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April 29, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:08
Ep. 339 - How Odd Of God

A neo-Nazi attacks a synagogue on Passover, politicians politicize the tragedy, and Avengers is awful. We will examine how this tragedy happened, and why our culture no longer knows how to talk about tragedy. Date: 04-29-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A neo-Nazi attacks a synagogue on Passover, politicians politicize the tragedy, and Avengers Endgame is awful.
We will examine how the tragedy in San Diego happened and why our culture no longer knows how to talk about tragedy.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Awful tragedy that happened on the last day of Passover at a synagogue in San Diego.
It could have been a lot worse than it was.
There were a lot of things that happened, providential and personal, that came into play that prevented this from being a massacre.
Nevertheless, obviously, just an awful thing to happen at an awful time.
And we will examine why awful things happen, how to respond to them, and how even to talk about them.
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This attack in San Diego is a clear example of anti-Semitism.
I don't use that phrase willy-nilly.
I don't use the word racism willy-nilly.
I don't use bigotry willy-nilly.
The left has taken these phrases, watered them down to not mean very much.
But this attack was caused by a guy who vehemently and irrationally hates Jews.
And it gets to a bigger question, the question of theodicy.
It even, it reminded me, there's an old Clara Hugh poem that says, How odd of God to choose the Jews.
And this is considered a poetic jive at Jewish people.
And the rejoinder to that was, Not odd of God, goyim annoyim.
And then the more profound response to that was, But not so odd as those who choose a Jewish God yet spurn the Jews.
And that's what you see in what happened with this 19-year-old guy who went in and tried to shoot up this synagogue.
What happened exactly?
In San Diego, at this synagogue shooting, you saw the interaction of two distinct elements.
You saw providence and you saw preparedness.
It's the only way to describe how this tragedy didn't become an even bigger massacre.
You have a 19-year-old white supremacist come in there with an AR-15 rifle and shoot up this synagogue.
He killed one woman.
He wounded three people, including the rabbi.
The woman who was killed was 60-year-old Lori Kay.
And she wasn't killed accidentally.
She gave up her life to shield the rabbi from bullets.
The rabbi apparently was trying to get the children out of the synagogue.
This woman was a wife and a mother, and she gave up her life to save the rabbi and to save these children.
So this shooter comes in.
He's got sunglasses on.
The rabbi couldn't see his eyes.
He says he couldn't see into his soul.
And the shooter squares up on the rabbi with the rifle, pulls off a round, and misses.
He goes wide.
He ends up shooting off the rabbi's finger when the rabbi went and lifted up his hands.
Then squares up, gets a better aim on the rabbi, pulls the trigger, doesn't fire.
The gun jams.
Guns jam.
Modern guns jam less than some older guns.
What are the odds that this gun would have jammed after he'd only gotten off a relatively small number of rounds?
Hard to imagine.
Hard to imagine the odds of that.
He gets one round off and it misses.
These guns are very easy to aim, but he misses the rabbi, and then he pulls it again and the thing jams.
At this point, at this point of unmistakable providence, A combat veteran and an off-duty border patrol agent comes out and starts running and yelling at the shooter, and he's got his own gun on him.
And then this coward, this little gutless sociopath, runs out of the synagogue.
He can't stand up to a real guy with a gun.
No, no, he thought he had a soft target.
Then this combat veteran comes up with his gun, and the guy goes running.
Now, the combat veteran was able to hit the shooter's vehicle, wasn't able to hit the shooter himself.
The central story here, this guy could have slaughtered that whole synagogue if not for an off-duty border patrol agent, combat veteran, and Providence.
Those two things.
If his gun hadn't jammed, eventually he would have fixed the jam or he would have thrown in a new magazine.
And if this good guy with a gun were not here, we wouldn't be talking about one killed, three wounded.
We'd be talking about a slaughter at this synagogue.
Providence and preparedness.
So how are politicians reacting to this?
Ilhan Omar tweets out, famously anti-Semitic congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweets out, Love is the answer, love is the way, and yes, less gun.
Hashtag, no more thoughts and prayers.
Is there any better way to describe the left in 2019 than the statement, no more thoughts and prayers?
That's it.
That sums up the entire left-wing agenda.
No more thoughts, no more prayers.
That's what they do.
Notice, not a terribly specific statement, is it?
Love is the answer, love is the way, and no more guns, less guns.
What are you talking about?
If that off-duty border patrol agent hadn't been permitted to carry a gun, the whole synagogue would have been massacred.
The whole thing would have been shot up.
It doesn't make any sense.
And by the way, this was expected.
The rabbi apparently was so afraid of an attack on his synagogue that he asked that off-duty border patrol agent to carry a gun.
When this guy started to come back into his Jewish faith, he asked him to please carry a gun.
I think the rabbi got a permit to carry a gun, though he didn't have one on him at the time.
And fortunately, he prevented what could have been much wider killing.
No more prayers.
No more prayers is what she says.
Prayer is the central issue.
The shooter attacked these people while they were praying.
The shooter attacked these people on a holy day that celebrates God's gift to the Jewish people of escaping from Egypt, of leaving Egypt and becoming their own nation, free nation.
The shooter hated those prayers.
These shooters who go in hate prayers.
When you come out against prayers, as some people are doing on the left and in politics, you've lost the narrative.
To oppose thoughts and prayers tells you the whole story.
Now, after this tragedy, President Trump calls the rabbi of the synagogue, Rabbi Yisrael Goldstein, and he explains his gratitude for receiving this phone call.
I received a personal phone call from our President Donald Trump.
I was amazed to answer the phone and say the Secretary of the White House was calling and he spent close to 10-15 minutes with me on the phone.
It's the first time I've ever spoken to a President of the United States of America.
He shared with me condolences on behalf of the United States of America and we spoke about the moment of silence and he spoke about his love of peace and Judaism and Israel and he was just so comforting that I'm really grateful to our president for taking the time and making that effort to share with us his comfort and consolation.
I've noticed this among a lot of my Orthodox Jewish friends, just anecdotally, is they tend to really like Donald Trump.
For a few reasons, Donald Trump has the most moral clarity on the question of Israel-Palestine of any president in modern American history.
This is why Israel named a train station after him.
This is why they're naming a town after him now.
Trump also is clearly, I think, the most pro-Jewish president ever in American history.
He's the most nearly Jewish president himself.
He's got a daughter who's a convert to Judaism, and he's got a son-in-law who is an Orthodox Jew.
This is apparently one of the reasons why the shooter hates Trump.
The question is, why did he do it?
Why did this 19-year-old kid become radicalized and go in and shoot up a synagogue?
Sometimes people say, who cares their motivations?
Don't read the manifesto.
Don't read the notes.
Don't figure out why he did it.
He's a lunatic.
He's a crazy person.
It should be dismissed, and he shouldn't get any publicity.
Okay, I'm sympathetic to some of those arguments, but unless you confront the motivations of You're going to have a harder time preventing these things in the future.
You're going to have a harder time refuting these arguments.
Because this guy wasn't just some lunatic.
There's no reason to believe that he has a mental illness or that he's completely insane.
He had a perverse ideology, has a perverse understanding of history and theology and philosophy.
So why did he do it?
The first thing to know, this is a total copycat of New Zealand.
It's a total copycat of that New Zealand shooting, not just in the act of it, but in the manifesto.
I read the manifesto.
It looks exactly like it.
It's a copycat of actually not just the document, but the reasons to.
So this guy, the shooter, opens up his manifesto, which was available online.
I don't know if you can still find it.
He opens it up talking about ancestry and race and blood.
It's the first paragraph or two paragraphs of this thing.
I'm proud of my ancestry.
I'm proud of the blood that goes through my veins.
I'm a descendant of this person and I have his blood running through me and that's what matters.
Now, he later tries to justify these crimes with culture and religion.
But you'll notice he doesn't open up the manifesto on culture or religion.
He says later in the manifesto that he's a devout Protestant Christian.
You don't see that in the first paragraph, do you?
No, he gives away the whole game.
He is interested in race.
Everything else that goes on top of this racial reason is window dressing.
Everything on top of racial bigotry is a distraction from the core question.
So why does he hate the Jews?
Because he blames the Jews for everything that has ever gone wrong.
He blames the Jews for pornography.
He blames the Jews for political revolutions.
He blames the Jews for everything.
Genocide, slavery.
He also says this is payback for the Jews killing Christ.
He puts that in one of the paragraphs of his manifesto, which means he probably missed the point of the gospel story.
You know, we just celebrated Easter a week ago, and...
The crucifixion of Christ is where Christ conquers death and redeems mankind.
So this is why you sing on Easter Sunday, Christians sing, And they're talking about not just the crucifixion, all the way back to the original sin of Adam.
It's a way to view the crucifixion as not just this very sad moment, But this triumph over death on the cross, to view even that original sin as not this sad, awful tragedy that has no happy ending, but as a tragedy that actually wins for us a wonderful victory, that actually turns a tragedy into a comedy.
He doesn't seem to understand that, this kid.
And like this New Zealand shooter, this guy in San Diego clearly spent an inordinate amount of time on the internet, in the deepest bowels of the internet.
He dedicates the shooting and the manifesto to all these anonymous people on internet message boards.
He uses internet-y language.
Sometimes he tells jokes that are ironic, so if you're not familiar with this kind of language, you won't really understand exactly what he's saying.
A lot of in-references.
And then he gets to the direct copycat of that New Zealand Shooters Manifesto, which is he does a little interview with himself to explain his political views.
So his first question is, are you a Trump supporter?
His response, you mean that Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-white, traitorous expletive?
Don't make me laugh.
So he hates Trump, calls him a traitor, And he hates Trump because Trump doesn't hate the Jews.
We've heard now for weeks, well really for two years, but the mainstream media certainly for the past few weeks have been calling Trump a neo-Nazi, saying that he called neo-Nazis very fine people.
Clearly the neo-Nazis don't think that Donald Trump likes them very much.
I mean the stated reason why he hates Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is not a neo-Nazi, that Donald Trump doesn't like neo-Nazis, that Donald Trump is too nice to the Jews.
He then asks himself, are you affiliated with any political ideology?
He says, yes, it's called not wanting to go extinct.
So this is the same exact ideology that the New Zealand shooter was talking about.
It's this idea that white people are about to disappear and they're all gone and it's this massive conspiracy by any number of people.
It's either the Muslims' fault or the Jews' fault or these people's fault.
But it's never your own fault, by the way.
Nobody ever takes responsibility for your own problems.
No, no.
It's always somebody else's fault.
And then finally he says, are you a conservative?
And this guy says, I'm not a useless, spineless coward, so no.
I'm not a conservative.
Conservative is a misnomer.
They conserve nothing.
So he hates Donald Trump.
He hates conservatives.
And his only political ideology is essentially racial.
Notice here, he's not really talking very much about his religious views.
He's talking about race.
Now, you can read the rest of this manifesto if you want.
It's just boilerplate, shallow, white supremacist ideology, so I wouldn't waste your time, but if you want to, you can probably find it online.
Immediately in the wake of these things, anything that you do is considered politicizing the tragedy.
Almost any way that you can respond, other than saying we're praying for the victims and we're praying for everybody involved, is considered politicizing the tragedy.
And both sides accuse each other of politicizing the tragedy.
And generally speaking, politicizing the tragedy is mostly nonsense.
Why is that?
Because what is politics?
Politics is just the way that you and I interact with each other in civil society.
Politics is the way that we all get along underneath the same government.
So virtually any way you respond could be accused of politicizing a tragedy.
It's the same kind of phrase when you hear people say, we can't legislate morality.
That's another one of these mostly meaningless phrases.
Listen, I just believe we shouldn't legislate morality.
All legislation touches on some aspect of morality.
The law exists to codify some aspect of the moral law.
This is obviously true of healthcare.
All the arguments for healthcare are, it's evil to let people die in the streets.
It's evil to not let certain people go get medical treatment for free.
It's evil not to pay for people's cosmetic surgery.
It's all moral arguments.
This is true even of taxes.
The arguments for raising taxes are, it's wrong, it's unfair, you're not paying your fair share.
Or, conversely, we need to lower taxes because I have a right to my liberty.
I have a right to my property.
It's my natural right from the natural law.
This is morality, baby.
Every aspect of the law has to do with morality.
And almost any interaction that we have each other in some way touches on politics.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't inappropriate ways to respond to a tragedy.
There are appropriate ways and there are inappropriate ways.
And one of them, by the way, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's.
So she tweets out right, right after this happens, quote, heartbroken to hear of the San Diego synagogue shooting, particularly so on this final day of Passover.
We have a responsibility to love, to protect our neighbors.
The longer the Senate delay is holding a vote on HR eight, the more we put Americans at risk.
What?
Heartbroken to hear about this.
We should protect our neighbors.
If you don't vote for the very specific gun control legislation that I want you to vote for, you are basically responsible for shooting up a synagogue.
That's an inappropriate way to respond to a tragedy.
Inappropriate way to respond to a shooting.
In part because it's just not true.
H.R. 8 is some more gun control legislation to expand background checks.
No evidence whatsoever that this would have prevented this shooter from getting a gun.
No evidence whatsoever that this would have prevented any of the other mass shootings that we have seen in recent years.
So we ask ourselves, how could we have prevented this shooting?
How could we have stopped this?
More gun control?
No.
There's no evidence that any major gun control law that's been proposed would have stopped any of these things.
How about if law enforcement had somehow caught this guy earlier?
I guess that would have stopped it, but how would they have caught the guy?
The guy who did it had no prior contact with law enforcement.
The guy before that, before the shooting happened, he was basically a model citizen.
He wasn't arrested.
He didn't have any priors.
Well, maybe if we were able to catch mental illnesses earlier.
Again, there's no evidence this guy has a mental illness.
When you read that manifesto, it's perverse, but it's not insane.
It's a perverse ideology that he's following down to its own logical conclusions.
But it's not the ravings of a lunatic.
It's the ravings of a bigot who's filled with hatred, who becomes violent.
None of those precautions would have prevented this shooting or any other.
None of them.
Fortunately, the shooting was prevented from becoming much, much worse.
One person dead.
It's a tragedy.
It's less tragic than had the entire congregation been killed.
How was that prevented?
Providence and preparedness.
a gun jamming at exactly the right time, and a guy who was carrying a gun.
The greatest, most obvious evidence that gun control would not have prevented the shooting.
More gun control may have made the shooting a lot worse.
What does it all boil down to?
It's hard for us to accept that evil exists.
How odd of God.
How odd of God that in this creation of ours, there's evil and And it's not just evil and suffering for people who make bad decisions.
It's evil and suffering for innocent people.
One of the people who was shot at this synagogue was a little girl, was shot in the leg.
I think she was eight years old.
This 60-year-old woman gave her life to save her rabbi.
Totally innocent.
Another man, that little girl's uncle, shot.
Innocent.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Why does a little kid get leukemia?
How odd of God.
How do we accept tragedy?
The reason that we can't have a coherent political conversation about this...
Actually, we can't have a coherent cultural conversation about this.
We can't have a coherent cultural conversation because we cannot have a coherent religious conversation.
It's not just that there are attacks on synagogues.
Obviously, there was the attack on the mosque in New Zealand.
Obviously, there have been countless attacks and desecrations of churches throughout France and throughout the West.
There was another attack that just occurred on a Protestant church in Africa.
Five people killed.
Including the pastor of that church.
There is an attack broadly on religion.
And it's really too bad because the only way that we can understand this tragedy...
Is religion.
This is the question.
We live in a fallen world, and all we want to do is perfect it.
All we want to do is say, oh, just one more law, one little bit of money, just one tweak to the regulatory state, and then no more tragedies.
No, that's not how it works.
No government program will end evil.
And so we can't accept the tragic fact of life.
Ironically then, we can't accept the fact that justice exists.
If we can say right now with a good deal of certainty there's really nothing we could have done as a society before this shooting to stop it, what about afterward?
Is there some justice that we can have now?
Unfortunately, in the state of California, about a month ago, Governor Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on the death penalty.
The dog who shot up that synagogue should be taken out back and killed by the state, by the civil authority.
The state should execute him.
He should die.
He should die because that is just and that will give us some modicum of justice.
It is important because it can deter other shooters.
It is important because he deserves it, because it is punishment, because he committed a crime, and that demands retribution.
But we don't understand the tragic fact of life, and so we don't understand justice either.
We think there's some way to fix it, some way to just make it all better.
No.
We can now, though, at this moment, we can enact justice by putting down this killer like the dog he is to claim some modicum of justice.
We can't do that though, can we?
You know, speaking of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she's in trouble again because she came out and she used this tragedy to try to push her own gun control legislation.
And then it was pointed out, she never said anything about the Sri Lanka church attack.
Killed 300 people on Easter Sunday.
300 people.
And she never made a statement about it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting 25 hours a day.
And so Kellyanne Conway goes out on television and says it's a little weird that she doesn't talk about this.
And Ocasio-Cortez responds, Hello, Ms.
Conway.
On Easter, I was away from tech visiting my grandmother in Puerto Rico, which continues to suffer from the White House's incompetent disaster response.
Are you trying to imply that I am less Christian?
What's the point of you bringing this up on national TV? The point is very clear.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is only going to comment on things that affirm her narrative.
And the killing of Christians around the world does not affirm her narrative.
It doesn't affirm her narrative on intersectionality or victimhood or religious bigotry.
Christians can never be the victims, according to Ocasio-Cortez.
And even when she comments on the synagogue shooting, it's just to push her own legislation that wouldn't have prevented it and might have made the shooting worse.
That's the point that Kellyanne Conway is making.
Now, did AOC understand this?
Probably not.
But we don't understand how to talk about tragedy either.
And this becomes apparent in all of our fiction, in all of our novels, in all of our movies, including the biggest movie that came out over the weekend, Avengers Endgame.
There were a lot of problems with it.
I hate the Marvel movies to begin with.
But one of the central problems is...
We can't talk about tragedy.
We have such a shallow view as a culture about tragedy.
We will get to that in a second.
Then we'll get to a little political wrap-up because there's a lot of very bad news for Joe Biden and it's worth talking about because his campaign is floundering.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
I saw Avengers and I hated it.
Thank you.
I'll tell you all the reasons I hated it first, but then we'll get to the bigger cultural problem.
To begin, three hours long, three hours of my life I have given away to watch this insipid movie.
The movie is divided basically into four acts.
The first act is unbearable.
It is so slow and pointless and horribly written and mostly poorly acted.
I was checking my watch every five minutes.
The second act is bearable.
It's nearly tolerable.
It actually has one moment that's almost poignant.
So, okay, that part is okay.
The third act is inevitable.
It's the thing that happens in every superhero movie.
And then the fourth act is totally saccharine, sentimental, self-indulgent payoff for all the people who have watched 20 of these movies, certainly not me.
And so that was pretty awful to watch, too.
One of the four acts was almost tolerable.
The others were awful.
What was so bad about the movie?
There's no stakes whatsoever.
There's no stakes at all.
We already know from the Marvel Universe that people can die and come back.
We already know from every superhero movie that basically everything turns out the way you expect it to.
We already know...
That these guys have superpowers, and so some of them have superpowers that are so immense that basically they're invincible.
Okay.
That was one aspect.
The other is it's tediously politically correct.
The moments of political correctness are so...
It's egregious and cringe-inducing.
Luckily, there aren't too many of them.
There are like three or four of them throughout the movie, but you just think, oh my gosh, what are you doing to me?
And some of the implications of this political correctness, I'm trying to speak in vague terms so I don't spoil the movie for those of you who, for some reason, want to go see it, but some of the implications of this political correctness just don't make any sense at all.
Like, are exactly contrary to characters' motivations and the worlds that these characters inhabit.
In some cases, the characters are just terrible.
So Captain Marvel is just a horrible character.
She's annoying.
She has no weaknesses, really.
Her biggest weakness is that when she was eight years old, she got kind of angry sometimes.
Now she has basically no weakness.
She's just a perfect and amazing and can do no wrong.
This is one of the real downsides of injecting political correctness into superhero movies, is...
Superheroes, when they don't have a weakness, become really, really boring really quickly.
But if you're making superhero movies for the purpose of injecting gender politics or leftism or intersectionality, then you basically can't give them any weaknesses.
So it's just totally boring.
That is Captain Marvel.
I guess the best thing I could actually say about Avengers Endgame is that it's not Captain Marvel.
That's a good thing.
And it's not Black Panther either.
It's better than Black Panther.
Which, again, damning with faint praise.
Then there's the saccharine sentimentality of it all.
It's just so nostalgic.
I get it.
You're talking about 20 movies here.
People have been watching this throughout this whole course, so you kind of want a little bit of a clips show.
You kind of want to go back and revisit old memories.
Okay, fine, but it's so indulgent.
It's just bleh.
My final takeaway is that Scarlett Johansson is terrific.
She is such a good actress and she's hotter than a $2 pistol, so that part was really good.
And Robert Downey Jr.
is good in it.
I mean, some performances are pretty good.
The guy who plays Captain America is awful.
I get it that he is a very attractive man and looks like Captain America.
I get it.
Right.
But his performance is not very good.
Some of the others are fine or whatever.
It's okay.
Take it or leave it.
The writing is pretty weak in a lot of places.
Okay.
Whatever.
Take it or leave it.
The biggest issue with the movie actually does relate to our theme today, how odd of God this problem of evil, that evil exists in the world, is the movie is basically about how to deal with regret and grief and After some evil action has occurred.
That's not a spoiler.
We know some evil action has occurred and now all the superheroes are trying to come to grips with that.
How can you change what happened?
Can you change what happened?
If you changed what happened, would it change the future?
Why did it happen?
Why does evil exist?
Why don't the good guys win every single time all the time?
That's a serious question.
There's one moment in Act 2 that nearly approaches poignancy.
It almost gets to a serious discussion of this problem, and then it totally runs away from it.
It totally backs away.
And the answer that Avengers Endgame gives for how to deal with evil is basically...
La la la la la.
No, no, no.
Let's make it all better and it'll just all be better and it can be better for some reason.
That's basically the answer that it gives.
Now, you might say, Michael, you're making too much out of a superhero movie.
This is a popcorn movie for people who like the funny costumes and see big explosions.
Okay, fine.
That's also true of the Greek myths.
That's also true of the Nordic myths.
That's also true of the stories that we've told ourselves for years and years.
The Greek myths were the superhero movies of their day and of the ensuing millennia.
But those Greek myths also told us something about our nature.
Good myths, good fantasy stories, tell us something about reality and about human nature.
And so you've got explosions and superpowers and monsters and ogres and giants, and you have all the same elements as every superhero story, but they tell you something true about your nature and about reality and about evil and about God and about our purpose and why we're here and how we came to be here.
Now let me ask you something.
If you're a defender of the Avengers movies and the Marvel movies, What profound truth about human nature is conveyed in these movies?
What does this movie tell you about reality, suffering, grief, evil, personality, God?
What does it tell you about anything that stories are supposed to tell you about?
Without giving away any spoilers...
It tells you the opposite of the truth.
That's what it does.
It's a fantasy in the true sense of fantasy.
Nothing really has any stakes.
Probably nothing really has any costs.
I guess you'll see in the future movies if anything really has any costs.
If you can correct one evil in history, why can't you go back and correct other evils?
Well, because you just can't.
If we're so focused on stopping one evil, why not all the evils?
Why don't we live in a perfect world?
Why don't we exert our will to just create a perfect world?
Why is that not possible?
How odd of God to create a world in which evil exists.
What does that mean?
Maybe it means that we live in a world with free will.
Why do we live in a world with free will?
What does our freedom mean?
How does our freedom relate to providence, to the grace of God?
The takeaway from that synagogue shooting is providence and preparedness.
The providence of the gun jamming.
The preparedness of the combat veteran being there to chase the shooter out of the synagogue.
Save lives.
Not every life.
One woman died, but he saved every other life in that room.
What does that interaction look like?
That's what stories are supposed to help us deal with.
And what do we make of the inevitable tragedy of life in the here and now?
Once you catch the shooter, now we can't kill him.
He can't face capital punishment.
At the founding of this country, The punishment for every serious crime was death.
You would hang for any serious crime.
That was the definition of a felony.
Now, in many states, you can't die for any crime.
State of California.
If this guy is punished by the state of California, he will not be killed.
More than that, you have presidential candidates saying that this guy should vote.
Bernie Sanders last week said that this guy who shot up the synagogue shooting should not vote just when he leaves prison.
He should vote from prison.
That is our talk about justice these days.
And why is it?
Why is our talk about justice so totally warped?
We've actually had to create a whole other term for it because we know that what we're talking about is not justice, so we call it social justice, and social justice really just means not justice.
Why?
Why?
It's because if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.
If you put in a garbage premise about human nature, that this isn't really a tragic world, that we really can perfect human nature, you're going to get out the garbage conclusion that we should never kill anybody, that there's no such thing as real justice.
There's only social justice, which is all about therapy and rehabilitation and not giving up on that stupid garbage premise in the first place that human nature is perfectible in this world.
It's not.
That's our moral discourse.
And so, if you accuse me of haranguing a popcorn movie like Avengers, I'll say, you don't like superhero movies.
It's true, I hate superhero movies, and I especially hate the Marvel movies.
I liked Dark Knight and I liked Logan, but the other ones I can't stand.
Right.
Okay, then I just wouldn't go see them.
But the issue is, I have to go see them.
Because superhero movies aren't just movies for kids anymore.
They're not even just movies for kids and for nerds.
They're actually movies for everybody.
They are the central cultural event that happens in the United States.
That movie took in $1.2 billion over the weekend.
It's basically the only movie that people will go see anymore.
That's pretty sad.
That tells us Our culture has been degraded.
And our moral language has been degraded.
And therefore, our politics is going to be degraded.
We say, don't politicize a tragedy.
Don't politicize this.
Don't politicize that.
Sure, yeah, we shouldn't act inappropriately.
But politics is down from culture.
Culture is down from religion.
Our cultural moments, our movies and our books and our fantasies reflect a religious understanding and they are reflected in our politics.
You can't divorce them.
Profound religious misunderstanding and bigotry It's going to be reflected in certain cultural memes and it's going to be reflected in awful political actions, terrorist actions.
It's going to be represented in the wicked actions of individuals to hurt innocent people.
All political problems, fundamentally, ultimately, are religious problems.
And culture is right there in the middle of that.
And that's why you've got to take culture seriously, even if it's a popcorn movie with a lot of superheroes.
Before we go, we've got to get to a little bit of politics because Joe Biden's campaign has had trouble from the very beginning.
I know it looks like he's eight points up right now, not just on the Democrats, but Morning Consult and Politico say Joe Biden is up eight points on Donald Trump.
Don't believe it.
Joe Biden is going into this with the nice, glossy, I've been out of the public eye for years, I'm the former vice president under Barack Obama, I'm a really nice guy and I never did anything controversial in the last four years.
Okay.
Don't believe it.
Joe Biden is already having trouble.
They obviously got him on Sniffing Gate.
They got him on all his weird interactions with those women, you know, smelling their hair, giving them shoulder massages.
Now they're trying to get him on Anita Hill.
Which doesn't make any sense.
They're trying to get him on the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas in 1991, and they're saying that Joe Biden didn't treat Clarence Thomas' accuser fairly, which is ridiculous.
He gave Anita Hill the ability to air all of her claims.
Her claims, in many cases, were debunked, and Clarence Thomas got the confirmation.
If anything, Joe Biden should apologize to Clarence Thomas, not to Anita Hill.
But now the big problem he's facing is that Barack Obama won't endorse him.
And here is the pathetic response that Joe Biden is mustering for that.
Best choice for the Democrats in 2020.
Why didn't President Obama endorse him?
I asked President Obama not to endorse, and he doesn't want to dismiss it.
Whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits.
So why you?
Welcome to Delaware.
Why you?
You and your message very clearly made this about a debate about President Trump, but you're going to have to get through the Democratic primary first.
Why are you the best choice for Democrats?
That'll be for the Democrats in the Senate.
How could you differentiate yourself?
What do you think about the Mueller report?
Mr. Vice President, it's the Democrats.
Mr. Vice President, it's the Democrats.
Talk about all this stuff in time, okay?
Is the case against Donald Trump strong enough for impeachment, Mr. Vice President?
Excuse me, impeach sir.
So he's being followed by this gaggle of reporters, and he knew that answer was weak, so he had to get out of there.
Why hasn't Barack Obama endorsed you?
His first try is, I asked him not to endorse me.
Now, his campaign operatives had been saying this for the past week.
Oh yeah, Joe asked Obama not to endorse.
Yeah, okay.
If you believe that, I got a great bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Hey, popular former president of my party that I served under for eight years, please don't endorse me.
Hey, I know there's a field of 20 Democrat candidates now, and it's going to be really hard to differentiate yourself.
I definitely don't want the popular former president to endorse me.
That would be terrible, right?
So nobody believes this.
Joe Biden knows that nobody believes this.
So then you hear people are missing this.
He changes his answer immediately after he gives it.
He says, I asked Barack not to endorse.
And he doesn't want to.
He wants the people of the Democrat Party should decide.
We should.
The candidates should win it on their own merits.
Hold on.
Did you ask him not to endorse you, or does he not want to endorse?
Obviously, he doesn't want to endorse you, and you would take his endorsement.
But why does Barack Obama not want to endorse Joe Biden?
Because he thinks Joe Biden's a lot weaker than the media think he is.
Another report just came out that Barack Obama nudged So,
this is a big blow for Joe Biden.
We've been saying this for weeks now.
The only way that Joe Biden really is able to sustain that lead, I think, is if Obama comes out strong for him at the top of the race.
That has apparently been closed off.
We'll see where Joe goes from here.
Again, we've long said that first day of the race was going to be Joe Biden's best day and then he was just going to trail.
You're already seeing his net favorability drop five points since January, probably only headed further down.
Now, why?
Why is Joe Biden no good at this?
Why does Barack Obama think that Joe Biden ultimately can't beat Donald Trump, that some other candidate would be better?
One of the rumors is that Michelle Obama is going to get into the race.
I'm highly skeptical of that.
I don't think that is happening.
But I do agree with Obama that he's probably not the strongest candidate.
It's because Joe Biden's shtick is being the everyman, the popular guy.
He's just going to nuzzle your little daughter.
He's, hey, I'm just Joe.
I'm a big giant smile.
Hey, I'm Joe Biden.
That game is a losing game against Donald Trump because Donald Trump is the most authentic, for better or worse, politician that we've maybe ever had in our history, certainly in the last hundred years.
I was on Jesse Waters' show on Fox News the other night.
They interrupted our segment because Trump was giving this rally.
So I watched the entire rally beginning to end.
Donald Trump is just so good at politics.
Here's just a quick little clip of how he opens up his rally.
By the way, Saturday night, is there any place that's more fun than a Trump rally?
Can you imagine Sleepy Joe...
Crazy Bernie.
You look at the candidates, right?
I think Pocahontas, she's finished, she's out.
She's gone.
No, when it was found that I had more Indian blood in me than she did, and then it was determined that I had none, but I still had more, That was the end of her 32-year scam on colleges.
Donald Trump is going to eat Joe Biden for lunch.
This is where he thrives.
These rallies are where he thrives.
He doesn't always thrive in press conferences.
He doesn't always thrive in Oval Office meetings.
He doesn't always thrive from the position of president.
But he totally kills it in these rallies.
And these rallies are what campaigns are.
This is the stuff of campaigns.
He had another line.
He said, you know, before I became a politician, can you believe I'm a politician?
And the crowd goes crazy.
They love him.
They just eat it up.
That is the game that Joe Biden has been trying to play for 40 years.
He spent 40 years becoming the slickest politician in Washington to be slick enough to pretend that he's not a real politician.
Oh, Joe, he's so authentic.
That's what makes Joe, Joe.
B.S. Joe Biden is a totally constructed politician.
This guy is the real thing.
You put those two up against one another, it's not going to be close.
All right, that's our show.
We've got a lot more to get to, but too bad, too late.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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 Olvera.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about this story of an innocent family being ripped apart by Child Protective Services.
Because apparently, if you haven't noticed by now, you have no rights and you have no presumption of innocence whatsoever when the bureaucrats in CPS set their sights on you.
So we'll discuss that.
Also, President Trump got himself into hot water, which he's done many times, but this time when he called Robert E. Lee a great general.
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