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May 2, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

47:29

Ep. 342 - The End Of History

Students across the country turn on Washington and Jefferson. We will analyze the end of history. Then, an Alabama legislator admits abortion is murder, academics normalize pedophilia, and finally the Mailbag! Date: 05-02-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Students at Hofstra University are demanding that the school tear down a statue of Thomas Jefferson.
	Meanwhile, a Northern California public school district is considering painting over a mural of George Washington because a working group deemed the painting, quote, traumatizing to students and community members.
	We will analyze the end of history.
	Then, an Alabama legislator admits abortion is murder, academics normalize pedophilia, and finally, the mailbag.
	I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	You ever notice that President Trump has this bizarre knack for predicting things?
	I'm not saying he's historically very well-versed or, you know, is the most book-learned man that's ever walked the earth.
	But he has this incredible knack for predicting things.
	And one of his predictions just came true, again, in a really distressing way.
	We'll get to that in a second.
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	President Trump has this incredible ability to predict things.
	So he did, the first time I noticed this was in 2015.
	He announced that he was running for president on June 16th, 2015.
	You remember he comes down Trump Tower, he gives this long speech about how illegal aliens are criminals, they're threatening the country, we need to build a wall, we need to block the illegals from coming into the country.
	And he was pilloried for this.
	They said, illegal aliens don't commit crime.
	Stop it.
	How dare you?
	It's awful.
	It's made up.
	It's fiction.
	And then what happened?
	Two weeks later, we had one of the most high-profile murders in recent memory.
	And it was an illegal alien who killed Katie Steinle, an American citizen.
	And I thought, does this guy just...
	Does he just say things and then reality decides to comport with whatever he's saying?
	So, this happened, first of all, with his election.
	He predicted when he did that roast of Donald Trump on Comedy Central, and everyone thought he was a joke running for president in 2011-2012, he said, look, I'm not sure if I'm going to run, but if I do, I'm going to do a lot better than everyone thinks I'm going to do.
	Everybody laughed at him.
	We were told by all these Nobel Prize winning economists that the economy would crash if he were elected.
	He said it would boom.
	What happened?
	It boomed.
	This happened again.
	And this is an even more consequential prediction than any of those.
	You remember during that Charlottesville incident, President Trump made a very precise prediction about what would happen if we start knocking down Confederate statues.
	George Washington was a slave owner.
	Was George Washington a slave owner?
	So will George Washington now lose his status?
	Are we going to take down...
	Excuse me.
	Are we going to take down...
	Are we going to take down statues to George Washington?
	How about Thomas Jefferson?
	What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
	You like him?
	Okay, good.
	Are we going to take down the statue?
	Because he was a major slave owner.
	Now are we going to take down his statue?
	So you know what?
	It's fine.
	You're changing history.
	You're changing culture.
	Are we going to take down statues of Washington and Jefferson?
	People said, oh, what are you talking about?
	We're only taking down statues of Confederates.
	We're only taking down Robert E. Lee.
	He's a bad guy.
	Jefferson, well, he had problems, but we're not, don't worry, we're not going to take him down.
	Except now, less than two years later, that's exactly what's happening.
	Right now at Hofstra University, last Friday, a group of students hosted an event titled, Jefferson Has Got to Go.
	These students have previously already defaced this Jefferson statue at Hofstra.
	They wrote Decolonize on it.
	They wrote Black Lives Matter on it.
	They wrote all this other stuff on it.
	Who are the organizers of this event?
	Hofstra students.
	Planned Parenthood, for some reason.
	Couldn't tell you why.
	And then local community members.
	And there is a real irony here, by the way, that Planned Parenthood is hosting an event to take down a Jefferson statue because it's not nice to black people.
	Thomas Jefferson enslaved black people, that is true.
	Planned Parenthood kills black people, slaughters them en masse.
	Black women get abortions at more than three times the rate of white women.
	More babies in New York City are aborted than born.
	And Planned Parenthood has the temerity to go to an event and say, we need to tear down our history because it's not nice to black people.
	Because this man owned slaves.
	You kill black people.
	In New York, more black people killed than born.
	Neither here nor there.
	The Hofstra College Democrats also want the statue gone.
	It's not just at Hofstra.
	Students at GW University now want to get rid of George Washington.
	For those of you who don't know, GW University stands for George Washington University and they want to get rid of their namesake and their mascot.
	This is the majority of students here.
	There was a vote that was conducted.
	54% of students at GW want to get rid of George Washington.
	How about George Washington High School in Northern California?
	They now want to paint over, they want to get rid of a mural that depicts George Washington.
	And the way they did it is so insidious.
	It's just that creeping, tyrannical leftism that seems like it's nice and orderly, so they mask all of their totally destructive instincts with this sort of orderliness of bureaucracy and meetings.
	They didn't just take a sledgehammer to it, no.
	They formed a working group.
	Oh, it's a working group.
	There's a committee.
	The committee's going to meet, and then they're going to decide to take a wrecking ball to a work of art and a piece of history.
	The working group decided that a mural of George Washington, the founder and father of our country, at a high school called George Washington High School, quote, traumatizes students and community members.
	It doesn't just offend them.
	It traumatizes them.
	This is what we have been seeing increasingly for years now.
	What I see at these universities when I go and give speeches there, they are conflating speech with violence.
	So it's this work of art, this work of history, is not simply offensive.
	It's not simply unpleasant.
	It's not simply unappreciated.
	No.
	It is traumatizing, which is to say it is committing an act of violence that has physical repercussions on students.
	And so, if the school is going to protect the students' safety, their physical well-being, then they have to paint over the artwork.
	Very clever strategy.
	Because what the school should say is, we're not going to erase art and history because you don't like it.
	Because some mob is demanding it.
	Because what is happening in reality?
	A mob is demanding that we burn books, burn history, burn artwork, burn paintings.
	A mob is doing that.
	But the way the left organizes it is they say it's not a mob, it's a working group.
	And we're not destroying art because it offends us.
	We're destroying art because it traumatizes us.
	It committed violence on us.
	So we now will commit violence on it.
	The district spokesman, so the spokesman for the administration of the school district said, quote, At its conclusion, the group voted and the majority recommended that the Life of Washington mural be archived and removed because the mural does not represent the school district's values.
	Then what values does the school district hold?
	Because George Washington, the father of our country, created the greatest country in the history of the world.
	A country premised on the idea that all men are created equal, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	That man and what that man established and presided over and fought for and won has led to the most just, most equitable, most prosperous, most charitable country in the history of the world ever at any time, certainly now by orders of magnitude.
	If the school district doesn't stand for that, what do they stand for?
	What are their principles?
	They apparently oppose life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	They oppose charity.
	They oppose justice.
	They oppose equality.
	What do they stand for?
	If we were to give this school district the benefit of the doubt, it seems that they just don't know anything about history.
	They don't know anything about George Washington.
	They don't know anything about what George Washington stands for.
	But that indictment is just as bad because they're a school district.
	They are supposed to educate students, but they don't know anything themselves.
	They don't know anything about history.
	This is a real threat to the country.
	And this threat has been building for a long time.
	And Donald Trump is not the only guy who predicts things.
	There was another prediction made by George Orwell in 1984 through the character of Winston, which describes this time that we're living in perfectly.
	He writes, history has stopped.
	Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.
	That's what happens.
	What happens when you get rid of history?
	Because you might say, who cares?
	It's a statue.
	Oh, who cares?
	It's a monument.
	Oh, who cares?
	It's some dates of some battles and some things that some guy wrote.
	Without history, there is only an endless present in which the party is always right.
	If you're not going to be guided by history, you are going to be guided by something or somebody And in the absence of history, in the absence of fact, because when we talk about history, we're talking about facts.
	History and facts are the same thing.
	Facts means something that's done, something that's true.
	The word fact comes from the verb to do.
	So fact is something that's done in history.
	But when you get rid of that, what are you guided by?
	Ideology.
	And who wields ideology like a weapon?
	Ideologues, totalitarians, activists, politicians.
	The party is always right.
	Totalitarians hate history.
	This is why all of the most famous totalitarian regimes in history have immediately erased their own history.
	Stalin did this.
	Stalin actually took people out of photographs after he purged them, after he liquidated them, after they became politically incorrect to his party.
	How about in China?
	They had the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, right?
	They got rid of all of their history.
	They tried to deny all of their history and just innovate from the very beginning, create the whole world anew, a terrible idea.
	They always want to erase history.
	Why?
	Because history gives us context.
	History puts all of their schemes in a historical context.
	When AOC, this poor, empty-headed legislator, 29-year-old bartender, comes up and says, Hey, I've got a plan that will completely upend the entire American economy and political system that will cost $93 trillion, that will get rid of most of your private property rights, that will get rid of your homes, that will get rid of all of your political rights...
	How about that?
	Is that a good idea?
	I'm promising you the world, everything, it'll be better.
	It's going to save the whole planet.
	If you don't know history, you might actually find that compelling.
	If you do know history, you'll say, hmm, every time these exact ideas have ever been tried, they've led to widespread misery.
	Famine, murder, slaughter, poverty, misery.
	But they want to get rid of history so that we don't impede their schemes.
	History also gives us something to cherish.
	So these are two totally opposite ideas when we look at history.
	I gave a speech at Notre Dame about Christopher Columbus and how Columbus was actually quite a good guy.
	And these students who were protesting, they came up and they said, how could you say that Columbus is a good guy?
	He's terrible.
	Everything about him is awful.
	Everything he ever did was awful.
	Everything he led to was awful.
	And then I started recounting all of the good things Columbus led to.
	First of all, he led to our country.
	He created the Latino race.
	He literally created a race of people.
	He spread Christianity throughout the world.
	He gave us what we have.
	It's something to cherish.
	Some people look on history and they cherish that tradition that they have.
	Others look on it and they despise it.
	They hate it.
	They stand on the shoulders of giants.
	They think that they're flying and they spit on the people who have led them to where they are.
	The issue basically boils down to the same reason why we respect our elders.
	Why should we respect history?
	It's the same reason we respect our elders.
	First of all, why do you respect your elders?
	Should you?
	I think these days we're taught not to respect our elders.
	We're taught to talk back to our elders, or to dismiss them, or to despise our elders.
	Coincidentally, at the same time, we're taught to hate our history, despise our history.
	You know, those are just our elders in a whole higher order of magnitude.
	They're just our elders much further back.
	Why should you respect your elders?
	In part, humility.
	Because it's the classic whiny, angsty teenager.
	I hate my parents.
	My parents are terrible.
	They're so dumb and wrong and awful.
	I hate them.
	But I'm really great.
	There's nothing wrong about me, right?
	No.
	You in part respect your elders because it shows you a little bit of humility.
	You are just as flawed as you are convinced that they are.
	In part, it's gratitude.
	because no matter how flawed your elders are, you're here because of them.
	In the case of your parents, literally their love is the reason why you exist.
	And in the case of your elders broadly, you are here in this society, in this civilization, because of their work, because of what they have done.
	Also, because to respect your elders is to respect yourself.
	We are not just isolated atoms floating in the middle of nowhere.
	We don't just pop into existence in the middle of the air and fall down and say, okay, I guess here I am, all myself, an island unto myself.
	No.
	We are part of a tradition.
	We come from somewhere.
	We come from a culture.
	That culture forms us.
	As much as we form the culture, the culture forms us.
	Actually, the culture forms us much more than we form the culture.
	And so those traditions that we despise, that we hate, that we disrespect, to disrespect those things is to disrespect ourselves.
	Because they form us.
	They make up our character.
	We are connected to the past.
	But these days, we're taught to hate ourselves.
	That's what the whole culture tells us to do.
	Americans are the worst.
	Americans are awful.
	Especially, don't get me started, on straight white men.
	Don't get me started on straight white men who think that they're men.
	Oh, if you're one of those guys, you have to hate, you have to despise yourself.
	You have to shut up, never open your mouth, never express an opinion.
	Just sit there and feel really bad about how awful you are.
	But it's not just straight white men who think that they're men.
	Everybody has to check their privilege.
	Because you have some sort of privilege.
	You've got to hate yourself.
	Now, if you hate yourself, you're going to hate your past.
	Because if we're so bad, then surely those awful people in the bad olden days, they're even worse, aren't they?
	If we enlightened modern people are so bad, they were terrible.
	We're taught that our culture is hopelessly bigoted.
	So obviously anybody who lived even five seconds ago is hopelessly bigoted.
	We are now told that the opinion that Barack Obama had on gay marriage for his entire political career up until seven years ago is an example of pure malicious bigotry because he thought that marriage is an institution between men and women, husbands and wives.
	Because he thought that, that opinion is hopelessly bigoted.
	That was the opinion that everybody held as recently as seven years ago.
	But radicals hate history.
	And you notice it speeds up.
	So now we're changing history much more quickly.
	Once you start to get rid of Robert E. Lee, it's not like you get rid of the Robert E. Lee statues and then 60 years later you start to get rid of the Thomas Jefferson statues.
	No.
	Once you grant the premise...
	Then it doesn't proceed gradually.
	It proceeds exponentially.
	Because that's the logic.
	If we're going to erase our history, if we're going to erase our art, if anything bad that ever happened in the past is not just unfortunate, but traumatizing, it's literally harming physically people right now, you've got to get rid of all of it.
	You've got to get rid of Barack Obama's speeches from 2011 when he talked about marriage.
	You can't have those.
	Those are traumatizing.
	You can't have a statue of Barack Obama.
	It's traumatizing.
	Ultimately, you're going to get rid of even the recent past.
	You're going to get rid of five minutes ago.
	All that's going to exist is the eternal present in which the party is always right.
	History shows that those utopian schemes are going to fail.
	Shows us that men are not perfect.
	They're never going to be perfect.
	Shows us that the world is complicated.
	You can't spell it all out in some doctrine, in some manifesto.
	So we got to get rid of it.
	And the party will always be right.
	But we're not just killing off our past.
	We are also killing off our future.
	And at least, you got to give him credit.
	There's one state legislator in Alabama, a guy named John Rogers, who is at least being honest about why Democrats want to kill babies.
	All I'm saying to you, it ought to be a woman's choice.
	I'm not about to be as a male tell a woman what to do with her body.
	She has a right to make that decision herself.
	To rake their headsets.
	Some kids are unwarned.
	So you kill them now, kill them later.
	You bring them in the world, unwarned, unloved, then you send them to the lecture chair.
	So you kill them now, kill them later.
	But the bottom line is that I think we should be making this decision.
	Kill them now or kill them later.
	I love this clip.
	I kind of like this guy.
	If you can't see him, he's wearing this baby blue suit.
	He's got this really thick Alabama accent.
	And at least he's honest.
	He's wrong, but he's honest.
	He's admitting a true premise, which is that abortion is killing a baby.
	He's admitting that.
	He's saying, no, we're not just performing some procedure.
	We're not just removing the pancreas or something.
	We are going in and killing a human being.
	He's admitting that a baby is a person.
	He's admitting that we're killing these babies selfishly, You say, yeah, we're going to have to kill them eventually, aren't we?
	Because they're going to be bad, they're going to be inconvenient for us, they're going to commit crimes, so we've got to kill them now.
	Then we're going to save ourselves a whole lot of headache.
	Now, what he's wrong about is he's assuming that unwanted babies are going to become criminals and we're going to have to kill them, send them to the electric chair.
	This is wrong for a number of reasons.
	One, there's no evidence that babies given up for adoption or babies raised by single parents or babies raised who are not wanted or not loved inevitably become criminals and such awful criminals that they receive capital punishment.
	I mean, he's pulling that completely out of thin air.
	This is an argument that the left tried to make for a while, like that Freakonomics book.
	He said, oh yes, the reason crime rates have declined is because Roe v. Wade legalized abortion.
	And so we're killing all the bad kids who are certainly going to become criminals.
	This has been roundly debunked and people no longer seriously make that argument.
	Uh, But it's a weak argument anyway.
	First of all, it's not an argument to kill babies before they've committed a crime.
	I mean, I guess that's the premise he's trying to make.
	It's a weak argument because in the United States we kill very few criminals anyway, so you're not going to kill them later.
	And it's a highly immoral argument.
	Because if that's the argument, if you are just saying, look, unwanted unborn babies are likely to commit crimes.
	Let's grant that premise.
	Therefore, we should kill them.
	Then this is obviously true of any demographic group that is likely to commit crimes.
	Young black men in certain geographic areas are very likely to commit crimes.
	Statistically more likely than other demographic groups.
	Is this guy arguing that we should kill them now because they're likely to commit crimes?
	That's a heinous argument.
	But that is the logical conclusion of the argument that he's making.
	And then he admits, by the way, that it's not really about crime.
	Then he admits it's not really about we're going to have to kill them later.
	What he admits is, I just don't want these babies.
	They're inconvenient.
	Here he is.
	It's hard to hear.
	That microphone was not as good there.
	What he's saying is the child could be born retarded.
	The child could be born half-deformed.
	Therefore, we've got to kill him.
	So retarded people have apparently no right not to be murdered.
	People who are deformed, maybe the kid's missing a few fingers.
	Kill him.
	Who wants a kid who doesn't have a few fingers?
	Oh, could you imagine anything worse than not having a couple of fingers?
	Kill him.
	That is the disregard for human life that we're talking about.
	And I really like that he's making this argument because he's allowing the ethical and moral argument to take place in a way where we recognize the humanity of the baby.
	He's allowing us to say, okay, if by your logic we need to kill people before they commit crimes, why shouldn't we kill people?
	Any adult demographic group based on race, based on sex, based on age.
	Why shouldn't we do that?
	Oh, because it's not legitimate to kill people before they commit a crime.
	Okay.
	Well, but then his argument is, well, the kid's retarded.
	Okay, so if we can kill people because they're not smart enough, where's the cutoff?
	Maybe a 90 IQ, 95 IQ? We'd have to kill off basically all of the U.S. Congress.
	Dan Crenshaw probably could still live.
	Dan Crenshaw would be the last remaining congressman.
	Ha ha ha!
	Everyone else would be gone by that measure.
	Is that what we're going to do?
	Deformed.
	How about if someone's ugly?
	Someone's a little fat.
	You know, they've got some pockmarks on their face or something.
	We'll kill them, right?
	They're deformed.
	Nobody wants a deformed person.
	How ugly?
	Either...
	Human dignity, human worth, comes from some superficial characteristic like IQ or how you look or how many fingers you've got or how much your parent loves you or how well you're going to be raised or the likelihood because of your circumstances that you're going to be in situations where you might commit more crime.
	Either it's from that or it's intrinsic.
	Human beings have intrinsic value.
	Those are the two options.
	That's the logic of abortion.
	Speaking of little children, a bunch of academics now want to normalize pedophilia.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	We'll also get to the mailbag.
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	Where is my Leftist Tears Tumblr?
	Oh my gosh.
	I don't have a Leftist Tears Tumblr on my desk right now.
	If those doors to the studio open up, I very likely will drown.
	This could be my last show.
	Don't be like me.
	Go get your Leftist Tears Tumblr.
	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	All right, we've reached the end of society.
	I guess it's all over.
	We had a good run.
	We lasted for, I don't know, probably like 5,000 or 6,000 years.
	Now it's over.
	Academics in Britain at a conference hosted at Cambridge University, one of the oldest and best universities in the world, have now reached the logical conclusion of the sexual revolution, the normalization of pedophilia.
	What they say is that pedophilia is normal and natural.
	Quote, pedophilic interest is natural and normal for human males.
	At least a sizable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children.
	Normal males are aroused by children.
	This has been building for a long time.
	I think I've been predicting this for years.
	Other people have as well.
	And everyone said, oh, you're crazy.
	It'll never happen.
	No way.
	They'll never tear down statues of Washington.
	No way.
	They'll never normalize pedophilia.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	They are doing that.
	And it doesn't take a genius, by the way, to predict these things.
	All you have to do is realize what the premises of the left are and then use your mind to follow them to the logical conclusions.
	So the premise of we need to tear down history that we don't like or that we find offensive or that was wrong or evil leads necessarily to tearing down all of history.
	The premise that sex is just some physical action and that any desires that we have are not to be shunned or shamed or repressed, but are to be explored and liberated because there's no such thing as normal.
	There's no such thing as wrong.
	There's no such thing as sinful sexual behavior.
	The logical conclusion of that is the normalization of sex with children.
	And that's what these people are doing.
	So in 1981...
	There was a respected publisher, Batsford, published a piece called Perspectives on Pedophilia, edited by a sociologist named Brian Taylor.
	And what Brian Taylor did was challenge the, quote, prejudice against sex with children.
	Now, there is a prejudice against pedophilia, that's true.
	I think it's a pretty good prejudice.
	It is true.
	Our society has this prejudgment.
	We say, sex with children is bad.
	I think this is exhibit A, evidence number one, that some prejudices are a very good thing.
	Then in 1991, a professor wrote on his blog, this was recently republished in 2012, quote, Many adult pedophiles say that boys actively seek out sex partners.
	Childhood itself is not a biological given, but an historically produced social object.
	You see the language of all of modern academics, all of this relativistic academic culture.
	Childhood doesn't even really exist.
	It's just a social construction.
	Male and female, they don't really exist.
	They're just social constructions.
	Everything's everything.
	You know, man, and nothing's really itself, and nothing's categorically distinct, and you know, and like we're all just part of the universe, man.
	That's the logical conclusion of that idea.
	Debates are now being had at the American Psychological Association over the DSM, over the book of psychological disorders, over whether or not to include hebephilia as a disorder.
	I believe it is now not included as a disorder.
	Hebephilia is sexual attraction to children 11 to 14, basically after their little kids but before their post-pubescent.
	These sexual revolution types have been saying for a long time that pedophilia is normal and natural.
	Maybe he's right in the sense that It occurs with some frequency.
	You know, when the sexual revolution left-wing types say, oh yes, any kind of bizarre sexual behavior is normal, it's natural, it's no big deal.
	Then you have the right-wing types who are saying, pedophilia is abnormal, it's unnatural, it's obviously, it can't be any of the things that the sexual revolution types are saying that it is.
	Maybe both views miss the point.
	Maybe this is the actual point.
	Let's say that pedophilia is natural.
	Let's say that people are born this way.
	This has been the argument for all the sexual liberation movements.
	See, we were born this way.
	We were born with certain desires.
	Therefore, we have to fulfill them.
	I am perfectly fine with the conclusion that some people are born naturally with a desire to have sex with children.
	It's still wrong.
	But we're born this way.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's still wrong.
	It's wrong to do.
	It's evil.
	It's a wicked desire that you have to repress all the time.
	Well, let's say that it's not just natural.
	Let's say that pedophilia, as these academics in Britain say, is natural and normal.
	So it's very easy to imagine at some point in the future that these guys get their way and...
	Pedophilia is taken out of the DSM. It's no longer considered a disorder.
	It's a sexual orientation.
	It's something you're born with.
	And let's say lots of people accept this throughout society.
	It becomes totally normalized.
	It's still wrong.
	But 80% of people say it's okay.
	Right, 80% of people are wrong.
	But 5% of people are born with this desire.
	Right, the desire is still wrong.
	This is a really tricky issue for the sexual revolution, and I guess for the left broadly, which has embraced the sexual revolution, because pedophilia, our natural, correct revulsion toward pedophilia and pedophiles, Shows us that so many premises of the sexual revolution are not true.
	The idea that exists now, I mean this is I think the chief moral maxim of our age, which is if it feels good, do it.
	That's not sufficient.
	That's not true.
	That's not right.
	Certain acts are wrong.
	Certain ones are right.
	So the way that the left has gotten around this in recent years is they've made consent the most important thing.
	You can do anything you want to anybody, but you need consent.
	You can smack your sexual partner around.
	You can punch him in the face.
	You can put a cigarette out on his forehead.
	That's okay as long as you get consent.
	And so children can't consent.
	Okay, can a 14-year-old consent?
	I feel that when I was 14 I could consent to a lot of things.
	I was able to consent to go work.
	I had working papers at 14.
	I had a job.
	How was I able to work a job if I couldn't consent?
	In that case I was a slave.
	Was I really a slave?
	Are teenagers who work at fast food places slaves?
	No.
	In some way they're consenting.
	Consent is insufficient.
	This libertine, totally liberal culture of saying, well, whatever you want to do, it's fine, just do it, as long as you have consent.
	That's insufficient.
	Some things are intrinsically wrong, no matter who's born that way, no matter what people think, no matter how we can bend the definition of consent.
	It's just wrong.
	But if this is wrong...
	Then what else is wrong?
	What else does the moral order say about our behavior?
	Not even just our sexual behavior.
	All of our behavior.
	That's a difficult question.
	And ironically, as we've gotten so much worse, so much less able to have moral discourse, we're seeing the horrifying conclusions of that.
	Perhaps that will wake people up and say, gosh, I've gone down a terribly wrong road here.
	On my trip to progress, I've gone down a horrifically wrong road.
	I've gone to this awful conclusion.
	And as C.S. Lewis points out, when you realize you're going down the wrong road, the person who turns around and starts going in the other direction is the progressive.
	He's the one who is actually pursuing progress.
	We've got to get to the mailbag.
	First question from Alyssa.
	Not sweet little Alyssa, but Alyssa.
	Hello, Michael.
	Why can't governments just print more money?
	Why do people say it brings down the value of the dollar?
	I've never been explaining this, and everyone else seems just to understand, and so I've always been too embarrassed to ask.
	Thanks, Alyssa.
	Well, you're looking at Venezuela right now, I assume, to see why you can't print more money.
	Here's why.
	Money refers to value.
	Money is a symbol of value.
	And what is that value?
	That value is goods and services.
	It's the production of our economy.
	So you've got the money supply and you've got the real output of our economy.
	The goods, the services, the products made, the things built, the things done.
	Okay.
	The money has to match the output.
	So...
	Let's say your economy is worth $20 million.
	And that's the output that you're putting out.
	And then one day the government decides it wants more money.
	So it starts to double the amount of money it's printing.
	Now the government is printing $40 million.
	But your real output is still only $20 million.
	Well, you've got double the money, but the same amount of goods and services.
	So as people go to buy those goods and services, everybody knows you're printing more money.
	Eventually, people figure out the secret.
	And so what happens is the prices of those goods and services will double.
	Gradually, but eventually they will double.
	What that is called is inflation.
	You get inflation because you can't trick everybody.
	You can't make something out of nothing.
	To quote the great philosopher Billy Preston, Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
	So, these ridiculous tin pot dictatorships like Venezuela in Latin America think that the way that they can make up for all of their overspending, their economy made a certain output, and then they're just spending and spending and borrowing and bribing people and doing all of this.
	And eventually, when that catches up to them, and they say the bill comes due, they just start printing more money.
	It's not going to work.
	Nobody cares about the paper.
	They care about what the paper represents, and there's no such thing as a free lunch.
	From Evan, Hey Michael, if my memory serves me correctly, when you were younger, you were an atheist.
	True.
	I am sort of in the same boat as you, in that I was an atheist, and now believe in God, mainly due to you and the influence you've had on me.
	It's nice to hear.
	What drove you to believe in God, and what would you recommend to someone who is trying to explore faith?
	Thank you so much.
	For me, it started with the arguments for God.
	And it started with my recognition that all the people around me, this was during college, all the people around me were smart.
	And they were all atheists.
	But the smartest people were not atheists.
	The very smartest people were Christians.
	And generally, they were Catholics, or on the road to becoming Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox also.
	Liturgical, traditional, with a profound...
	Body of work and philosophy and obviously natural law and all of these sorts of things.
	So I noticed that.
	That piqued my interest.
	Then I started reading C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton, started reading the arguments for God, the ontological argument that Alvin Plantinga formulates, the I mean, Alvin Plantinga is the most recent of a zillion people who have formulated it.
	It goes back to Saint Anselm of Canterbury and the Thomistic arguments for God from Saint Thomas.
	And it occurred to me, eventually, that the arguments for God's existence were much stronger than the arguments against God's existence.
	Now, you'll notice what word has been missing throughout all of this is faith.
	For me, it was initially almost entirely intellectual.
	Then, the experience and practice of faith happened after.
	What I would recommend, I didn't really go to church very much, almost never in college, and for me the reason for that was that I was raised in the very liberal post-Vatican II Catholic Church, where it was all these awful insipid hymns that were like, you know, bad pop songs with saccharine lyrics, and it was all just kind of a show.
	It was just, you know, the priest would say, hey, be a good person.
	You know, hey, I mean, you don't have to really do anything or think anything.
	I don't know if anything's really that true, but be a good person.
	I'm only slightly exaggerating.
	And then you'd all hug, and that's okay.
	And it was really more of like a, I don't know, therapy group than real worship.
	The purpose of the mass, or the purpose of whatever church you go to, is not to make you feel really good about yourself.
	You were there to worship God.
	And you're actually doing something.
	And in the churches that recognize the real presence of Christ in the communion, you are there to literally commune with Christ.
	You are really doing something.
	It really matters.
	This is why I found an old Mass, a Latin Mass, or at least a Mass with some Latin.
	And I thought, oh gosh, this is really beautiful.
	I didn't realize there was all of this beauty before.
	So what I would recommend to you is, however you're going to do it, whatever church you come from or tradition you come from, Do it.
	Really do it.
	Read all the stuff.
	Convince yourself intellectually.
	It seems like you've already done that.
	And then do it.
	And realize that you're doing something.
	You're not just playing around in a sandbox.
	You are really doing something.
	And something is really being done to you by the Holy Spirit.
	When you realize it's all true, that will obviously inform your faith and transform your life.
	From George.
	This morning I heard on a local radio station here in St.
	Louis that you will be speaking at the state capitol in Jefferson City on May 9th.
	Can you elaborate on this or supply website to find out the specifics?
	That's true.
	I am.
	I'm going to be speaking in Jefferson City at the state capitol in Missouri.
	I was invited by a state senator there because my speech at the University of Missouri Kansas City was interrupted and because I was physically assaulted and because the awful chancellor of that university, Molly Agrawal, then chose to condemn me and praise the hecklers who were trying to shut down a free discourse on campus.
	So I was invited to go give a speech there at the state capitol.
	We'll get more information out soon.
	I actually don't have it all on me right now, but it promises to be a lively event.
	So if you're around, I sure would love you to come out.
	From Seth.
	Hello, Michael Knowledge.
	I was talking to a friend, and she said that when she gets married, the husband will have to change his last name to hers.
	What do you think about husbands changing their last name to their wives?
	Well, if she's waiting to find a man who's going to change his last name to hers, this might not end up being too much of a problem for her.
	She might not have to actually answer this question ever.
	She'll wait a very long time.
	I think this is a bad idea.
	I have one friend who did take his wife's last name.
	And he came up with some elaborate explanation of this that was philosophical and everything.
	I think really why he did it is because he had a really long kind of clunky last name and his wife had this really sleek last name that was short.
	So I think maybe it was a little self-interest there as well.
	What that accepts is an inversion of the tradition.
	So what you are...
	Traditionally, the man is considered the head of the household.
	Now what does that mean?
	Does that mean he's like dragging his knuckles across the floor and bellowing like some tyrant or something?
	No.
	But it does mean that the man has a leadership role.
	The husband has a leadership role in the household.
	And one...
	Symbol of this is the family, the whole family, taking the husband's last name.
	If you are going to take your wife's last name, what you are saying is, we are going to invert this traditional order.
	So the wife is going to have the leadership role in the household.
	What does this mean?
	Does this mean that she's going to be the primary breadwinner?
	Does this mean that you are going to be the...
	The man is primarily going to be the keeper of the home and the nurturer and the person who raises the children and the person who is keeping the family together in a more private way while the wife goes out and is the public face of the family and is spending much more of her time in public.
	Okay, if that's the life you want to live, that's fine.
	I think there is a reason why throughout All of history, certainly in our civilization and in the vast majority of other civilizations, it has been the other way around.
	Something about our nature probably leads into that.
	Something about our inclinations probably explains that.
	If you want to upend that and do the opposite and see if backwards day works for the rest of your life...
	Go for it.
	I mean, be my guest.
	But you are fighting against the tides of your culture and civilization and history.
	And maybe they knew something that you don't.
	From David.
	Hello, Michael.
	I'm currently in college studying English teacher education.
	I'm thinking about changing to a poli-sci major program.
	Do you think this is a useful major and what would you recommend studying to get into politics?
	Thanks, David.
	I think it's a terrible major.
	I think it's completely useless.
	I don't recommend studying political science.
	Ben was a poli-sci major, and he says the same thing.
	Political science is a highly politicized ideological major.
	It now rarely focuses on political philosophy, which is a very worthwhile thing to study, and instead focuses on statistics and social science and things that are a little softer, a little less related to the traditional liberal arts.
	It depends.
	If you want to go into politics, I recommend you study history or English, perhaps, literature, or I guess philosophy, if you're interested in political philosophy.
	And maybe if you want to go into politics, you should study business.
	I don't know.
	It depends if you want a liberal education or a more practical education.
	And if you study business, you can make a whole lot of money and then you can buy your way into some political seat and rise your way up if you want.
	If you want to be an English teacher, I guess you should study English or English education.
	It depends what you want to do with it.
	Poly-sci can be useful in the sense that a lot of poly-sci majors end up going to law school.
	If you want to go to law school to get into politics, then that's fine.
	What I would really recommend, though, is doing what you are good at, doing what you naturally gravitate toward, and knowing what Somehow, some way that that might apply to the rest of your life.
	I studied liberal arts.
	I studied history and Italian literature.
	Those are not mechanical arts.
	Those are not practical.
	You don't get a job out of those.
	But I was very interested in them.
	I think they're very good for understanding the West, understanding our culture, understanding human nature.
	They're obviously good for politics, which is what I'm doing now.
	They're obviously good for an understanding of the culture and where things are going.
	So it does apply in that way.
	Poli-sci, I don't think, really does that.
	You've got to figure out what you want.
	So often people go into these schools and they just pick some random major just because, and then they come to regret it years later.
	Don't end up with that regret.
	We're right now at a crisis of the American university.
	The whole thing is collapsing around us, and you don't want to be the one who spent a quarter million dollars getting a degree that you come to find out is useless.
	All right, that's our show.
	So much more to get to, but we just don't have time, man.
	I'm sorry.
	We will be back on Monday.
	Have a good weekend.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	show.
	I'll see you then.
	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, socialist Venezuela is, as I'm sure you noticed, falling apart before our eyes.
	But it's pretty disturbing when you think about, when you see what's happening in Venezuela and you think about that so many young people in this country want that system in America.
	But...
	Here's the question none of these people seem to be asking themselves, and it's, if socialism is a good system, then why has it destroyed every country that has tried it?
	And if socialism is a good system, then why wouldn't you want to live in any of the countries today that are socialist?
	So we'll talk about that.
	Also, a Democratic state representative in Alabama made the most horrific...
	And insane, but also the most honest argument for abortion that you'll ever hear.

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