Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, destroying Soviet Communism and vindicating the conservative Reagan Revolution. But that great victory for freedom created a big problem for the libertarians, traditionalists, and Religious Right who made up the post-war conservative movement: what unites us all now? We will examine the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Then, Elizabeth Warren picks up an endorsement from the backbone of our democracy, the good guys get a win in the War on Christmas, and leftists try to save a convicted murderer and rapist from execution. Date: 11-12-2019
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Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, destroying Soviet communism and vindicating the conservative Reagan revolution.
But that great victory for freedom created a big problem for the conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, religious right, everybody who made up the post-war conservative movement.
What unites us all now?
We will examine the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
Then, Elizabeth Warren picks up an endorsement from the backbone of our democracy.
She says.
The good guys get a win in the war on Christmas, and leftists try to save a convicted murderer and rapist from execution.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
The Berlin Wall fell down 30 years ago, almost to the day.
The Berlin Wall existed, stood from 1961 up until November 9th, 1989.
So we're a few days late.
I've noticed a lot of people haven't really been commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was the most significant moment in most people's lifetime, most people who are alive today.
I guess I was alive today, but I was still in the womb.
So according to the left, I wasn't alive.
I was just like a completely dead, inorganic clump of cells or something.
And according to reality, I was alive.
And it was a very significant event.
It was an event that...
Was inaugurated by Winston Churchill.
He announced this metaphorical Iron Curtain much earlier in 1946 at Westminster College in Missouri, in America.
And he described this Iron Curtain and in this speech we see the very beginning of what we would have called the modern conservative movement.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is no time for generalities.
And I will venture to be precise.
A shadow.
Has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.
Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Budapest.
All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.
That's the Soviet sphere.
That's the Iron Curtain.
Well, I think actually a lot of people, when they think of that speech, one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century, they think of it as referring explicitly to the Berlin Wall because the Berlin Wall was such an image of communist oppression.
But the Berlin Wall wasn't built for 15 years.
Until after that speech.
The Iron Curtain was this sphere of Soviet influence.
Actually, the phrase Iron Curtain wasn't Churchill's own phrase.
He borrowed it from Joseph Goebbels, from the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, who I think was the first person to describe Soviet influence as an Iron Curtain.
Churchill picked up on that, and of course it was true.
It was very bizarre for Americans to hear this, because we had been told throughout the whole war that the Soviet Union was our friend.
Uncle Joseph Stalin was our friend, and now we hear that he's imprisoning half the world behind an Iron Curtain.
What this did, what the Iron Curtain did, the end of the Second World War and the advance of Soviet communism, was it forged what would have been called the conservative movement.
And we are now in a moment where we're trying to figure out what the conservative movement means.
It forged what was called fusionism.
Fusionism was developed by William F. Buckley Jr.
at National Review and Frank Meyer, an editor at National Review.
And fusionism made perfect sense during the Cold War.
What fusionism did is it brought together libertarians and traditionalists and the religious right and social conservatives, brought all these people together with a common enemy, Soviet communism.
Now, what did the libertarians have to say about the Soviet Union?
Libertarians and the classical liberals hated communism because it was collectivistic.
So you had this kind of individualist economics versus collectivist economics.
Then why would the traditionalists and the religious right and social conservatives hate the Soviet Union?
Because the Soviet Union was atheistic.
So you had theism, Christian civilization, versus the atheist Soviet Union.
And therefore, the libertarians, the economic individualists, and the social conservatives and the traditionalists come together in this fusionist body brought together mostly by Bill Buckley.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, those groups did not have much in common.
What was amazing about the fall of the Berlin Wall is it basically vindicated the whole fusionist coalition because it worked effectively.
They defeated the Soviet Union.
We had been told since the early 20th century, from the New York Times and the Evening Post and all these leftists, that the Soviet Union was the future.
They said, I've seen the future and it works.
That was Lincoln Steffens, the journalist, referring to Soviet communism.
And then Bill Buckley famously said, a conservative stands athwart history yelling stop.
Because you might have the future, you might have seen the future in the Soviet Union, but we're going to stop it.
And it worked, it justified it.
I mean, the huge advance of conservatism in America brought to the pinnacle under Ronald Reagan, who was probably the only man in America who knew that the Berlin Wall was going to come a-tumbling down.
I spoke to Peter Robinson, who's the host of Uncommon Knowledge on the Hoover Institution, and who wrote the famous tear-down-this-wall speech, and He constantly refers to Reagan's vision.
He knew.
He had that boldness.
He said, tear down this wall.
Mr.
Gorbachev, because he knew that communism was doomed.
And while all the smart people in suits and ties in America said we had to come to some sort of understanding with those slave masters in the Soviet Union, Reagan said absolutely not.
And that fusionist conservative coalition ultimately won.
I think it was Charles Krauthammer who said the most shocking event of his life was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And it was shocking to very many people, but not to Ronald Reagan, because he knew that that thing was going to tumble down.
So he vindicated that and And yet, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conservative coalition had no reason to stay together anymore, which brings us to where we're going now, because we're in a fraught moment for the conservative worldview.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So the Berlin Wall falls.
Great victory of conservatism.
And now the question is, what does it mean to be a conservative?
Fusionism is not coming back.
The Buckley Coalition is not coming back.
Not because of any problem with Bill Buckley.
He's one of the greatest men in recent American history.
It's not coming back because communism is no longer seen to pose an existential threat.
You see this all around you anecdotally and you see it in polls.
There was a poll from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation This is a pretty recent poll showed that communism is viewed favorably by more than one in three millennials.
And millennials are people now who are late 20s, early 30s.
How about the younger generation?
Only 57% of Gen Z, that's the generation after us, and only 62% of millennials believe that China is a communist country and not a democratic country.
So it seems to be getting worse.
You know, I meet a lot of the Zoomers, a lot of Gen Z when I go to my speeches and they're great.
They give me great hope for America.
But Those are just the ones that show up and tune in to conservative speeches on college campuses.
The majority of them, the trend is not looking great.
Now, if you've got these kind of numbers, I mean, even if you look at, still with millennials, 57% of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto does.
57%.
What's that say about the other 43%?
Not great.
Let's compare it.
94% of the World War II generation believes that the Declaration of Independence is a better way to protect freedom than the Communist Manifesto, which is just obviously true.
That number drops to 57% of millennials.
Why?
Why are these numbers so low?
Part of it is indoctrination.
K-12, and then into college, and so many millennials are going to college, getting saddled with debt.
In most cases, for no reason whatsoever, and they're being indoctrinated into hating their own country and to unlearning their own history.
An ISI study, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found that, and this was an older study from 2007, found that in elite colleges in the country, graduating seniors knew less about their government and their history and their politics than incoming freshmen.
They were actually becoming more ignorant during college.
So part of its indoctrination...
Part of it is the ignorance comes from the fact that these millennials in Gen Z have never witnessed the historical problems.
I was in the womb when the Berlin Wall fell down, and I'm a millennial.
Gen Z, they mostly don't remember 9-11.
I mean, they just haven't seen, certainly they haven't seen the historical problems of communism.
We defeated communism before they came of age.
So they just didn't see it, and naturally it's not going to be at the top of their mind.
Those are two reasons, and we can blame that on the left, and we can blame that on specifically a failure of education to teach people their own history and to teach people their own civics and political philosophy.
The third problem is the tougher one to grapple with, which is the failures of modernity.
Okay?
And conservatives, if we want to address this challenge, we need to be able to see reality for what it is.
There are many, many failings of modernity.
There are many, many failings of what we would call the kind of capitalism of the 1980s.
It's still a hell of a lot better than socialism.
I mean, I'm not saying we need to go over to AOC. She's got all the wrong answers.
Bernie Sanders got all the wrong answers.
But there have been problems caused by a very specific type of political philosophy and economic philosophy that we've embraced more or less as a consensus.
What do I mean by that?
We're told.
We're told.
That we've never had it so good.
GDP is so high.
Unemployment is so low.
Everything is great where riches can be.
That's all true.
Those are the facts.
However, anxiety, stress, depression, suicidality are all through the roof.
They are surging.
Among teenagers, suicide is up 70% in recent years.
And we have to grapple with that reality.
Something is not quite right.
Now, what the left and the socialists and AOC would say is, see, our economic system is hopelessly rotten and we've got to overhaul it and steal everybody's wealth and then that'll make us all happier.
Of course, that's not going to make us happy at all.
Money can't buy happiness, which is a lesson that the left and the socialists haven't learned.
But also, money can't buy happiness.
And so the problem of our politics and our culture is very likely not exactly economic.
If everything's so good, if we've never had it any better than this, then why are we so anxious?
Why are we so stressed?
Why are we so depressed?
Why are we suicidal in many cases?
Why are antidepressant drugs so prescribed?
Why are we lonelier than ever?
Reports of loneliness are through the roof.
This is a cultural problem that the right has failed to address.
In large part, I think, because we so prioritize the hyper-individualism that was used successfully to defeat Soviet communism.
Why are we so lonely?
I'll give you one example.
In 1950, do you know what the median age was for getting married?
In 1950, the median age to get married for a man?
22 years old.
That was when you could expect to get married in 1950 if you were a man.
If you were a woman, 20 years old.
Pretty young by today's standards.
In 2010, the median age to get married for a man, 28 years old.
The median age to get married for a woman, 26 years old.
We are delaying maturity.
We are living alone a lot longer.
And the numbers can't just be accounted for with something simple like college attendance rates.
They partake in real political and cultural problems that the right is debating right now.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So people, even as things materially are so great, are anxious, stressed, depressed, lonely, They're not getting married.
They're staying single longer.
And when you ask people why they're not getting married, whether it's on a survey or just anecdotally, because I talk to a lot of young people, especially on college campuses, they'll tell you the reason they're not getting married is they're saddled with debt.
They've been funneled into college, you know, In 1940, I think it was about 5% of Americans graduated from a four-year college.
Now 60% of high school graduates anticipate, expect to go to a four-year college.
Many of them are not going to graduate, but that's a huge increase.
Do all of those people need to go?
And get a liberal education?
No, they don't really need to do that.
For many of them, they won't get a liberal education anyway.
They'll get saddled with $200,000 in debt.
They'll put themselves in a much worse position than they could be.
And they'll get indoctrinated in leftism.
So they'll say, well, we're in debt.
I want to pay off my debt before I get married.
Other people will say that they don't want to get married just yet because...
They were raised without a vision of a transcendent moral order.
And I'm not throwing any stones here.
I mean, we all grew up in this kind of environment.
And so you grow up and you say, why would I get married when I can just hook up all the time and go to bars and be single and have fun and do whatever I want and not be accountable to anybody?
The secret of this is marriage is much more satisfying and gratifying.
But you can't tell somebody this.
You just have to experience it before you believe it.
I know that because people told me that and I didn't believe it at all either.
But that's the secret.
I mean, that's the dirty little trick of the temptation of staying single and just satisfying your own desires and appetites and not being accountable.
But for a whole generation, or now two generations, that was raised without any real solid sense of a moral order, they're just not going to feel any compulsion to do it.
People want to pursue their own interests.
That's the me, me, me society that we're living in, particularly exacerbated by social media and the fact that we're all the little celebrity in our own heads.
This is a consequence, not just of leftism, okay?
And the right needs to grapple with that.
This is a consequence of A hyper-individualism unbridled from any moral order.
This is a consequence of allying with people who don't share our values, though they might be good partners to attack the Soviet Union with.
Okay, we need to grapple with that.
What is the effect of this hyper-individualism removed from the transcendent moral order?
What is the effect of the so-called fiscal conservative social liberal, meaning libertarian individualist on economic issues and derelict on social issues?
Something that I refer to as greedy leftism, as greedy Democrats.
One effect of that is right now in cities around the country, and I think especially in Los Angeles, some young people are paying $800 a month to live in cages.
I'm not joking about that.
This is so dystopian, but it's real.
And there's actually a silver lining to this story, but in any case, we'll get to that after.
In any case, people are paying $800 a month to live in what amounts basically to cages, to pods, in a response to a political consensus that no longer makes much sense.
There is a community for young people in cities across the country now called Upstart, It's for young artists and people who aren't making a whole lot of money, who need affordable places to live.
Now, what people used to do is go in with some friends and live in apartments with a lot of roommates.
I did this in New York.
My two very good buddies of mine and I lived in this very tiny apartment.
I think my bedroom was about 70 square feet with no windows, and one wall was fake.
But, you know, at least they were kind of pals of mine, and we just all decided to go live together.
Now what people are doing is they're just renting their own individual pods.
Like you climb up into a little box and that's where you sleep.
Each room contains up to six capsules, which the people who live there describe as cozy.
I think that's probably a euphemism.
And it's a single bed, a bar for hanging clothes, a few compartments for shoes and other items, and an air vent.
And you're still paying about $800 a month for this.
Is that the vision of life that we want to live in?
No.
I mean, that is a dystopian horror movie version of what a hyper individualistic, isolating society is going to look like where you all just pay a lot of money and you climb up and you live in your pod and you check into your pod at night like you're a kind of bug or an animal isolating society is going to look like where you all just pay Then you get out and go work for the man again tomorrow.
Now there's a silver lining here.
And this also tells us something about the political problem.
Upstart has the good central location, modern building, and it's got a gym and dance classes and a recording studio and an arts workshop and cleaning and laundry.
And one of the rules here is that men and women have to sleep apart and they're not allowed to get frisky with one another.
No getting handsy after dark in the pods.
One description of this is that on Taco Night, you get 50 people who all live in these little individual pods and they'll come together in one of the four building complexes, communal areas.
So the downside of it is you've got this hyper-individualistic kind of dystopian lifestyle, but the upside is...
Trying to reclaim a sense of normality or a sense of a normal order in all of this.
So people coming together.
In one sense, you're living as isolated as you possibly could be.
In another, you've got 50 sort of roommates that maybe you can make friends with.
In the one sense, you're extracting yourself from all of your humanity.
On the other, you're trying to regain some kind of traditional moral rules because you're not allowed to get frisky in the pods.
You're not allowed to completely become an animal.
It's a very schizophrenic way of living.
That is something that I think if you asked a thousand people on the street, 999 of them would say, people shouldn't live like that.
People, even if you're living in Manhattan and your apartments are maybe indistinguishable from that pod, at least there you've got your own apartment.
People should have their own apartment, their own house, their own space.
They should not live like they're animals or like they're robots.
And this hyper-individualistic, all that matters is squeezing, pinching every single penny, no connections to family, no connections to community, we're just in our own little pods.
That's not a way that people want to live.
And a conservatism that is going to make sense in the future is going to be one that addresses that very legitimate problem.
The worst product of this political confusion of our times is what we would call identity politics.
Okay?
And I want to be really specific about that term because in a certain sense, all politics is identity politics in the sense that politics is about you and me living together in a community.
Politics comes from the polis, the city-state.
We're all just trying to live together.
Now, This kind of works well when identity is rooted in unity, when identity is rooted in subjects of real significance, in shared culture and customs and love of country and ultimately in God.
This That kind of system becomes absolutely barbaric when the identity politics is rooted in difference, which is really what we mean by identity politics.
When it becomes a brutal battle of interests, not a reasonable exchange of ideas and a decision of how to live together in a community.
That system creates discord.
When identity is viewed merely through differences, and the left has gone in this direction for a very long time, for about a century.
First, they wanted to divide people on class, then it was about race and sex.
The right has flirted with this as well, and it's always ugly, and it's always very stupid.
Nowhere has this been better exemplified than in Elizabeth Warren's latest Campaign endorsement announcement from a group called Black Womoxon4.
I guess it's Black Women4, but it's women spelled with an X instead of an E, so I guess it's pronounced Womoxon.
We will get to that endorsement in just a second.
We will get to her silly response to that endorsement.
We will get to this kind of mindless politics and maybe try to plot a way out of it.
We will get to an orangutan who has been declared a person in Florida.
Only in Florida, folks.
And we will get to death row inmate Rodney Reed, who some people are defending because they have no sense of justice.
We'll get to all of that.
And even a little update from the war on Christmas.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to our friends at Facebook and YouTube.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
The race for president is over, folks.
Liz Warren, she's won it.
She hasn't just won the nomination.
She's won.
The whole presidency.
Trump can pack his bags and she can start measuring the drapes because Liz Warren has received the endorsement of what she describes as the backbone of our democracy.
A group with 3,000 Twitter followers called Black Womokson 4.
Here is their announcement.
Despite pervasive attacks on our communities, our identities, and our lives, Black trans and cis women, femmes, gender non-conforming and non-binary folk remain at the forefront of each and every social movement to hold this country accountable.
We are progressive Black leaders who are not impressed by political theater.
We know that big things happen when Black women come together and take our own space in the political process.
And though no one person could hold all our aspirations in the hopes for a president, there is one leader who we believe will work with us.
Hold on, just before we go on and finish, was that last person in a hostage video?
The way, at least the first couple performances, although absolutely absurd, ridiculous identity politics, at least they seemed sort of enthusiastic.
That third one looked like she was being held hostage, obviously reading from a script.
We believe that the most inspiring beep-boop, beep-beep-boop, so the endorsement goes on to explain why Liz Warren is the choice.
That candidate is Senator Elizabeth Warren.
She has a track record of taking on the predatory policies that harm our communities.
We've come together as a collective voice, and we hope to encourage others, especially Black women and gender non-conforming folks, to join us.
We are all in for Warren.
And if you are too, go to blackwoman4.org, sign the endorsement statement, and join us.
There it is.
There it is.
The election's over.
Who are the black women?
The Wimickson.
It's just a Twitter account.
It just has 3,000 followers.
It's not a lot of followers in terms of political accounts.
But in the age of identity politics, this group has the absolute audacity to pretend to speak for all black women and some black men, because they're saying trans women, which is really just men, and gender non-conforming people, whatever that means.
So when you add all those people together, by a conservative estimate, you're talking about 19 million Americans.
And you've got a Twitter account of 3,000 people claiming to speak for them, black women.
And Elizabeth Warren was happy to take it and go along with the pretense.
By the way, Elizabeth Warren has very, very little black support.
When you just look at the polling numbers, she's not doing that well.
She's not as bad as Bernie, but Joe Biden has much, much higher levels of black support.
So Elizabeth Warren goes to this one identity politics group, and they say, oh no, the black women actually were for Elizabeth Warren.
And she plays along with it, because it's politically advantageous to her.
Elizabeth Warren tweeted out, quote, Thank you, Black Wimmickson Four.
Black, trans, and cis women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people, are the backbone of our democracy.
And I don't take this endorsement lightly.
I'm committed to fighting alongside you for the big structural change our country needs.
Black, trans, and cis women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people, are the backbone of our democracy.
You might be surprised to hear that if you're a Hispanic woman.
You're not the backbone of our democracy, according to Elizabeth Warren.
Hispanic women, nope.
Sorry.
They're less important to our democracy.
Than black, trans, and cis women, gender nonconforming, non-binary people, according to Elizabeth Warren.
Obviously, white people, much less important.
Native American people, less important.
Black men, according to Elizabeth Warren, less important to our democracy than black, trans, and cis women, gender nonconforming, and non-binary people.
Now, does Elizabeth Warren really think this?
No, because if she thought that, she wouldn't be running for president.
She would instead vote for a black, trans, or cis woman, gender non-conforming or non-binary people.
But identity politics makes people lose their mind.
Especially on the left, but on the right wing too.
Makes people lose their mind and say very silly and stupid things such as this.
If Elizabeth Warren really believed this, the most important people to our democracy were black women, she would drop out of the race and vote for Kamala Harris.
She obviously doesn't think that because obviously one's skin color is not the most important aspect of their identity.
Far from it.
The one's competency to be President of the United States is not determined by skin color.
And Elizabeth Warren knows that, even though she says she has high cheekbones and is therefore likely Native American.
I mean, she's been playing, this woman's been playing the most absurd side of identity politics her entire life.
This kind of mindless politics, racial politics especially, It's making us all very stupid and it's making us all very vacuous.
What it is doing is removing the contemplative and reasonable aspect from politics and it is just leaving us with interests and sentiment.
Just basically brutal people.
Clubbing each other over the heads with their own irreconcilable interests and gussying it all up with sentiments, saccharine sentimentality, like the backbone of our democracy.
I mean, I guarantee you, if a Twitter group called Hispanic Women 4 endorsed Elizabeth Warren, she would say that they were the backbone of the democracy.
It's just so petty.
It's such pandering.
It leaves you with a politics that is incoherent and inhuman.
And speaking of an inhuman politics, you see this taking shape especially down in Florida.
In Florida, an orangutan named Sandra has now been declared a non-human person by a judge.
How can you be a non-human person?
Isn't that a contradiction in terms?
I certainly would have thought so.
But nevertheless, the orangutan is a person.
This is according to Judge Elena Liberatore.
Oh gosh, and it's in Italian too.
Talk about identity politics that I want to disavow and remove myself from.
This was a ruling based in 2015 that declared that Sandra the orangutan is not legally an animal.
But rather a non-human person entitled to some legal rights enjoyed by people and some better living conditions.
How on earth did this maniac judge come up with this ruling?
She explains, quote, with that ruling I wanted to tell society something new.
She didn't want to follow the law or anything.
No, no, no.
That's not what she wanted to do.
She's a judge after all.
She just wanted to tell society something new, quote, that animals are sentient beings and that the first right they have is our obligation to respect them.
I think maybe we need to certainly focus on the care of this Sandra the orangutan.
Maybe we need to get better care for this judge too.
She seems to be in dire need of some extra care.
So...
The orangutan remained at the zoo because they're not going to buy her a house.
And then the zoo closed in 2016.
And now Sandra the orangutan is in Florida.
It's another care facility.
This is madness.
But it comes from an identity politics that doesn't understand our own identity.
We are not primarily to be identified by people.
Mad characteristics, including the color of our skin or our profession or our socioeconomic status.
That is not our primary identity.
And a normal culture knows this.
Our culture was crafted by Christianity.
Our civilization was crafted by Christianity.
And an understanding of God.
In the Old Testament, you see, when Moses asks God, Who are you?
Who shall I tell the Israelites that you are?
And God says, I am that I am.
God is the essence of being.
Christ says, before Abraham was, I am.
God describes himself as being itself.
When an individual or a community or a whole culture and civilization grounds their identity in the ultimate identity, in God himself, that culture, that person, that civilization will see the world a little more clearly, will be able to live in greater harmony, will understand himself and reality much, much better.
When society severs that understanding of the ultimate identity in God, When that society loses the understanding of I am, that I am, then that society is left with a pathetic question, which is, who am I? Like a little child, like a little flower hippie child who leaves home and says, I'm just going to go find myself and does a bunch of drugs or something.
It's a pathetic question.
And then you ground your identity in ultimately unsatisfying physical things, including skin color or sex or sexual preferences or the amount of money that you have or the job that you have or the neighborhood that you live in or your socioeconomic status or the size of your house.
That will all be unsatisfying.
Politics grounded on those things will not be the kind of culture that we want to live in.
I mean, that will be...
The opposite of a heavenly politics, a politics that grounds our identity in God, that will be a hellish politics.
And you see it all around us.
In fact, the nearest bit of hope I have on this is bizarrely in the questions being raised by the transgender movement.
I've long predicted that transgenderism would cause a lot of headaches for the left because it pits so many of leftist ideas against one another.
It pits feminism against...
Gender theory.
It pits feminism, the idea that women are women.
There is such a category as women and they get to define womanhood for themselves against gender theory which tells men that if they slap some lipstick on and wear a dress then they really are a woman.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense together.
What transgender ideology begins to ask is Actually, about the nature of the soul, right?
How I can look like a man, but secretly be a woman because of some immaterial, metaphysical soul is really what they're trying to say, but they can't bring themselves to say it.
Now, of course, it's not possible for your soul and your body to be totally opposed to one another.
It's not possible for us to live in a society that says that our physical selves have nothing to do with who we really are.
I mean, that was an idea that was tried a thousand years ago called Albigensianism, and we rejected it because it's completely lunatic.
But at least they're asking those questions that are shaking us out of this stale...
That stale political consensus that have obviously left people unsatisfied.
Some good news on this front.
Actually, we can see it in the war on Christmas.
There is a war on Christmas.
We'll get into it as the season gets a little closer.
There's also a war on Advent, which is waged by the people who are actually fighting the war on Christmas.
It gets very complicated and murky.
But what I will tell you is...
There was this whole slew of marketing materials that came in over the past 15 years, really past 20 years, which was renaming Christmas trees into holiday trees, which was taking the word Christmas out of television commercials and out of department stores and off of coffee cups like the Starbucks cup.
Lost any imagery that could be associated with Christmas and just became a regular, boring, lame, clinical red cup.
And now that is changing.
You're seeing Christmas come back in.
You're seeing at least the new Starbucks cups as merry coffee.
Kind of annoying, but you know, that's fine.
As far as I'm concerned, until Simeon is depicted on the coffee cup, proclaiming the nunc dimittis before the baby Jesus, then we still have a lot of work to do in the war on Christmas.
But nevertheless, I'll take the victories that we can get.
The culture is calling for something more specific.
The culture is calling for something more real, more tangible.
not just this clinical and isolating, lowest common denominator, materialism or secularism.
That's just unsatisfying to people.
It's leaving people depressed, anxious, living in little pods all by themselves, single, not getting married.
And that's not going to be able to last.
And all the left is offering is just another modernist solution.
It's just silly versions of Marxism and identity politics.
Some people on the right want to basically embrace those ideas I don't think that's going to do very much for us.
I think what we need to do is reclaim our culture.
And the way you reclaim the culture is you reclaim the foundation of that culture, which is obviously related to cult, which is in the ultimate identity politics.
I am that I am God himself.
Before we get to that...
But rather, before we're able to completely fix the culture, we should also mention a little something about justice.
There is a big story related to criminal justice that is about the death row inmate Rodney Reed.
Pop culture stars are trying to get this death row inmate sprung from the slammer.
This includes Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, who I suspect at this point has an office in the West Wing.
I have to assume she seems to have so much influence when it comes to criminal justice reform in this administration.
So they're trying to get this guy sprung from the slammer, and they say he was wrongly convicted, and there are so many questions about his guilt.
There aren't, really.
There just aren't.
Rodney Reed was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites.
This was due in large part to overwhelming DNA evidence showing him or suggesting that he is guilty.
He's set to be executed by the state in less than two weeks on November 20th.
Reed says he's the victim of racism.
Reed is black.
He says he's the victim of racial bias.
He claims he did not murder Stites, but was having a secret consensual affair with the then-teenager.
And when her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, who's a white police officer, found out, he killed his fiancé and framed this man, Reed.
The evidence determined that Stites was raped in many different ways and was also strangled to death.
DNA from this teenager's private parts matches the DNA of Reed, Rodney Reed.
His DNA was found everywhere that it would be found.
Initially, Reed denied even knowing the teenager when investigators asked him about this.
He said, I didn't know her, never met her, never talked to her, had no idea who she is.
The only thing I know is what I saw on TV. Then he changed his tune when they found his DNA and said he had an affair with her, but it was consensual.
This was first matched up against...
Other biological things that he left behind in a woman with an intellectual disability.
A woman named Caroline Rivas admitted to her caseworker that Reed, whom she had been dating, had also raped her.
Reed was also connected to the rapes of five other females, according to court documents, including a 12-year-old girl.
Now, Stites' fiance at the time of the murder also doesn't seem like a terribly nice fella.
He went to prison and was released in 2018 after serving 10 years for kidnapping and alleged rape of a person in custody when he was a police officer in 2007.
And Arthur Snow, an inmate and one of the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood gang at the prison that Fennell was serving at, signed an affidavit saying that Fennell had bragged to him about killing Stites.
I don't know if this is true either.
Nobody seems like a terribly nice guy in this whole situation.
Now of course, am I inclined to believe the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood?
Not especially.
So the Innocence Project, which tries to spring convicted death row inmates from the slammer, is saying that a former sheriff's deputy also claimed that Fennell was glad that his wife or his fiancée was murdered.
Stites' family, the family of the victim, believes that Rodney Reed killed her.
This is not to say that we should dismiss claims of racial bias out of hand.
Certainly we shouldn't.
We should look into them.
This is not to say that there aren't problems in the criminal justice system.
There are.
We should investigate them.
Any reasonable look at the evidence in this case makes this guy look guilty as sin beyond a reasonable doubt.
And a system of justice must exact justice.
But we're unwilling to do that.
We're In Florida, but not personhood rights to little babies who are being born.
We are going to do as much as we can.
Rihanna and Kim Kardashian are going to do as much as they can to spring this man, Rodney Reed, who's been connected to multiple rapes from the slammer.
And yet they would...
I don't know about Kardashian or Rihanna personally, but the left would support the murder of a million babies a year.
They clamor for it.
They want taxpayers to pay for it.
That is, there's a real irony.
I mean, the people who say that we're living in a rape culture are the same people who are saying we need to free this, this rapist Rodney Reed from prison.
This is the toxicity of identity politics that is only going to view this case through the lens of race rather than through the lens of evidence of an identity politics that won't even acknowledge the existence of babies, but will acknowledge through sentiment and saccharine and no sort of evidence.
They will try to pretend that an orangutan is a human being.
or a person who's not a human being, whatever that means.
That is incoherent.
That is brutal.
That is depressing.
That is isolating.
That's not the sort of politics that we want.
And the way that we're going to reclaim a coherent politics is not to bang even louder for less reasonable purposes.
Frivolous identity, shallow identity, is a basis of politics.
It's going to ultimately root our politics in the ultimate identity, the divine logic of the universe.
It will make our politics far more reasonable.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
American journalists have announced that they've entirely underestimated Donald Trump and everything they thought he was wrong about has in fact turned out great.
No, I'm joking.
They move from one lie to another, forgetting each one as they go.
And we'll show you how it works on The Andrew Klavan Show.
