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Oct. 10, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
44:31
Ep. 430 - He Who Pays The Piper Calls The Tune

The NBA comes under fire for cowering to the brutal regime of Communist China, Matt Lauer is accused of violent rape, and finally, the Mailbag! Date: 10-10-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Time Text
The NBA comes under fire for cowering to the brutal regime of Communist China.
But the problem runs way deeper than the NBA, infecting virtually all of corporate America, Hollywood, and even the U.S. government.
We will examine the root cause of the trouble, the eternal maxim, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Then, Matt Lauer is accused of violent rape.
But is the Me Too movement redefining rape beyond the bounds of reason?
We will analyze, as it were, the evidence.
Finally, the mailbag.
All that and more.
more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show.
This NBA issue is so much bigger than the NBA.
You've probably heard about the NBA issue.
I've been kind of avoiding the story all week because I don't care about the NBA. I don't care about most professional sports leagues.
I really only watch baseball and even that, not that often.
So I've been kind of out of it.
All of these names are new to me.
The issue is not new to me.
The Will they give up their integrity, give up their principles, give up everything they believe in for mammon?
That's what it really comes down to.
And every step of the way in this NBA issue has been so pathetic, but it's not just the NBA. So what happened with the NBA? The NBA issue all began when Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets tweeted out Seven words.
Just a seven-word tweet.
Fight for freedom.
Stand with Hong Kong.
And the context of this is that the communist Chinese government is clamping down on Hong Kong, which is a politically independent entity.
It was controlled by the British for 100 years.
And then the British, in a moment of stupidity and weakness in the 1990s, decided to give Hong Kong back to China.
And everything has gone downhill since.
Because China is one of the worst regimes in the history of the world.
And...
The West never should have given them back Hong Kong, and now we are where we are, which is that the brutal Chinese government is going in and clamping down on protesters because they've increasingly tried to take political control away from Hong Kong over the past two decades, and they passed a new law which would allow them to extradite prisoners from Hong Kong.
So political dissidents, for instance, they could just go into Hong Kong and rip them back to mainland China.
China protested that.
Now they're clamping down.
One person has been shot already.
A lot of chaos in the streets.
So in the midst of all this, I mean, this has been going on for weeks and weeks now, Daryl Morey comes out and says, fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.
China didn't like that very much.
The Chinese consulate in Houston expressed, quote, strong dissatisfaction with Morey's tweet.
Okay, well, I got your dissatisfaction right here.
Who cares what the Chinese government says, right?
Except the NBA makes a lot of money in China.
NBA has a lot of relationships in China.
Are you sure that's what you want to say, Mr.
Morey?
Are you sure?
Maybe we should...
And this is how it starts.
This is how the censorship starts.
And it infects every level of the government.
So, after he makes his comments...
All of a sudden, there's a sportswear brand, Li Ning.
They sponsor some NBA players.
They announced they would suspend business ties with the NBA. Okay, that's fine.
That's just one hit.
Then Tencent, which is the NBA's exclusive digital partner in China, said it would suspend business relations with the Rockets.
So, no more digital passes in China to the Rockets.
The fans who bought the team pass to watch the Rockets this season, We're good to go.
The Lakers-Nets exhibition game in Shanghai did occur on Thursday, but it was played without sponsors.
Media sessions for the teams were canceled, so no money, no publicity for it, no point.
And Yahoo Sports was reporting several NBA teams were now planning for a scenario in which the cap for the 2020-2021 season could drop between 10% and 15% because of the situation with the NBA in China.
A lot of basketball fans in China, a lot of people in China in general.
A lot more of this.
Sportswear brand Anta, which works with a few NBA players, announced that it would suspend contract renewal talks with the NBA, so they're going to lose money there.
An NBA Cares event in Shanghai was canceled by the Chinese Board of Education.
China is basically saying if you don't shut up about our vicious, evil political activities, we're going to cut you off.
We're going to cut you off from your money.
So how does the NBA respond?
This is a good American sports league.
They're being bullied by an adversary of the United States, a red communist, disgusting, despicable government.
They're going to stand up to them, right?
No, they're not.
They're going to just beg for money.
NBA sends out an official statement, quote, we recognize that the views expressed by Houston Rockets general manager, Daryl Morey, have deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.
While Daryl has made it clear that his tweet does not represent the Rockets or the NBA, the values of the league support individuals educating themselves and sharing their views on matters important to them.
We have great respect for the history and culture of China and hope that sports and the NBA can be used as a unifying force to bridge cultural divides and bring people together.
Blah!
Sorry, excuse me.
What a disgusting, weaselly, horrific, there is not one redeeming syllable in that entire statement.
Because it's not that they have respect for the people of China.
If they had respect for the people of China, they'd support the overthrow of their brutal regime.
They obviously don't have respect for their own country, the United States.
What they have respect for is the almighty dollar.
And so they send out this tweet saying, we would never support freedom.
Why would we want to fight for freedom?
We're the NBA. Why would we want to fight for freedom?
We're an American sports league.
They send that out.
It wasn't just the NBA. Houston's team owner, Tilman Fertitta, am I pronouncing that right?
I don't really care, sent out a tweet acknowledging that Maury's opinions do not reflect the views of the Houston Rockets.
He said, quote, Listen, Maury does not speak for the Houston Rockets.
Our presence in Tokyo is all about the promotion of NBA internationally.
We are not a political organization at ESPN. Well, you are a political organization.
You're supporting communist China.
Right, you are political.
You are making a political statement.
The political statement is we oppose the pro-freedom protesters in Hong Kong.
We oppose one of the last bright spots around China and we support the brutal communist regime.
And what happens then for Daryl Morey?
He could either stand firm, hold his ground, And I'll tell you, it's very important to do that.
When the outrage mob comes for you, very important to hold your ground if you haven't said anything wrong.
Maybe if you said something right and important.
So what does Daryl Morey do?
He caves.
He sends out an apology.
Quote, I have also, I added that part.
He didn't put that in the statement.
He goes on.
I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided, and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention.
Those who are upset, by the way, are communist slave masters in China.
So he doesn't want them.
I'm sorry, I didn't understand you, you brutal, degenerate communists.
He goes on.
My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA. We know that.
We know because the NBA sucks up to China.
Our adversary.
Because they have no care for their country.
They have no care for principles.
They have no care for the people fighting for freedom in Hong Kong.
We know that the NBA does not agree with your tweets.
Not only...
Do we get that apology?
We get an apology from the rocket star James Harden, who said, quote, We apologize.
We love China.
We love playing here for both of us.
Individually, we go there once or twice a year, and they show us the most support and love.
We appreciate them as a fan base, and we love everything they're about, especially communism.
He didn't say that, but that's the implication.
That's the only conclusion you could draw from his comment.
We appreciate the support they give us individually and as an organization.
How?
How?
Pathetic.
And it's not just that they're cowering to China.
It's not just that the league is cowering to China.
They're shutting down freedom of the press in the NBA to suck up to China.
The rot runs so much deeper.
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Obviously, this NBA issue has generated a lot of controversy.
Some reporters have been asking about it.
Are they taking the questions?
Are they giving serious answers?
No.
The people working for the NBA are now shutting down the very reporters themselves so that they don't need to answer for their disgusting behavior.
Hi, Christina McFarlane, CNN. The NBA has always been a league that prides itself on its player and its coach as being able to speak out openly about political and societal affairs.
I just wonder after the events of this week and the fallout we've seen, whether you would both feel differently about speaking out in that way in future.
Excuse me, we're taking the basketball questions only.
It's a legitimate question.
This is an event that's happened this week during the NBA. Can you give us an answer?
This particular question has not been answered.
James?
You can't ask any questions here.
This is a press conference.
It's amazing how quickly, the minute you sell your soul for the almighty dollar, you just become like your slave masters in China.
They're just behaving like the Chinese government.
And Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, same sort of issue.
Finally, a reporter was able to get to him, and the apparatchiks of the NBA weren't able to...
Hustle the reporter away.
And so he was asked about this.
Listen to the kind of weaselly non-response he gives.
It's a really bizarre international story.
A lot of us don't know what to make of it.
It's something I'm reading about, just like everybody is, but I'm not going to comment further.
Oh my gosh.
It's not a bizarre international story.
You have good people in Hong Kong and bad people in China, and the bad people in China are trying to ruin the good people in Hong Kong.
And we're talking about not a complicated issue.
We're talking about an issue that's been clear for at least 100 years.
And the only reason you're pretending that it's not clear is because you are afraid of losing your job with the NBA. President Trump.
The ironic voice of moral clarity.
People, you know, people go after him because he's engaged in highly publicized immoral behavior, like extramarital affairs and multiple marriages and all this kind of stuff.
And, you know, he's mean to people and he says mean things.
And sure, all that's true.
When the rubber meets the road, when it comes to important public issues, this guy has an uncommon moral clarity.
And you see it here as the NBA capitulates, as so much of America capitulates, this guy, President Trump, puts the issue into stark relief.
Well, the NBA is a different thing.
I mean, I watch this guy, Steve Curran.
He was like a little boy.
He was so scared to be even answering the question.
He couldn't answer the question.
He was shaking.
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know.
He didn't know how to answer the question.
And he'll talk about the United States very badly.
I watched Popovich, sort of the same thing, but he didn't look quite as scared, actually.
But they talk badly about the United States, but when it talks about China, they don't want to say anything bad.
I thought it was pretty sad, actually.
So are you okay?
It'll be very interesting.
Excuse me?
Are you okay, then, with the Chinese government pressuring the NBA over Hong Kong?
They have to work out their own situation.
The NBA's...
They know what they're doing.
But I watched the way that, like, Kerr and Popovich and some of the others were pandering to China, and yet to our own country.
It's like they don't respect it.
It's like they don't respect it.
I said, what a difference.
Isn't it sad?
It's very sad.
To me, it's very sad.
This is the irony.
This is the real irony.
You have American professional sports teams that are encouraging people to denigrate their own country, the greatest country in the history of the world.
That's not a statement of preference.
That's an objective fact.
The most just, the most equitable, the most free, the most prosperous...
The most generous country in the history of the world, and they denigrate it day by day by day.
And I'm speaking most specifically of the NFL, but other teams as well.
Other teams in other leagues as well.
And yet, they bend over backwards.
They bend over a lot of different ways for communist China.
No one can tolerate any disrespect for communist China.
And it's not just the NBA.
It's all over corporate America.
Apple.
Apple has now censored the Taiwan flag emoji in Hong Kong and Macau.
They've censored a Hong Kong protest map on their app store.
They gave away iCloud data and encryption keys to China.
All because Apple needs China.
Needs China to manufacture their products.
Needs China to buy their products.
Activision.
Activision Blizzard, video game, banned a player for supporting the Hong Kong protest, confiscated all of his weddings.
There's actually a great, on Reddit right now, actually Reddit is a little bit in the pocket of China too, so they're probably going to take this down pretty soon, but there's a great list of all of these on Reddit, just a few.
Vans, the shoe company, censored a pro-Hong Kong democracy design in its shoe.
Disney and ESPN, maybe the worst offenders, banned any mention of Chinese politics related to this NBA issue.
Viacom and Paramount censored the Taiwan flag that should be on Tom Cruise's jacket in the new Top Gun movie.
They just took it out.
Disney and Marvel censored a Tibetan monk from Doctor Strange, and the screenwriter admitted the reason they censored the Tibetan monk is because they want to make money out of China.
Marriott, the hotel company, apologized to China, changed Taiwan as its listing for hotels to Taiwan, China.
Taiwan is not China.
Taiwan is separate from China.
The main Chinese government.
Taiwan was the stronghold of nationalist China after the communist revolution there.
Other companies, Mercedes, virtually every American airline, Audi, Zara, Ray-Ban, Sheraton, Princeton University, JP Morgan, lots of others, all censoring themselves for China.
U.S. government does it, too.
I remember I was working on a presidential campaign.
We were talking to some candidates, and one of the big issues then was whether or not to label China a currency manipulator.
Now we're getting tough with China, but back in 2010, 2011, 2012, we weren't getting tough with China.
And a lot of candidates wanted to back off Labeling China currency manipulator.
And they said, well, look, if we label China currency manipulator, they could say some things about us.
And let's not forget, they're our largest creditors, so you got to be really careful.
And we need them for our manufacturing.
And it all gets down to the point that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
This is the problem.
We thought, we went around for so long And thought, oh great, look at all these cheap Chinese goods.
This is all upside, no downside.
Oh, look at our access to these huge Chinese markets for our own products and our own entertainment and our own Hollywood movies.
Oh, there's all upside, no downside.
There is downside.
Look at all this money that's coming in from China, buying up all of our debt, largest creditor, funding whatever we want to do around the world, funding our unsustainable entitlement programs.
All upside, no downside.
There is downside.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
And it's so insidious.
You see it in a small scale in the media.
When you go on media platforms, if you say things that the people who are putting you on that platform don't like, they'll kick you off.
They'll throw you out of there.
It's not politically correct.
This is what the left uses to completely transform the culture.
And there's no greater example of the left than a communist government.
The most successful communist government in history, China.
And what they do is they say, look, here's all this money.
Here's all this success.
Here's all this wonderful stuff.
We would prefer if you don't criticize what we're doing in Hong Kong.
You wouldn't mind doing that for us, would you?
We're giving you a billion viewers.
You wouldn't mind.
We're giving you all this money, all these cheap goods.
Hey, come on.
We did you a favor.
It's like the mob.
It's like when you ask Don Corleone for a favor and he goes, I'll grant you this favor.
And one day, and that day may never come.
I will call upon you to return my favor.
And that's what's happening.
That's what we're seeing now.
This is an argument for nationalism.
This is an argument for maybe doing some of our own manufacturing.
This is an argument for patriotism.
And it gets down to the central debate of the Trump era that we were talking about yesterday, which is nationalism versus some other form of government.
Call it imperialism.
Because in this totally globalized world, You're not allowed to stand for very much.
You're not allowed to stand for very much because in this totally globalized world, China gets a say.
We have a different country than China.
We have a different system of not just economics, but a different system of politics, different belief system, different religion, different culture, all that.
In the globalized, one-world, kumbaya version, those distinctions go away.
Everything that matters to us, everything that makes us a people, everything that makes us a nation, disappears.
It plays in so perfectly to these questions of the Trump era.
And what's going to happen?
Are international corporations and the people who have no care for our own country and just want to live all together in one world, are they going to win?
Or are we going to say something's more important than money and we know that everything has a cost and we're willing to pay the cost for our own integrity?
What side is it going to be?
I'm not terribly optimistic, but I at least do have hope in the American people and you see that a little bit in the pushback.
Pretty much the only guys who stood firm on this were Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park.
They did a version of this on their show.
They gave an answer to this.
Even as the Washington Wizards are literally confiscating free Hong Kong protest signs from their games, South Park goes out there and has Disney, sort of corporate America, in the person of Mickey Mouse, going out and demanding that we get on our knees and pay fealty to communist China.
Which one of you decided to go and start bad-mouthing the Chinese government?
Who here thought they had permission to say anything critical of Chinese politics?
Well, it is true, sir.
The Chinese seem to exploit their own people with forced labor.
Shut the f*** up!
That's it.
That's it.
Shut the F up, Thor.
Nobody can criticize China.
We are Disney.
And at the political level President Trump is speaking at, all of us should speak at, too.
Moving on to a story, another surprising story.
Never thought I'd have to do this.
I kind of have to defend Matt Lauer.
I don't want to do that because Matt Lauer is a degenerate, and I'm certainly not defending everything he did.
But it seems like there's an unfair attack against him now.
In Ronan Farrow's new book, Ronan Farrow, the leading journalist of the Me Too movement, he's got a new book, Catch and Kill.
He runs the story of a former NBC producer, Brooke Nevels, who says that Matt Lauer raped and sodomized her.
This is, and they're using the word rape to report all of this.
Matt Lauer disputes this.
He says that he engaged in a months-long consensual extramarital affair with Nevels.
What really happened?
Here's what everyone agrees on.
Here's what everyone agrees on.
Ronan Farrow, Nevels, and Lauer.
They agree that at the 2014 Saatchi Olympics...
This young producer, Brooke Nevels, went out with Matt Lauer and they drank a lot of booze.
And then after a night of drinking, she went up to his hotel room.
He didn't follow her back to her hotel room.
She went up to his hotel room.
At that point, they consensually, everyone agrees on this, they consensually engaged in oral sex, regular sex, and what I will call irregular sex.
I think, listen, this is a family show, so let's read in between the lines here.
They engaged in those three things.
Consensually in oral sex, consensually in regular sex.
Then there is a question.
But what they still both agree on is that during the irregular sex...
Matt Lauer asked Nevels if she liked it, and she said yes, she liked it.
Then after the Saatchi Olympics, they continued their affair at bars and at Matt Lauer's apartment in New York for several months.
Here's where the stories diverge.
Gets to the irregular sex.
Sorry that that image is in your mind.
Nevels says that after the oral and the regular sex, she didn't want to do the other thing.
And she said she didn't want to do the other thing, but eventually she relented, and then they did the other thing, and then she said that she liked it.
Lauer says that he never forced anything on her, and it certainly wasn't an assault.
Then they continue the affair consensually, is what Lauer says, and what she says is they did continue the affair, but she only did it because he was a powerful guy at the company, and she wanted to please him and appease him.
I suspect all of this is true.
I suspect all of that is true.
Everything that they are both saying about the actual incident and the incidents that followed, I bet all of that is true.
What is not true is that that's rape.
It's awful.
It's awful.
Matt Lauer is a degenerate.
What this girl is describing is sordid and disgusting.
But what she's describing, what Ronan Farrow is describing, is not rape.
It's bad, but it's not rape.
To begin, actually on both of them, mostly on him, what they're doing is very bad.
I mean, he's the man, he's the older guy, he's the more powerful guy, so he shouldn't take a young girl up to his room.
Also, young women should not go up to the hotel room of married men after a night of drinking.
Young women are not You know, totally senseless creatures, okay?
They have will, they have intellect, they have their own free will and their own free choices.
Young women shouldn't do that.
He's in the position of power here, so it's mostly on him.
He shouldn't have asked her to do that particular sex act.
He shouldn't have asked her to have sex at all because he was married and he shouldn't be such a degenerate.
And he should have lost his job.
Anywhere else in America right now, if you do what he did, totally consensually, you would lose your job and he should have lost his job too.
But that isn't rape.
And the reason this matters is because rape is a very serious crime.
And rape does happen a lot.
And it should be treated very seriously.
And when we treat otherwise consensual months-long extramarital affairs as being the same thing as sexual assault and rape, you downplay the seriousness of rape.
You undermine actual victims of rape.
And that's a very bad thing.
And the Me Too, this has always been the tension of the Me Too movement, is the Me Too movement is exposing actual bad things being done by actual bad people in serious positions in Hollywood.
At the same time, there is a risk of redefining rape and sexual assault so broadly that you actually diminish the seriousness with which we as a culture treat rape.
That would be a very bad thing to do.
I have no desire ever to defend Matt Lauer again.
I think he's a complete dirtbag.
So please, please Me Too movement don't make me have to even remotely in any way defend what he is saying because he's pushed back very hard against this and he actually has acknowledged some of his own Moral wrongdoing here.
Not sufficiently, but a little bit.
But what he's saying is I should have been more open from the very beginning.
I was a rich, powerful, famous guy, and I took advantage of my position, and I had extramarital affairs with young women, but I didn't rape anybody.
And maybe he did in other circumstances.
I don't know if he did or not, but in what everyone is describing here, that is not it.
There is so much more to get to, but unfortunately we have to take a break and head on over to dailywire.com because we've got the mailbag coming up.
And if you go to Daily Wire, here's the important thing.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Wall show, you get all of the, you get to ask questions in the mailbag, but you get Another Kingdom.
And Another Kingdom is super cool, and the new episodes are dropping on Monday, but for subscribers, you get to listen to them on Friday, and that is going to be tomorrow.
And actually, tomorrow, when this episode drops, Drew and I are going to be doing a discussion for all Access members.
At 3 p.m.
Eastern, noon Pacific.
So head on over there.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
Listen to Another Kingdom.
And you can also do it, by the way, on the Daily Wire app.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right, let's get into the mailbag.
I always run so late in the mailbag, so let's try to go right in.
From Arun, Dear Dr.
I have never boycotted a business or individual on the basis of politics.
However, in the past few days, various events such as Robert De Niro cursing on CNN due to his hatred of the president and the vegan restaurants in my city tweeting support for pseudoscientific climate alarmism.
What is the point at which we should refuse to purchase goods or entertainment from extreme liberals?
Thanks.
Love the show.
These are actually different questions.
One is about boycotts.
One is about your choices as a consumer.
They're related.
They seem very similar, but they're actually different.
A boycott is when you organize enough people to cause enough pain to a business to make them change their behavior.
Think of the bus boycotts during the civil rights movement.
Boycotts almost never work because no one actually cares.
What we see instead are fake boycotts, and this is ginned up almost exclusively on the left by groups like Media Matters and Sleeping Giants and those kind of people, to get 30 or 40 people to call up a conservative media personality's sponsors and convince them that there's a boycott and have them drop them right away out of fear of some future problem.
But it's only ever 30 or 40 people.
It doesn't in any way affect the bottom line.
So boycotts don't work.
I don't think conservatives really should engage in boycotts, unless we're talking about some seriously momentous political issue.
Personal consumer choice is a different thing.
I won't purchase anything from Nike.
Not that I ever did purchase very much from Nike.
I'm not exactly the sneaker-wearing type.
But I certainly won't purchase anything from Nike anymore.
Why?
Because Nike didn't just weigh in on some political issue that I disagreed with.
They explicitly endorsed a protest of the American flag.
Not just...
A protest of taxes or something, or tax cuts, or not a protest of this issue or that issue.
The flag itself, the country itself, which I pledge allegiance to.
I pledge allegiance to the country in a way that I have allegiance to my parents.
It's totally right and just to love your country and to have a loyalty to your country.
And they undercut that, so I won't shop at Nike.
That's a pretty high level.
Now, other companies do things that I don't like, and I still use them sometimes.
That's just the way it is.
For instance, some coffee companies will match donations that employees make to Planned Parenthood.
I hate that.
I hate Planned Parenthood.
I want it to be abolished tomorrow.
And if I were ever in a position of power, I would certainly do everything I could to do that.
But if you start getting down into the weeds on every little thing, huge numbers of companies match employees' donations to Planned Parenthood.
You basically wouldn't be able to participate in the market if you were to make your decisions that way.
And life is too short and there are too many details involved.
So the answer that I will give you on the consumer choice aspect of this is the answer that Antonin Scalia actually gave me when we were asking him about particular issues of constitutional law, like stare decisis and gun control and what that really means.
How should you make those decisions?
It's an unsatisfying answer, but it's the real one.
Very carefully.
From Annie.
Do you think this next election, no matter the result, will create even more divide between the Democrats and Republicans?
Yes.
Yes, it will create more divide and it will acknowledge that there is more of a divide being created.
A divide among Democrats and Republicans, by the way, is not necessarily a bad thing.
I actually think it's nice that the parties are different.
I want a choice, not an echo, like Phyllis Schlafly and Barry Goldwater in the early post-war conservative movement used to talk about.
I want there to be a difference.
Too often you elect a Republican and he behaves just like a Democrat.
So I want that divide to Of perspective, ideological divide, philosophical divide.
I want that to be stark and clear because what that gives us is honesty.
Now, I don't want there to be a divide among countrymen who view each other as alien and awful and terrible and deplorable and irredeemable.
You see that a little bit from the way the right looks at the left?
A little bit?
You mostly see it from the way the left looks at the right.
There's no moral equivalence here.
I mean, Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, said that half of her countrymen are deplorable and irredeemable.
That is pretty clear.
You don't hear that kind of stuff from President Trump.
You don't hear that kind of stuff from the right generally.
So I don't want that divide to grow.
But that divide is not going to be caused by a presidential election.
It's not going to be cured by a presidential election because that divide is not political in the strict sense.
It's cultural and it's religious.
As Cardinal Manning said, all political debates are fundamentally theological debates.
If you approach politics from the position that man is broken, we are fallen, we are all deserving of death, we all do terrible, terrible things, and we can accept the grace of God and the mercy of God, and we forgive other people's trespasses as...
Our trespasses are forgiven us, and we pray for mercy, and mercy is a category of godliness.
Then, you can look on your countrymen with whom you disagree and whose goals you oppose with a degree of charity and with a degree of...
Patriotism with a degree of brotherliness as your fellow citizens.
If you approach politics as nothing in the world makes any sense and there's no such thing as redemption and we all just take a dirt nap and turn to worm food when we die and it's just a brutal fight until the end, you can't.
You can't look at it that way.
You'll hate your fellow countrymen.
I mean, you'll do anything.
They get twisted so out of proportion when leftists look at things like this.
I think that's a little beyond his purview.
from Grant.
My girlfriend of four years and I broke up last night.
She broke up with you.
She broke up with me.
We've had some trouble for the last three months and She might not want kids.
She isn't aligned with my Christian faith.
She's an incredibly sweet girl, and I planned my life with her, but now it all seems all for nothing.
Do I fight for her, or do you believe a couple should share religious views to truly work?
This is a question that depends on a lot of variables that you haven't given me, most especially your age.
Sweet little Lisa and I dated for the first go-around when we were like children.
We met when we were 10.
We dated in high school.
We had very different views, not really from each other even, but different views than what we hold now on all manner of questions, from politics, culture, religion.
And so that changes over time, and you grow with someone or you grow apart from someone.
Now, by the time we got married, those things started to converge, obviously.
I mean, you're not going to have completely different views from your spouse about how the world works.
When you say she's not aligned with your Christian views, what does that mean?
Could she come around?
Is she sort of curious?
Or is she totally antagonistic to those views?
That's a big distinction.
She says she might not want kids.
Does she really not want kids?
Or is that just the sort of thing that an 18-year-old millennial or Gen Z girl says?
It's a big difference, too.
Faith is very important, and your faith will dictate a lot of other things that happen in your family.
Certainly, you shouldn't marry a girl who says explicitly, I don't want kids, if you want kids.
That is a recipe for disaster.
And certainly, you shouldn't marry a girl who says, I'm never going to come around to Christianity, and I won't raise the kids Christian, and we won't.
No way, that's not going to work.
If that is the case, if this is real, if those are real divides, Plenty of fish in the sea, my man.
Be a man.
Take the dumping for what it is or take the breakup for what it is and move on.
It's not always the manly thing to fight for the girl.
If it's really not going to work, move on.
That's the manlier thing to do.
These are all soft no's and not quite, and you have this more of a leadership role here.
Yeah, it might be worth fighting for, but it's really about the relationship.
It's not about hard and fast rules.
It's not about a checklist.
It's not some kind of clinical relationship.
It's about love and your future together and your ability to lead a family.
From Dan.
What is your impression on China's reaction of blocking all South Park materials from Chinese social media?
South Park could receive no higher honor than being blocked from Chinese social media.
That is truly a badge of honor.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker should be very, very proud of themselves.
You see an analog to this in American politics.
There are some conservatives who Who, when they get criticized by left-wing media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, they get really sad, they're really nervous, they want to fix it, they want to get better, no, please take me back.
Those guys are the worst.
There is no greater badge of honor than for CNN and the Washington Post and Media Matters and all those truly, truly troubled people with very wrong views of the world to come after you.
That's a good thing.
It shows you're doing something right.
From Elliot, what is your opinion on what California should do about the homeless crisis?
If you were the governor of California, what would be the first thing you would do to combat homelessness?
The first thing I would do is stop permitting it.
I would not permit it.
Now this question comes down to mayors of cities, so mayor of LA or mayor of San Francisco for instance.
I would not allow it to happen.
I would send in the police and I would have the police pick up all of these people and I would have them drag the people to homeless shelters.
I would have those police come and arrest the people and throw them in prison.
If the problem is that there aren't enough homeless shelters, I would build more homeless shelters at public expense.
If the problem is that the people are crazy, they have mental problems, which is true of huge numbers of people who are homeless on the streets, then I would build more mental asylums.
And what I would do is change the law to make it easier to involuntarily commit people.
Because those insane asylums were ripped down 50 years ago in the misguided but understandable hope that people didn't need to be locked up in these institutions anymore and psychiatric drugs would be able to cure people and they'd be fine.
Turns out that when people leave the institutions and they don't have a social network and they don't have families and they don't have strong communities, they end up on the street and they stop taking their drugs and that is not compassionate to anybody.
Sleeping on the street is a dysfunctional act that harms the individual and it harms society.
And so I would immediately do those three things.
I would make it illegal and empower the cops to deal with it.
I would make sure that there are sufficient homeless shelters and resources available, that the people who actually want them can use them, and I would make it easier to commit mentally insane people to asylums.
Those three things, they're not all politically correct, but they would do a lot to fix the problem, and in the long run, they are far, far more compassionate than letting poor, vulnerable people languish on the street.
From Dom.
In this internet age where we continue to further isolate ourselves from each other, how can we come together like we used to without compromising truth?
By that I mean how people have devolved to the point where they only see their truth instead of the truth.
How can we bridge that divide?
That's not a social media problem.
Social media exacerbates the problem, but it's not caused by social media.
That is a problem of politics and A problem of culture and a problem truly of religion.
I mean, this comes down to the fundamental question, is there a such thing as reality or is reality only in the mind?
And for the last half century at least, and really this is a problem that's been growing for 500 years, the West has lost faith in objective reality and specifically in objective metaphysical reality, the moral order.
And so everything just becomes a matter of preference.
Social media amplifies this problem because social media makes everybody a star.
Everybody's their own little celebrity and celebrities are the worst people on earth.
So it exacerbates all of their worst qualities, their hubris, their pride, their arrogance.
It actually exacerbates ignorance because it locks you into these tiny little bubbles and tiny little clusters where only your opinions are affirmed and you never hear different points of view.
So The hope, sure, it'd be good if we could reform social media in such a way that we stop making such little celebrity monsters, but the greater hope is addressing the philosophical and religious issue, which is getting people to stop believing the silly, stupid lie of moral relativism, of radical subjectivism.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote eloquently about this.
C.S. Lewis wrote eloquently about this.
This is the great challenge of our age is this poison of subjectivism.
We need to show people that truth, there is such a thing as truth.
And one simple way to do it is to show people that there's a difference between a fact and an opinion and preference.
So right now what people think is that facts and opinions are different because facts are either true or false and opinions are neither true nor false.
They're just, you know, up to preference and taste.
That isn't true.
Facts can be true or false.
Opinions can be true or false as well.
Two plus two equals four.
That's a fact.
I think two plus two equals four.
That's an opinion.
It happens to be a correct opinion.
If I said, I think 2 plus 2 equals 5, that would also be an opinion, but that would be an incorrect opinion.
And then if I say that I like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla ice cream, that's a preference.
Opinions and preferences are different things.
If you can show people that there are true opinions, it will give them confidence, not just in their own opinions, it will give them confidence that there is an objective reality itself.
And then they can tweet about that and fix social media for us.
Final question from Jake.
Does your sweet little Alisa know about the humorous, yet hopefully not accurate impression you do of her on your show?
Shut up, Meg!
Shut your mouth, Meg!
Where was that?
Did Sweet Little Lisa even hear that question?
I don't know.
No, of course.
The answer is, of course, no, because why would she ever listen to this show?
That would be totally crazy.
That's our show.
Thank you very much.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Have a good weekend.
See you.
I'll see you in the, another kingdom discussion tomorrow.
And then I'll see you on Monday.
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