When Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and all those guys had that little publishing movement in the mid-2000s, the New Atheists, it was never really a serious philosophical movement, but it was a publishing phenomenon.
And they didn't really make arguments against God, but they wrote books.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a book, God is Not Great.
And the book never took on the question of whether or not God is great.
He just pointed out that religious groups have done bad things at some points throughout history.
And this was heralded as some great, great mind, some great work, some real powerful thoughts.
This is what we're seeing here.
And stupid things like this encourage people in their delusions that life has no meaning.
And it really exacerbates the problem.
So I just want to go through very quickly some of the stupid ideas in this short column and point out how dumb they are.
Because it's very fun to do that as well with the New York Times.
So...
The column begins, if you look up God in a dictionary, first of all, you know, people, when you are writing or when you are giving a speech or a eulogy or a toast, the worst way that you can possibly begin is...
When I looked up such and such in the dictionary, it said blah, blah, blah.
But to me, it means so much more.
Or to this, Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines, I mean, this is the cliche worst way to begin a piece of writing or an oration.
So no wonder it ends up in the New York Times.
That's just a little bit of advice for you if you're ever giving a best man toast or a eulogy or something.
Don't do that.
Okay, if you look up God in a dictionary, the first entry you will find will be something along the lines of, quote, a being believed to be infinitely perfect, wise, and powerful creator and ruler of the universe.
Okay.
Certainly, if applied to non-Western contexts, that would be puzzling.
But in a Western context, this is how philosophers have understood God.
The question, does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense?
Does it hold together when we examine it logically?
Yes, yes.
So you could just stop the article there, but let's go on to see what he thinks.
Let's consider the attribute of omnipotence.
You've probably heard the paradox of the stone before.
Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted?
If he can create such a stone, then he's not all-powerful since he cannot lift it.
On the other hand, if he cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then he is not all-powerful since he cannot create the unliftable stone.
Either way, God is not all-powerful.
So this is something that when freshmen students in college smoke pot during their first semester and sit around at night.
They think this is really profound.
They think this is a really powerful motive.
What is actually written there is more semantically similar to, doesn't really mean anything.
Now he acknowledges that in a sense.
He acknowledges that God cannot do self-contradictory things, as Thomas Aquinas acknowledged.
But he says other people believe that God can do self-contradictory things.
Rene Descartes thinks this.
Now, what this author doesn't write is that actually Muslims think this as well.
Pope Benedict, channeling Ibn Hazim, the Muslim scholar, talks about this.
How the difference between the God of Christianity and the God of Islam is that the God of Christianity is a God of intellect and will.
Perfect intellect and perfect will.
Whereas the God of Islam is all will.
Allah is so utterly willful that if Allah willed for you to worship idols, You would have to worship idols.
Even though this is self-contradictory.
He doesn't go there because that's politically incorrect.
So he says, but Rene Descartes thought that Thomas Aquinas was wrong.
You're like, okay, yeah, I don't know.
Joe Blow down the street thinks that Thomas Aquinas is wrong too, but Joe Blow's a dummy.
So, okay.
He kind of skips that though.
He kind of, he says, okay, it evidently would be a world very different from the world that we currently inhabit if God could create a world in which evil does not exist.
But it's a possible world all the same.
Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it's difficult to see why he wouldn't have created such a world, so why didn't he?
Okay, so he's saying, why is there evil in the world?
Now this is the only argument against God that really has any strength whatsoever, and actually it ends up being an argument for God.
He points out that according to Alvin Plantinga, a favorite of mine, to create creatures capable of moral good, God must create creatures capable of moral evil.
And he can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil at the same time, preventing them from doing so.
Right.
The reason that Evil exists is because we have freedom.
Now, why would God create a world with freedom if freedom necessitates that evil would exist?
Possibly because that's the greatest possible world.
This is what we sing on Easter.
We say, Results in the fall of man.
It results in all these awful things, but then it wins for us redemption, which is the greatest possible world.
Okay.
And then this guy says, but it doesn't explain, as Darwin noticed, why there's so much pain and suffering in the animal kingdom.
Why there's so much physical suffering caused by non-human causes, like earthquakes or something.
The way John Milton explains this is the way that Paul explains this, which is that the original sin that ruins perfection doesn't just result in one person's free will, That's not how freedom works.
That's not how our actions in the world work.
What happens is that when sin enters the world, sin pervades the world, and death comes from sin.
Evil, all of this is pervading the world.
Your actions are not limited to yourself.
We know this.
If I swing my hand, I could knock over my leftist tears tumbler.
I'd spill the leftist tears all over the ground.
That would seep in.
That would create mold.
Someone might walk into the room and breathe in the mold.
These endless number of effects of my evil, of when I commit a sin, This is actually what the doctrine of indulgences is about.
We don't have time to go into that here, but this is a question that many deeper thinkers than this guy in the New York Times have thought about for a long time.
He goes on, he says, Now, this is not true.
I can know cancer without having experienced cancer.
A doctor knows quite a lot about cancer.
When he's operating on a cancer patient, it doesn't mean he has to have had cancer himself.
One does not need to have experience of these things, to have knowledge of these things.
He goes on, he talks about, well he tries to, he brings this one for a little while, that it doesn't do very well.
And he refers to logical inconsistencies.
He says, Okay, and he's saying because Blaise Pascal rejected reason as the basis for faith, that's wrong.
Blaise Pascal, of course, was a member of a largely heretical Christian movement called Jansenism, which was roundly condemned many times for getting things wrong.
Blaise Pascal, one of the great geniuses, but can get certain things wrong.
I go through this, one, because it's fun to knock down stupid arguments, even if we have very limited time and we can't go into it in as much depth as we would like to.
But I bring this up because this is the point on the media that we've been making all week, now in its most fundamental way.
It's the point that I repeat again and again.
It's the point that Dr.
Johnson made.
All shallows are clear.
Shallow thinking is clear.
Shallow news reporting is clear.
Shallow conspiracies are clear.
Conspiracies are so clear.
It was so clear that Donald Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
To quote John Brennan, it was so clear that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians.
It's so clear that God couldn't exist.
It's so clear.
It's in the New York Times.
Shallows are clear.
And we need to crack ourselves out of shallow thinking.
We need to stop being so damn gullible and falling for it.
I hope people get that lesson, but they don't.
And it's not just on little political scandals.
Big political scandals, which in the grand scheme of things are little.
It's on big questions, fundamental questions too.
We'll see.
Let's hope our eyes are opened.
We've got a lot more.
Come back tomorrow.
Maybe I'll see you at the University of Redlands tonight.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you then.
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.
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, President Trump has the best day of his presidency, maybe in history.
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