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April 25, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:47
Ep. 338 - Joe Biden Is A Shameless Liar

Joe Biden is in, and according to Morning Consult he opens with an 8-point lead, not just over his Democrat opponents, but over President Trump himself! We will analyze how 2020 stands. Then, the Mailbag! Date: 04-25-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Joe Biden is in, and according to Morning Consult, he opens with an eight-point lead, not just over Bernie Sanders, not just over the Democrats, but over President Trump himself.
We will analyze how that shameless liar, Joe Biden, stands in 2020.
Then the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Huge poll numbers for Joel Biden.
Nobody, I think, expected this on his first day.
We expected it to be a big day.
But according to Morning Consult and Politico, there was a poll just over the last week of a little under 2,000 registered voters.
He is now leading President Trump by eight points.
This is a significant edge over Trump among key demographics.
17 points over women.
17 points over Trump with women voters.
22 points with millennials.
10 points with independents.
We will get into how he stands and we'll get into his shameless, lying, despicable announcement video.
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What a great day for Joe Biden.
What a fabulous open.
A lot of people who have been Biden skeptics say that Joe Biden's best day is going to be his first day.
Maybe that's true.
If that's the case, then he's got a long way to fall before he's having a bad day.
This is really good.
Among Democrats right now, Joe Biden has about 30 percent.
The number two candidate in the race is Bernie Sanders with 24%.
But that six-point lead is even higher in the early states.
Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, he's got a lead of about 34 to 26.
He's got more like an eight-point lead there.
Also important for Joe Biden.
You've got 21, 22 candidates in the race right now.
Joe Biden is the number one choice for 30% of registered Democrats, but he's the number two choice for basically everybody.
For supporters of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and others, Joe Biden is the number two pick.
So if it comes down to it and people have to pick and some of their number one candidates fall out, Joe Biden right now is poised to pick up all of those votes.
The coalition right now is older, it's more racially diverse, and it's more likely to identify as moderate.
You might be surprised by that.
I think a lot of people on the left want to pretend that Bernie Sanders has the racially diverse coalition, that Bernie Sanders is bringing in all these more radical people who are less moderate, less racist, less old white guys than Joe Biden.
That's not true.
Joe Biden has the more racially diverse coalition.
The only downside for Joe Biden right now is that his net favorability has taken a five-point hit since January.
So in January, it was the first time stories came out that he might run.
His net favorability is down.
Now 40% of Democrat likely voters have a positive view of him.
That's about the same as Bernie Sanders and only 14% have a negative view of him.
So the numbers are really strong.
However, you got to remember Hillary Clinton had really good approval numbers too before she got in the race.
Hillary Clinton was the inevitable candidate, inevitable nominee, inevitable future president before she got into the race and And then those approval ratings took a massive hit once she got in.
So what's going to be more telling is how those numbers look a week from now or two weeks from now.
So how did Joe Biden open up his campaign?
He aired about a three and a half minute or so campaign announcement.
This is the very beginning of the announcement.
This is the very first tone that he wants to set for his campaign.
Charlotteville, Virginia is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history.
We know it by heart.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain and alienable rights.
We've heard it so often, it's almost a cliché, but it's who we are.
We haven't always lived up to these ideals.
Jefferson himself didn't, but we have never before walked away from them.
Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years.
It was there in August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open.
Their crazed faces, illuminated by torches, veins bulging and burying the fangs of racism, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 30s.
That's the opening.
Same bile heard across Europe in the 30s.
Anti-Semitic bile.
Donald Trump is a Nazi.
That's the campaign.
That's Joe Biden's opening salvo.
Donald Trump is a Nazi, therefore elect me.
Donald Trump is a Nazi.
The same people who marched for him marched for Hitler in the 1930s.
Never mind, by the way, that the state of Israel named a train station at the Wailing Wall after him.
Never mind, by the way, that Israel is about to name a town after Donald Trump.
Benjamin Netanyahu said that just the other day.
Never mind any of that.
Never mind that this president is the most pro-Israel president in the history of this country.
Never mind that his daughter is a convert to Judaism.
Never mind that his son-in-law, who's a senior advisor, convert to Judaism, or is rather a Jew himself.
No, no, never mind that.
Donald Trump is a Nazi.
That's the opening salvo.
Okay, he's taken a strong punch.
The The problem with this line, he actually, he makes it even more explicit.
So he opens up on Charlottesville, the dark, the torches, this is what we heard in the 30s.
Then he goes for the jugular and explicitly ties Donald Trump to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
And that's when we heard the words of the President of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation.
He said there were, quote, some very fine people on both sides.
Very fine people on both sides?
With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.
That is not true.
That did not happen.
Donald Trump did not say that there were fine people among the neo-Nazis and white nationalists and white supremacists.
That did not happen.
This is one of the most pernicious lies propagated by the fake news mainstream media over the last two years.
I know that you think it happened.
I know.
I sort of thought it happened, too, because I saw the clips that were being played, and then I heard the mainstream media people in their ties and their suits and their serious faces.
So I thought also that Donald Trump called white nationalists and neo-Nazis fine people in Charlottesville.
That is simply a mass delusion propagated by the mainstream media.
Not only did Donald Trump not call white nationalists and neo-Nazis very fine people at Charlottesville, he explicitly condemned them in the same paragraph when he was using the phrase very fine people.
people.
Here is the cut that nobody in the mainstream media is willing to show you.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
They didn't put themselves down as the owner.
And you had some very bad people in that group.
But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
You're changing history, you're changing culture, and you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally, but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?
And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats.
You had a lot of bad people in the other group, too.
This is objectively true.
It is true that there are some race-obsessed activists on the right.
Donald Trump explicitly condemned them.
It's also true that Antifa exists on the left, and they wear their masks and they physically assault people.
Happened to me.
Happens to a lot of speakers all around the country who are conservative.
Happens to a lot of conservative activists.
He never, ever, not once referred to neo-Nazis and white nationalists as fine people.
Now, it's a good attack.
It's completely dishonest.
It's a total abject lie.
But it's been a good attack for two years.
Think about the kind of Stony, cynical dishonesty it takes.
Not just to utter that line.
Not just to rehash that attack.
But to open your presidential campaign on a lie.
To define your presidential campaign by a race-hustling, cynical lie.
That's Joe Biden.
Oh, nice old Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's so genuine.
Joe Biden's, what you see is what you get is Joe Biden.
No.
He's a man who has worked in politics for his entire life.
He's been very successful in politics.
He's been able to maintain power for a very long time.
He is a jaded, cynical, lying, race-hustling politician.
That's his M.O. That's what he does.
He did it to Mitt Romney in 2012.
He's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules.
Unchain Wall Street.
They're going to put you all back in chains.
Going to put you all back in chains.
Mitt Romney is going to put you all back in chains.
By the way, most people in that audience were black.
I assume you knew that, just judging by his rhetoric.
They're going to put you all back in chains.
Joe Biden did this to Mitt Romney.
He did it to Mitt Romney in 2012.
He did it to Donald Trump in 2016, or 2020 now.
He'll do it to you.
If you ever run for office against Joe Biden, he'll call you a neo-Nazi, racist, slaver, bigot.
He'll do it because he's totally dishonest.
The guy is nothing.
The guy is just a big walking simper, like a giant set of teeth.
You know those big giant white teeth that look...
About as artificial as teeth can possibly look, that's Joe Biden.
That's why the attack on him, that he kisses people on the forehead and gives them shoulder rubs, that's why that attack was never going to work, is that's not some secret facet of Joe Biden's political career.
That's the entirety of his political career.
He's just a used car salesman.
He just walks around and says, hey, I love you.
I love you.
I'm so genuine.
I really care about you.
I will say anything you need me to say to get your vote.
I'm Joe Biden.
I'm really concerned.
I really like you.
That's his whole career.
That's all we expect from him.
Now, this is ironic.
It's ironic that he's such a race hustler because Joe Biden made one of the most famously racial comments about Barack Obama that anybody has made, much more than any Republican has made, At the presidential level, he said, quote, while they were running in 2008, I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.
I mean, that storybook, man.
Joe Biden called Barack Obama the first African-American ever, I guess, who is articulate and And bright and clean and a nice looking guy.
Because I guess according to Joe Biden, most black people are inarticulate, stupid, dirty, and ugly.
That's what he said.
The first mainstream African American who's articulate, bright, clean, and nice looking.
Because all those other African Americans are inarticulate and Dumb, dirty, and ugly, according to Joe Biden.
Storybook.
That's storybook, according to Joe Biden.
So how's the kickoff?
Basically a good start.
It's a good start.
And coming out this way with the Charlottesville and Trump's a Nazi, even though it's completely a lie, 100% made-up BS, it's a good first punch because he's attacking really hard.
And the left is so wound up in their hatred of Trump, they want to see someone be a fighter.
This was one of the lines about Donald Trump in 2016.
At least he's a fighter.
At least he punches.
The downside for Joe Biden is he's launching his campaign on an attack ad.
And that doesn't usually work.
When you're running for office, you cannot just tell people not to vote for the other person.
Attack ads work.
Negative ads work.
But you can't only offer that.
You have to offer something positive.
You have to give people a reason to vote for you.
Because if Joe Biden is framing this entire campaign around Donald Trump, if the only question in this campaign is Donald Trump, it's not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden.
It's just, is Donald Trump good or is Donald Trump bad?
Donald Trump's going to win.
Because it's all about Donald Trump.
It's not about you.
Who are you?
Who's Joe Biden?
What do you do?
You're that guy who dropped out of the race in 1988 because you were a plagiarist.
Is that, that was you?
You're the guy who lost in 2008.
You're a loser.
Who's Joe Biden?
You're the guy who was a punchline during the Obama administration.
That's you.
You're the guy who smells people's hair.
Who is Joe Biden?
What does Joe Biden stand for?
Nothing.
Because he's a walking simper.
Nothing.
Because he's just a giant set of dentures with legs on it that goes around and it smells girls' hair with the little nose on top of the dentures.
Thank you.
That's Joe Biden.
Now, it's even worse for him because he's launching an explicitly negative campaign when he's got 21 opponents in the Democrat Party.
So he's running against Trump.
He's showing he can take a swing at Trump.
Okay, yeah, okay, we all agree.
Trump's terrible.
We hate Trump.
Why would we choose you over the 21 other people who are offering us a positive message?
What he's hoping, what he thinks is going to happen is because he has the highest name recognition of anybody in the race, he thinks that he doesn't have to offer a positive message for himself.
He thinks he can ride name recognition and slickness all the way to the nomination.
That's not going to work.
It might work against people like Pete Buttigieg or against people like Kamala Harris who have relatively lower name recognition.
It's not going to work against Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders was almost the 2016 Democrat nominee.
Bernie Sanders is a well-known national figure.
He has nearly 100% name recognition.
Joe Biden can't just ride, we hate Trump, we want an alternative, the only alternative we've ever heard of is Joe Biden, therefore we'll nominate Joe Biden.
We've heard of Bernie Sanders.
Forget all the other candidates.
We've heard of Bernie.
That line of strategy is not going to work against Bernie Sanders.
Now, of course, Donald Trump comes out swinging against Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is not one to back away from a fight.
He answers basically anybody who's ever said anything negative about him.
So here's his attack.
Welcome to the race, Sleepy Joe.
I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign.
It will be nasty.
You will be dealing with people who truly have some very sick and demented ideas.
But if you make it, I will see you at the starting gate.
His way with words is poetic.
So he comes out, a lot of this tweet I like.
I like that he's calling all of the Democrats sick and demented people, which they are.
I like that he's questioning Joe Biden's intelligence.
This is a good attack line against Joe Biden because Joe Biden is not very smart.
He, he did very poorly, went to a low ranked law school and didn't do very well in his class.
He has just been a politician his whole life.
Intelligence is not a prerequisite for politics.
Actually, it's a hindrance in politics.
He's totally gaffe-prone.
He just isn't very smart.
So I think that's a pretty good line of attack.
I like the idea.
It says, I'll see you at the starting gate.
It's reminding people, Joe Biden, you've got to get through this primary first.
You're pretending you're running against me.
You've got to get through 21 other Democrats.
The only thing I question is Sleepy Joe.
Far be it from me to question the nickname master of the world, Donald Trump, the guy who always seems to come up with these solid nicknames.
And why are the nicknames solid?
Crooked Hillary, Little Marco, Lion Ted, all of the others.
The reason they work is because they speak to some visual aspect of the candidate, so So in the case of Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz is not a liar.
Ted Cruz is an extraordinarily honest politician, but he kind of has that look.
He has that look of a sort of politician.
Donald Trump zoomed in on that and he called him a liar and it worked for the primary campaign.
Marco Rubio, I guess relatively he's not very tall, so okay, he goes after that.
Crooked Hillary.
Crooked Hillary was his best one because Crooked Hillary is crooked.
It speaks to something that is really negative, that is really unlikable, that is really unattractive, and it's totally credible in her.
And she also looks crooked.
Sleepy Joe, I don't know about her.
The point he's trying to make is that Donald Trump has very high energy.
Joe Biden has lower energy, which is true.
Donald Trump doesn't appear to be his age, and Joe Biden seems like an old man.
It's kind of the argument that he made about Jeb Bush.
He's basically saying it's low-energy Joe.
The other advantage that sleepy has is that it rhymes with creepy.
So creepy Joe Biden has been a nickname for years now, and he's sort of referring to that, but in an implicit way.
Okay, that's fine.
Still, it's a little bit weak sauce.
Nobody's going to not vote for a man because he's a little sleepy.
Frankly, after all the tumult, all of the craziness in politics of the last two years, people might want a sleepy candidate.
It does often seem to be the case that presidents are the opposite of the presidents who came before them.
So you have...
You have Ronald Reagan.
You start out with Ronald Reagan.
Start out with Jimmy Carter.
I mean, you could take this back however far.
You got Jimmy Carter.
He's this weak guy, timid, pulling away from the world.
He's not very good on camera.
He doesn't seem very strong.
Then you get Ronald Reagan.
You get a movie star who says, I've outlawed the Soviet Union.
The bombs drop in five minutes.
Ronald Reagan, the day he gets into office, the hostages are released from Iran.
Big movement conservative guy.
Then after Reagan you get George H.W. Bush.
He's the establishment wing.
He's the Ivy League guy.
He's the deep state guy.
He's the quiet, reserved New England.
Okay.
Then after him, this totally upright man, you get Bill Clinton, just a degenerate from the South, a derelict who was using his secretary as a human humidor in the Oval Office.
Then after Bill Clinton, you get George W. Bush, good old boy, Christian values.
My favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ because he changed my heart.
You get that guy.
He ran on restoring dignity to the Oval Office.
After George W. Bush, who in his later years was viewed as a cowboy, reckless, going in, American exceptionalism, spreading democracy throughout the whole world, you get Barack Obama.
Barack Obama won that primary because he voted against the Iraq War, unlike Hillary Clinton.
So you get Barack Obama.
He's so much better spoken.
He is less prone to rhetorical gaffes.
He says we're going to pull away from spreading democracy throughout the world.
He is a liberal.
He apologizes for American exceptionalism.
He's the opposite of a cowboy.
And after Obama, you get Trump.
So the question is, can you run against a candidate because he's totally different from you?
I don't think that's a very good strategy.
Now, President Trump is known to shop different taglines, different nicknames, until he comes up with a good one.
I don't think Sleepy Joe is going to be the one that we should land on.
I think we've got to keep workshopping this.
He tried this with Hillary.
First it was No Stamina Hillary, a few other Hillary names, then he landed on Crooked, which was way better.
I think we need to keep workshopping Sleepy Joe and keep going after him.
We've got a lot more to get to, but we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube and another Kingdom fans.
Andrew Klavan's book, based on the popular series, is out now.
It is getting rave reviews.
And I've got to tell you, the audiobook of Another Kingdom is one of the greatest performances of literature I've ever heard.
Whoever did that audiobook deserves an Oscar for it, frankly.
Go over there, get the audio book, or you can get the physical book.
If you haven't picked up a copy, go to Amazon or Barnes& Noble and order one.
Trust me, it's fantastic, and you will be glad that you did.
We will say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Ten bucks a month, hundred dollars for an annual membership.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Walsh show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag coming right up, you get to ask questions backstage, you get another Kingdom podcast, you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
21, 22 Democrat candidates in the race.
Only going to get crazier.
You are going to need the Tumblr.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
I was at Cal State LA the other day.
You remember this?
So I was giving a speech on immigration.
Pretty basic speech outlining facts about immigration that the mainstream media won't tell you, outlining the case for protecting our borders, for building a border wall, outlining the negative...
Behavior associated with illegal immigration, the negatives for the United States, the negatives for illegal immigrants and illegal aliens who come over themselves.
A woman gets up, who I assumed was a student, turns out she's actually a member of the faculty at Cal State LA, and she proceeded to tell me that speech is violence.
I thought she just was making a verbal gaffe.
I thought she couldn't possibly be saying that.
She did.
Here's the exchange.
I also support our protester in the back.
What do you support specifically?
Do you think that anti-immigrant rhetoric is violent free speech?
Yes, because of the reasons I'm talking about.
You think that speech is violence?
No, I think that the conversation that you're having is oppressive.
So I am oppressing people by what I'm doing.
I am exerting violence on people by my speech.
That's what the sign says, and that's what you just said.
And the protester is saying that's exactly what I'm doing, and she's saying that's exactly what her sign means.
So that means that you, a faculty member at an American public university paid for by taxpayer dollars, are conflating speech with violence.
Yes.
Speech can be violent.
What you are saying contributes to systemic racism in this country.
I've been to art school for eight years.
I understand liberal arts extremely well.
I am an artist, and I fully understand...
I don't think you do.
I'm sure you've been to art school for eight years, but you do not understand the liberal arts.
It's popping up a sign which says, disrupting speech is fascism.
No, no, no.
The sign says anti...
Oh, that one.
Disrupting speech.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You understand?
Yes.
These people who are yelling are disrupting my speech, and I agree it's fascism.
You are disrupting it.
You're interrupting me, and I think that you need to look up violence in the dictionary or expand your idea of violence.
So guess what I did?
I looked up violence in the dictionary.
I have the definition right there.
Violence, a noun.
Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
I looked it up in the dictionary.
If that professor that I was speaking to has a different dictionary, I'm more than happy to read it.
She can send it over here.
But what it looks like is that she's completely wrong and I'm completely right.
And it's very consequential that she's wrong and I'm right because I'm not even a professor at a university.
She is.
And she's saying that speech is violence.
Why is this so important?
Because the university consists in speech.
We read words at the university.
We have professors give lectures.
We go to seminars.
We discuss ideas.
We start with premises in speech and then we analyze them and we come to conclusions and we explore different concepts.
The left wants to shut down speech at universities.
They want to hollow out the essence of liberal education itself.
But how can they do that?
The only way the left can do that is with violence.
That's the only way you can really shut somebody up in the end.
You need to threaten them with violence or you need to physically assault them.
Now, the left brings violence to the table because they have no arguments.
The right brings speeches to the table.
Speeches, debates, and arguments.
So how can the left justify using violence to shut down speech?
The only way they can do it is by redefining speech as violence.
Because the way it looks now, when these left-wingers show up to conservative speeches and physically assault us and threaten us and shout us down, they are the aggressors.
And we are being victimized.
But they can't have it look that way.
So instead, what they need to do is say, no, no, no.
It's not that you're giving a speech and then I'm responding violently.
It's that you are instigating the violence.
You, by your very speech, are committing violence on me and I am simply defending myself.
That's their argument.
When I punch you in the face unprovoked, I'm actually the victim because you've committed violence on me with your speech.
I wonder how many kids these days Still hear the expression, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Do kids say that anymore?
They said that when I was growing up.
You go up to your parents and you say, Johnny was mean to me.
Johnny said I'm no good.
Your parents say, well, son, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
I don't think they say that anymore.
I think what these professors at universities are saying is, Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words will also hurt you.
So if somebody says something you don't like, you should throw a stone at them and hit them with a stick.
That's what she's saying.
She is hollowing out.
She is undermining the essence of liberal education itself.
If you live in LA, your tax dollars are paying her salary.
And I can't imagine she's the only one.
Actually, she's not.
There was another professor I spoke to at this same event who said the same thing, speech is violence.
How many professors think that?
Major scandal.
This is a major scandal.
And there needs to be some disciplinary action for professors who would conflate the two.
Because it crumbles the entire university itself.
A lot more to get to, but we don't have time, so we're going to go to the mailbag.
From your fish.
You're a fish.
This is from the Twitter account, MyPetFish.
There are a lot of fake Daily Wire Twitter accounts, like Jeremy Boring's beard and, I don't know, a bunch of different fake Twitter accounts, and one of them is Michael Knowles' Pet Goldfish.
So this is from MyFish, I suppose.
Dear Michael...
I need spiritual help.
I'm so depressed.
Very few things make me happy.
I often find myself struggling to find reasons to continue on to the next day.
I do go see a psychologist, psychiatrist weekly, and I'm on a daily antidepressant medication, but nothing seems to be helping me anymore.
My family and church leaders just tell me to get over it.
I don't know what else to do or where else to turn.
Do you know of any religious resources that might be able to help me improve?
Thanks.
Sincerely, Your Pet Fish.
Sorry to hear that, Fish.
It seems to me, if you're going to see a psychologist and a psychiatrist, that's good.
If the psychologist and psychiatrist are not helping, you should get a new psychologist and psychiatrist.
I know multiple people who have been helped by their psychologists.
I know many more people who have not been.
And I think it's because very often today psychologists, or really psychiatrists, are just glorified drug dealers who don't ever treat the actual problems.
They're just giving you a...
Prescription for some antidepressant drugs.
And by the way, you're not alone.
The entire country is extremely depressed.
One in six Americans is on antidepressant drugs.
One in 20 American teenagers between 12 and 17 are on antidepressant drugs.
When people get on these drugs, they remain on them for a very long period of time.
Diagnoses of anxiety, depression, stress are way, way up.
Teen suicide is way, way up, 70%.
This is a major epidemic that cannot simply be explained by people.
Psychiatry.
They cannot simply be explained as a medical condition.
There seems to be a philosophical problem here as well.
So what I would recommend is, if the psychologist or psychiatrist you're seeing is good, stick with them.
If not, go get a new one.
You should make sure to be in consultation with doctors who can treat the medical side of it, whatever it is.
There is also a philosophical and a $200 meals every night and everybody's at some beach in the Caribbean every day because we are seeing all around us only the highlight reel of people's lives.
And especially if you find yourself as someone who is on the internet most of the time rather than in the real world, you will get a completely warped view of what the real world is really like.
Now, another side of this is our society has lost the sense of suffering.
We think suffering is evil.
We think suffering is bad.
Suffering is not evil or bad at all.
Suffering is morally neutral.
The only moral question is our reaction to suffering.
St.
Paul writes about this.
St.
Paul says, I rejoice in my suffering for I am making up in my flesh that for you that which is lacking in the suffering of Christ, in the cross of Christ.
That suffering has a sanctifying quality.
This is the old expression that you hear old Catholics sometimes say.
They say, kiss it up to God.
Oh, you're hurting?
Kiss it up to God.
There's real wisdom in this.
The great saints of history all suffered immensely.
Suffering is a fact of existence.
You can react to suffering with self-pity, or with blandness, or with apathy, or with lethargy, or you can accept suffering as a cross to bear.
Take up your cross.
Just that mental switch, just that switch in perception, I have found has gotten me through difficult periods of time.
We don't allow for grief.
We don't allow for those feelings.
The other thing, then, is in this society that we're in, I think we very often convince ourselves nothing really matters.
We're all just sort of atoms floating around, bags of chemicals.
Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Oh, we're all going to just turn to worm food someday.
It doesn't really matter.
There's no moral law.
It doesn't matter if I get out of bed in the morning.
It does.
God exists.
God created you.
You have a purpose.
There will be a final accounting.
You will be held to account for what you did for the life that you were given, that you did not create, that you do not exactly deserve, that was given to you freely as a gift.
This is why sloth is a sin.
We think about sins, we focus on sexual sins or sins of wrath and anger.
Sloth is a sin too.
You only have a certain number of minutes in this world.
You have to make sure you use them in a way that is respectful and grateful for the gift that you've been given.
This society that we're in right now is so radically skeptical.
We are taught that you have to doubt everything.
We should just doubt every single thing.
We can't be certain of anything.
That's the exact opposite way to look at the world.
Cardinal Newman wrote about this.
John Henry Newman, one of the great thinkers in all of history, wrote about this in the idea of the university.
About how our education system is exactly backwards.
We have this idea that action follows from belief.
That's not true.
Belief follows from action.
We are active creatures.
We live in time and space.
We do things.
We're on the move.
We're not just brains floating in the air where there's no stakes, there's no urgency.
We are actors in this great comedy of the world.
And when you lose that sense of purpose, it's easy to fall into a sort of despair.
What is despair?
It means the absence of hope.
What is your hope?
What are we hopeful for?
In this culture, we're hopeful for nothing.
We're optimistic.
We pretend to be hopeful.
We say, oh, well, you know, let's be happy and I'm happy and let's self-love and let's affirm ourselves and let's just be happy.
Who are you trying to convince?
You can't be happy.
You can't be happy because you want to be happy.
Happiness is a fleeting feeling.
Joy is real.
Joy is not always happy.
Joy comes from hope, which is the opposite of despair.
And what is hope?
It's a theological virtue.
Faith, hope, and charity.
Faith, hope, and love.
If you find that you're pitying yourself, it's not that you should think less of yourself.
You should think of yourself less.
Go do something outside of yourself.
Especially in the real world, not on the internet.
The internet is a bad place for this sort of despair, and I have no doubt that the rise of the internet and the rise of social media are in part to blame for this widespread epidemic of despair throughout the country.
We could go on about this for a long time, but I hope that begins to help young fish.
From Veronica.
Hey, Mikey Poo.
How many electoral votes would California lose if the number were based on legal citizens versus total population?
Shouldn't the electoral votes reflect the number of voters anyway?
Am I totally wrong about how this works?
Thanks.
This is a great point.
This is why there's now a battle over the U.S. Census.
So, at various points we've asked on the census whether you're a citizen or not.
Democrats don't like this.
Currently, that question is not on the census.
Republicans want to put it back on.
The Trump administration wants to put it back on.
The left is challenging this.
It went up to the Supreme Court, and in oral arguments, the court's conservatives seem to suggest that they would allow the question to go back on the census.
It looks like it'll be a 5-4 decision.
Now, the argument from the left is that the primary purpose of the census is to count the number of people, not the number of citizens.
So we shouldn't ask that question.
Now, that's true, but we ask plenty of other questions on the census.
We ask questions about sex.
We ask questions about race and ethnicity.
We ask all sorts of questions.
So if we take out the citizenship question, certainly we should take out all those other questions.
If we don't take out all these other questions, I think it's very clear that That while the primary purpose might be to count the number of people, there are many other purposes as well.
What this comes down to is a battle over immigration.
It comes back to immigration again.
Because illegal immigrants are already giving an unfair advantage to Democrats.
Why is that?
Because they tend to be in blue places.
They artificially inflate the population in those places.
And then as seats are allocated in Congress, Democrats get greater representation.
Now, that's very unfair.
That's a bug of our Constitution.
It's a bug of our immigration system.
I imagine that when the framers were writing our Constitution, they did not expect that there would be tens of millions of illegal aliens living in the country, radically changing our representation.
As a matter of fact, in the Constitution, they leave Native Americans out of those counts because they're a separate nation.
They are foreign nationals.
Well that's certainly the case for the foreign nationals who enter our country illegally and reside here.
It does give an unfair advantage to Democrats.
It's why this census battle is going to be so important.
Hopefully the Supreme Court stays strong.
Hey Michael, I'm starting a summer internship in a lab at the end of this month.
The current lab intern has been training me to do the job all month, and I've developed a huge crush on her.
The only issue is that she's moving back home post-graduation while I've still got another year of school.
Should I still go for it and tell her I like her?
Thanks, Anonymous, just in case she listens to your show.
All the cute girls listen to my show, so that's good that you used Anonymous.
Absolutely.
Of course.
Turn off this program and go do it right now.
Why not?
She's cute.
You like her.
You've got some things in common.
You've got to kiss the girl.
Go do it.
What are you talking about?
You're a young guy.
Go have fun.
From Alec.
Hey, Michael.
What is the origin of the idea of purgatory?
And is it biblically based?
Love the show.
Yes.
Very good question.
Most people don't understand purgatory, which makes it difficult to understand literature.
Lots of, obviously, Dante or Shakespeare makes it very difficult to understand so many of these references in our culture.
Purgatory is biblical.
Like the Trinity...
It's not explicitly named in the Bible.
The Trinity is not explicitly named in the Bible, but the Trinity is very biblical.
We can easily deduce the Trinity, and we can easily deduce purgatory.
Purgatory is purification to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.
So it's a purification.
It's very different from hell, which is punishment for the damned.
Purgatory is a sanctification, a purification to achieve the perfection that will get you into heaven and the holiness.
What is the biblical basis for this?
Matthew refers to the sinner who will, quote, not be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come.
So, what we can deduce from this is that it is logically possible to be forgiven in this age or in the age to come.
We know we can be forgiven in this age, but what does it look like to be forgiven in the age to come?
To be forgiven in the age to come implies that there is something other than eternal torment that That also involves a purification or a need for forgiveness or an imperfection.
St.
Paul does this as well.
St.
Paul discusses what happens when a righteous man is judged and the righteous man fails the trial, fails the test.
He says in the first letter to the Corinthians, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
So this is the explicit imagery of the fire of purgatory.
If he's a righteous man, but his works fail the test, he will suffer loss.
He will be saved.
He will only be saved as though through fire.
We see this in Maccabees.
There are prayers for the dead in Maccabees, meaning that there is some hope for the dead who are not yet in paradise, not yet in perfection.
For those people who wanted to get rid of purgatory, who wanted to deny the existence of purgatory, in the 16th century, they just got rid of the book of Maccabees from the Bible.
Just because Maccabees was so clear about this that they had to erase it in order to help them erase purgatory.
We also see in Revelation, we know that nothing unclean will enter the presence of God in heaven.
We know in Hebrews that it is appointed for men to die once and that after that death comes the judgment, though there is another judgment at the end of time when Christ returns.
That is the general judgment.
And we hear Christ say in Luke, I tell you, you will never get out till you have paid the very last copper.
That there is some purification, there is some period between...
A judgment between death and getting out.
How do you get out if there's an unbridgeable gulf between heaven and hell?
This is purgatory.
And this goes back very far.
We know that Monica, St.
Monica, the mother of St.
Augustine, the author of The City of God, asked her son in the 4th century to remember her soul in the masses.
Why would she ask her son to remember her soul, her son the Bishop of Hippo?
Bishop, what is he?
Augustine?
Yeah.
Gosh, I'm like getting totally confused.
She asks her son to remember her soul because she doubts that her soul will be in heaven.
That there's something where her soul might very well be.
So, anyway, there are a lot of attestations of purgatory in the Bible, in scripture, in the church tradition, and I think...
It would be much better if people would be open to these questions because when one takes a purely narrow, rigid, literal view of pieces of scripture, you lose so much of the faith, you lose the trinity itself.
But when you are open to what is clearly there, though not always spelled out in exactly the words you want it to be spelled out in, you open yourself up to the truth and the magnitude of the faith.
All right, that's all we have time for.
We've got a lot more to get to, but unfortunately, we just don't have time.
So, I will see you on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
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 Ulvera.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Joe Biden jumps into the race and we break it all down.
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