President Trump has announced that the leader of ISIS was killed. We examine the gory details, and what it means for US foreign policy, and what it means for the media coverage of US foreign policy. Then, Congressman Katie Hill resigns from Congress after details of her creepy and exploitative relationship with a staffer come out. We analyze the double standards of the sexual revolution. Finally, Kanye West comes home to Jesus! Date: 10-28-2019
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We will examine the gory details and what it means for U.S. foreign policy and what it means for media coverage of U.S. foreign policy.
Then, Congressman Katie Hill resigns from Congress a week or two, a full week or two.
After those creepy naked photos of her exploitative relationship with her staffer come out, we will examine the double standards of the sexual revolution.
Finally, Kanye West comes to Jesus.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All right.
We have got a lot to get to today.
I also want to mention a little bit about my very fun experience debating Clay Aiken yesterday at Politicon.
I was supposed to go in and debate the Democrat Chris Hahn from Fox News, and somehow I ended up debating the moderator, Clay Aiken, so we'll try to get to that as well.
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Do you remember...
How just a week ago, the mainstream media told us that ISIS was about to be reconstituted.
ISIS was coming back because Trump moved 50 soldiers in northern Syria, out of northern Syria, and therefore we're going to have ISIS all over again.
It's all Trump's fault.
It's all the Republicans.
We've got to vote them out.
Oh, wait a second.
Wait.
I'm getting new information.
Under the administration...
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed, the leader of ISIS. Here's President Trump making the announcement.
Last night, the United States brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.
He was the founder and leader of ISIS, the most ruthless and violent terror organization anywhere in the world.
The United States has been searching for Baghdadi for many years.
Capturing or killing Baghdadi has been the top national security priority of my administration.
U.S. Special Operations Forces executed a dangerous and daring nighttime raid in northwestern Syria and accomplished their mission in grand style.
This is great news.
Great news.
Very well done.
And the message was delivered.
Okay, we're all done, right?
No, of course we're not done, because the president is Donald Trump.
So instead of just leaving it there, the United States Special Operators conducted a mission.
It was a dangerous mission.
We took out the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and that's it.
That's all you're ever going to hear about this, and it's done.
No, no, no.
President Trump comes out, and he just describes what all of us want to hear, which is the gory, Details.
Here's the President.
The U.S. personnel were incredible.
I got to watch much of it.
No personnel were lost in the operation, while a large number of Baghdadi's fighters and companions were killed with him.
He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.
The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering or being shot and killed.
Eleven young children were moved out of the house and are uninjured.
The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, and he had dragged three of his young children with him.
They were led to certain death.
He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down.
He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children.
His body was mutilated by the blast.
The tunnel had caved in on it, in addition.
But test results gave certain immediate and totally positive identification.
It was him.
I love it.
I love it.
I like hearing this.
And it's not wrong to like hearing this.
Trump is catching a lot of flack because they're saying he's not behaving like Obama.
He didn't give Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a proper funeral.
You remember, after we killed Osama bin Laden, they gave him a proper funeral.
And we never saw any photos and we never saw any confirmation of this.
Trump is going out there, he's saying, we went out there, we picked up the guts and the gore and all the remains in the cave, and we made sure it was him, and we chased him down like an animal.
Good.
We should hear that.
There was a time in this country when we weren't afraid to show the inhumanity of our enemy, and it's important to show the inhumanity of our enemy.
It's important to have some moral clarity.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was one of the worst people in the world.
He raped, killed, pillaged, and burned.
He was a true monster and an animal.
And it's proper to describe him as such.
We used to do this.
There is nothing especially moral about restraining yourself when talking about a vicious enemy like this.
There's nothing particularly moral about not celebrating this victory of killing the worst terrorist leader in the world.
This is what the president does in many ways.
He's being criticized for being unpresidential here.
This is the role of the president.
We've talked a lot about how the founders are so brilliant.
They set up our separation of powers, our three branches of government, to correspond to the three parts of the human soul.
There's the logos, the pathos, and the ethos.
So there's the logical part.
There's just the rigorous logical part.
That's the Supreme Court.
That's the judiciary branch.
Those are the guys who are just looking at the facts.
Does it always work out that way?
Absolutely not.
But that's how it's The emotional branch, the branch that corresponds to appetites, the wills of the people, that would be the Congress.
That's why they're elected every two years in Congress.
And in the Senate, they're elected every six years.
They are much more responsive and reactive to what the people themselves want.
And then you have the ethos, the spirited part, the part that represents the spirit of the nation.
That would be the president.
That's the executive branch, which does not exist simply to deliberate and to contemplate and to only use faculties of reason.
It is using the spirit.
This is why the president of the United States is not just some functionary at the post office.
That's why not all government employees are exactly the same.
He is actually representing something about our spirit as a country.
I remember after 9-11, I guess it was on 9-11, President Bush gave his speech.
And he said, the images that we're seeing on television of planes flying into buildings fills us with deep sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger.
It's my favorite line of the speech because it wasn't just some polished political speech written by some Harvard graduate.
It represented what all Americans were feeling, which is in part what we are asking the president to do, to represent our spirit in one person, in one branch.
Same thing, actually another George Bush example.
When he went down to the pile on 9-11, he had that bullhorn, and someone said, we can't hear you, because they couldn't hear him giving a speech.
And he said, well, I can hear you, and the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear from all of us soon.
That's not a workshop speech.
That's not the kind of thing you put in front of focus groups.
That's just really expressing a genuine aspect of the spirit.
That's what Trump was doing with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
I wish that President Obama had reacted that way to the death of Osama bin Laden.
What Osama bin Laden did was traumatic for the nation.
It was incredibly traumatic.
Certainly the greatest national trauma of my lifetime and probably the greatest national trauma since the Civil War.
That demands a response that's not simply clinical, that's not just stating the facts.
This really matters to people.
You know, after Trump announced that the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been killed, In this U.S. raid, the mother of Kayla Mueller, or I don't know how to pronounce her name, Mueller or Mueller, this was the American aid worker who was kidnapped by ISIS in 2013, repeatedly sexually abused by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself.
The mother said her daughter might still be alive if President Obama had been as decisive as President Trump.
Does Trump get credit for killing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?
Yes.
It's not like he was pulling the trigger.
I mean, it was the special operators who went into this really risky mission.
But he gets credit in the way that Obama gets credit for killing Osama bin Laden because he made the decision.
He's the decider.
Ultimately, that decision goes up to the presidential level.
And Obama made it, so he gets some credit for killing Osama bin Laden.
And Trump made that decision.
So he gets some credit for killing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The mother of this abducted aid worker said, I still say Kayla should be here.
And if Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been.
For me, what matters most, I'm hoping now we will finally get the answers we have been asking for all along.
I think this administration truly might help us.
I don't think they are as closed about what happened.
This is pretty harsh language against President Obama.
She's saying he just wasn't decisive.
Now, he was decisive when it came to Osama bin Laden, but it is strange that ISIS began on Obama's watch and it began largely because we so quickly withdrew from Iraq that the Islamic State was able to come up.
He didn't get it.
Obama didn't get it.
You know, they harangued Bush because Bush didn't get Bin Laden and then Obama did.
Well, Obama didn't get ISIS, didn't get Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Trump did.
And I'm sure you're going to see very different reactions to those two stories based on where people fall on the political aisle.
Now, Trump is also getting criticism about this.
It's unbelievable.
You kill the worst terrorist in the world and somehow you get criticized for it.
Trump is also getting criticism because he did not inform congressional Democrats that the raid was about to happen.
Now, President Trump, I think, has a pretty good reason for this.
He said he didn't want it to leak.
Here's his explanation.
You requested to the Russians to fly over this area they controlled.
We spoke to the Russians.
We told them we're coming in.
And they said, thank you for telling us.
They were very good.
But did you tell them why?
No.
They did not know why.
We did tell them, we think you're going to be very happy.
Because, you know, again, they hate ISIS as much as we do.
You know what ISIS has done to Russia.
So, no, we did not tell.
They did not know the mission.
But they knew we were going over an area that they had a lot of firepower.
And have you notified the congressional leaders about this?
Pelosi?
We've notified some.
Others are being notified now as I speak.
We were going to notify him last night, but we decided not to do that because Washington leaks like I've never seen before.
There's nothing — there's no country in the world that leaks like we do.
And Washington is a leaking machine.
And I told my people we will not notify them until the — our great people are out.
Not just in, but out.
I don't want to have them greeted with firepower like you wouldn't believe.
Fair enough.
He says, look, Washington leaks all the time.
You got leaks especially coming out of Adam Schiff like crazy.
Leaks even coming out of our intelligence community.
So I'm not going to let you guys know.
Totally fair.
And the left is sort of proving his point here in their reaction to the killing of al-Baghdadi.
I mean, you now have, on MSNBC, you somehow have...
MSNBC panelists discussing how killing the worst terrorist in the world actually, capital A-C-K-S-H, actually killing the worst terrorist in the world is a bad thing because, I don't know, MSNBC can explain it.
No, but I wonder here if this type of killing only reinforces the ideology of Baghdadi's followers and, in fact, strengthens it.
Well, it doesn't make it any easier for those of us who want to destroy the organization completely.
It's really actually bad.
It's really, you know, killing the leader of this organization now makes it really hard to destroy the organization.
And, you know, frankly, look, if we kill them, you know, they kind of, they win, you know, if you really think about it, you know, but if you really think about it, this is a completely ridiculous argument.
And they're making it because this is a...
This is an unobjectionable win for the White House.
This is an absolute good for the country.
They've really done something great here.
We have defeated ISIS. And I think the real reason that the left is so upset about it is really the timing to...
It so cuts against the narrative that we were hearing just last week.
The narrative was ISIS is about to reform.
You heard it from some Republicans who didn't want Trump to pull those troops out of northern Syria.
And not only is ISIS not currently reforming, ISIS has now been struck the most decisive blow in the history of ISIS. This is a cause for some skepticism now when we approach the mainstream media because Their predictions just keep being so wrong.
The greatest example of this is actually not MSNBC. I don't even want to really pick on MSNBC. The greatest example of this is the Washington Post.
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, ran an obituary for the leader of ISIS that read, I am not making it up, it said that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an austere religious scholar and leader of the Islamic State, dies.
An austere religious scholar.
Adolf Hitler, passionate community planner and dynamic public speaker, dies at 56.
That was one version that went around on Twitter.
Another one.
Mao Zedong, who saved 20 to 45 million of his own people from having to suffer through the struggle of existence, dies at 82.
I put one out, said, Attila the Hun, renowned world traveler and government administrator, dies at 46.
When I saw this Washington Post headline, I did not believe it.
And it is not possible for me to have less respect for the Washington Post than I currently do.
And yet, even I said, this has to be a Babylon Bee headline.
Parody of the Washington Post.
No, it was real.
They then changed the headline a few times.
It was extremist leader.
But a lot of it focused on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's scholarly training on his expertise in Islam.
And it's such an irony because all we heard during the rise of ISIS is that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.
Here's Barack Obama saying as much.
Now let's make two things clear.
ISIL is not Islamic.
No religion condones the killing of ISIS. Let's be perfectly clear.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has a PhD in Islamic theology from Baghdad University, he doesn't know nearly as much about Islam as me.
Some guy in America who's not a Muslim.
Let me be perfectly clear.
He also calls them ISIL instead of ISIS, which everybody called them.
Obama would call them ISIL because if he called him ISIS, it would acknowledge that Obama had completely bungled Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
So he called him ISIL, which was the Islamic State in the Levant, or the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant, which was a little muddier, and so Obama didn't have to take total credit for it.
But he completely bungled the thing up, and it exposes this lie.
The left wants to have it both ways.
The left wants to revere this austere religious scholar.
They want to say, gosh, this guy really knew a lot about Islam, and then say, but also, he doesn't know anything about Islam.
It depends what argument they're trying to make about the religion of peace.
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I love the Washington Post headline because it admits that the left has been lying for years when they say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.
If ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, then I guess Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is not much of a religious scholar.
If he is a religious scholar, he probably knows something about Islam.
And the answer is, of course he knows something about Islam.
He knows a lot more about it than Barack Obama does or any of the American left, who have never cracked open the binding on the Koran, have never read a page of it, have never studied anything about the religion, and simply say that it is the religion of peace.
Now, is that to say that ISIS represents all of Islam everywhere, all around the world?
No, of course not.
But it does admit that there is a complex question here, and it's not a complete coincidence that radical Islamic terrorism has some coincidence with Islam.
And Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he was a really important figure in this way as well.
well.
I mean, the fact that he was a religious scholar does matter because he did command some serious credibility on Islamic theology.
He also was one of the most notorious terrorists in the world.
He got chased down by dogs screaming and whimpering, and now he's dead.
That is a very good thing.
The bad news for the left here.
Bad news for Democrats especially on the Hill.
This is not going to help them in their impeachment argument.
Killing really, really, really bad guys tends to boost your president's popularity.
I nearly liked Barack Obama for six or seven hours after he made the decision to go kill Osama bin Laden.
This is really going to hurt their impeachment calls.
It's really going to knock their credibility.
And that's not the only woe that Democrats are facing on the Hill right now.
Democrats on the Hill also have to deal with the resignation of Representative Katie Hill, a total weirdo pervert who was engaged in a thruple with her husband and a 22-year-old staffer.
So we're not even just talking about perfectly fun, free-loved, consensual, do-whatever-you-want-to-do, man.
We're talking about What the left in any other situation would call sexual harassment.
We're talking about inappropriate relationships with young female staffers.
We're talking about the Me Too movement, except it's never the Me Too movement when it comes to Democrats.
So...
There were some reactions to this.
I mean, there were so many photos that came out.
Katie Hill could no longer sustain this.
There was one photo of her sitting completely naked behind her completely clothed female staffer brushing the staffer's hair.
These photos were so far beyond sexy.
They were so far beyond anything that any normal person could remotely consider titillating.
And they just were fully 100% creepy.
Nothing titillating was left in them.
So she's brushing the hair.
That wasn't even the weirdest one.
There was another photo of naked Katie Hill, the Democratic congressman, Ripping a bong and showing her Iron Cross tattoo.
She had a Nazi-era German tattoo on her body while ripping a bong, while doing a bunch of drugs, while sexually harassing her staffer.
Even for the left, they couldn't defend this anymore.
So they kick her out.
You know, she resigns.
She can no longer sustain it.
Even at that point, the left wasn't going down without a fight.
So BuzzFeed runs the greatest headline of all time.
This, I think, officially wins the award for dumbest article on the internet today.
The headline.
Oh my gosh.
Jeffrey Epstein was driven to suicide after shameless tabloids leak details of his personal life.
That's not the story, guys.
The story is she and her husband, who seems like kind of a creepy guy too, were exploiting this young staffer in weird threesomes that they would go on and taking photos of it and taking photos of using illicit drugs and taking photos of the congressman's naked body with Nazi tattoos.
Oh, and also the congressman, Katie Hill, is leaving her husband and her 22-year-old staffer because she's also been sleeping with her male finance director.
So awful.
I can't believe those tabloids leaked details of her sex life.
So, she's the real victim here, if you ask me.
You know if you really think about it.
But actually, but actually, this is such rank hypocrisy.
And I just, the article goes on.
I have to keep reading.
Hill said her supporters should, quote, no longer be subjected to the pain inflicted by my abusive husband and the brutality of political operatives.
It's so funny.
The husband has made a few Facebook posts here.
And because initially Katie Hill tried to spin this as she's discovering her sexuality and she's becoming a lesbian.
And it's therefore a good thing that she's leaving her husband.
And her husband posted and said, you're leaving me for a man.
You're not a lesbian.
We've been engaged in this weird threesome for a few years, but you're not leaving me for a woman.
I don't know why that would be good if you leave your husband for...
A woman, but it's definitely not good if you're leaving your husband for another guy, who's also an employee of yours.
Nothing about this is defensible, Katie Hill, but she's my abusive husband, and of course, the brutality of political operatives.
How dare those political operatives make Katie Hill take naked photos with her staffers ripping bongs and having Nazi tattoos?
So awful of them to do that.
The piece goes on.
Representative Katie Hill is resigning from Congress amid an allegation that she had an inappropriate relationship with a member of her staff.
I guess allegation is a new word for many photographs.
She's resigning from many, amid many photographs coming out showing her inappropriate relationship.
They go on.
The conservative website Red State published text messages and photos indicating that Hill had been in a consensual sexual relationship with a female staffer on her campaign and that she was also involved with a male staffer in her congressional office.
It's just that awful conservative website that showed that.
Totally consensual relationships.
Also, if a male boss ever pays a compliment to any female employee, he's done.
He's got to be fired and thrown out, and he's practically a rapist.
But if a female congressman has a completely exploitative relationship with her 22-year-old female staffer, where the staffer actually describes herself as having been heartbroken and ripped apart by this, that is wonderful and consensual, and wow, great job.
That's the sexual revolution.
The piece goes on.
Hill, who is openly bisexual, admitted and apologized for having a relationship with the female staffer, but denied any improper relationship with the male staffer.
Hill says those claims came from her ex-husband, whom she is divorcing.
Okay.
All of this just shows you how little you really can trust the media and the left.
I know it's like we almost don't even need to say it anymore, but I don't think I've seen two clearer issues in the news in recent days.
And somehow the left has managed to completely flip them.
Trump kills the most wanted notorious terrorist in the world.
The heir to Osama bin Laden, a cartoonishly evil terrorist.
And under Trump's watch, the United States kills him.
And the left somehow spins that as a bad thing.
A Democratic congresswoman has a cartoonishly Ridiculous affair with one of her staffers.
If I took that script into a Hollywood studio and I said, hey, I want to do a movie about a bisexual congressman having a thruple with her husband and a female staffer, and also she combs her hair while naked and the staffer's clothes, and also she's ripping bong hits on camera.
You see all of this.
Oh, and also she has Nazi tattoos.
If I handed that into the Hollywood studio, they would say, that's too on the nose, Michael.
That's ridiculous.
A clear case.
And yet somehow the mainstream media portrays the congressman as a victim.
What this means is the next time the media give you some outrage, the next time they say Trump did the worst thing in the world, the next time they say some Republican congressman did the worst, just take a deep breath, calm down, and remember that these guys are lying to you.
And I think increasingly people are seeing the light.
One guy in particular is seeing the light.
He is probably the avatar of the pop culture, maybe the biggest guy in the pop culture other than the president himself.
That would be Kanye West.
Kanye West.
He's released an album called Jesus is King.
You know I don't care for hip-hop.
You know I don't care for most popular music made after World War I. Listen to the album.
We will analyze Kanye's come-to-Jesus moment.
We'll see where it stands.
We'll see what it means for music, for Kanye's own soul, and for the culture.
Then...
If we have time, we will also talk a little bit about my debate at Politicon, not with Chris Hahn, who is the Fox News Democrat, the aggressive progressive that I was supposed to debate, but actually a debate where I guess Chris was there, he was participating, but really the debate came from Clay Aiken, who was supposed to be the moderator.
Clay Aiken, totally objective, unbiased.
You can watch and listen to that whole debate on YouTube.
I'll post it to my Twitter page as well.
That was from Politicon 2019.
We'll post that there because it was a real trip.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
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You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
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You get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday.
You get Another Kingdom, which is the last season and it's the best season.
And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Get it?
You're going to need it because...
ISIS is dead.
Kanye is alive.
Things are going really, really well, and the leftist tears are flowing.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
I never thought that I would do this, but I have got to do a close reading of Kanye but I have got to do a close reading of Kanye West because Kanye West has this album out, Jesus is King, and it's quite Now, what do I mean by that?
I don't care for much modern music.
I don't care for hip-hop at all.
I really don't care for modern Christian music.
I really don't like that.
So...
This seems like the intersection of everything I hate.
The thing I like about it is I've always felt that Kanye West has a very good ear.
The line I've used about him in the past is that he has such a great ear for music that he then makes worse by rapping over it.
But he has a real incredible musical talent.
He does hear things, not just in the music, but in the culture as well.
This album just reads as very sincere.
And I was also afraid that the music was going to be heretical or soapy or saccharine and sentimental like so much Christian music.
And it's not.
The best worst version of this is a song called On Eagle's Wings that they play in blue hair Vatican II Catholic churches where there are three people in the parish and the songs weren't even cool in the 70s, but they all just really get into it.
The song says, I will raise you up on eagle's wings.
Which is also not true.
I will never raise anybody up because I am a person and I am not God.
So it's not only a terrible song to listen to, but it has the added injury of being heretical.
So I was afraid we were going to get some of this stuff from Kanye West.
Or that we were just going to get a bunch of other kind of nonsense with more of a hip-hop vibe.
It's not what we got.
Three songs in particular I really liked.
God is...
Closed on Sunday.
And Water.
I think you should listen to those songs.
God Is.
Here are the lyrics.
You can hear just, just listen to just a little bit to get the sense of the music.
So the song reads, God is my protection.
God is my all and all.
God is my light in darkness, oh.
God is, he is my all and all.
God is my joy in the time of sorrow.
God is my all and all.
God is my today and my tomorrow.
God, God, my God is my all and all.
God is the joy and strength of my life.
God is remove all pain and misery and strife.
God is, he promised to keep me, never to leave you.
He'll never, ever come short of his word.
I've got to fast and pray, stay in that narrow way, keep my life clean every day.
I want to go with him when he comes back.
I've come too far and I'll never turn back.
God is, God is, God is, God is, God is my all in all.
It's a beautiful song.
The thing that I first noticed about the album is the songs are short.
They should be short.
Modern musicians tend not to have that much to say.
And if you say things quickly, there can be something profound.
What is God?
You know, when Moses asks God, who do I say you are?
God doesn't say, I'm God, I'm this guy, I'm that guy.
Because God is the essence of being.
He is.
So God says, I am that I am.
God is so being that he simply is.
The same thing Christ is asked about his divinity, and he says, Christ is always in the present because he is the essence of being.
And that is what the song means.
That's the title of the song.
God is.
Profound and simple and something that probably has not occurred to many aficionados of modern music.
God is my all and all.
Every line in here is true.
There's no heresy as far as I can tell.
He's my today and my tomorrow.
He's eternal.
Not bound by our linear conceptions of time.
He's the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
He is all of that.
He is outside of time and space.
And he inserts himself into time and space in the incarnation.
My all in all.
This constant just going back to God.
You don't want it to be like one of these Jesus is my girlfriend songs where you mention Jesus a couple times but you could replace the word Jesus with baby and it would just be a regular modern song.
That would be Missing the point.
He keeps coming back.
The song is called God Is.
You just keep going back to the name of God.
Very beautiful song.
The next one is the funniest song in the album.
It's called Closed on Sunday, and it is a song about Chick-fil-A. Have a listen.
When you got daughters, always keep them safe.
Watch out for vipers.
Don't let them indoctrinate.
Closed on Sunday.
Love it.
Love it.
Great stuff, Kanye.
The other thing I was worried about this album is that Kanye was just going to take himself too seriously.
Chesterton said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
Kanye can take himself lightly here as well.
It's one of the catchier songs on the album, and it's just very funny.
Closed on Sunday, you're my Chick-fil-A. Closed on Sunday, you're my Chick-fil-A. Hold the selfies, put the gram away, put the Instagram away.
Get your family, y'all hold hands and pray.
When you got daughters, always keep them safe.
Watch out for vipers, don't let them indoctrinate.
Closed on Sunday, you're my Chick-fil-A. So this is a song about the Sabbath.
And it's a song about Chick-fil-A, because Chick-fil-A is representative of the modern culture.
And it's even an example of being in the consumer culture in modern America, but still keeping holy the Sabbath day, but still keeping holy sacred things, but not totally losing yourself in this den of vipers.
Not totally losing yourself in this completely illusory culture of Instagram and this totally self-centered idea of selfies.
Not losing yourself in trying to make more money on Sunday.
This idea that you will take a moment and reflect and contemplate.
You're my Chick-fil-A. Closed on Sunday, you're my Chick-fil-A. You're my number one with the lemonade.
They have lemonade at Chick-fil-A. Raise our sons, train them in the faith.
Through temptations, make sure they're wide awake.
Follow Jesus.
Listen and obey.
No more living for the culture.
We nobody's slave.
We're nobody's slave.
Even in the consumer culture, we're not going to be wage slaves.
We're not going to...
Because if you work...
I mean, this is one of the many explanations of the Sabbath is no matter how much money you make, no matter how successful you are, if you are constantly working, if you're working 100% of the time, you're a slave.
It doesn't matter.
You could own the biggest corporation in the world.
You're still a slave to your appetites for money, to your appetite for power.
To your appetites, literally, for the chicken sandwich.
The chicken sandwich is representing those appetites, and Kanye West is saying, we're going to close it on Sunday.
To raise our kids, to have our family, to contemplate God.
Most importantly, to follow Jesus.
We're not living for the culture.
We're not living for mammon and for the here and now.
We are living for a kingdom that is not of this world.
He goes on, stand up for my home.
Even if I take this walk alone, I bow down to the king upon my, the throne.
My life is his.
I'm no longer my own.
I pray to God that he'll strengthen my hand.
They will think twice stepping on my land.
I draw the line.
It's written in the sand.
Try me and you will see that I ain't playing.
Now back up off my family, move your hands.
I got my weapons in the spirits land.
What an amazing turn.
You know, so much of popular hip hop music speaks about violence.
Sometimes it advocates violence.
And Kanye is nodding to that here.
And he's speaking not about physical warfare.
He's speaking about spiritual warfare.
We are fighting against principalities and powers.
We are fighting against spiritual darkness.
Not just random people on the street.
This juxtaposition of the modern, the material, the things that satisfy our appetites in this world, and the spiritual and the metaphysical world, this juxtaposition in the very funny catch of Chick-fil-A is really quite smart.
He says, Jezebel, don't even stand a chance.
Jezebel, don't even stand a chance.
Really, really good song.
And it's funny.
You can tell when people have lost the narrative, no matter how well-intentioned they are, when they completely lose their sense of humor.
Kanye hasn't.
In many ways, he's gained more of a sense of humor in this.
Shows you maybe he's on the right path.
And then the last song, people aren't talking about it as much, but I think it's really, really good, is a song called Water.
Give a listen.
Clean us like the rain and spring.
Take the chlorine out of conversation.
Let your light reflect on me.
I promise I'm not hot in anything.
It's water.
It's water.
That's the name of the song.
Listen to the lyrics.
Clean us like the rain in spring.
Take the chlorine out of our conversation.
Let your light reflect on me.
I promise I'm not hiding anything.
It's water.
We're water.
pure as water, like a newborn daughter.
The imagery of the water is the imagery of baptism, of rebirth.
It's the imagery of laundering your soul in the confessional.
It's the laundry, or it's the imagery rather of taking something which is dirty and making it clean.
And not artificially clean, but really clean.
You know, even this cleanest like the rain in spring, take the chlorine out of our conversation.
Take the artificial sanitizing aspect out of our conversation.
Present ourselves as really as dirty and damaged as we are by original sin.
And clean us.
Clean us.
Let your light reflect on me.
I promise I'm not hiding anything.
I'm not hiding it.
There's no chlorine in our conversation.
I'm not holding anything back.
Here's what I am.
Please clean me pure as water in the baptism.
Pure as water, like a newborn daughter.
The use of daughter here is interesting.
Is daughter...
In the song, just because it rhymes with water, perhaps.
I mean, I'm sure that helps.
I've talked to many songwriter friends of mine.
I'll say, wow, what about that lyric?
And they'll say, oh, it sounded good.
So I'm sure that has some part of it, but it actually doesn't really matter what's going on in the artist's mind.
What matters is the work of art itself.
And to mention, Pure as Water, Like a Newborn Daughter, has something beautiful because it's avoiding some of the...
worse aspects of modern versions of Christianity is they really don't capture the whole of the faith.
And in particular, what they lose is a feminine side of the faith, the notion that we are the bride of Christ.
The church is literally the bride to the bridegroom who is Christ.
The idea that the Marian aspect of things, the idea that Mary plays an incredibly significant role in the history of salvation, a role that we will never know until we get to heaven, that Mary is born without original sin in the immaculate conception.
That's That's the traditional understanding of Mary.
Like a newborn daughter, it captures an aspect in a way that is lovely.
It's really a lovely song and has lovely music.
It goes on, the storm may come, but we'll get through it because of your love.
Either way, we crash like water, your love's water, pure as water.
Jesus, flow through us.
This is where Kanye comes in.
This is the verse.
Jesus, flow through us.
Jesus, heal the bruises.
Jesus, clean the music.
Jesus, please use us.
Jesus, please help.
Jesus, please heal.
Jesus, please forgive.
This is a total acceptance of grace.
Not the Pelagian heresy of, I'm going to work for it and it's about me and it's only about my struggles.
You play a role.
You have a role to play in your salvation because you have free will and you can turn away from God.
But if you turn toward God and allow that grace to come, it is overflowing like water.
You see this even in the Annunciation when the angel Gabriel comes down to Mary.
God's grace comes all the way down the mountain and then heaven holds its breath when the angel says, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
And the angel says, you will conceive a child.
She doesn't understand how that's possible.
And she says, I'm the Lord's servant.
His will be done.
The heavens hold their breath while Mary ascends to God's will.
But God's will is overflowing like water.
And this constant going back, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, just like God is.
God, God, God.
It's going all back to Jesus, to living water.
And then we become as water because we are taken into the body of Christ.
St.
Paul uses this.
He says, I wish to dissolve.
Cupio dissolvi.
It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.
Pure as water.
A really beautiful song.
And it's one that's not getting enough attention on the album.
I encourage you to listen to a Kanye West album.
Never thought I would say that, but somehow...
Somehow, in this political world that we're living in, and the cultural world and this religious world, our expectations are confounded.
President Trump...
Doing a lot of good things.
ISIS is dead.
Kanye West is alive.
They are subverting our expectations.
When I saw this news come out, you know, that ISIS is completely dead.
Somehow we were told it was going to be the exact opposite.
ISIS was going to be reconstituted.
And we saw it came out.
I said, wow, that's great news.
Then I saw Kanye West releases an album called Jesus is King, which all the fears I had about it, that it would be about Kanye, that it would be saccharine, that it would be bad, that it would be heretical, none of those come true.
It's actually profound, and it's an album that's not focused on the self, and it's doing, I think, a lot of good in the culture.
My conclusion of that is...
We are living in the greatest timeline.
This is good news.
ISIS is dead.
Kanye is alive.
And there is hope for the culture.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Because hope is not just a feeling.
It's not optimism or pessimism.
Some shallow feeling.
It's a fact.
Hope is a fact.
And you can have hope in very real events.
Very real things.
It's really in reality.
Really, really, really in reality.
We don't have too much time to talk about Politicon, so I have to encourage you to go over and watch and listen to the debate.
I debated Chris Hahn, the Fox News Democrat, in Nashville yesterday at Politicon, and very quickly the debate became not just me against Chris Hahn.
It became me against Chris Hahn and Clay Aiken.
Two liberals debating one conservative, so, you know, it's a fair fight.
Even then, you should go check it out because Clay really lost it.
I mean, he melted down.
He started swearing at the audience.
He really let his leftism show.
And I think it's a pretty good example in what Clay was doing about what the left does when conservatives don't let them shut us up.
So go check it out.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
Look at daughters.
Always keep them safe.
Watch out for vipers.
Don't let them indoctrinate.
Closed on Sunday.
You my Chick-fil-A. If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
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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.
Assistant Director Pavel Wydowski, edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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