Iran-backed terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, but decisive leadership dispelled the violence. We will examine why Baghdad didn’t turn into Benghazi and what it means as we look forward to the coming decade. Then, the Pope smacks a lady, a “trans man” gives birth, and finally the Mailbag!
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Iran-backed terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year's Eve, but decisive leadership dispelled the violence.
We will examine why Baghdad didn't turn into Benghazi and what it means as we look forward to the coming decade.
Then, speaking of violence, the Pope smacks a woman's hand for grabbing him too forcefully.
Good for him.
We analyze the Pope slap heard around the world.
A trans man gives birth using female sperm, according to the British media.
And Anderson Cooper muses on the biggest phalluses in Hollywood on CNN. Finally, The Mailbag.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
We begin this new year on a somber note.
We lost a real one just moments ago.
Julian Castro dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential field.
Poor one out for Julian.
He was a real one.
My favorite candidate in the race.
And now he's gone.
I was on Leland Vittert's show on Fox News as Julian Castro announced that he was running for president.
And Leland asked me for my reaction and I told him what I ate for breakfast that morning.
It was some sort of omelet.
And I told him that was more consequential news than Julian Castro entering the presidential race.
And it turns out I was right.
Commemorate his candidacy because the candidacy of Julian Castro took political correctness to the furthest extreme we've ever seen in presidential politics.
This was during, I believe it was the second Democratic presidential debate when he said he didn't merely support reproductive freedom.
He supported reproductive justice and not just for women.
He supported abortion rights for trans women.
As well, meaning biological men, people without uteruses, people who could never ever possibly have an abortion.
That was Julian Castro's campaign, and it only got more outrageous and ridiculous from there.
I am seriously going to miss him in this presidential race, Julian Castro.
I really hope that you run again next time so that we can enjoy this all over again.
We will get to the biggest news of the decade, and there's only been two days so far in this decade.
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In the news beyond poor Julian dropping out of the race, the year started off in a pretty auspicious way.
It was actually a pretty good start to the year.
Why?
There was an attack on a U.S. embassy.
That's not a good start.
Well, the good start was the response, and it shows you the difference between the 2020s, or between right now, and, say, the Obama administration.
Maybe there's a difference in these two decades.
On New Year's Eve, Iran-backed terrorists tried to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
This was a replay of the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2011.
You remember that.
During the Obama administration in Libya, there was an attack on the U.S. Embassy.
Four Americans killed, including the ambassador.
It was an absolute disaster when the militants started to attack.
Nobody responded.
There was no reaction from the political leadership in Washington.
They just let the consulate be attacked over there.
And unfortunately, these Americans died.
And then there was a cover-up afterward.
Barack Obama sent his national security advisor on national television to lie about the The attack.
They said that it was a spontaneous uprising caused by a YouTube video that virtually nobody had seen.
Of course it wasn't that.
It was a terrorist plotted, planned, and executed attack.
And it led to years of investigations.
Hillary Clinton famously testified about it and said, Who cares?
What difference at this point does it make if they were terrorists or YouTube video demonstrators?
Who cares?
It's no big deal.
And of course it does matter.
It does matter.
This attack in Baghdad failed because of decisive leadership.
So what happened is hundreds of terrorists, of militiamen, and their supporters showed up to this embassy in Baghdad.
They broke into the compound.
They destroyed a reception area.
They smashed windows, smashed up the whole building, put graffiti all over the walls.
This was to protest U.S. airstrikes against an Iran-backed militia that ended up killing 25 terrorists.
So now they're protesting this.
There's going to be a response because the United States is fighting with Iran through these proxies.
Now, why didn't it turn into this disaster of Benghazi?
It didn't turn in because the U.S. responded immediately.
And yesterday, the militiamen, the terrorists, withdrew.
They withdrew after two days of clashes with American security forces because the minute the attack began, the United States sent in 100 Marines, the United States sent in 750 paratroopers to the region, they deployed troops out there, and they said, you are not taking our embassy.
And of course, eventually, after that show of force, The terrorists withdrew.
President Trump was asked about this on New Year's Eve at Mar-a-Lago.
So he's there in his tuxedo, looking great, by the way, and Melania's standing there looking significantly better.
Just like the picture of elegance and grace, and they're being asked about this attack.
And Trump has one clear message for the terrorists, for the international community, and for the American people.
He says, this will not be another Benghazi.
I think it's been handled very well.
The Marines came in.
We had some great warriors come in and do a fantastic job.
And they were there instantaneously, as soon as we heard.
I used the word immediately.
They came immediately.
And it's in great shape.
As you know, this will not be a Benghazi.
Benghazi should never have happened.
This will never, ever be a Benghazi, but we have some of our greatest warriors there.
They got in there very quickly.
As soon as we saw there was a potential for problem, they got in, and there was no problem whatsoever.
I also want to thank the Iraqi government.
They really stepped up.
I spoke to the prime minister today.
I thanked him, but they stepped up very nicely.
All right.
This story tells you two important things.
It shows you, for one, the absolute corruption of the media, which was basically taking the side of the terrorists and sort of lamenting the fact that this wasn't turning into Benghazi.
That's the first part.
The second thing it shows you is the importance of political leadership.
It shows you something that I predict will Possibly define this decade, which is the importance of taking control of your own political destiny.
The ability of us to use our will, to use our decision-making powers, to come in and take control of our political destiny.
We are not simply leaving ourselves up to circumstance.
we have the ability to shape our political future.
We'll get to both of those in a second.
We'll read the New York Times' take on it.
The New York Times, they outdid themselves on this attack in Baghdad.
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Drats.
What this attack in Baghdad shows you is the corruption of the media and that we have the ability to form our own political future.
So the New York Times, when they're responding to this, initially takes the side of the terrorists.
I don't think that's an overstatement.
Here's what they tweeted.
You decide for yourself.
Quote, hundreds of Iraqi mourners tried to storm the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad shouting, down, down, USA, in response to deadly American strikes this week that killed 25 fighters.
First of all, who are the fighters?
The fighters are Iran-backed terrorists.
They're fighters.
They don't want to use the word terrorist, so they use the word fighter.
There were U.S. airstrikes against terrorists.
Good.
That's a win.
And then in response, a group of mourners showed up to attack the U.S. Embassy.
First of all, I don't think they were mourners, okay?
Because when I think of mourners, I think of people wearing all black, crying, sort of just sad and dejected, possibly despairing.
That's not what these guys were doing in Baghdad.
What they were doing in Baghdad was busting down the door to the compound to try to kill Americans.
Those aren't mourners.
This reminds me of when the Washington Post ran an obituary on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS. It described him as an austere religious scholar.
Not a terrorist, not an absolute gang leader, the leader of one of the biggest death cults in modern history.
No, no, no.
He was an austere religious scholar and these terrorists in Baghdad were mourners.
Okay, that's the media for you.
Joy Reid was upset.
She was hoping.
You could read the desperation as she was typing on Twitter saying that this was going to be Trump's Benghazi, and yet it wasn't.
Why wasn't it?
It wasn't because of the importance of individuals, of decision-making, of political leadership, of our own free will.
The left constantly tells you that Individuals don't really matter, okay?
Individual decisions, individual leadership.
They tell us on the left that history is moved by great impersonal forces.
Circumstances dictate our destiny.
The presidency is too big a job for any one man.
You can't possibly ascribe responsibility to individual politicians when you look at these great forces in the world.
Well, if that's true, then how do you explain the difference between Baghdad and Benghazi?
How do you do that?
You can't.
I think this is the theme of the 2020s.
I think the theme is going to be people waking up and realizing, hey, wait a second.
We're not just victims of circumstance.
We're not just victims of a sort of global consensus on the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans.
This consensus that's going to outsource our jobs and Get rid of our political futures and destroy our homes.
And we're not just victims of social circumstances, cultural circumstances that will destroy the family, that take away our constitutional rights.
We're not.
We're going to say no.
We're going to fight back.
And look, our decisions, our own leadership can have a positive effect.
You know, there was a church shooting over Christmas and New Year's.
The shooting at West Freeway Church of Christ.
A drifter, lunatic, drug addict showed up with a shotgun.
He came there.
He was known to the congregation.
He had mental issues.
He had drug issues.
This guy had a long rap sheet.
He's got a long criminal history.
He showed up with a shotgun.
And the very sad news is he got off a couple shots and killed two members of the congregation before anybody was able to stand up.
Now, the silver lining to this, the reason that he killed two people instead of 240 people, is that the congregation was armed.
And a very well-trained person who was a firearms expert, who was a firearms teacher, got up there.
His name is Jack Wilson.
One single shot, he killed the shooter, saved 240, 250 lives right away.
Now, the mainstream media were horrified by this.
Here's USA Today.
USA Today.
USA Today ran an op-ed here, said, armed even in church, Texas shooting is about a lot more than Jack Wilson's heroism.
The real story isn't heroism here, right?
The real story, they write on Twitter, quote, Jack Wilson is exactly the type of person you want around with a gun because he's also a firearms instructor.
But we know nothing about the at least six other parishioners who also appeared to draw their handguns, and that's terrifying.
Why is it terrifying?
What's terrifying about it?
So you've got seven parishioners pull out their guns the minute this guy starts shooting because he's trying to pick off the whole congregation like sitting ducks.
And seven people pull out their guns, one person neutralizes the target, and that's it.
It's not terrifying at all.
These people all, every single one of them, used their firearms responsibly.
They didn't just start shooting left and right, get in the middle of a gunfight.
They pulled out their guns.
This guy Jack Wilson was able to take out the target immediately, and then they put their guns away.
That's a wonderful thing.
These people took control over their destiny.
They weren't simply going to let the cruel and the deranged run roughshod over their entire congregation and kill 240 innocent people.
This is a real silver lining here.
I mean, it's awful.
The loss of any life, two lives, is so terrible.
They saved 240.
There was a spate of anti-Jewish attacks over the Christmas break.
All throughout New York, New Jersey, all around that area in particular.
Now, they haven't been reported on very much, these attacks, because the assailants weren't white guys generally.
They don't fit the media narrative that Trump has unleashed this spate of white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and so they've mostly been out of the news.
But these were major attacks.
I mean, some were killings, some of them were just assaults on the street, but there were a number of them.
How do we respond to this?
I suspect religious conflict is going to increase in the 2020s.
I think we're looking at a decade of more intense religious conflict because All of these religions are getting kind of muddied.
You know, the religion, especially of secular leftism, of environmentalism, of gender ideology, these are religious movements and they're very exclusive.
So, you know, just to use environmentalism as a great example, if you oppose environmentalism, you're accused of destroying the world.
That's why we've had eco-terrorism for the whole history of the environmentalist movement.
On the fringes, you get eco-terrorism because it is such an intense and exclusive religion.
But this is true of other religions, too.
Obviously, we've had a lot of violence from Islam in the past several decades.
This is true.
You're seeing rhetoric increase around gender ideology.
If you oppose the gender ideology, you're called a bigot, a hater, denying people human rights.
There are new laws that are being passed to stop you from that.
I think we're going to get a little more conflict in this religious ideological landscape.
Now, how do we protect ourselves?
There's a simple answer from the church shooting, from the attacks on Jews, from all around, which is to arm yourself, avail yourself of your constitutional rights, take some responsibility, take some control.
David French tweeted this out.
David French, the writer, formerly a National Review, now he's at the Dispatch.
David French tweeted out, hey, one thing you can do right away to protect yourself is to get a gun and learn how to shoot it.
People jumped on him on Twitter.
And the reason they jumped on him is not just the guns.
Okay, it's not just the idea that, okay, there's a Second Amendment and I can use my gun to protect myself.
Everybody already knows that.
The reason that people attacked David and other people who suggested arming yourself...
Is because of the sort of novel idea over the last several years that you have some control over your own destiny.
And this is going to be a key theme of the 2020s.
Last decade, people were told that they were powerless.
We the people were told we had no control over our government, over our trade, over our economy, over our culture, over our future.
We were told we don't have any power.
And then we realized we do.
There's a movement going on, not just in the United States.
It's bigger than the US.
It's bigger than Trump.
It's going on throughout the West where people realize that we can take control of our political destiny.
We'll get to what that means in a second.
We'll get to a trans man giving birth or something.
I don't, you know, good luck figuring that one out.
And we'll even get to the Pope slap.
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Last decade, the Obama administration, if you want to try to neatly delineate the time, last decade, we the people were told we were powerless on our rights, on our law, on our trade, on our economy.
Just to use trade, just to use the example of trade, we were told There's just, there's no way to keep manufacturing jobs.
There's no way.
It's impossible.
Neither party is going to do it.
You can't, how could you possibly keep manufacturing jobs?
We've just got to go.
We've got to send all of our jobs overseas.
We need to just buy cheap consumer goods from China that are produced with slave labor.
And then we've got to live in tiny little pods and eat bugs.
That's what we're going to do because we have no power over ourselves, over our lives.
Of course not.
Same thing with immigration.
We were told there's no way to slow down immigration.
We take in a million illegal aliens a year and 1.2 million legal immigrants far more generous than any other country in the world by a long shot.
There's no way to slow it down.
There's no way to stop it.
You can't control who comes in and out of your country.
There's no way to slow down the progressive destruction of our culture and our rights.
No way to stop Obama.
Can't impeach him.
Can't do anything.
The Trump election was this prefiguring of grabbing back our rights.
The Trump election is often referred to as a middle finger to the elites and the bureaucrats and the technocrats, and that's true.
So what does that mean?
What is the significance of that middle finger?
The significance is you can't tell us what to do, or you can't tell us what to do forever.
And what has happened as a result of taking back our rights?
Has the whole world fallen apart?
That's what we were told was going to happen.
But that's not what happened.
Things are actually going great.
The economy is going gangbusters.
We just found out Trump has issued the fewest regulations in 44 years.
This is a 44 year low.
The economy is doing great.
Just over Christmas, the economy soared.
Consumer confidence way, way up.
We had a great Christmas season.
Manufacturing jobs have returned.
Again, just to use that one example, we have some control.
Even the arguments over porn, over the social issues that kind of dominated the last few weeks of 2019, they're about this.
They're about the question, can we take back our political future?
Can we decide how to govern ourselves?
Can we have a spirit of an exalted freedom, a social freedom?
Of course we can.
I predict that the 2020s are going to be about reclaiming control over our political future all around the West because we know that we're on the precipice.
We know that things have fallen apart.
They've broken down to such a point that we can't even say what a man is and a woman is anymore.
We can't even say that a baby is a baby.
We can't say these basic things.
We can't say what marriage is anymore.
And that is too far.
We know it.
We know how much we have to lose.
Just to use this example, I love this story from The Mirror.
This is a UK tabloid.
The headline is, quote, Transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner's baby with female sperm donor.
That is some Julian Castro-level political correctness.
What?
Let's try to break that down.
Transgender man...
Okay, so that's a woman.
Gives birth to non-binary partner's baby.
Okay, I don't know.
Non-binary, what does that mean?
With female sperm donor.
Now, I'm no biologist, but last I checked, there is no such thing as female sperm.
So you read the article and it explains to you what it really means.
Proud dad, Reuben Sharp today, tells how he, capitals, gave birth to a miracle baby in Britain's most modern family.
The 39-year-old transitioned to a man 12 years ago.
But he still had maternal instincts and six years ago stopped taking testosterone in the hope of one day having a child.
And that dream came true when he and partner Jay had a bouncing baby.
Jay is non-binary, so does not identify as male or female.
The sperm donor was a trans woman, and even the doctor was transgender.
And while a handful of other UK men have fallen pregnant after transitioning from a woman...
Reuben and Jay are among the first couples to speak out about their remarkable journey.
Except it isn't remarkable.
The journey is not remarkable because once you cut through all the imaginary gender categories that Britain apparently has embraced and certainly this tabloid media have embraced, what you realize is it's not that a transgender man gave birth to non-binary partner's baby with female sperm donor.
What happened is a woman Who now identifies as a man, but she's a woman, used sperm from a stranger to conceive a baby and give birth.
Which has happened many, many times.
There's nothing new about that.
There's nothing particularly interesting about that.
It's been going on since the dawn of time.
A woman used sperm from someone she didn't know very well to conceive a child and give birth.
It's the story of the human race.
Now, there's just a lie in the headline.
They say that this transgender man...
Well, I guess the whole headline is a lie.
But they say the transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner's baby.
That's not true.
The non-binary partner had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of this baby.
The headline would be more honest if it said...
Woman gives birth to baby conceived with sperm from a stranger, and that woman also has a girlfriend.
That's what happened.
But the gender categories make it so confusing.
It doesn't have to be that confusing.
There's nothing unclear about this situation other than all of the sort of ornamentation we've put onto it.
All of this gender ideology.
And this is the importance of clear language, because if you use the leftist jargon, then you can be convinced that a man just conceived and gave birth using female sperm.
That's a very strange world to live in.
Or you can just realize that a woman gave birth as women always do.
That's what's really happened.
This also breaks down some of this gender ideology because we've defined man and woman down to be absolutely nothing.
So we're now at the point where if a woman identifies as a man but then says she wants to give birth and menstruate and have a normal female cycle...
She's still a man.
Well, if that's true, then what is a man?
I mean, at the very least, the most basic definition we had before of gender ideology was that you are however you identify.
But if you start identifying as someone who menstruates and, and conceives a child and has a baby, surely you're no longer a man, right?
I mean, what, there, there is no definition that could possibly fit this for men and for, for women.
I, I predict, looking forward at 2020s, I think we're going to see a return to a little I think so much of the pushback on leftism has been these crazy metaphysical claims about Men and women and gender ideology and even abortion, the beginning of human life, what a human is, a clump of cells.
I think we just, we see that it isn't true and we see the disastrous effects of it on our culture and we are not.
We're ready to be rid of it.
We're ready to return to normal and reclaim some of our future from these fantastical ideologues, which is something pretty hopeful when you're looking at the next decade.
We will get to the Pope slap heard around the world.
We will get to Anderson Cooper referring to the largest phalluses in Hollywood on national television because CNN, real news, serious journalism.
And we will get to the mailbag first, though.
Based on what we've seen so far, 2020 is shaping up to be a pretty wild year as Democrats rally to get rid of President Trump.
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We will be right back with a whole lot more.
The Pope slap, the CNN Anderson Cooper phallus discussion, and the mailbag.
Head to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
The Pope slap heard round the world We have to get to it.
It has created quite a lot of controversy online among Christians, among Catholics specifically, even among conservatives.
The Pope was meeting thousands of people and he's going around and a woman grabbed the Pope's hand, his arm, and wouldn't let him go.
She yanks him back in and so he smacks her right on her hand and sort of chides her for grabbing him so forcefully and then walks away.
Here is the clip.
I will narrate it.
So the Pope, he goes, he pulls away, and she yanks him.
And she won't let him go.
And then he gives her a nice little smack on the hand and walks away.
And he looks really kind of angry about it.
He looks a little peeved.
He goes, ow, stop pulling me.
What are you doing?
Stop that, lady.
And then he gets out of there.
Okay.
Was the Pope correct to act this way?
Some are saying it was totally unchristlike.
Some are saying it was very Christ-like, you know, because on the one hand, you have Christ saying, turn the other cheek and, you know, give away your possessions and just live to serve.
And on the other hand, you have Christ throwing people out of the temple and overturning tables and whipping people and saying, go buy a sword.
And so, there's a little bit of debate on both sides.
Certainly, the Pope was within his rights to chide this woman for what she was doing.
I don't just mean this in a kind of liberal, individual autonomy, my rights, my body, my choice kind of way.
I mean this as a matter of justice and prudence and responsibility.
The woman has no right to yank the Pope and for him to just necessarily roll over.
If nuns at a Catholic school are able to give you a little smack on the hand with their ruler when you're misbehaving, surely the Pope can give you a little smack on the hand when you're yanking him and pulling his arm in and not letting him get away.
It's perfectly right, perfectly just for him to do that.
However, the Pope should not have lost his temper.
That is the real problem.
The problem isn't the smack.
The woman needed a little smack.
It can be very encouraging to smack people.
On the bio tapestry, there's this famous image, the Battle of Hastings, of Bishop Odo wielding a club, smacking these retreating soldiers.
They're his own soldiers, and they're trying to retreat, and he's got a club, and he's just smacking them over the head and saying, go back there, go back and fight.
And the bio tapestry says, here Bishop Odo wielding a club encourages the boys.
So it can be encouraging and supportive to give people a little smack, which is what the Pope was doing.
However, he should not have lost his temper.
He should have given her that little smack out of love.
And I think that's the subtlety here that is being lost in this whole debate, is he looked visibly angry and sort of marched away.
And then he apologized.
And I think he probably should have apologized.
Not for the smack.
The woman deserved it.
And she needed a little corrective to teach her how to behave when the Pope is around.
But because he lost his temper, he shouldn't have done that.
People make mistakes.
A good reminder that the Pope is fallible, except for the very rare instances when he's infallible.
And he apologized, as he should have.
Before we get to the mailbag, I have to talk about the biggest fallacies in Hollywood.
Or rather, we have to talk about the CNN journalist, super serious, facts first.
This is real news.
Describing the biggest phalluses in Hollywood on CNN, on live national television, on New Year's Eve.
Here is Anderson Cooper.
She turned to Anderson and said, he's not going to ask me who has the biggest bleep of anyone I've ever been with, right?
No, it was...
She turns to me out of the blue and goes, he's not going to ask me who has the biggest cock in Hollywood, is he?
Okay.
That's what she asked.
And just said it.
Okay.
Alright, there he is, just giggling away on New Year's.
Now, the thing about CNN's New Year's coverage is that it's always pretty degenerate these days.
The hosts are doing shots on TV. Last year, there was a bunch of pot on TV during CNN. And now Anderson Cooper talking about his very famous socialite mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and all the men she slept with, and who has the biggest phallus.
I mention this not to really attack Anderson Cooper or CNN. I don't care.
Nobody's watching it.
Nobody saw this live anyway, other than the people who had the misfortune of walking through airports on New Year's Eve.
But I do it to point out that CNN is not a news channel.
There was a piece in National Review on this the other day.
CNN is not a news channel.
It has no credibility.
It has no standing.
It obviously has no dignity.
It's a kind of tabloid entertainment channel for leftism on cable.
And it's pretty much been that the whole time.
And now we can see it, okay?
And it's worth remembering because when they air their really super serious journalism ads, facts first, this is a banana, we're real news.
Just remember that, no, you're not real news.
You're the station where Anderson Cooper jokes about the biggest phallus in Hollywood and calls conservative Republicans teabaggers.
And that was Anderson Cooper too.
And where Don Lemon...
Shows up and he looks super serious right after he gets back from Murphs and allegedly assaults people at bars late at night.
It's a bunch of derelicts, okay?
This news channel doesn't have that kind of credibility.
Now, that's fine.
They provide sort of tabloid cable entertainment.
Okay, they've got an audience for that.
But don't let them harangue you about real news and serious journalism and the separation of powers in our constitution.
They don't get to do that.
You talk about the biggest fallacies in Hollywood and you giggle about it while doing shots on TV, you lose that right.
Which is fine because I think it's kind of the theme of the decade.
I mean, if you can predict a theme of a decade, that's what it is.
It's We the people looking forward, taking back some of our political destiny, taking back our culture, taking back our rights, taking back our seriousness of purpose.
And what happens on the left?
The politicians on the left are screaming about socialism and soaking the rich and all this kind of crazy cockamamie gender theory.
And on the mainstream media, you have them giggling about phalluses.
Okay, that's what they're doing.
They've run their course.
And now I think we, with a little bit of hope, are pivoting back and taking control of our destiny.
Let's get to the mailbag before we have to go.
From Ben.
Hi, Michael.
Happy New Year.
I'm getting married on August 30th this year to the love of my life, and I wanted to know what your advice would be to a Christian couple regarding the cultural environment.
How do you navigate being in the world without being a part of it?
Thank you for the excellent podcast, and I hope to see another fantastic book soon.
Thank you very much.
This one may even have words in it.
The important lesson in my vast experience as a married man is to remember that there's no such thing as a vacuum.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
So you cannot try to live a virtuous, upstanding, good Christian life by not doing the things of this world.
That's not going to work.
By Not doing this.
Not looking at this.
Not drinking that.
That's not going to happen.
You are going to be able to practice the virtues by actually practicing the virtues, by affirmatively doing something.
So, for instance, late at night, when you're lying around your apartment, you could do a few things.
You could binge eat.
You could just sort of stuff your fat face.
You could watch 5 million episodes of some show on TV. You could look at porn.
Getting back to our debate in the last weeks of 2019.
You could drink yourself silly.
Or you could pray.
Those are all activities that will take up, I don't know, call it half an hour to an hour late at night.
And so you can't do the culture.
You can't be virtuous.
You can't practice the virtues by avoiding.
You have to do something else.
And so what I would recommend is you do those things that are going to make you in the culture but not of it.
You're going to do those things that allow you to thrive in society but be living for another place.
And maybe that means going to church.
Maybe that means praying.
Maybe that means availing yourself of the sacraments.
Maybe that means going to confession.
Maybe that means doing.
And so it's very foreign in this culture where all we ever want to do is sort of sit around and loaf and scroll on Instagram or something.
But what you've got to do is turn away from that.
Kanye West sang about it in his new Jesus is King album.
He said you've got to put the gram away.
Even things that seem kind of trivial like scrolling mindlessly on your phone or something, they can be harmful.
You've got to do something else.
Have a conversation.
Read a book.
Go pray.
Go to church.
It sounds like you're pretty proactive anyway and excited to do that.
So I wish you the best of luck and happy engagement.
From David, Hey Michael, I'm a recent subscriber and a big fan.
I'm debating a couple friends currently about the morality of capital punishment, and they are saying that the death penalty is immoral, or at least that we shouldn't use it, because one, it is irreversible versus something lifelike in prison, and two, in the New Testament, specifically using John 8, Jesus wants us to have mercy.
What are your thoughts?
Also of note, they cited the Catholic Catechism, 2267, this is this new change to the catechism by Pope Francis, which says that the death penalty is impermissible.
Although I'm not Catholic, I'd appreciate your thoughts on this as well.
Thanks so much.
Okay, yeah, there's so much misunderstanding about capital punishment.
First of all, your friends are saying that capital punishment is bad because it's irreversible, unlike all those other punishments, say, life in prison.
But those are irreversible too.
If you're stuck in prison for 35 years, Because of bad evidence or something?
Those 35 years are gone.
You can't reverse that.
It's just like capital punishment.
It's irreversible.
Now, you might say, at least you can get out of prison and have a good five years before you croak, whereas with capital punishment you can't.
But what this speaks to, and I think the reason why opposition to capital punishment has grown, is because of the advance of secularism.
We used to believe, from the dawn of time until just about five minutes ago, that this world is not all that there is.
That the human person has a soul.
That there is ultimate justice.
That our justice comes from divine justice.
That our laws come from the natural law.
I still believe that.
Religious people still believe that.
But among the kind of shallow secular culture, that is gone.
So I think that's part of the reason why there's now opposition to capital punishment, even though it's not terribly reasonable.
Then, in the New Testament, Christ wants us to be merciful.
But he also is a God of justice.
So there's mercy, but there's also justice.
So at the same time, when Christ tells us, go, you know, put away the sword, give away all of your possessions, he also says, go right now and sell your possessions, sell your purse, so that you can buy not just one sword, but two.
All right?
And this kind of reminds us of...
How there is a time for every season under heaven.
There's a time for peace and a time for war.
There's a time for all of these things.
We don't just have an ideology that is pacifistic.
Christianity is not pacifistic, and it's a shallow Christianity that would pretend to be pacifistic.
There's nothing good or virtuous or moral about letting the cruel rape the earth.
Nothing right about that at all.
When it comes to the Catholic Catechism, it's true the Pope has used very confusing language on this.
He's used the word inadmissible, but that's certainly not been the case.
A threat.
2,000 years of Christianity, Thomas Aquinas defended killing heretics, using the power of the state to kill heretics.
Okay, so is Thomas Aquinas now anathema?
I don't think so.
There can be legitimate disagreement over the death penalty among Christians, as Pope Benedict pointed out, and let's not be confused about that sort of thing.
The key to the death penalty is Okay, we think now that the purpose of all criminal justice is rehabilitation and deterrence.
Those are important aspects, but the primary aspect is retribution, justice itself, punishment for violating justice.
The moral law for violating the civil laws, too.
That's the key.
The purpose of it is justice.
Everything else falls downstream of that.
From Joshua, if the stock market and job growth drops in any significant way, can Trump still win in 2020?
Would he be able to successfully make the election a referendum on the Democrats' devastating economic policies, in your opinion?
Happy New Year.
If the economy collapses, Trump will have a much harder time in 2020.
Luckily, there's no sign that the economy is going to collapse.
I mean, everybody says we're due for a recession, but you're never really due for a recession.
Recessions are caused by the economic cycle, but they're also caused by policies.
And fortunately, the economy has been going gangbusters because of policies, because the Trump administration has come in and said, no, we can get our manufacturing back.
We can get consumer confidence up.
We can get manufacturing confidence up.
Things are going really, really well.
You know, the fewest federal regulations issued in 44 years.
That is a really good thing.
And so I would suspect, as much as you can predict these things, I think Trump is probably going to have a pretty good economy going into 2020.
But even if it started to falter, I think there is a chance that Trump could still win based on first principles.
I mean, let's not forget the misery index was pretty high when Barack Obama got re-elected.
The power of the incumbency is pretty important.
And there's so much more going on in terms of judges, in terms of culture, in terms of national security under Trump, that he might have a little leeway.
But still, the economy is probably going to lead the election.
From Josh.
Michael, what types of things are going on in your earpiece during your show?
Thanks.
It's pretty much just like Hall& Oates on repeat, just kind of happy 1980s music, just to keep me all pepped up, you know, ready to go.
Obviously, nothing professionally important is ever going on in my earpiece.
The minute they try to tell me anything that actually has to do with work, I just turn that down, of course.
From Johnny.
Hey, Michael.
Love your show.
Just wondering, do you think it's possible that we could legally classify news sites such as CNN as tabloids?
I was going to the store and it struck me when I realized how tabloids get away with publishing literal lies, at least from what I hear, about celebrities and how the media does the same thing.
Thanks.
Yeah, I mean, I think it pretty much already is...
Considered tabloid news.
The mainstream media, CNN, New York Times even, I think those already are considered tabloids.
What would be the legal distinction, though?
There really isn't one.
We have very strong freedom of the press in this country, so we have very weak libel laws.
It's very difficult to successfully sue somebody for libel, for defaming you, and so...
Yeah, the mainstream media are going to publish lies all the time.
They publish lies about me personally, and that's just what they get away with.
The key is exposing them, as you say, as tabloids, as shallow, yellow journalism.
And I think that's already happened.
I think that's probably the defining feature of the Trump era, is the absolute just collapse of the press.
And their credibility, and that's a very good thing.
All right, last question from Jairo.
Hey, Michael.
I'm in the U.S. Army.
I'll be deploying again soon after the holidays.
I'm an avid reader, and I love books about U.S. politics, history, economics, etc.
I was wondering if you had a short list of books that you would recommend for me to take with me or have my wife send to me if possible.
Very respectfully, Jairo.
Well, first of all, thanks for your service.
I hope you have a good deployment.
I do have recommendations for books and actually that timing worked out very well.
We're about to launch a show with PragerU in addition to this show but I will have another show on PragerU called The Book Club and we're going to be going through some of the most important books that you should read.
We're going to do one a month.
We're starting that out this month in January.
We're going to begin with Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and that guest on that episode is going to be Dennis Prager, the man himself.
So stay tuned for that.
I'll put out some lists of the books That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Happy New Year, everybody.
See you Monday.
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