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April 11, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:06
Ep. 330 - Assimilation Isn’t Racist

President Obama tells immigrants to learn English, 2020 hopeful Eric Swalwell says he's us, Ilhan Omar says more terrible things, and finally the Mailbag! Date: 04-11-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The president came out swinging on Saturday, describing the need for immigrants to assimilate and learn the language of the countries that they are moving to.
He also explained how there is legitimate fear among native populations over the massive influxes of newcomers.
The only surprising aspect of those statements is that they were not made by President Donald Trump.
They were made by President Barack Obama.
That's a far cry from the open borders policies of the modern Democrat Party.
We will examine what that shift means for the left in 2020.
Then, speaking of 2020, Democrat congressman and presidential candidate Eric Swalwell tweeted out yesterday, I am You.
Which contradicts my previous belief that he was he, and I am me, and we are the walrus.
Goo goo goo joob.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Eric Swalwell, and this is The Eric Swalwell Show.
I'm having a real identity crisis.
This is so difficult with all of these Democrats telling me I am they.
Previously, I was Pedro.
I think I was Beto for a while.
There's a lot of identity crisis.
I'm going to be speaking tonight at the University of Missouri-Kansas City on identity crises, on how men are not women.
We have a lot to get to.
But first, let's make a little money, honey.
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Don't be stupid.
So...
These comments that came out on Saturday from the President are provoking shock, consternation at the xenophobia, the bigotry, the hatefulness, the President of the United States saying that we should force immigrants to our countries to assimilate.
We should encourage them to assimilate.
It is incumbent on them to assimilate to learn the language.
How xenophobic.
Doesn't it sound just like Donald Trump, except it's not Donald Trump.
It is Barack Obama.
Here is him saying it himself.
If you're going to have a coherent, cohesive society, then everybody has to have some agreed-upon rules.
It's, you know, it's not racist to say, ah, if you're going to be here, then you should learn the language of the country that you just arrived at.
That's not racist.
It's actually true.
It's exactly true.
What he is saying is exactly right.
He opens up, he says, should we want to encourage newcomers to learn the language of the country they're moving to?
Of course.
It's not racist to say if you're going to be here, you should learn the language of the country you arrived at.
Of course.
We need to have some sort of common language in which all of us can work and learn and understand each other.
Of course, this is simply natural in a republic such as ours, especially in a republic where you have to govern yourselves.
You need to be able to talk to each other.
And quite literally, you need to share a language.
Even if you don't use words in exactly the same way, even if you don't share opinions, even if you don't share a view of the world, you at least need to have the same words and symbols and language that will allow you to communicate.
Barack Obama makes an even better point.
He says, reducing fear on the part of people who are already there requires some levels of adaptation from the people who are coming in.
There is a legitimate fear.
This is natural.
It's hardwired into us that when a group of people that's very different, culturally very different, has different practices, speaks a different language, when they come in, you're going to have a bit of fear because it's so unknown.
You don't know what they want.
They don't know what you want.
You don't know how to get along together.
You don't know if they're going to try to destroy your traditions or if they're going to adopt them themselves.
Obama says, we are still wired to only be able to process knowing about 150 people in our brains.
He's referring to aspects of evolutionary psychology, the ideas that come out that really we can only keep A small number of people and acquaintances in our heads at any given time, and we really can't expand beyond that.
And so he points out, now suddenly we're in cities with strangers we don't know, and we're asked to trust them, and it goes against some of our impulses.
Yes, this is all right.
Barack Obama's saying this.
This is not just a Democrat, but a very left-wing Democrat.
The most left-wing president we've had, certainly since Woodrow Wilson, Certainly since FDR, I guess.
And in some ways, much more left-wing than they are.
And he's just pointing out the obvious.
So the Daily Caller went out.
They did a man-on-the-street video, and they read Barack Obama's comments to people, and they pretended that they were Donald Trump's comments.
And they said, what do you think?
Do you think that those comments are racist?
These are comments from the president about immigration from this weekend and we're just seeing what people think and you can read it here.
That's most definitely a racist idea.
I don't know what he's doing.
You can just stop what he's doing for real.
It's extremely racist for him to believe that English is the only language that we should know.
I don't agree with that statement that you have to learn English in order to come to this country.
So you're not in favor of any kind of assimilation at all?
No, I'm not.
English isn't even the dominant language in the world.
I'm against the idea of forcing people to learn English or saying that if you don't learn English, you can't get a job here.
Do you think people should adopt any parts of American culture or not really?
No, I really don't.
I think people should be free to live their life wherever they want to live.
Do you think it should be encouraged?
I think that the resources should be made available and accessible to everyone.
Are you in favor of open borders as well?
Yes.
Well, I mean, you should learn the language, but you can't learn it immediately if you don't know it.
Alright, so of all of those people, just that woman at the end, she says, yeah, obviously you should learn the language.
I guess it's kind of hard to learn it, but you should learn it anyway.
Right.
Of course you should.
For two reasons, by the way.
On the one hand, because you should expect to try to accommodate yourself to the culture that you're trying to enter.
Right.
Nobody asked you to come.
Nobody's saying, you have to come over here.
Please, please come.
You wanted to come into this country.
you should have the respect to learn the language and engage in some of their cultural practices and traditions.
Also, if you don't learn the language, you will not have a successful life.
If you come to America and you refuse to learn English or you say, no, you're going to take the advice of this leftist and not learn English, you're going to have a terrible life.
You're not going to be able to get a good job.
You're not going to be able to make strong social connections to your community.
It's just awful advice.
It's that classic road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The left wants to say, hey, you do you.
I don't want to impose my values on you.
But the practical effect of that is that you create a permanent underclass of people who can work only the most difficult and low-paying jobs and who are totally isolated from the community as a whole.
Now, this isn't just a fringe view.
This isn't just people on the street.
This is the mainstream view of the Democrat Party.
Don't assimilate.
Don't learn the language.
Open borders.
Come on over.
Don't pay any respect, not only to traditions, but to laws.
As recently as, what, ten years ago, you had leading Democrats, guys like Chuck Schumer, who were basically saying exactly what Donald Trump is saying on immigration and exactly what Barack Obama is now saying on immigration.
Here's just a cut-up of Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump.
You can barely tell the difference.
The American people want their government to be serious about protecting The public enforcing the rule of law and creating a rational system of legal immigration that will proactively fit our needs rather than reactively responding to future waves of illegal immigration.
But we want an immigration policy that's fair, equitable, but that's going to protect our people.
What the American people are pleading for is sanity and common sense in our immigration system.
So that's it.
Now, now, by the way, Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and all those guys were quite radical in practice on immigration.
In practice, they were encouraging open borders.
Barack Obama gave a recklessly unconstitutional executive amnesty to illegal aliens in the country.
However, in their rhetoric, they were not that radical.
In their rhetoric, they were sort of normal.
And this gets to this line from Rochefoucauld, who famously said, So they might have taken these vicious actions.
They might have had open borders and been encouraging people to come in and not to assimilate.
But at least in their language, at least in their rhetoric, they were paying tribute to the virtue of assimilation, of enforcing the law, of making people wait in line, not letting certain people cut the line just because they're from a country closer by than, say, a would-be American immigrant from Ghana or Nigeria or Southeast Asia.
So...
In the mainstream now, we've gotten rid of even paying tribute to virtue.
Nancy Pelosi is saying that physical borders to protect our national sovereignty are immoral and ineffective.
Of course, that never made any sense.
It could only be one or the other.
If it's ineffective, it's not immoral.
If it's immoral, it's not ineffective.
But to say that it is immoral is to now say We have no right to an immigration regime.
We have no right to expect anything from immigrants who would come to this country.
We have no right to expect, not just that they would learn the language, not just that they would assimilate and take on cultural practices.
We don't even have the right to expect that they would come into our country legally.
We don't even have the right to expect that they would, in their first action in the country, respect a fundamental law.
How do we know this for effect?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she was not even a congresswoman yet, when she was running, she endorsed the policy of abolishing ICE, abolishing immigration and customs enforcement.
A radical policy.
And what happened?
Did the Democrats laugh at her and push her away?
No, they all endorsed her policy.
Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Liz Warren.
These are people who are...
Now, running for president, they all followed suit.
They all endorsed abolishing ICE. Now then, some of them backed off of it.
Kamala Harris is trying to pretend now that she didn't endorse it.
She totally did.
All of those guys did.
We're talking about Senate Democrats.
We're talking about presidential candidates.
A bunch of congressmen followed suit.
The far-left-wing Democrat mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, followed suit.
He said, ICE's time has come and gone.
We can't have enforcement of our immigration laws.
Now, Kirsten Gillibrand...
Doesn't show us very much because she's a completely mediocre candidate who is probably going to be out of the Democrat presidential race before the first debate.
But she's an interesting case study because she had positioned herself for her whole career as a moderate, as a middle-of-the-road or centrist.
We can all work together.
She was trying to position herself like Hillary was in the 2000s, and she was kind of the next Hillary Clinton.
Now she is not only taking a leftward radical turn— She's actually apologizing for all of her old positions.
Here she is at a town hall saying, please forgive me for formerly saying that illegal immigration is a bad thing.
So I think part of what Parker is talking about, obviously, is the dramatic change in your position on this issue over time, right?
From English, obviously, as an official language of the country, not supporting things like benefits for illegal immigrants.
That's part of your record as well.
What made you change?
Well, when I was a member of Congress from upstate New York, I was really focused on the priorities of my district.
When I became senator of the entire state, I recognized that some of my views really did need to change.
They were not thoughtful enough and didn't care enough about people outside of the original upstate New York district that I represented.
And so I learned.
And I think for people who aspire to be president, I think it's really important that you're able to admit when you're wrong and that you're able to grow and learn and listen and be better and be stronger.
This is actually a pretty good answer from her.
It's about as good an answer as she can give.
She's saying, when I held those views, I had local interests that I was representing in the Congress.
But then I became a senator.
And I had broader interests.
Okay, now, the problem with this distinction here, the problem with this excuse, is that even when you're elected to Congress, you're not just being elected to represent some petty, tiny interest.
You're being elected for your judgment, for your judgment to represent a local interest and the national interest.
That's why you're in the federal government.
But she actually corrects this a little bit, too, and I think you're going to be hearing a lot of Democrats giving this same answer.
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So Kirsten Gillibrand, this is her excuse.
She says, well, I represented a local interest, and then I represented a bigger interest, and I changed my views.
That doesn't quite explain it.
Because basically what she's admitting is, I had poor judgment, and I was petty and selfish, and then I became, I don't know, still petty and selfish, but my circumstances changed.
Not a great answer.
So she actually does go further, and she says, yeah, I realized I was wrong.
I was wrong.
She says she was wrong to encourage immigrants to learn English, to encourage immigrants to assimilate, to oppose illegal immigration.
That she was wrong.
I'm sorry.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
That's what she's saying.
How pathetic.
But this is the way that the whole race is going to go.
When you look at these candidates who are like wind...
not windmills, what am I... oh, weathervanes.
When you look at the weathervane candidates, like Kamala Harris is one of them, Kirsten Gillibrand is very much one of them, Beto is one of them, a lot of weathervane candidates out there, the ones who say...
Make me into whatever candidate you want.
Shape me however you want to shape me.
Eric Swalwell, I am you, Eric Swalwell.
For those weathervane candidates, they're telling us which way the party is going.
And it is very clear the wind is all blowing in the direction of open borders and illegal immigration.
And this creates a big problem for Democrats in 2020.
Americans hate illegal immigration.
By the way, Americans hate...
Large-scale legal immigration, too.
There was a study that came out from Harvard Harris at the end of last year.
It showed that the majority of Americans want to radically reduce even the number of legal immigrants coming into this country.
They want to reduce it by over 50%, upwards of 60%, down to about half a million per year.
We're at about 1.2 million per year right now.
So it shows you this isn't just about illegal immigration.
This isn't just about people violating our laws at the border.
There actually are broader questions here of assimilation, learning the language, Integrating people into society so that you don't have permanent underclasses.
So that you don't have people isolating themselves.
Barack Obama gets this.
Barack Obama's talking about that.
That's why he's not just speaking about illegal immigration.
Sometimes President Trump, he only wants to talk about illegal immigration.
And he says, I'm so pro-immigration.
I want more people coming here legally than ever.
It's kind of missing the point.
The point is not just this narrow question of illegal immigration.
Poll after poll shows that immigration broadly, not just illegal aliens, is the number one issue for Americans.
And this creates a big problem for Democrats in 2020 because they've gone so radical on it.
If Barack Obama ran today with his current stated views on immigration, he would not win the Democrat nomination.
He could not say what he said on Saturday at his town hall in Berlin and win the Democrat nomination this year.
It would not happen.
Why have the Democrats gone so radical on this?
They've gone so radical because they are reflexively opposing Trump, which is a bad idea.
In some ways it's a good idea because Donald Trump is personally unlikable to a lot of people.
A lot of people find him personally offensive.
But his policies are very, very popular.
I know you can find some poll, oh no, really, people hate X, Y, and Z provision of the wall, or X, Y, and Z. B.S. They hate the tax law.
Okay, fine, whatever.
What that is reflecting is people's aversion to Donald Trump's personality.
People like his policies, which is why these issues...
Immigration, illegal aliens, the economy, taxation.
That's why they always rank at the top of people's concerns.
Donald Trump knew that.
He knew that when he was running for office.
He's a very smart politician in many ways.
And so he picks these very popular issues and stances that only he is taking that actually oppose the kind of broad political consensus.
And he wins on those issues, not on his personality, on his issues.
And Democrats stupidly say, well, we're going to reflexively oppose Trump because he's personally unlikable.
And so, by opposing him, we're going to oppose all of his issues, which does what?
It backs you into this awful corner where now they've got to defend illegal immigration, they've got to defend not learning English, they've got to defend not assimilating, they've got to defend open borders.
How are they going to be able to defend all of that?
Who is going to vote for them?
They're going to win some plaudits from pundits and hardline activists.
But if Barack Obama today is too conservative to win the Democrat nomination, Barack Obama, then who is going to win it?
Who's going to get that nomination?
And who do they think is going to vote for that person to be President of the United States?
What voters in Wyoming and Pennsylvania and Michigan, Florida, who do they think are going to vote for those people?
It's a...
I think the reason Barack Obama's making these comments is he's trying to open the door for Democrats to moderate on this issue.
Because he's looking down the path and he's saying, this is electoral suicide for them.
The question is, are Democrats going to heed his warning or is Barack Obama old news?
And they're moving on.
They're moving on to some new candidate.
Who are they moving on to?
They're moving on to Eric Swalwell.
And this is sort of just by definition.
Eric Swalwell is a...
Democrat congressman who is a nobody, but he's decided he's running for president this year because everybody's running for president this year.
And Eric Swalwell really is the answer, I think, to this conundrum for Democrats.
Because Eric Swalwell tweeted out yesterday, he said, I am running for president of the United States.
I see you.
I hear you.
I'm for you.
I am you.
He's me.
But, this does solve a problem for Democrats.
Because, right now, none of their candidates are going to be elected president.
There's no chance.
And so, if they keep running on this radical platform.
So, let's say Donald Trump gets re-elected.
Everybody votes for Donald Trump.
If Eric Swalwell is all of us, and one of us is Donald Trump, then that means that Donald Trump is Eric Swalwell.
Which means...
No matter who wins the election, Eric Swalwell becomes president.
Touché, Eric.
Very, very well done.
Now, the slogan itself, pretty bad.
Pretty stupid slogan.
Actually, the most tedious and cliché slogan probably in all of politics is Because it's so on the nose.
I've been saying this now for days.
I've been saying this since he announced he was running.
Eric Swalwell is not a presidential candidate.
He's a parody of a presidential candidate.
If there were a presidential candidate on The Simpsons, if there were a presidential candidate on South Park, it would be Eric Swalwell.
He's taking this fact of campaigning, which is that you need to show that you empathize with people, And he's just putting it so on the nose.
He's saying, I am you.
I am you.
See, I empathize.
It's not believable if you have to say it.
Like, so many things.
If you have to say it, it's probably not true.
The most famous version of this stupid slogan, I'm you, comes from one of the most hilariously awful campaigns in modern political history.
This was from the Tea Party wave.
I believe it was 2010.
Christine O'Donnell was running for the Senate.
There was an accusation out somewhere that she's a witch, and she decided...
First of all, she decided to answer this accusation, which was probably not advisable, but then she decided to answer it with this same awkward, awful slogan, I'm you.
I'm not a witch.
I'm nothing you've heard.
I'm you.
None of us are perfect, but none of us can be happy with what we see all around us.
Politicians who think spending, trading favors, and backroom deals are the ways to stay in office.
I'll go to Washington and do what you'd do.
I'm Christine O'Donnell and I approve this message.
I'm you.
I'm you, and you're a witch, and you're going to cast spells on everybody.
So awkward.
So now Eric Swalwell has two campaign slogans.
He has, I am you, and the other one that he has, he put it in his video and it's on his materials, do good.
I am you, do good.
Because the writers of The Simpsons are the top campaign advisors to Eric Swalwell, I guess.
A parody of a presidential campaign.
Norm MacDonald, the greatest living comedian, had a great tweet on this.
Eric Swalwell tweeted out, he said, I'm running for president, I'm you.
And Norm responds, he says, this is fine news indeed.
It explains my self-loathing.
Bad start for Eric Swalwell.
A really bad start, actually, because we ding Kirsten Gillibrand.
She's a total mediocrity.
She'll probably be out.
She's starting out way better than Eric Swalwell.
Joe Biden's starting out a little bit better.
Beto a little bit better.
You don't want to start out as a joke.
And he's starting out as a joke.
He can't afford to do that, especially as an unknown candidate.
At least if you're a superstar candidate like Joe Biden, you can afford a little bit of being a joke.
You can't do that when you're nobody.
The only impression people have of Swalwell now is that he's a joke.
At least Kirsten Gillibrand is lying low enough to maybe be considered for, I don't know, VP or some position in some Democrat administration.
She's kind of a non-entity.
Swalwell is a punchline.
Hard to imagine where he goes from here.
Where will we go from here?
We have a lot more to get to.
We have got to get to the mailbag, but first, let's say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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We will be right back with the mailbag.
All right. .
We have got much more to get to, but first...
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All right, let's get to the mailbag.
Let's get to the mailbag.
So...
We've got so much more to get to, but we're just going to have to wait.
Maybe I'll talk about it tonight in my speech.
I'm going to be speaking at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
If you are in Kansas City, come on by.
The doors are going to open at 7.30 Central Time.
We are going to try to stream that out.
The speech will start at 8 o'clock Central, so what is that?
6 p.m.
Pacific, 9 p.m.
Eastern.
The topic of discussion tonight is men are not women.
This should not be a crazy topic, but...
Apparently it's the most controversial thing in the world, so come check it out.
On to the mailbag.
From Garland.
Question.
Two questions.
First, what would your ideal humanities department look like in a university?
Second, do you know of any good studies regarding bias in academia?
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, I know of about a million studies regarding bias in academia.
The most important study is just open your own eyes and you can see it pretty clearly.
My ideal humanities department, for the first question, would focus on the core liberal arts.
Things like the classics.
Things like history.
Things like literature.
It would not focus on silly, non-academic fields, pseudo-academic fields, ideological fields like lesbian dance studies.
I don't know.
Women's gender studies.
Race and migration studies.
All of those studies things I would basically get rid of and I would go back to core aspects of the humanities.
Languages.
Art.
Literature.
History.
Those are the things that are really going to form the basis of your education.
And this is important for conservatives, too.
It's not just that we get to spend all our time on our own ideological reading.
We should also go back to those classics.
That is going to form the best education you can get.
As far as these studies go, just a few of them...
There was a poll that came out, 61% of all Americans have a negative view of higher education.
So that means it's not just conservatives, it's not just Republicans.
It's a majority of all Americans.
There was an Oxford study in 2018 that identified significant what they called scholar activism in fields such as sociology and poli-sci, highly politicized fields.
There was a study from Brooklyn College and George Mason University Found that at colleges, liberal professors outnumber conservative professors 12 to 1.
It gets worse.
In certain departments, like history, very important departments, that number rises to 33 to 1.
33 liberal professors for every one conservative professor.
The National Association of Scholars found nearly 40% of top-ranked liberal arts colleges have how many Republican professors?
Give you a guess.
Zero.
Zero.
Forty percent of the top-ranked schools.
Another study of sociology professors found just two percent identify as conservative.
When you add in libertarians, it gets up to four percent.
Eighty-three percent say they are liberal or radical.
And there was a study from Queen's University of Charlotte.
It found that conservative students self-censor during class discussions.
They parrot what their liberal professor's This was backed up.
I think there was another study by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education said exactly the same thing.
A lot of studies to show this.
It's not a conspiracy.
I think everybody knows it.
I think the majority of Americans know it.
And so how do you fix that?
It's not that you're all of a sudden going to get super conservative professors.
You should just stop the liberal indoctrination.
You should stop those ideological majors and ideological pseudo-departments and get back to the classics.
At least then that's one way to rein it in.
From James.
Hi, Michael.
Do you have a favorite passage or phrase from the Bible?
Thanks, James.
Yes, I do.
Leviticus 17.7 This will be a statute for all times.
Also translated as, you shall no longer sacrifice your sacrifices to goat demons after whom you whore.
There's just something about that.
The language is very evocative.
Where is it?
In Exodus, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
That's a good one.
Or is that Deuteronomy?
I don't know.
There are many, many good passages of the Bible.
But broadly speaking, you should read the Bible as a whole.
Actually, I would caution one against You know, in the parable of the prodigal son, that parable has been described as the gospel within the gospel.
John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him might not perish but might have everlasting life.
That's been described as the gospel within the gospel.
There are important passages, but really you've got to take it all together.
What a lot of shallow thinking atheists do when they try to debunk the Bible is they say, ah, but how do you defend this line?
You defend it in the light of All of Revelation, in the light of all Scripture, and in the light of sacred tradition, and in the light of natural law, and in the light of philosophy.
So if we don't take that whole view, we're likely to take ourselves down Shallow paths.
From Logan.
Dear Michael, I've got an audiobook credit for my Audible account.
I need a good American history recommendation or a recommendation on history that leads up to the American Revolution, something along the lines of the great Christopher Columbus or early colonization.
Thank you.
God bless Logan.
Yes, I have two books, both of which will be good on Audible.
If you want Columbus, you should read Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Elliot Morrison, one of the greatest American historians ever, and a fabulous, very long, but fabulous biography of Columbus.
And if you're interested in colonization, say, from the time of the Mayflower and the early United States-American experiment, you should read Nathaniel Philbrick's book, Mayflower.
Fabulous book.
Really good about the voyage on the Mayflower and the early...
Plymouth Colony.
And it's very readable.
Both of those are very readable books, so highly recommended for both of those while you're driving or working out or whatever.
From Sarah.
Hello, Michael.
I go to a lot of baseball games.
I often wear a baseball hat with my long hair tied up in the back.
Is it rude not to take my hat off during the anthem, or is it different for girls?
Love listening to you and Klavan.
Thank you, Sarah.
I'm sorry to tell you this.
You asked the question on etiquette, so I'll give you the answer.
You have to take your baseball cap off.
The rules are different for women and girls.
Women are, generally speaking, permitted to wear hats indoors or in houses of worship or even when the national anthem is playing or the flag is being paraded by.
Except when it's a baseball cap.
Except when it is a unisex cap.
In that case, you are expected to take the hat off when the flag passes by in a parade or when the anthem is playing.
I don't make the rules.
I just enforce them.
Take it up with Emily Post.
From Joel, dapper debonair of The Daily Wire, I come to you with a fashion question, another fashion question, that plagues me whenever a special occasion is upon me.
What is the point of wearing a tie?
They just seem to be upside-down nooses that always want to choke your neck.
I never have to dress formally for my occupation, and when a special event arrives that warrants me wearing one, I always have to look up how to tie a tie on my search engine.
Should this pointless piece of fabric die like powdered wigs?
No!
Learn how to tie a tie.
Act like a man.
What's the matter with you?
Ties are very important.
Where do ties come from?
Ties have a pretty interesting history, actually.
Ties come from Croat migrants.
Why I know this, I don't know.
When Croat migrants came during the Manichaean persecution of 1700 or so years, 1800 years ago, something like that.
I guess 1700 years ago.
They come over into, I guess, what you would call...
Croatia.
And they wore, to identify themselves, handkerchiefs around their necks.
So they called themselves Croats, they called themselves Corvats, and this phrase evolved into cravat.
In Italian, cravatta is what you say for tie.
You wear a cravat, it's a certain type of tie.
When did this become popular in the West?
It became popular during the Thirty Years' War, when Croat mercenaries were used, and the young boy king, Louis XIV, took a liking to this style trend, the cravat, and he started wearing one, and then, like everything Louis XIV did, it became very popular.
Ties tie everything together.
I don't wear one nearly as much as I should.
Highly recommend wearing a tie.
The problem in our society is not that we're too casual.
That is definitely not the problem.
The problem in our society is we're, or I'm sorry, the problem is that we're too casual.
The problem is not that we're too formal.
We are too casual.
We're too casual in our speech.
We're too casual in our conversation.
We're too casual in our dress.
We're too casual in our dancing, in our singing, in our attire.
Tie it all together.
Act like a man.
Be civilized.
Wear a tie.
From Norman.
Hi, Michael.
According to his latest book, Ben seems to think that the very essence of paganism is polytheism.
Thus, for him, the Greek philosopher's discovery of a single unmoved mover and cosmic telos were an escape from the pagan worldview.
Dante, however, famously kept the pagan philosophers out of paradise because, regardless of their heady intellectual knowledge, they still needed conversion through Christ.
Who is right?
Who is right?
Ben or Dante?
Dante, buddy.
And if Dante, what is it that philosophical pagans still lack that makes them not fully converted to a Judeo-Christian worldview?
Thanks, Norm.
Okay, a lot here in this question, but it's a very, very good question.
So, what Ben is saying in his book is, paganism is polytheism.
And then the Greeks, like Plato or Aristotle, think of the unmoved mover, the cosmic telos, this idea of a single god.
And this escapes them from the pagan worldview.
Except Dante doesn't put them in paradise.
He puts them in hell.
This is sort of true.
He actually puts the Greek philosophers, the virtuous pagans, broadly speaking, which included Saladin, a Muslim, it included some Romans, he puts them in the first circle of hell, but it's really just sort of fine.
It's sort of nice.
It's called the Elysian Fields.
And he puts them there not to punish them for their transgressions.
He puts them there because they don't have hope.
They're pagans.
They don't have hope of the resurrection.
They don't have the hope of Christianity.
And actually, you use the phrase Judeo-Christian worldview here.
That's a very apt phrase because Dante doesn't put the Jews in hell.
Why doesn't Dante put the Jews in hell?
He doesn't put the Jews in hell because the Jews are a messianic people.
They are awaiting the coming of the Messiah.
They have hope.
But the pagans and the Romans, by definition, do not have hope.
So even if they can recognize the unmoved mover, the cosmic telos, whatever, they recognize these important intellectual aspects of God.
They lack a living faith.
They lack hope.
And so, through their own ideas, they preclude themselves from paradise.
That's the difference there.
And...
Fortunately, those who have a messianic religion do have hope.
From Scott.
Hello, Michael.
My two questions for you.
First, do you think the left wants to be like the book 1984 and Animal Farm with how they are controlling the government and media?
Second, do you think the left wants to bring segregation back with intersectionality?
Thank you and keep doing great work.
Big fan of you and The Daily Wire.
Yes, yes, yes.
Is that clear enough that they want to do all of those things?
Yeah, they do.
Of course they do.
What do you mean?
Do they want to bring 1984 an animal farm?
Do they want to have a centralized power associated with the government that controls you?
Yes.
Not just controls you as a mechanism of politics, but controls you even in your thought, but controls you even in your culture, but controls what you can say, what controls your personal behavior, controls your personal opinions.
Yes.
They're openly advocating for that.
They're openly advocating for that.
Now, do they want to bring segregation back with intersectionality?
Yes.
I mean, they are literally doing that.
They are literally segregating campuses and giving black students black-only dorm rooms, black-only study areas.
That is obviously what they're doing.
They might say, we're doing it for the best of intentions.
Okay, maybe you are.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I'm sure people had good intentions when they were segregating the country 50 years ago.
I'm sure people had good intentions when they were advocating for totalitarian systems.
Sure.
We judge others on their actions.
We judge ourselves on our intentions.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Alright, I've got to go finish writing my speech.
Come on out tonight.
It's going to be a lot of fun at University of Missouri-Kansas City.
We will analyze the most controversial...
Deep, difficult question of our age.
Are men women?
Come check it out then.
In the meantime, I'm Eric Swalwell.
This is The Eric Swalwell Show.
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, Pope Benedict has emerged...
From seclusion to discuss the sex abuse crisis.
And he has some insights that are true, but also pretty startling.
And we'll talk about that.
Also, according to a recent report, Google has a running blacklist.
And you'll never guess who's on it.
We'll discuss.
Also, we'll talk about black holes and the Lion King and biblical end times prophecies.
There's a lot to cover on the show today.
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