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May 11, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
52:39
Ep. 761 - Gomorrah-By-The-Sea Goes Down In Flames

California shrinks for the first time ever, a fat activist claims to have anorexia, and a UK pastor gets reported to the terror watchlist for questioning the Left’s weird sex claims. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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California is shrinking.
California has grown consistently since the gold rush, since 1850.
And last year, for the first time ever, California shrunk.
More people left California than came into California, born in California.
So...
If the population is shrinking here, I am actually part of that diaspora of people fleeing.
What does that mean for the Golden State?
It means that they are in big trouble.
Gamora by the sea is going down in flames.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Larry, who says, That's very kind.
Larry, but the problem with your comment is you didn't tell me how to pronounce it in the comments.
So perhaps I've corrected it inadvertently, but I may well be mispronouncing your name again.
I hope I've gotten it right.
I'm not going to hedge.
I'm just going to stick with Larry.
I hope that Larry is the right name.
Otherwise, you're going to have to add another comment.
We'll see if that one gets picked, too.
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California's population fell by more than 182,000 last year.
And we here at the Daily Wire account for about, I don't know, 120 of them, apparently.
Not 120,000, but 120 people.
Because we're out, you know, just like Rogan is out, just like Elon Musk is out, just like everybody's out.
Everybody is fleeing Cali because the weather's still great, but everything else is going down.
You've got crime through the roof.
You've got homelessness through the roof, even though the mayor of L.A., for instance, passed a gigantic bond a few years ago to take care of homelessness.
What happened?
It got worse and worse and worse.
You've got shops boarded up.
You've got the most draconian lockdowns in the country, and you've got confiscatory taxes.
So, yeah, you're gone.
There's only so far you can push us, California, before we're out.
I was on my friend Alex Michelson's show on Fox in LA just a couple of weeks ago.
And I pointed out, I said, California's shrinking.
He said, hey, hey, hey, Michael.
Look, California's still growing.
It's just that the rate of growth has decreased.
And I let him have it.
I said, I don't know, maybe he knows something that I don't know.
But I thought, you know, maybe immigration, for instance, is taking off at a higher rate than I was expecting.
But turns out I was completely right.
California actually is shrinking.
And I wonder why.
I wonder why.
I see headlines like this.
About the Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, one of the most, if not the most radical prosecutor in the United States.
He's a prosecutor, but his whole aim is to let criminals off the hook.
So a couple of criminals he left off the hook are a couple that killed and tortured a 10-year-old boy.
And the 10-year-old boy was the son of the mother killer.
This is as heinous as it possibly gets.
There is no doubt that these people should face capital punishment.
It would be a mercy to them.
It would be good for society.
It would...
More directly satisfied justice.
And it would be a mercy to them because one hopes they could face the reality of the moral order and get their act together, right?
It would be rehabilitative for them.
Heather Maxine Barron, 31, and her boyfriend Karim Ernesto Leyva, 35, charged in the 2018 death of Anthony Avalos, Barron's son.
Because the death penalty is on the table, they could now face a maximum of life in prison without the possibility of parole if they are convicted.
Is that justice?
You know, when you hear about the criminal justice reformers and, you know, our incarceration system is modern day slavery and it's so unjust and we need to spring the criminals out of the clink.
By the way, there are Republicans who have adopted this ridiculous talking point.
Frankly, it infected the Trump administration to some degree.
And you know how much I love Trump, but even he caved into a little bit of this let the criminals out of jail mania.
When you hear about that, and then you hear that these psychopaths, Heather Barron and her boyfriend Kareem Leyva, killed this woman and tortured this woman's 10-year-old son.
Does that make you want to spring criminals from the clink?
No, it makes you want to ratchet up the punishments.
Not even for revenge, right?
I don't even know these people.
But for justice.
Because we know it's an injustice if these people get off the hook.
LA's DA, George Gascon, says no.
We need to think of poor Heather Barron and poor Kareem Leyva.
You know, society made them kill and torture her 10-year-old son.
It was someone else's fault.
It wasn't their fault.
It would be wrong to punish them.
No wonder California is shrinking.
You know that New Salini over there, the Patrick Bateman, American psycho governor that they've got in that state, he is facing a recall.
And the recall is a little bit ridiculous because there are some ordinary candidates.
I'm thinking of Kevin Falconer, former mayor of San Diego.
I'm thinking of John Cox, who's run before, and Caitlyn Jenner.
Formerly Bruce, greatest athlete in the world, you know, very impressive fella, all running and you think this is kind of a clown show now.
This is turning into a reality TV circus and Newsom may well survive.
Well, Newsom seems at least a little bit nervous.
Because Gavin Newsom, totally failed governor, one of the two worst in the country on COVID and otherwise incompetent when we're not talking about crisis situations, he is announcing the largest tax rebate in American history.
Now consider this.
One of the reasons that the Daily Wire and others, you know, Rogan or Musk or whoever, left California is because the taxes are so ridiculous.
Taxes, state tax already 13%, then they're going to raise it to 16%.
That's crazy.
16% versus you move to Tennessee, there's zero state income tax.
That's a no-brainer.
You can only push me so far, folks.
But now Newsom completely changing his tune, saying he wants the largest tax rebate in American history.
According to the LA Times, the proposal to deliver $8 billion in new cash payments to millions of Californians is part of a $100 billion economic stimulus plan made possible in part by a budget that's faced a windfall of tax revenues.
Windfall of tax revenues, yeah, because he jacked taxes up on everybody.
So now he's got everybody's money and he's going to give a little bit back to them.
Newsom's also proposing a $5 billion plan to double rental assistance to get 100% of back rent paid for those who have fallen behind, along with as much as $2 billion in direct payments to pay down utility bills that are overdue.
So what does this mean?
This means that Gavin Newsom knows that he's in trouble.
knows that his policies have failed, and so he's trying to reverse them in the short term to survive the recall.
So he's saying, yeah, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to give away all the money to people.
All the money we took from people, we're going to give some of it away so that you forget what a terrible governor I am.
What's shocking to me is not that Democrats would buy votes.
They've been doing it for a long time.
And Republicans try to buy votes occasionally, too.
Though not nearly enough.
Because Democrats are cleaning their clock in that department.
But what's so surprising to me is even in this insane race where you've got candidates who are not polling that well, Falconer and Cox and even Jenner.
And Jenner is such an eccentric personality who probably would not be able to win.
Even in that race, Newsom is afraid.
Newsom is worried about the possibility of losing his job because it reminds us of something that is an eternal truth in politics.
Never say never.
Never say never.
Remember, do you remember 2015?
Donald Trump is running for president, comes down the escalator and the gold and the Mexicans are rapists and all this sort of thing.
And people say, there is no way.
This guy's not going to win nothing.
Never Trump.
Never Trump.
And then what did we have?
We had never say never, Trump.
Never say never, because the guy got elected.
Could this happen with Caitlyn Jenner?
Could this happen with someone else, even, you know, Cox or Falconer?
I suppose it could.
Newsom knows that too.
Is it likely?
Probably not.
But could it happen?
Absolutely.
So this is why the left is now training their sights on Caitlyn.
Sarah Silverman, the comedian, is furious at Caitlyn Jenner because she says that he is transphobic with the issue of trans sports.
What does Caitlyn Jenner, well-known decathlete and guy on the Wheaties box and guy who now dresses up like a woman, what does he know about transvestitism and athletics?
He doesn't know anything.
So Sarah Silverman decides to educate him.
I saw Caitlyn Jenner saying trans girls should not play girls sports.
Caitlyn, you're a woman, right?
A trans girl is a girl.
She should have the same rights as cis girls.
If you think a trans girl is too strong, what about tall girls as opposed to short girls?
What about boys in high school who are teeny tiny and their teammates have already hit puberty and are shaving?
Why don't you just have co-ed sports divided by weight or height?
Yeah, that's the difference.
This is so dumb.
They are legislating this shit without one single example of how this plays out.
This is not worrying about girls' sports.
Believe me.
I think there are better ways to worry about girls' sports.
This is not worrying about...
This is not what that is.
This is not worrying.
This is not concern for girls' sports.
It's transphobia, full stop.
Okay, virtually everything Sarah Silverman just said is wrong and is demonstrably false.
There's no example of this sports issue being a problem for girls.
Yes, there is.
There's a very famous case working its way up the courts right now, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, because guess what happens when the boys play in the girls' sports?
The boys, virtually every time, win.
So there certainly is a case.
Trans women are women.
No, they're not.
Caitlyn Jenner, you're a woman.
No, she's not.
Trans women should have the same rights as women.
Well, they have equality under the law, but men and women are different, so they're treated differently.
Okay.
But she does say something that is useful and true.
She says, this is not about girls sports.
And she's totally right.
This is not about girls sports.
I don't care about girls sports.
I've never watched girls sports.
Maybe if the Olympics is on in the background, I guess I have seen some girls sport.
Otherwise, I have never watched.
I've very rarely watched men's sports.
I have not watched women's sports.
I care in the sense that it's so unfair that these girls who run in track to try to get scholarships and awards lose them and don't get the scholarships and don't get the awards because some dude is faster and bigger and stronger.
But But generally speaking, I don't care about girl sports.
What I care about is human nature.
What I care about is the relationship of my society and my politics to reality because the left wants to divorce those things from reality and I am pleading.
I'm clawing with my fingernails.
I'm saying, no, let's Stick a little bit almost on reality, no!
And then we fall off of the abyss, just like California is about to fall off of the United States and sink into the Pacific Ocean.
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Sarah Silverman says this issue of distinguishing between men and women and not letting the men play in the girls' sports, even if they wear a dress, and not letting the men go into the girls' bathroom, even if they're wearing a dress, it's not about the girls' sports.
You're right.
It's not.
It's totally not.
It's about reality.
The reason that I can't call Caitlyn Jenner her, the reason that I can barely call him Caitlyn, I'm sort of going back and forth on this.
Should I just call him Bruce?
Caitlyn is a woman's name.
It's not a man's name.
So if we call Caitlyn Caitlyn, aren't we in a much lesser degree than with the pronouns, but to some degree, aren't we mainstreaming this?
I don't know.
I'm going back.
Perhaps I'll go back and forth on the names today.
But if we call Caitlyn or Bruce her, My issue is not about politeness.
I don't think it's polite to lie to people, so on that front, I don't think it's necessarily polite to call him her.
But it's not about the sports.
It's not about the way he looks.
It's not about the way he talks.
It is a little bit about his immigration policy, but that's a separate issue.
It's just about the reality of it.
I just...
I won't lie about something that fundamental, okay?
I get it.
Politics, there's a lot of scummy people saying a lot of things that are only slightly true or not true at all, and there's spinning, and there's dishonesty, and I know that that's true in politics.
I expect that of my politicians.
But you can't tell me that a man is a woman, and you can't make me say that.
I just won't do it.
It's about much more than that.
There's much, much more to lose.
Gender dysphoria is not the only body dysmorphic issue that we have going on.
This gets to not just Bruce Jenner's psychological struggles.
This gets not just to the social contagion where we erase the distinction between men and women.
This gets to A fundamental misunderstanding of our relationship to the physical world.
That's actually what it comes down to.
And so put the gender issue aside for a second.
There was a story that just came out about the plus-sized model, Tess Holliday, which is plus-sized model is a euphemism for someone who is obese, but models clothing.
Okay.
And I guess she actually goes by the term fat activist.
Tess Holliday revealed last week that she has anorexia and is in recovery for anorexia.
Morbidly obese woman has anorexia.
I'm in anorexia and I'm in recovery, says Holiday on Twitter.
I'm not ashamed to say it out loud anymore.
I'm the result of a culture that celebrates thinness and equates that to worth.
But I get to write my own narrative now.
I'm finally able to care for a body that I've punished my entire life and I am finally free.
Okay, where to begin?
I think there are two discrete issues here.
I'm going to, obviously there's the absurdity that a fat person has anorexia.
That's the first thing.
But I actually don't think it's totally absurd.
You can suffer from any number of psychological problems, even if your body doesn't match those psychological problems.
This is the definition of body dysmorphia, right?
Is that your body doesn't match the issue.
So an anorexic is a thin person who thinks that he or she is fat.
This woman is an obese person who thinks that she is too thin, I guess.
Who thinks that she is too fat or something.
It's sort of one more layer of dysmorphia.
But I actually don't think that it's impossible.
I don't think it's any more absurd than any other body dysmorphia.
So there's that issue.
And then there is the issue of multiple types of dysmorphia.
So what I mean by this is, The first cultural issue I see with the fat activist saying she's anorexic is that she's basically saying, I identify as a very thin person.
I'm a very large person, but I identify as a very thin person.
So she might say, I have anorexia, but the psychological condition that she says she has is not enfleshed in any way.
It's not enacted.
We live in this time right now.
It's a very gnostic time where we think that all that matters is what's going on in our heads.
And it doesn't matter what we do.
And it doesn't matter what our bodies look like.
And it doesn't matter what the physical world says.
If it's floating around in my head, that's fine.
This actually gets to one of the issues with political correctness.
Political correctness replaces moral codes, old moral codes with speech codes so that it replaces the idea of how we interact in a moral way from what you do to what you say.
There are many things that political correctness does, all of which I discuss in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now, by the way, for pre-order.
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In the old order, I might have the best of intentions, but if I do something unjust, if I commit a sin...
Then that's what matters.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but ultimately, talk is cheap.
It really depends on what you do.
But in this culture, it's all just about what we think.
It's all about what we say.
It's all that floats around.
So, okay, that's the first big problem.
Then the other big problem is, maybe this woman, she's got anorexia.
Okay, I grant it.
She has another body problem, though.
It's not just that she thinks she's too fat, even though she's too thin.
She's got obviously some issues there.
It's that she overeats.
What she's saying is this culture values thinness.
No, no, no.
This culture exalts fatness too, doesn't it?
We have this plethora of plus-sized models.
This woman, this woman's career is a testament to that.
We have a culture right now that celebrates unhealthy eating habits, not just in the don't eat enough direction, but also in the eat too much direction.
We not only celebrate starvation, we also celebrate gluttony, but both of those are a problem.
It's actually a problem.
We all struggle with lots of different problems, but as Chesterton points out, heresy is not the promotion of vice to the exclusion of virtue.
It's the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of all the others.
So yes, you've Starvation, okay, of, you know, which goes into a lot of other issues.
But you've now gone into the sin of gluttony.
What you really need to do is recognize that both of those are a problem and try to get back there into some sort of moderation, which is a virtue.
Speaking of bodily comfort, we have great news coming out of the United Kingdom.
As the coronavirus enters its 15th month, 15 days to slow the spread, we're now on month 15.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, the putatively conservative prime minister who went totally squish on coronavirus, he's got great news for you.
Pretty soon, you might be able to hug your loved ones.
We're taking a step towards that moment when we learn to live responsibly with COVID, when we cease eventually to rely on detailed government edicts and make our own decisions based on the best scientific advice about how to protect our families and those around us.
So from next Monday, we're updating the guidance on close contact between friends and family.
Wow.
Thank you, Boris.
Wow.
Thank you, Conservative Prime Minister.
Now, Brits, starting Monday, not today, so hold off, starting Monday, they can maybe hug their relatives and Using common sense.
That's how this was covered.
Boris Johnson now permits common sense contact between friends and relatives.
Common sense, it would appear, ain't so common anymore.
Johnson initially had a really tough, strong approach to the virus, which was, this is bad, but we're going to get through it.
We're not going to totally destroy our lives and upend our society.
Then he got COVID and he went totally squish.
And that's the way it's worked in so many places.
When you look into what's going on in Britain, you are in many ways looking into a crystal ball of what's going to come to the United States.
Same thing in Canada.
When you see what's going on there with the total deference to the public health experts, with the massive growth of these government bureaucracies, with the total collapse of that English tradition of liberty, that's probably what's coming here, folks.
And we've got to be very much on guard against that.
It's not just on the COVID issue.
COVID is just a lens through which to recognize the broader political problem.
Because COVID demonstrates the state-established religion of the Anglosphere and the broader West.
And that state-established religion is secular progressivism.
And the high priests of secular progressivism are the public health experts.
Public health.
Because the public is the political part, the health is the scientific part, and they are going to apply just as All the progressives have done since the dawn of the progressive era.
They're going to apply science to our political problems and thereby get rid of any need for political debate.
You don't need to have a political opinion anymore.
The scientists will tell you what to do.
And that is a fundamentally religious point of view.
And it is squeezing out the other religions, notably Christianity and notably in the United Kingdom.
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Also, check out Ben's show.
Ben is going to be covering what's going on in Israel right now and the left's embrace, in Ben's words, of Jew hatred.
It's hard to look around at what the Democrats are saying and come to any other conclusion.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
The COVID lockdowns in the United Kingdom are just the tip of the iceberg in that country for a broader religious conflict.
And you've seen this breakout into the open just this week.
A pastor in the United Kingdom who was a chaplain at a college there, I think he was a former chaplain at Cambridge University.
This chaplain was fired, not only fired, but reported to a terror watch agency of the UK government because he gave a sermon defending the Christian view of sex and Take a listen.
It was just so mind-blowing.
I was thinking, I'm never going to work again.
Because I've been accused of being a terrorist.
This is the sermon I gave in June 2018.
But remember that religious belief is just as protected in law as sexual orientation.
And no one has the right to discriminate against you or be abusive towards you.
When ideologies compete, we should not descend into abuse.
We should respect the beliefs of others.
The fact that in this day and age, a sermon should be deemed effectively blasphemous by other people.
It would just never have occurred to me before this happened that that could be something that would happen in 21st century Britain, which I thought was a liberal, tolerant society.
So this guy, obviously a thoughtful guy, you know, obviously a very respectful guy, a very mild-mannered British guy.
It reminds me of that scene in European Vacation where Chevy Chase keeps running into the English bicyclist in his car, and the bicyclist keeps apologizing to him.
He's like, oh, I'm so sorry, yes, yes, well, no, oh, yes, no, it's all right, no, no, no, just a little scratch, yes, yeah, you know.
So the Brits, very, very nice people, this guy very genial, and now he's being called a terrorist.
But what he doesn't understand...
There's that last line there at the end.
He said, I can't believe that in 21st century England, which I thought was a respectful, tolerant, liberal society, I can't believe that my views of Christianity would be called blasphemy.
That's because this fellow doesn't seem to understand that liberalism is a jealous God.
Liberalism is a very jealous God.
And...
People who practice their religion out in the open, they tend to have a more coherent view of the world.
They tend to be more grounded.
There's this idea that religious people are very superstitious.
No, we're actually the least superstitious people on earth because we know exactly what we think and we're subjecting it to rigor.
The people who pretend not to have a religion, they tend to be the kookiest.
They tend to be the most superstitious.
They tend to be the most censorious because they're not even aware of what they're doing.
Liberalism is a jealous God.
Here's what this guy did.
He's at Trent College, which, by the way, purports to have a Christian ethos.
And he gave this lecture about competing ideologies.
He said, look, I'll give you an example.
We talked about this competing ideology often.
You've got the Christian view of the world where we've got, you know, of human nature where man is body and soul.
And you've got the transgender view of human nature, which is that man is really just his soul and his body is evil when his body doesn't accord with his soul and his body has to be mutilated to better accord with it.
Okay, two totally different views.
And he says these are competing ideologies and we just have to be respectful of them.
Now he's a little nicer than I am.
I don't think that we need to, I think we should be respectful of people, but I don't think we should be respectful of bad ideas.
I think this Gnostic idea that my body has nothing to do with my actual identity is ridiculous and we should ignore it and we should say it's not true and not teach it.
Because when you put these things on equal ground, you empower very bad ideas, and when you empower these bad ideas, they tend not to be happy to leave it at just a sort of nice liberal tolerance.
They want to dominate, because ideologies make truth claims.
They say, this is the way the world is, and anything that does not jive with that, they're going to try to get rid of.
So, this guy gives his talk.
The Trent College here, the allegedly Christian college, invites a group called Educate and Celebrate to make their school more, quote, LGBT-friendly.
Educate and Celebrate, this non-profit, declare that the school's mission is to embed gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation into the fabric of your school.
So if you do this, if you are a Christian school and you invite this group, Educate and Celebrate, what an Orwellian, bizarre, creepy, vague name.
If you invite them to your school, they're going to embed gender ideology in your school.
And what that decision amounts to is de-Christianizing your school.
You used to have a Christian school.
Now you have a gender ideology school.
Okay, you're going to make that decision as the president of the school.
That's what you're going to get.
The head of the charity, Dr.
Ellie Barnes, says that the purpose of Educate and Celebrate is to, quote, completely smash heteronormativity.
That's what we want to do.
So that's it.
The Christian school invites in this radical group to destroy the Christian vision of the school.
Fair enough.
That's the school if they want to do it.
You know, the problem here is also that the Church of England has just completely cracked up over the last 50 years or so.
I once had a former Anglican who became a Catholic tell me that to join the Church of England now and to become ordained in the Church of England is not just to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, it's to actually grab and hold on as the thing goes all the way down to the bottom.
And so this poor guy, Reverend Dr.
Bernard Randall, asks this question.
He says...
Or rather, he makes this point.
He says, when ideologies compete, we should respect everybody, okay, but one should no more be required to accept LGBT ideology than you should be told that you're in favor of Brexit or that you must be Muslim.
We would object to that, right?
I made this point, I think, on the show yesterday.
I made this point somewhere.
I don't know.
You may have heard it somewhere, which is, If a Muslim comes out and quotes the Quran, then a homosexual or transvestite might rightly object that they are being victimized on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, because the Quran has strong things to say about those sorts of identities and behaviors.
But if the transvestite Criticizes the Muslim for quoting the Quran, then the Muslim could complain on the basis of being victimized for his religion.
You've got these competing ideologies here.
And which do we give the greater latitude toward?
That's the question that people are grappling with right now, and it would appear that the answer is on the radical sex front.
Because what happened to this guy is he didn't just get fired, but he ends up being reported to a terror watch list that is aimed at protecting youth against radicalization.
Right now, apply it to the American context.
Drag queen story hour, you know, you've got radical gender ideologues indoctrinating your toddlers into how to twerk and how to make little boys look like little girls.
That is considered mainstream in the culture.
Christianity is considered radical, and there are now government programs in the United Kingdom to watch out for this sort of thing.
He ultimately was not permanently listed as a terrorist, but he was reported.
It shows you where the perception is among the people there.
This is happening in America.
It's coming to America.
Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, just addressed this at Regent University.
Today I want to speak to you about the challenges that are ahead of you as followers of Christ and how you should approach them and overcome them.
Our freedoms, particularly our unalienable right of religious freedom, is increasingly under attack from our government, be it local, state, or federal.
More and more.
More and more, being a good follower of Christ is becoming less synonymous with being a good American.
Even though you know the history, the founding of our country is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
It gives new meaning to the theme I was asked to address.
In Philippians 4.13, this says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Each of you Each of you can meet those challenges, but you'll not be able to overcome them without Christ.
There's not a chance.
I love this.
I really love this speech.
I'm very glad that Secretary Pompeo gave it.
Now, you notice some tensions here, because he opens up.
When he opened up the speech, I thought, okay, this will be a perfectly fine speech, but it's not going to knock anybody off their feet.
Because he opened up on the issue of religious liberty.
Not on what we believe, but just on the freedom to believe stuff.
And as I lay out in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, freedom of belief doesn't mean anything for people who don't believe anything.
Freedom of speech in the abstract doesn't mean anything for people who don't have anything to say.
So the question is, what do we believe?
So he opens up on it, we have this freedom of belief, freedom of religion.
But then he implies, he doesn't say it explicitly, but he implies that freedom of religion has limits.
Because then he says...
Less and less each day do we seem to hold to this idea that being a good Christian is synonymous with being a good American.
Wow, what an insight for the vast majority of our country's history.
It was a Christian country.
It was founded as a Christian country.
I know that some people take a line out of context from the Treaty of Tripoli when some American diplomats were trying to convince Muslim pirates not to capture and sell our sailors into bondage.
But if you take that ridiculous line out for just a second and you look at the actual writings of the actual founding fathers and the men who led the country, it's quite clear this is a Christian country.
They always, when they point to the Treaty of Tripoli, they say John Adams said that America is not in any way founded on the Christian nation.
You say, first of all, John Adams didn't write the Treaty of Tripoli.
He affixed his name to it, I suppose.
It was actually written by a Jeffersonian Republican.
But even beyond that, Jefferson said that the morality of America is the morality of Christianity.
That's it.
He wrote about it at greater length elsewhere.
So anyway, you can read the full arguments for that in my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
But...
Does that count as two?
I guess it does.
I figured that was an extended plug, but that's fine.
I'll take two dings.
He says, America always considered itself a Christian country.
That's what he's implying.
But now, less and less so each day.
So, okay, if America always seemed to consider itself a Christian country, if being a good Christian was synonymous with being a good American, then that means that there wasn't total, total religious freedom in the most radical sense.
You didn't have freedom exactly from religion.
I'll put it more bluntly.
In the Declaration of Independence, the premise of the American Revolution is that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If our country is predicated on the idea that we are endowed by our creator with certain rights, this very Christian idea...
Then, one does not have the liberty to contradict that idea and to be an American.
That would be incoherent.
One does not have the thought, or rather, as Chesterton says, there is a thought that stops thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
One does not have the right to the thought that stops thought.
It is incoherent to say, I'm an American and I totally undermine and I totally dispute all of the things that make America, America.
You can't have that and still have a country.
John Locke, very famously in the letter concerning toleration, as the father of liberalism, says we need to tolerate everybody except for atheists.
Just where you get this idea that, yeah, you have quite a lot of latitude in terms of your freedom of religion, but you do not have freedom from religion.
And by the way, I'm not even making a prescriptive statement here.
I'm not even saying we need to be really tough on atheists.
I'm just...
Making a descriptive observation.
Everybody's got to serve somebody.
Everybody's got some religion.
The woke people have a more rigid and fanatical religion than anybody in this country right now.
They're just not even aware of it most of the time.
And that religion is a jealous God and it makes claims they're booting out true religion.
In this milieu, in this craziness, in this madness, an MSNBC guest goes on TV and And compares the Republican Party to Al-Qaeda.
The majority of people in this party and their elected leadership is siding with the anti-democratic forces within the Republican Party.
It's not that it's just a segment of the party.
It's now becoming the entire party.
I don't think there are enough of people who are willing to stand up to this iteration of the Republican Party to build another party at this point.
I mean, for all of the conversation about Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney or Adam Kinzinger, they're the outliers.
And it's really something hearing those comments from President George W. Bush, I've been thinking to myself this whole time, you know, Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, the people who wanted to do harm to our nation and to our way of life and our democracy, they got nothing on what this Republican Party is doing.
The idea that a member of their party, of their leadership, whose last name is Cheney, The Republican Party,
according to this MSNBC guy, is far more of a threat to the America that he envisions than Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda ain't got nothing on these guys, he says.
Obviously an outrageous and inflammatory statement.
But I'm, and this guy doesn't know anything about anything.
And he's, he's pulling the same, the usual tactic of, I, you know, look, I love Liz Cheney.
I love George W. Bush.
All the Republicans that lose and hate the Republican party and are now attacking the party and supporting the Democrats.
I really support them.
I have a strange new respect for them.
So he's pulling that thing, whatever.
It's a sort of stupid political rhetorical device, but people use it.
On his point, though, I want to give it the most charitable read possible.
I think he actually has a little bit of a point.
This MSNBC guy believes that the Republican Party...
Is far more transformative for the country than Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden or something like that.
He's absolutely right.
In this sense, what did Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and the people who launched the attacks on 9-11 do?
They killed thousands of innocent Americans.
This was the worst, bloodiest, most terrible attack in American history.
Yes.
Yes.
It did not succeed at what it attempted, it succeeded at killing people, but it did not succeed at the ideological goal of totally changing the direction of the country.
Actually, what happened is we just kind of kept up the same policies that we already had.
We ratcheted them up a little bit, but the liberal internationalism that we saw with George H.W. Bush and that you saw to a lesser degree with Bill Clinton and you see with George W. Bush and you see it with With Obama, that just kind of continued to pace.
In fact, we restarted a war that we had already won in the early 90s.
We actually just went right back to what we were doing before.
Whereas this Republican Party that MSNBC has such a big problem with, this Republican Party is threatening that liberal establishment.
The liberal establishment that actually goes back further than George H.W. Bush, you see the kind of seeds of this progressivism in the...
During the Cold War, certainly, after World War II, and on the domestic front, even going back further than that, in Franklin Roosevelt, and even all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.
This Republican Party right now is questioning that, is actually threatening that.
Was there really much of a difference between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush and Barack Obama?
There wasn't a huge difference.
What there was, was, you know, a little change on the margins.
But then Trump comes in and he says, actually, all you guys are wrong on foreign policy.
All of you.
You all have the same foreign policy and you're all wrong.
All you guys are wrong on trade.
You all have basically the same trade regime and it's totally wrong.
All you guys are wrong on manufacturing.
You're outsourcing our money.
That's totally wrong.
All you guys are wrong on immigration.
On some of the most important issues, you guys are totally wrong.
So, Because of this, the left, you know, they'll say nice things about George Bush or Liz Cheney right now because the real threat to them, the real threat to their vision of the country are all those Trumpy type of Republicans.
The MSNBC guys using outrageous, disgusting, inflammatory rhetoric.
But the point he's making, I think, is actually pretty fair.
Joe Biden is the most radical president in American history.
I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that.
Actually, associates of the president say the same thing.
New York Magazine just covered this.
So New York Magazine, a liberal outlet, quoting a liberal person who is close to Joe Biden says, sometimes dumb tactics yield desired outcomes.
In March, the Associated Press distributed a memo advising reporters to avoid or use caution when using the word crisis.
Only one very real possibility is that one, one very real possibility is this strategy works.
The person close to the White House added, They may get criticism and think pieces about it, but at his 100-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we've had, and the public thinks he's a moderate.
That's a winning strategy to me.
They're willing to accept that you're going to write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren't going to read it.
Wow, what a great insight.
What a fabulous insight here.
And this is something that Ted Cruz pointed out a long time ago on our show, Verdict, which is that Joe Biden talks like good old Uncle Joe and kind of lulls you to sleep, and he talks about Scranton and taking the Amtrak, but because he doesn't believe anything, because he wakes up in the morning, licks his finger, puts it in the air, figures out which way the wind is blowing, Joe Biden is...
He's just a weathervane.
So if the party's moving very far to the left, then he is going to move very far to the left as well.
But he's not going to worry people.
I think of plenty of senior citizens who don't want all this craziness going on right now in our culture.
They remember Joe Biden.
They say, oh, I like Joe.
Joe's fine.
And so he even says, yeah, okay, you can put this in New York Magazine.
Those rural voters in Colorado, they don't care.
They're not going to be reading New York Magazine.
Radical, radical stuff.
So what is the GOP going to do about it?
The GOP right now is facing an identity crisis.
They've got leadership that does not represent them.
You've got Liz Cheney, who's basically just a liberal internationalist of the kind of Bush era.
But at this point now, she's siding much more with the Democrats than with the Republicans, at least as a matter of jockeying for party power.
She might vote with the Republicans on some more issues.
But in terms of who's controlling things, she's siding with the Democrats.
So finally, after they defended this woman a month or two ago, finally, the House leader, McCarthy, He's
This is no time to take our eye off the ball.
If we are to succeed in stopping the radical Democrat agenda from destroying our country, these internal conflicts need to be resolved so as to not detract from the efforts of our collective team.
Having heard from so many of you in recent days, it's clear that we need to make a change.
As such, you should anticipate a vote on recalling the conference chair this Wednesday.
Good.
Glad to hear it.
Great stuff.
Now, unfortunately, they want to replace her with Elise Stefanik, who is this more liberal member of the GOP. We don't support that, but we do like that at least the GOP is getting serious about taking out people who do not support the party.
So what kind of Republicans should we be looking at?
Well, here are the types.
Obviously, this guy's not in the House of Representatives, but here are the types.
Republican Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, who just on Friday issued a directive to block state agencies from establishing the use of vaccine passports, which some states are soon going to require for residents.
Very good.
It doesn't go far enough.
As far as I can tell, this doesn't ban private businesses from requiring them.
The government should go in.
This is a good use of government power.
The Add more regulation to grow the size and scope of the government to ban businesses from forcing people to show the stupid vaccine passport when they go to try to get a beer at the pub.
Ron DeSantis has done an excellent job at this in Florida.
Ron DeSantis is kind of the leader among the Republican governors.
To contrast with that, you have the Excelsior Pass in New York, which will use secure technology.
Yeah, because we've seen how secure the technology is.
We've seen how the big tech overlords, they totally have our best interests at heart, to prove that a state resident has been vaccinated against COVID-19.
Now, this also gives the option to show they've had a negative test, but obviously the push here is for the vaccines.
One in five Americans do not want to get the vaccine.
One in five Americans don't want to get the vaccine.
Now, initial estimates for herd immunity against COVID-19, according to reports, were to set that number around 40 to 50 percent.
Dr.
Fauci now says that immunization has to be over 80 percent.
But one in five Americans, according to a recent survey from The Economist at YouGov, don't want to get the vaccine.
Nearly 70% said they're cool with it.
18% said they won't be getting the shots.
And of the people who aren't getting the shots, when asked if they could be persuaded to get the vaccine, 79% said no.
I totally get it.
I totally get why not.
I guess the category that I'm in is I don't intend to get the vaccine.
Could I be persuaded?
I guess so.
I've got an open mind.
But I don't intend to get it.
And if we're already going to get 80%, then it sounds like we're good, doesn't it?
And if the public health officials have squandered all of their credibility, then I guess there's no reason to pay any attention to them.
I get it.
Look, I get we need experts.
We need the doctors to tell us about...
I'm not even against vaccines generally.
But if people have squandered their credibility, if they have misled on multiple occasions, if the things that they have predicted have not come true, then it's going to raise a question in people's minds.
And you're going to hear for quite a while now, you're going to hear people say that this 80%, you know, that this 20% rather that don't want to get vaccinated, they're terrible, they're stupid, they're anti-vaxxers, they're dumb, they're endangering the public health.
Those people...
Have every reason, every justification to be very skeptical of these public health experts.
Who, by the way, even by these numbers, will achieve the degree of immunity that they set out to achieve.
And by the early estimates, they're actually going to get more immunity than that.
So why the push?
Why the push for the vaccine passports and the insistence and the shaming and the ostracism?
It is about the imposition.
Of this political will.
And if we want to fight back, it's not enough even just to have the ideas floating around in our heads.
We have to enact it.
We have to push for it.
We have to offer a substantive vision of politics.
And then have the courage to actually enforce that.
And not just say you do you whatever you want to.
Actually enforce our vision of politics.
Lest we all become like Gamora by the sea.
Lest we all go like California and all go down together.
Hope we don't.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, Hamas fires hundreds of rockets into Israel while the squad rushes to defend them.
President Biden inherits Middle East peace and instead foments Middle East war.
And the 1970s gas lines are back, baby.
That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show.
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