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Aug. 14, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:00
Ep. 398 - Why Do We Defend Fredo?

Many conservatives take CNN’s side, and President Trump is furious. We’ll explain two different approaches to politics. Then, Trump wants gun control, a prominent Evangelical musician loses faith, and more details emerge about Jeffrey Epstein. Date: 08-014-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In the wake of Fredo Cuomo's meltdown, many prominent conservatives are taking CNN's side, and President Trump is furious.
We will explain two diametrically opposed approaches to grace and politics, and then, actually, another scandal involving another CNN host, coincidentally, that took place at one of my favorite bars in New York.
We'll get into that.
Then, President Trump signals an eagerness to pass new gun control laws, a prominent evangelical musician loses his faith, And more lurid details emerge in the never-ending Jeffrey Epstein saga.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
So Fredo goes unhinged.
Chris Cuomo of CNN fame and Cuomo family democratic politics fame.
All of the conservatives make fun of them.
You know, I made fun of them.
I'm still making fun of them.
I spent basically 10 hours on Twitter just making fun of them.
A lot of conservatives were going after Chris Cuomo.
I did point out, I said, I don't want public figures to be accosted just for expressing their viewpoint.
That's not a good precedent.
But nevertheless, this was a hilarious interaction.
On the right, one of the biggest Trump defenders on the right, Sean Hannity, went on his Fox show and gave not just a kind of both sides, yeah, it's hilarious, but, you know, look, maybe we shouldn't encourage this.
He gave a full-throated defense of CNN's Chris Cuomo.
Here's Sean Hannity.
This video surfaced showing a pretty tense altercation between Chris Cuomo, CNN, and another man who was lobbing insults.
He started it, got in Cuomo's face, and by the way, his nine-year-old daughter and wife were there.
Last night on Twitter, I defended Cuomo.
He did not start this because I don't support harassment of any public figure, especially in front of their children and their family and their wife.
But A person in this country should be taunted because of their political beliefs or opinions.
And with that said, Fredo is designed to be an insult.
Meaning, in other words, Fredo, the Corleone family, I wanted this for Michael.
I never wanted this for anybody else.
Okay, it was an insult.
He was like the dumb brother in the show.
So he's insulting Chris Cuomo.
And Chris has a right to defend himself.
And let's not be phony here.
Everybody, we've all heard those words before.
We've watched YouTube.
And anyone feigning outrage like, oh, your precious ears never heard these words before.
Frankly, you're probably full of it.
Or if you act offended, you're just acting like a liberal that are offended by everything.
Alright, so that's as full-throated a defense as it gets.
When he was on Twitter, Sean Hannity said, quote, Good for Cuomo.
Good for Chris Cuomo for fighting back.
President Trump didn't like that very much.
And we know that President Trump and Sean Hannity have a relationship and he's brought Hannity on stage to stump for him and he watches Hannity's show.
He didn't like that very much.
Here's what President Trump tweeted out.
He said, quote, it always happens when a conservative does even a fraction of what Chris Cuomo did with his lunatic ranting, raving, and cursing, they get destroyed by the fake news.
But when a liberal Democrat like Chris Cuomo does it, Republicans immediately come to his defense.
We never learn.
Now, he might have been pointing at other conservative figures, but I think President Trump was aiming this almost squarely at Sean Hannity.
So what do we make of this?
Who wins here?
Who's correct?
The Hannity approach, defend Chris Cuomo completely, no mocking Chris Cuomo, no just total defense of him, or this Trump approach of go for the jugular, because what President Trump did as a result of this Cuomo video, he didn't say, look, Cuomo, he's an okay guy.
Hey, we shouldn't do this.
No, instead, he started selling t-shirts on On his campaign website, it's a Fredo unhinged, and it's these black and white zoom-ins on Chris Cuomo's face from the video, and it says, text Fredo to 88022.
I assume this is a way to sign up for the Trump campaign.
He's selling it for $34.
By the way, if you're ever curious what I want for Christmas or for my birthday, that is the t-shirt.
So he establishes the principle, and Trump is completely right about this general rule in politics.
The left goes for the jugular and we play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules.
The left is engaged in a dirty, rotten street fight where there are no rules and we're engaged in a very sophisticated boxing match.
And Trump says, enough of this.
We shouldn't do that.
And he sells this t-shirt.
I think Trump gets this basically right to a point.
I don't care that Chris Cuomo yelled at that guy.
I want to live in a society that is defined by grace, where we don't just go out and harass every public figure, where a public figure can go out with his family and have a couple drinks and maybe lose his temper a little bit and have it not be the end of the world.
I want to live in that society.
That's the human and better society.
But the left won't operate in that society.
We would do it.
The right always wants to do it.
We've been doing it even in this Chris Cuomo scandal, even all the way up to Sean Hannity, who has one of the biggest programs on cable.
But the left doesn't do it.
There are whole organizations on the left that exist to get right-wing media personalities fired.
Whole organizations that exist to get...
Hannity and Tucker and Laura Ingram and Ben and Drew and me fired.
Just last week, Media Matters took a shot at all of us here at the Daily Wire.
They called us a cesspool of bigotry and hatred, and they tried to get us all to lose our jobs, and they did it by trying to organize advertiser boycotts to kick us out of our jobs.
The right doesn't even have those organizations.
But the left hates us so much that they won't even, forget the politicians, they won't even let the commentators speak.
They so have no arguments to respond to us.
They have so little to say, they're so afraid of what we're going to say, that they go after us.
The commentators.
Just last week, the New York Times, the gray lady, blamed us for mass shootings.
The New York Times, here's the headline.
Quote, how the El Paso killer echoed the incendiary words of conservative media stars.
The alternate headline, how the El Paso gunman echoed the words of right-wing pundits.
So how are we supposed to respond?
What are we supposed to do?
What does this mean for another big scandal coming out of CNN that coincidentally took place at one of my favorite bars in New York?
We'll get to that in a second.
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So you've got the New York Times even blaming, not the politicians, but conservative commentators for mass shootings that were perpetrated, by the way, one by an eco-fascist and another by an avowed leftist who supports Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, that's the lengths they're willing to go to.
And yet we're really nice to Chris Cuomo.
We're really nice to the left-wing commentators.
They can't answer our arguments.
They're afraid of what we're going to say.
They try to get us fired.
And then we point out that we actually don't care if Chris Cuomo loses his temper after a couple Coca-Colas out with his family at a beer garden.
President Trump completely has a point on this.
Now, I disagree in so much as I think the way we should handle this is we should still state the principle.
We should go out there and say, look, I don't care.
I don't care if Chris Cuomo goes out and wants to have a couple drinks, but we live in this graceless society and you're going to get one of ours and we're going to get one of yours.
And then we should organize advertiser boycotts and get Chris Cuomo fired.
Not because I want to.
Not because what Chris Cuomo did merits him getting fired.
But because they do it to us and we cannot unilaterally disarm.
There's nothing good or moral or virtuous about unilaterally disarming and letting the left destroy our entire culture and our politics.
There's nothing good about that.
There's nothing moral about that.
We should go out there, we should wear our Fredo unhinged t-shirts, we should make it so miserable for CNN that maybe, maybe, just maybe, they reconsider their actions.
And in that spirit, we should turn to another scandal, also involving CNN, involving another CNN host, Don Lemon.
This one...
It has a really personal resonance to me because it took place at one of my favorite bars in New York, Murph's Backstreet Tavern in Sag Harbor, New York.
So this is being reported that there was an incident at a bar involving Don Lemon at a New York bar.
It's not really a New York bar like the city.
It's actually like three hours outside the city.
It's out in the Hamptons, which is this ritzy part of town, ritzy part of Long Island, where the beautiful people all go out, you know, like...
The Kardashians are in Southampton.
That kind of thing.
It's a ritzy place that New Yorkers go for the summer.
Even though the beaches aren't actually that nice, it's close enough and people take the train out or the Jitney and they go out there.
So all the bars are way overpriced and they're not very fun and there just aren't a lot of great spots out there.
Except for Murphs.
Murphs is this great dive bar in Sag Harbor, which is the best town in the entire Hamptons.
It's the last, like, truly patriotic old whaling town.
It's mentioned in Moby Dick.
It's just a great spot.
Great bar.
But I mention that it's like a true dive bar because people get...
Real drunk at Murph's.
I've spent a number of nights at Murph's.
And it's like a real, it's not one of these fancy frou-frou, like you're going to order a Sex on the Beach or a, you know, I don't know, a Cosmo or something.
It's like a place where you drink beer and, you know, you'll have a couple shots or something.
And so, anyway, this is what happens.
There's a guy suing Don Lemon for emotional pain and suffering.
And why is that?
And also for damages.
He says he can barely work anymore.
What happened was they're at Murph's one night, and this guy, Dustin Heiss, is a bartender at a different bar in the Hamptons.
And he sees Don Lemon at Murph's.
Murph's is a really tiny bar.
I mean, it's like the size of my studio or smaller, and you know that I broadcast from a broom closet.
So it's this tiny bar, and he sees Don Lemon across the way, and he tries to get Don Lemon's attention, and Don Lemon doesn't pay him any attention, and then he tries to buy Don Lemon a drink, and Don Lemon says, oh no, thank you, I'm just going to be over here with my friends.
Fast forward to the end of the night.
Everyone's had a couple adult beverages, a few Coca-Colas at this point, and this is allegedly what happens.
Lennon, quote, put his hand down the front of his own shorts and vigorously rubbed his genitalia, removed his hand, and shoved his index and middle fingers in the plaintiff's mustache and under the plaintiff's nose and asked, do you like, and then I'll substitute the words, female genitalia or male genitalia?
And then they all sort of laugh, and Don Lemon leaves.
So, as a result of this alleged incident, the guy is demanding $1.5 million from Don Lemon not to sue.
He said, I'm going to sue if you don't give me $1.5 million.
I've been in...
I mean, that's a pretty bad altercation if it happened.
I don't...
I certainly wouldn't have enjoyed that.
But I've been in some bars where, you know, bar fights are going on.
People are getting kind of nasty with each other.
And I've never been in a situation where I felt I was owed $1.5 million for something that happened to me in a bar.
I don't know.
If someone, like, amputated my leg or something, maybe I could sue for $1.5 million, but some guy gets ugly with you.
I don't know about that.
So...
Don Lemon refuses.
He said he didn't do anything wrong.
Now the guy is suing.
Did it happen?
I don't know.
Maybe it did.
Don Lemon's kind of a jerk, it seems like.
And people get extremely drunk at that bar, so maybe.
On the other hand, it also kind of sounds like the guy is extorting Don Lemon.
We've heard of plenty of fake sex scandals over the past ten years, especially involving media figures.
Plenty of overblown ones, plenty of attempts to extort a wealthy guy.
So maybe it did, maybe it didn't.
I don't know.
But that's the conservative reaction, right?
My reaction is the conservative reaction.
Measured, fair, you know, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.
I'm going to reserve judgment.
Imagine if there were a lawsuit like this against Fox News, against Bill O'Reilly.
There was.
There was a lawsuit against Bill O'Reilly.
He was gone in two seconds.
Gone like that.
Imagine if there were a lawsuit like this that Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson went into a bar in the Hamptons or wherever and did that to himself and then took his hand out of his pants and put it in a woman's face.
Imagine, because Don Lemon is gay, let's say it happened to a straight guy, Hannity or Carlson, did it in a woman's face.
Could you, not only would they be immediately kicked off of the air, they would be, there would be criminal penalties.
I mean, there would be a true mob outside of their door trying to make them pay.
Imagine if it were against us.
Imagine if there were some lawsuit against us.
I don't know, I go to Murphs sometimes too.
Maybe some guy got angry at me at Murphs.
It would be over.
There wouldn't be a question about it.
The left would demand our heads.
They would call our advertisers every single day.
And this is the ugly fact about politics.
The left and the right are playing by completely different rules.
And President Trump shows us a little bit how we should react to that.
What we should do moving forward.
We will examine the only choice that we have.
Then we'll get to gun control.
We'll get to an evangelical leader losing his faith.
We will get to a whole lot more.
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So this is the ugly fact about our politics is that the left and the right are playing by two different rules other than Trump.
Because Trump isn't really on the right or the left, is he?
I mean, he's been very conservative as president.
He's been one of the most conservative presidents probably in American history.
But throughout his career, it's not like he was some rigid right winger.
He was donating to Hillary and Pelosi and playing both sides of the aisle.
He said he was a New York Republican or a New York independent or he was pro-choice.
Now he's like very pro-life.
He's a not originally ideological guy.
And I think this has helped him because he gets down in the mud.
He's a New Yorker.
You know, Chris Cuomo on that tape is screaming, I'm going to throw you down the effing stairs.
That is a little bit of a New Yorker reaction, and Trump kind of has that reaction, too.
So what does Trump do?
He doesn't scream at people like a maniac on a hidden camera, but he'll tweet out unsubstantiated rumors about his political opponents.
I mean, he tweeted out the Clinton body count the other day, and it was hilarious.
It was really funny.
It was one of the best moments on Twitter.
During the 2016 campaign, President Trump actually promoted a rumor that Ted Cruz's father murdered President Kennedy.
Like, I'm not defending that per se.
I'm just saying it's a distinction between how Trump fights and And how the right traditionally fights.
I wish that we lived in a gracious society where we all played by the Marquess of Queensbury rules.
But in a world where the left fights dirty and unfair and cheap and awful, and they get a lot of cultural victories because of that, it is refreshing that we have a guy who's willing to get down in the muck with them.
Especially because we don't want to.
I don't want to get down in the muck like that.
So if President Trump is willing to do it, I'm really glad.
He's the kind of guy who prints t-shirts that say, Fredo unhinged.
It's not nice, but that is why we elected him.
It's why we had to elect him.
And by the way, if the left doesn't want us to elect him again, then cut it out.
There's an easy way for us to not have to have more Trumps in the future.
At this point, I'm perfectly willing to give Trump like a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, tenth term in office.
He's going to be 150 years old by the time he leaves, and then I'm going to give it to Barron Trump.
I mean, I am really happy with generally how things are going in the country.
If the left doesn't want us to keep up these tactics...
Which are the same tactics of the left, and they got to cut it out.
Because we are not going to unilaterally disarm.
That is nonsense.
There is nothing virtuous about that.
There's nothing moral about that.
They need to stop trying to get all our shows canceled.
They need to stop pouncing on every non-traversy.
They need to do this three times in a row.
Because I'm not going to believe it the first time they let it go.
If they did it once, that would be nice.
Three times in a row.
There needs to be some kind of non-traversy and they need to be gracious about it.
And they need to not try to get our guys thrown out of office and they need to not try to get our shows canceled over nothing.
They can still fight fair, but they need to stop fighting unfair three times in a row.
Then we can back off.
If they extend us grace three times in a row.
At the highest levels.
I'm not even talking about the random Twitter accounts.
Just, I want their presidential candidates not to call half the country white supremacist three times in a row.
I want the New York Times to not blame me for the mass shooting in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, which was by a Liz Warren supporter.
They do that three times in a row.
We're good.
Until then, it's game on.
What other choice do we have?
Speaking of President Trump...
We're talking about all the great aspects of President Trump.
We need to talk about something that's not so great that's a little dangerous.
That is President Trump on gun control.
So, President Trump has signaled after those shootings a couple weeks ago, he signaled that he wanted certain kinds of gun control.
He was very careful about how he was talking about it, but he still signaled he wanted more gun regulation.
We've seen him do this before.
He passed a gun regulation after the Las Vegas shooting, which was to ban...
What's that thing called?
The instrument that lets you fire a semi-automatic gun and make it look as though it's an automatic gun.
Bumpstock, bumpstock.
So he banned bumpstocks, which was completely pointless.
It's not going to save any lives.
It is a rounding error.
It's nothing.
But it's a virtue signal.
Forget the fact that the vast majority of people who are killed with guns in this country are killed by handguns, not by AR-15s, not by any other guns and certainly not by bump stocks.
He still banned them, I think, sort of pointlessly.
Now the New York Times is reporting, so take it with a grain of salt, that President Trump is considering more gun control.
They write, quote, Mr.
Trump on Sunday telephoned Senator Chris S. Murphy, a Democrat who has been one of the leading voices in Congress for gun control, an indication that the President is interested in pursuing legislation.
Earlier in the week, Mr.
Murphy had contacted the White House to indicate that he was willing to work with Mr.
Trump on the issue, which prompted the call.
The conversation was positive, with Mr.
Trump indicating that he was serious about persuading Republicans to act.
According to officials familiar with their discussion.
Bad idea.
It's just a bad idea.
There is no gun control law that would have prevented the shooting.
Not the shooting in El Paso, not the shooting in Ohio, not the many, many, many, many more shootings that are not talked about in the Not all the shootings all around the country, not the gang violence, not the drug violence, not the suicide, which is the majority of gun deaths.
It won't stop any of that.
It will just take away our liberties for no reason other than to empower the left and to empower the government, which in the long run is the left.
And the left is the government in the long run.
A very bad idea.
It's just emotional.
I mean, the New York Post had that awful editorial a couple weeks ago.
It said, we need to ban assault weapons.
Even though we can't define assault weapons, we need to ban them.
And not just the cosmetic features, but the features that really differentiate assault weapons from other rifles, even though there aren't any features that substantively differentiate assault weapons, quote-unquote, from other rifles.
There's nothing.
We need to act now.
It's this constant push of emotivism.
Of, I don't care about the facts.
The facts be damned.
I need to feel better about myself.
This gets you into a lot of trouble.
And not just at the political level.
It gets you into trouble on the culture.
It gets you into trouble on religion.
We'll see that with a major evangelical figure apparently losing his faith.
We'll see how it's actually the same cause.
It's this emotivism.
It's this giving yourself away to emotion.
I really hope that President Trump doesn't push for more gun control.
There is no appetite in the country for it over the long run.
There is no defense of it constitutionally or legally from our political tradition or morally, as far as I can tell.
And I think it's just him being suckered in on this emotivism by Democrats.
Now, Trump is not a sucker.
I hope he doesn't allow himself to be played as one.
And if he does push for gun control, as it appears that he may be trying to do, I hope that Senate and congressional Republicans stand firm and do not give an inch on it.
It's stupid.
It's just a terrible idea.
And I suspect it's being pushed by forces around the president that are left-wing to begin with.
Stop it.
Get rid of it.
It won't help you in 2020.
It won't help our liberties in this country.
It won't help our constitutional government.
It won't help anybody but the left.
I want to get to, on this topic of emotivism, I want to discuss how this affects not just politics, but culture and religion.
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We have got to get to what this emotivism and this tyranny of feelings means, not just for politics, but culture and religion.
We'll get to that with an evangelical losing his faith.
We also have to get to, if there is time, the more lurid details that are coming out in the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
But first, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
What do you get?
What don't you get at this point?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get the Matt Wall show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up tomorrow, so get your questions in.
You get to ask questions backstage.
That is coming up.
We're going to be doing backstage live next week, so if you want to grab your last-minute tickets, make sure to go do that ASAP. I think we might still have some left, but not many, so go over quickly.
But most importantly, you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You need the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
If you even turn on CNN these days, You need it, or water will gush out of your TV, glass will shatter everywhere, you will end up floating with your face down in your own bedroom because of all the leftist tears, not just from Fredo, but from Don Lemon too.
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We'll be right back.
Okay.
We've got to get to emotivism in religion.
This is kind of a hobby horse of mine that I've been talking about for a little while.
This guy, Marty Sampson, is his name.
He's a songwriter for the popular evangelical Christian group Hillsong United.
He has just announced on Instagram that he is, quote, genuinely losing his faith.
This comes just a week after an evangelical author named Joshua Harris also announced that he no longer calls himself a Christian.
This is a problem I've been talking about for a very long time.
When you ground your faith in sentiment, you leave your faith in a very vulnerable position.
When the bedrock of your beliefs, religious, cultural, or political, is emotivism, it's just a faith in feeling, you are leaving your beliefs in a very vulnerable position.
This is true everywhere.
This is true throughout life.
It's true on marriage.
A lot of young people talk about this.
Actually, I mean, the baby boomers in particular, because they have those exploding divorce rates.
When you ground your marriage in the feeling of little butterflies that you got when you were 16 and you saw your girlfriend, if that's actually the bedrock of your marriage, you're going to get divorced.
Guaranteed.
Because the minute those butterflies go away, and they will go away, they might come back.
Butterflies, they can come back.
You can genuinely have feelings of romantic love again and again.
I've seen my grandparents do it.
They've been married for 70 years.
But there are going to be periods where the butterflies go away.
And if that's what your marriage is based on, it's gone.
You might as well not get married.
This is not just an evangelical problem we're seeing.
This is going on in all sorts of ecclesial communities.
This is going on in the Catholic Church.
I talk a lot about how the acoustic guitar, felt banner, soapy, sappy, sentimental saccharine The liturgies that have replaced really beautiful liturgy in the Catholic Church have led a lot of people away, myself included.
It contributed to my own lapsing in the faith for ten years, for a whole decade.
It's a huge problem.
Here's what Marty Sampson had to say.
He said, this is on an Instagram post.
He's since deleted it, but he still says he's grappling with his faith and he said he's losing it.
Quote, this is a soapbox moment, so here I go.
How many preachers fall?
Many.
No one talks about it.
How many miracles happen?
Not many.
No one talks about it.
Why is the Bible full of contradictions?
No one talks about it.
How can God be love yet send 4 billion people to a place all because they don't believe?
No one talks about it.
Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet.
They can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people.
But it's not for me.
I am not in anymore.
I want genuine truth.
Not just the I believe it kind of truth.
Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.
Lots of things help people change their lives.
Not just one version of God.
Got so much more to say, but for me, I'm keeping it real.
Unfollow if you want.
I've never been about living my life for others.
Just that last bit might show you the problem.
Might be your first problem.
If you can claim to be a prominent Christian leader and say with a straight face, I have never been about living my life for others, you probably weren't much of a Christian leader.
Probably didn't have all that much faith to begin with.
I mean, everything he said is really stupid and really wrong and really misguided, but I don't totally blame him for it.
What I suspect, which is true of a lot of people today, is that he did not have very much of a formation in the faith.
What I suspect is that this guy had a lot of butterflies in his stomach and a lot of soft soap and shallow feelings.
And then when that all went away, when he poked a little bit harder, his faith was based on nothing.
He just had an acoustic guitar faith.
He had faith in acoustic guitars.
Not in the church, not in the faith, but in those nice acoustic guitar sappy songs that I don't even think were cool in the 70s, but some people apparently like them.
them.
If your faith can be broken by the nature of miracle, if your faith can be broken by the mysteries presented in scripture or the problem of evil or the relationship between reason and revelation or the foundation of science itself, you probably didn't have a very sturdy faith to begin with.
You just had sad, sappy, hallmark music, acoustic guitars.
This is an example of the parable of the sower.
I hope this guy is, what's his name?
Marty Samson.
I hope he's watching this.
I hope someone sends this to him.
This is the parable of the sower from Mark chapter 4, or from Matthew chapter 4, I believe.
Mark or Matthew, I'm not sure.
Maybe my faith needs to be rejuvenated as well.
but here is the parable of the sower.
He was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them, listen, behold, a sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it.
Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil.
And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away.
Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.
And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding 30-fold and 60-fold and 100-fold.
And he said, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Seems to me a pretty clear example of seed falling on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it immediately sprang up and had no depth of soil.
And then the sun rose, and it was scorched, because it had no root, and it withered away.
This is an across-the-board point that I make for all sorts of people who call themselves Christian.
Follow the beauty and the goodness and the truth.
Don't let your emotions or your self-obsession or the acoustic guitars that you really like because they make you feel really good and cool carry you away.
Don't be carried away on thin emotion.
You need to have...
A serious foundation of your faith.
You need to ballast yourself in reality.
Then throw yourself into the sea, because the sea is the inspiration.
But you need to ballast yourself in the reality first.
If you just let yourself be washed away, wiped away, blown away on the breezes of your own thin emotion, you are not going to have very much faith at all.
This especially matters with the evangelicals.
Because without the evangelicals, the culture and politics of this country are lost.
They're the only reliably conservative people in the country.
Catholics aren't reliably conservative.
Catholics aren't even reliably pro-life.
Now, a lot of this gets down to a kind of cultural Catholicism.
Some people who say, yeah, you know, I went to church a few times as a kid, so I guess I'm Catholic.
I don't practice the faith, and I don't go to church, and I don't really believe any of it.
But, you know, hey, I'm Catholic.
There was a study that just came out from Pew.
It said that something like two-thirds of Catholics don't believe in the transubstantiation, which is the Eucharist really being the body and blood of Christ.
That is the center of the Catholic faith.
It's the center of the Mass.
Now, I don't know if the poll is right or not, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
And that's how you get such bizarre numbers.
Half of Catholics saying they're not pro-life or something like that.
Evangelicals are kind of the political last hope in the country.
And if they're being washed away because of shallow, sappy songs and not having a real, firm, solid faith, that is a very terrifying thing.
You know, it's funny sometimes.
I see this a lot.
I go to a lot of conservative religious circles, and you'll see these people who are super conservative across the religious spectrum, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and they balance themselves with such reality in every aspect of their lives And then they give in to sappy emotivism on a couple questions.
You know, maybe they give in to sappy emotivism on the gun control question, because they really let their emotions run away with them.
Or, even more terrifying, they give themselves into sappy emotivism on the eternal questions, on the most important questions.
The nature of reality, the nature of the human person, and the nature of our relationship to God himself.
Not good.
Not good.
Very scary.
And maybe this is an opportunity for this guy Marty Sampson.
Is that his name?
I keep forgetting his name.
Maybe this is an opportunity for Marty Sampson and for other people who currently have their faith mostly made up of lame, early 90s soft rock melodies and lyrics to really delve into those questions.
Because everything he brings up is...
Are the questions that children should bring up and then a good religious formation will answer them?
How many miracles happen?
Miracles happen every day, Buster.
They happen all the time.
And the central miracles of the scripture are incredibly well attested to.
But miracles happen every day.
Why is the Bible full of contradictions?
What he's really saying is, I don't understand scripture.
Therefore, it must be wrong.
No.
Why are you unwilling to engage with Scripture?
What contradictions?
Bring up the contradiction.
Explore them.
Take it seriously.
How can God be loved yet send four billion people to a place all because they don't believe?
What he's asking here is the problem of evil, the problem of pain, the problem of suffering.
You're not the first guy to think about it.
You're not the first guy to ask that question.
And acoustic guitar players are...
Look, I like acoustic guitar players.
I'm an acoustic guitar player myself.
But they're not the be-all and end-all of philosophical and theological thought and the question of theodicy.
Maybe explore what other people have had to say on the matter, the church fathers, the doctors of the church.
I want genuine truth, not the I just believe kind of truth.
Yeah, right.
You should have a genuine faith.
You should follow that through reason.
You know who didn't have a just, I just believe kind of truth?
You know who followed genuine truth and used his reason pretty seriously?
St.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest geniuses to ever live.
Maybe open his book up a little bit.
Maybe open up the Catechism of St.
Thomas Aquinas or the Summa Contra Gentiles or the Summa Theologiae.
Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.
No it doesn't.
That's just a stupid slogan that left-wingers say.
That is not true.
Science comes naturally from the church.
The basis of science is religious faith.
You need to accept the premises of faith in order to think in the first place and in order to follow the scientific method and to trust your faculties of reason.
There is a reason why the greatest scientists in history were all profoundly religious.
It's why Isaac Newton spent the last 30 years of his life interpreting scripture.
It's why Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematicians and scientists of all of modernity, Came up with Pascal's Wager.
He was profoundly religious.
All of these guys.
Got to use your mind.
The guy who discovered the Big Bang.
Do you know who discovered the Big Bang?
A Catholic priest named Father George Lemaitre.
The guy who discovered the human genome.
All of these people were profoundly religious.
Maybe they knew something that you, the acoustic guitar player, don't know.
I'm just keeping it real.
You're not keeping it real.
You're allowing your emotions to fall away with you.
You're grounding your faith on nothing but your own saccharine self-centeredness.
And you should shake yourself out of it.
I've never been about living my life for others.
Well, then I guess you've never been about Christianity, buddy.
And if you're interested in Christianity, maybe you should explore it with the wonder and awe of a child and not the cynicism of a professional musician and the saccharine sentiment of an acoustic guitar player.
That's my rant on that.
We have to ask a couple questions about Jeffrey Epstein because a day would no longer be a day if we weren't able to find more lurid details out about Jeffrey Epstein.
Big question here is over deep fakes.
Or, I'm sorry, we'll get to deep fakes tomorrow.
The big question over Epstein.
I guess it could be over deep fakes because we don't know who they wheeled out of that hospital.
But the big question here is, why didn't the guards check on him while he was killing himself?
Guards were supposed to check on Epstein every 30 minutes at least, if not every 15 minutes.
What happened?
The story now coming out of sources and investigators is that they fell asleep.
For three hours, while Epstein killed himself.
Both of them.
The guards who were supposed to be monitoring him apparently fell asleep for three hours.
Then they falsified the records in the morning.
Now they've been placed on administrative leave.
And some reports are coming out that the cameras were just malfunctioning.
And so we couldn't really see anything in or around Jeffrey Epstein's cell at all.
I'm not surprised if bureaucracy is incompetent.
Not surprised at all.
I'm also not surprised if bureaucracy is corrupt.
And I think there are some people trying to leap to this incompetence theory.
But it just requires so many coincidences.
It requires that Epstein actually had been taken off of suicide watch three weeks after an attack.
It requires that the cameras have not been pointed in the right place or not working.
It requires that records have been falsified.
And it requires that not one but two, Guards slept through three full hours at the same time when they should have been checking on Jeffrey Epstein.
And it requires that all of this happened right at the end of a news cycle on the best time to release news that you want to be buried to not have a huge effect.
I'm skeptical.
Not saying it couldn't happen, just saying I am skeptical.
And if that level of incompetence and coincidence occurred, that is a scandal in and of itself.
The two guards have apparently been placed on administrative leave.
Okay.
I ain't buying this.
I ain't buying this at all.
I also can't wait to find out that the two guards is, you know, one is a sort of taller man in his 70s with gray hair.
The other one is a shorter woman with blonde hair and wears a lot of pantsuits, you know, kind of.
Look, I don't know what the guards looked like.
They both had Groucho Marx glasses on and a mustache.
I don't know what they looked like.
I'm saying it's the Clintons people.
That's what I'm saying now.
I don't know.
I'm just saying there are some people on the right and the left who want to say, okay, open and shut case, nothing to see here, move along, move along.
I don't buy that.
Way too many coincidences going on.
Speaking of deep fakes, though, the deep fakes either of the supervillain now on his space station because they wheeled a deep fake out of a hospital...
There is a big story on this.
We've got deep fakes coming out.
It could really affect our politics.
It could affect our culture.
A lot of people are freaking out because you can make people say or do anything you want on video.
I actually think it's a pretty good thing, but I guess we'll have to get to it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
See you then.
hair and makeup by Jesua Olvera, production assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
In Hong Kong, pro-democracy demonstrators are waving our flag, the American flag, the one our millionaire athletes disrespect and CNN complains about.
Sort of tell us something, but what?
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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