Ep. 811 - Before You Accuse Me (Take A Look At Yourself)
The Democrats’ “January 6 Commission” falls apart, Australia locks down again over one WuFlu death, and government bureaucrats in the UK try to kill another baby.
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The insurrection that took place at the Capitol on January 6th was one of the worst, most violent attacks in the history of our country, according to the ruling elite that comprises not just Democrats, but also court jester conservatives such as Liz Cheney.
The attack on this building on January 6th was the worst attack on this Capitol since 1814.
It was an attack on our Constitution.
We supported what would have been the very best option, which was a bipartisan independent commission.
The minority leader opposed that.
He lobbied against it in the Senate, and the Senate blocked it.
The American people deserve to know what happened.
The people who did this must be held accountable.
There must be an investigation that is nonpartisan, that is sober, that is serious, that gets to the facts wherever they may lead.
And at every opportunity, the minority leader has attempted to prevent the American people from understanding what happened, to block this investigation.
Uh-huh.
The first part wasn't true and the second part is never going to happen.
Here's what really happened.
The horn guy made a mess of Nancy Pelosi's desk and the smiley guy stole her lectern and the only person to die by political violence was the Trump supporter that the cops shot and killed.
The good news here...
Is that even sometimes squishy Republicans are waking up to how the liberal establishment actually orchestrates so many national episodes, be they acts of terror, global lockdowns, or the brainwashing of whole generations.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Gwen and Gold, who says, I hope Larry Elder wins.
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The January 6th commission is falling apart.
The January 6th commission is a partisan hack tactic to continue to do what the Democrats and Liz Cheney, but I repeat myself, have been trying to do for months now, which is to equate the horn guy dancing at the Capitol with September 11th.
There was a 9-11 commission, so we need a January 6th commission.
Now, it was a terrible idea to create the commission in the first place.
Republicans rightly fought against it.
Because if there's going to be a commission to figure out why some eccentric people danced around the Capitol, probably there should be a commission to figure out why radical leftists burned down multiple cities around the country for eight months with the implicit and actually sometimes explicit support of elected Democrats, up to and including the sitting Vice President of the United States.
Don't you think there should maybe be a commission for that if we're going to have a commission about the smiley guy who took Nancy Pelosi's Lectern?
I think probably there would be.
So anyway, the Republicans try to shut it down.
Doesn't totally work.
So they go and they appoint people to the commission.
And then, as Politico reported yesterday, Nancy Pelosi rejected the conservative Republicans who would even sit on the allegedly bipartisan commission.
Nancy Pelosi rejected Representative Jim Banks from Indiana and Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio.
Who were both put on the commission by the GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.
As a result of this, and you've got to give McCarthy credit where credit's due, because McCarthy, everyone goes after McCarthy in part because he's a little bit more of an establishment figure, and in part just because he's the leader of the House GOP, and so he's always going to be irritating some people.
But you've got to give him credit where credit's due.
As a result of Pelosi's preposterous action to kick off a couple of conservatives on the commission, Kevin McCarthy pulled all of the GOP members.
He said, quote, We're good to go.
Spoiler alert, it never had any of those things.
And it shows the Speaker is more interested in playing politics than seeking the truth, of course.
Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts.
Good, this is the right approach.
Democrats are going to do whatever they want to do, but instead of it being a bipartisan, bicameral commission into the greatest tragedy in human history, the insurrection, now it's going to be a partisan House of Representatives propaganda campaign to pretend that the horn guy is Osama bin Laden.
There has been some evidence that's come out that federal law enforcement knew about planned demonstrations at and in the Capitol on January 6th.
Furthermore, there's been some evidence that's come out from Revolver News, notably, that law enforcement officials were involved, actually, in orchestrating some of the events of January 6th.
Now this sounds like a wild, crazy conspiracy theory.
What you're telling me, Michael, that the FBI may be, and I'm not claiming this was certainly the case, but there is evidence and there are reports of it.
You're telling me, Michael, that the FBI had some hand in what was going on on January 6th?
I am.
Yeah, I am telling you that.
First of all, I know that everything gets memory hold these days when it doesn't fit the narrative.
Who planted the bombs?
Remember, we were told they discovered bombs outside of the RNC and the DNC. Who planted them?
We live in the age of surveillance capitalism, to use a popular phrase.
We live in the age where there's a camera on every block.
There's cameras outside of the RNC and the DNC and every other building.
The FBI was able to trace down every single eccentric Republican who entered the Capitol on January 6th, but we can't trace down who planted bombs, allegedly, outside of the RNC and the DNC. That's kind of weird.
And even beyond what happened on January 6th, as BuzzFeed News, a left-wing outlet, is pointing out, the FBI very often has a role in some of these alleged terror attacks.
So notably, and this is from BuzzFeed, the conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Do you remember that?
That was a few months ago.
We were told that the radical far right, Nazi, fascist Republicans were going to go kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
Well, it turns out, That the FBI had a pretty big role, not just in executing this action, but in planning it as well.
At least a dozen confidential FBI informants reportedly assisted the quote-unquote investigation into this alleged extremist group.
And, this is the weirdest part, some of the informants reportedly took leading roles in the scheme.
They didn't just tell the feds what was going on with the extremist group.
They didn't even just egg other people along.
They took leading roles in the alleged plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
To date, this is according to BuzzFeed, One defendant has formally accused the government of entrapment, arguing that the FBI assembled the key plotters, encouraged the group's anti-government feelings, and gave its members military-style training.
And additional defendants have said that they plan to make similar claims when the cases which are divided now between federal and state courts go to trial within the next few months.
If you want to see the long history of this sort of thing, I'd recommend you go head over to Revolver News right now.
They have a great article on five instances of the FBI in American history putting forward operations to encourage acts of terrorism.
Because I get the FBI's legitimate role in getting informants to thwart acts of terrorism, but sometimes things get so far that it seems like the cart is leading the horse, seems like the tail is wagging the dog.
This is always my view.
Whenever the Ku Klux Klan is brought up in the mainstream media, which is frequently...
We're told there are all these Klansmen running around America.
I strongly suspect that roughly 99.3% of self-described Klansmen in America are just FBI informants informing on all of the other FBI informants that I think it's a completely, almost completely contrived phenomenon to maintain.
I'm not even saying this is through malice.
It might be just through the incompetence of the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
But to maintain a boogeyman that is almost entirely a phantom.
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So the criminals who are plotting all of these terrible terrorist attacks and the far-right fringe, turns out a lot of those criminals are working for the government.
Well, if everyone's an informant, then isn't the government just the instigator here?
Speaking of criminals in government...
Rand Paul.
Rand Paul has just...
Look, he came here to pass out pocket constitutions and smack down Dr.
Fauci.
And I'm all out of pocket constitutions.
So he's just smacking Fauci left and right in the Senate hearings, on television news hits, and now in a letter to the DOJ because Rand Paul is referring Dr.
Fauci to the DOJ for a criminal investigation.
You kicked off your questioning of Dr.
Fauci emphasizing federal law makes lying to Congress a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Is it your belief based on the evidence, Senator, that he lied before Congress and broke the law?
Yes, and I will be sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for a criminal referral because he has lied to Congress.
We have scientists that will line up by the dozens to say that the research he was funding was gain-of-function.
He's doing this because he has a self-interest to cover his tracks and to cover his connection to Wuhan lab.
Absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
We called it on the show when Dr.
Fauci made that claim.
Remember, this was some months ago.
Because it was one of the funniest claims that Dr.
Fauci's made.
He says, well, first he just denies the gain-of-function research.
You are wrong, Senator!
That type of research is not happening!
Then Rand Paul pushes him further on and he goes, the gain-of-function research was not being funded, and also it's totally cool, and I'm glad we funded it.
It's almost verbatim, not quite.
I took a little artistic liberty, but that was the point he made.
We're not doing this, but also it's totally cool that we did this.
So Rand Paul is saying, you know, Dr.
Fauci, this is not just some TV news hit where you can lie to the American people with impunity.
You are speaking under oath, and if you're lying, then you're going to perjure yourself.
And that is what Rand Paul contends Dr.
Fauci did, and so there will be a criminal investigation if the DOJ takes it up, which it probably won't because it's being led by Merrick Garland.
Now, I do not want to live in a country where, for instance, we always send the former president to prison.
I mean, it's fun to do the locker-up chants, and I don't want to live in Trump's America.
Yeah, because you'd be in jail, Hillary.
You know, these are good lines, and I like that.
But I don't want to live in a country where we just lock up our former presidents.
However, right now, Dr.
Fauci, first of all, is more powerful than just about any president that we've had in quite a long time.
And also, I'd prefer to live in a world in which we didn't have to jail...
Powerful politicians.
However, this is the world we live in, and so I think these threats, I'm not saying even carrying it out, but I'm saying the threat at least, the criminal investigation at least, just the fact that the DOJ could look into him would be a good way to diminish the power of Dr.
Fauci, the high pontiff of progressivism, because it's never going to end.
The COVID stuff is never going to end.
15 days to slow the spread is more than 15 months now to slow the spread.
And now we've got the Delta and the Lambda and the Sigma and the Phi Beta Kappa variants.
And we're going to put masks up again in the fall and we're going to lock up again and probably can't go to church now.
Not all the time.
Not those numbers.
Don't shake hands.
Maybe we still have to negotiate with the school unions.
It's just going to drag on forever if we give them that power.
Here's an article.
This is one of the most preposterous articles I've seen in quite a while.
It was going viral yesterday.
Headline.
I'm sorry, but it's too late.
Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients.
COVID deaths are very, very low right now.
This is why everyone is talking about the case numbers.
Even some Republicans are falling into this trap of grabbing their pearls about the case numbers, the diagnoses of COVID. The deaths are very, very, very low at this point.
And yet, the public health establishment is trying to get young people who face very, very, very little risk from COVID to Of any serious complications or death.
They're trying to get them to take the experimental drug.
I've mentioned before, my view on the vaccine is not that it's absolutely pure poison filled with microchips that's going to put 5G signals in your body.
Frankly, that would be an improvement to my cell service.
And it's also not that the vaccine is totally safe and there's no worry whatsoever.
Obviously, that's not the case.
There's been plenty of evidence of myocarditis, periocarditis, blood clots in women.
The FDA and the CDC have admitted all of this stuff.
So, I'm not saying either of those things.
I'm suggesting using prudence.
Prudence.
Prudence on your medical risk.
Prudence on your political power.
If your school is going to mandate that you get the vaccine, maybe that's going to be cause for you not to show up to the school anymore.
Maybe you're going to say, you know what, look, I'm going to take the risk of the vaccine.
Or at your work or wherever.
These are very thorny, difficult political questions that require some prudence.
But that's not good enough for the public health establishment.
No, no.
They need you to believe that an otherwise perfectly healthy young person is at grave risk of dying from the Wu flu.
None of the data backed this up, but here's the article.
Dr.
Brittany Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine.
The unvaccinated patient, she said, just needs a little oxygen and is expected to fully recover.
Some of the others are dying.
Quote, I'm admitting young, healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections, wrote Cobia, hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post on Sunday.
Facebook posts now are...
That's the sourcing and the evidence for serious journalistic articles.
Yes, the Facebook post says...
One of the last things they do before they're intubated is beg me for the vaccine.
I hold their hand and tell them that I'm sorry, but it's too late.
I will take things that never happened for 500, Alex.
Could I? Okay, oh good, I found it.
Here's the thing that never happened.
And I tell them, writes, by the way, she doesn't look so upset about this.
You look at what's Brittany Cobia.
She looks smiling in the picture.
Not great stuff from the photo editor, but it kind of highlights how preposterous this is.
That reporters are quoting random, unverified Facebook posts as though that's going to give you information about what's actually going on in public health.
I want them to start reporting on how I sent this article to my son.
My son said, Daddy, Daddy, why won't people assume the risk of myocarditis?
Before the Sigma and the Lambda and the Delta variants become the dominant strains.
And my son is six months old.
And when he said that, everyone in line at TSA applauded.
It's true.
Report it.
It's on Facebook.
You have to believe it.
Preposterous.
Preposterous.
If this were a serious epidemic-level threat for otherwise healthy young people, you would see that reflected in the data.
But you're not.
There are no data to back that up.
So you're seeing it reflected in fabulous Facebook posts and being reported by the hack corporate media as though it were the gospel truth.
There is a big push right now to downplay the risks of the experimental drug and to get everyone to take the jab.
For some people, it's worth the risk, be it for medical, political, whatever reasons.
For other people, it's not worth the risk if you're otherwise totally healthy and you have no reason impelling you to take it.
Eric Clapton.
Gosh, I love Eric Clapton.
I always liked Eric Clapton and now I love Eric Clapton.
He's been pretty strong against the lockdowns.
He and Van Morrison, another terrific guy, put out songs about how awful the COVID lockdowns are and how technocratic globalist elites are taking all of our rights.
So Eric Clapton took the vaccine.
He was impelled to do it.
And he had had a pre-existing condition, some issue with his nerves, I believe it was.
And he got the vaccine, and he had a very adverse reaction.
He couldn't play guitar for a few weeks.
Just his hand was almost paralyzed.
And so he's very, very anti-vaccine mandate right now.
And Clapton just came out, and he said that he would cancel any shows if the venue requires that attendees prove that they are vaccinated against COVID-19.
I love that.
This is what's going to do it.
More than making any arguments about the data and the statistics and the threat from the virus, and more than making any abstract arguments about constitutional rights and how this is unjust and how Dr.
Fauci has never appeared on a ballot, no one's ever voted for him, he shouldn't be running our country.
More than that, what is going to end this madness, if this madness is to be ended, is going to be the exercise of the political power you have.
Eric Clapton has some political power.
He's a very famous musician and people want to see his shows.
A lot of venues, at the behest of the public health establishment and the government and even other corporations, are going to try to require proof of vaccination, especially in the United Kingdom.
And Eric Clapton is saying, okay, well, if you want to do that, you just won't get Eric Clapton shows.
That's fine.
You do that, and then I'm just going to stay home and play my beautiful music by myself and count my money and have a perfectly fine life.
Your choice.
And then the venue's going to lose out on a lot of money, and the advertisers are going to lose out on a lot of money, and the corporations that sell our products are going to lose out on a lot of money.
But that's fine.
Do what you want to do.
That's a good use of political power.
Rand Paul making the DOJ referral.
That's a good use of political power.
Kevin McCarthy pulling the Republicans off of this committee.
That's a good use of political power.
Because if we do not exercise that political power, the countries are going to shut down again over very, very few cases and very, very few deaths as is going on right now in Australia.
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Australia's shutting down again.
Australia's totally locking down.
Like, it's going to be hard to leave your home locking down.
Why?
Australia is a pretty rough-and-tumble place.
It was a landmass settled by British criminals.
It has flying foxes and gigantic spiders and all sorts of things that are going to try to kill you.
And they survive, because there are tough people out there, right?
Until the Wu flu...
Killed one more person.
One more death and the country shuts down.
Good evening.
Within hours, Sydney will be in the grip of much tougher restrictions.
The Premier clamping down on the stubborn Delta outbreak with what she's calling a no regrets policy.
And this is why.
From a record 82,000 tests, the state today recorded 111 cases.
And tragically, the third COVID death in this outbreak, a man aged in his 80s from the city's southeast.
Across Greater Sydney, retail shops will now close.
A small list of essential stores can remain open.
Construction sites across the city shut down.
And from midnight tonight, 110 suburbs across Liverpool, Fairfield and Canterbury-Bankstown will be sealed shut.
That's 900,000 residents who can't leave their area, even for work.
So you've got hundreds of thousands of tests, well over 100,000 tests.
You've got a relatively small number of cases, some hundreds of cases, and you've got one more death.
The third of this outbreak, but now just this one death from this round of testing.
So they're going to shut down Everywhere.
They're going to shut down whole suburbs.
You can't go to work.
You are locked basically in your home.
Shut down retail shops because the lady running Australia wants to have no regrets.
Something tells me that the people who can't pay their bills are going to have some regrets.
Something tells me the people who can't go to church are probably going to have some regrets.
The people who can't be with their loved ones while they die, some regrets.
The people who can't get married, some regrets.
The people who can't bury their dead, some regrets.
You get the point.
The people who can't live their lives, I think, are going to have some regrets.
In the amount of time that it took to watch just that clip, From that segment on Australia's Channel 9 News, 90 people died.
Not from COVID. They just died.
Because people die.
People die all the time.
They die from a whole host of causes.
They die from heart attacks.
They die from cancers.
They die from car accidents.
They die from pianos falling on their head while they walk across the street.
They just, people die.
That's a fact.
Mortality is a fact of life that in modernity we try to deny as best we can.
But it's true, all of life is a preparation for dying.
Get used to it.
You will have a much better life if you accept this fact.
And because hanging concentrates the mind, you will also, one hopes, look beyond just this mortal coil to the metaphysical underpinnings of our world.
But we can't do that in our age.
So while the Wu flu kills relatively very few people, very, very few people as a proportion of those who are dying, Australia is shutting down again.
That will happen here if we do not exercise our political power and push back.
There are much more troubling issues of the government making decisions of life and death.
Let's go from Australia all the way back to the motherland, where right now, A hospital in the United Kingdom and a judge in the United Kingdom, they are both trying to kill a little girl.
So parents are fighting to keep their two-year-old daughter alive.
The two-year-old daughter...
Has very difficult health problems.
Has some brain issues.
And so the hospital and the judge are saying that they're going to withdraw life support.
Family, I think they're Orthodox Jews.
They do not want their baby to be killed by the health establishment.
But because the government runs the healthcare system in the UK, the government can decide whether or not to kill your baby.
And this has happened multiple times.
Remember, was it little baby Alfie?
There was another little baby just over the last four or five years.
The UK will kill them.
And you'll have people in the United States.
Remember, Donald Trump said, bring the babies here.
We'll take care of the babies.
The UK said, no, we're not going to do that.
Pope Francis said, bring the baby to a hospital outside of the Vatican.
We will take care of the baby there.
No, sorry.
Because the government bureaucrats in the UK... Have much, much more power.
And so you can make all the arguments all day long that you want.
This is unjust.
This is wrong.
This is terrible.
Please, the rights of the...
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
If you don't have political power, then you can't exercise those rights.
I'm not saying that might makes right.
Quite the opposite, actually.
I'm not saying that just because you have the power, that means you have the right to do something.
There are rights that you have, but those rights cannot be exercised if you don't also have a bit of might, if you don't also have some political power.
Meanwhile, speaking of killing babies needlessly, because it's always needless to kill a little.
I've never heard a good argument for killing a little baby, but I've heard a lot of arguments for it, notably in the abortion debate.
Right now, a pro-abortion state senator by the name of Senator Joe Cervantes Is very upset because he's nominally Catholic, even though he scandalously flouts church teaching on very important matters, not just one issue among many, but on the right to life, the prerequisite for all of the other rights.
And he's whining because his priests and his bishop will not give him the Eucharist.
He's not permitted to receive Holy Communion.
He writes, quote, I was denied communion last night by the Catholic bishop here in La Cruces, and based on my political office, my new parish priest has indicated he will do the same after the last was run off.
Please pray for church authorities as Catholicism transitions under Pope Francis.
This creates a problem.
First of all, let's get to the first part of that first.
Priests and bishops have repeatedly warned this guy.
They've said, hey, you are scandalously flatting church teaching.
This is not even just a private sin of yours.
It's not a private sin that you've repented.
First of all, it's not a private sin even that you're obstinately persistent in.
It is a public sin that is creating the sin of scandal and misleading the flock.
And it is our job.
If bishops and priests have any job whatsoever, it is to guide the flock, feed the sheep, and care for their souls.
So, when the priests say, you are not permitted to receive Holy Communion, that is an act of mercy and compassion.
Not just for the flock, not just for the other parishioners, but also for this state senator, who is imperiling his mortal soul, and in the words of St.
Paul, eating his own damnation when he receives the Eucharist outside of a state of grace.
It is an act of mercy that they are performing on him right now.
And by the way, if this state senator doesn't believe in church teaching, doesn't care about it, is willing to flout very important church teaching up to and including supporting a bill right now, because this is happening right now, he's supporting a bill that would make it easier to kill babies in the womb.
If you don't care about church teaching, then why do you care about the Holy Communion?
Because you recognize, deep down, somewhere you recognize that there is a moral order.
Deep down, you recognize that there is some objective truth, that you can't just do whatever you want all the time and be perfectly fine.
You just don't want to have that truth in any way impinge on your life.
Well, sorry, Buster.
That's the way the world works.
Now, the second part here is even more troubling.
Because this guy seems to believe that Pope Francis would support his side.
Pope Francis has been very confusing.
He's been very unclear about a lot of things.
Now, what he usually does...
The Holy Father is he will give an interview to an atheist, leftist, Italian journalist by the name, specifically one named Eugenio Sclafari, who runs La Repubblica, a very popular center-left newspaper in Italy.
And then it'll have all sorts of crazy claims about how the Pope thinks no one's in hell or how the Pope is totally fine with homosexuality or how the Pope is whatever, you know.
But then the Vatican will come out and be, no, the Papa, the Holy Father was a misinterpret.
Misinterpreted.
No, I don't know why these journalists are continuing to publish these misinterpretations.
Well, sure, I have no doubt that these journalists don't get things right.
In part, just out of ignorance, because they don't know a lot about the Catholic faith, and then sometimes out of malice as well.
But then why does the Holy Father keep giving them interviews?
See, that's the problem.
That's why the confusion of this pontificate, I think, goes all the way up to the top.
It might even seem to be a bit of a strategy.
I don't think that the Holy Father supports killing babies in the womb.
I don't think that at all.
But I see why this very ignorant, nominally Catholic state senator might think that, because there's been a lot of confusion.
And this gets to another point a lot of people have written in to me to ask about this, especially a lot of my Protestant listeners have written in here, because...
They heard this news article last week that the Pope has banned the Latin Mass, and they want to know, what does that mean?
Why does that matter?
What's going on here?
The long and short of it is, you had the traditional Latin Mass, which is about a lot more than just language.
I know we call it the Latin Mass or the English Mass, but the Latin Mass is the traditional Mass, which includes a lot of different reverent practices, a lot of more reverent liturgy, the order of public worship.
It involves...
It's an entire form of prayer that is physicalized in the Mass.
Then in the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council upended everything and changed a lot of aspects of the Mass.
Not just the language, but so much of the reverence let in all sorts of abuses and the church is emptied.
And so I was raised in the new hippy-dippy Mass with the sappy 70s hymns that weren't even cool 50 years ago.
And it is not very beautiful.
And then a lot of people fell away from the church during the sex scandals of the early 2000s, during the weak liturgy, during the rise of new atheism, that ridiculous publishing movement with Christopher Hitchens and all the rest of them.
And then, in the meantime, while I was away from the church, I came back to the church around 2013 or so.
Pope Benedict reauthorized the use of the Latin Mass, and the background on this is it led to a lot of young people coming back to the church, led to a lot of converts, because it's beautiful, because it's grand.
It's like the difference between classical architecture and ugly modern architecture.
Okay, classical architecture, think of the Supreme Court building.
Wow, it's grand, it's big, it's beautiful, it fills you with awe, it's inspiring.
It lifts you up beyond the mundane.
And then you think of ugly, hideous, modern architecture, like stuff in the 70s and stuff.
And that's ugly, and it brings you down, and it doesn't cause you to look up at the heavens and consider grand things.
It's just kind of small.
It makes the world...
That, I think, is a fair analog for the...
For these types of liturgy.
So young people come back to be inspired by this gorgeous chanting and this reverence and this music and the smells and the bells and all the rest of it.
And the irony here is that all of these 85-year-old These reformers, a lot of them ex-hippie types from the 1960s and 70s, they constantly tell you, if you want to reach the youths, you've got to have tie-dye shirts and acoustic guitars.
That's what's going to make you reach the youths.
Well, I'm telling you, I've been to masses all around this country.
Some of the new English masses, some of the old Latin masses.
I prefer the old Latin masses.
The median age at the Latin mass is like 25 and they've all got a dozen kids.
How is that biologically possible?
I have no idea, but they do.
It's young.
It's crying.
It's got babies.
It's great.
And then if you go to the new mass, quote-unquote, from the 60s in English with the acoustic guitars and the felt banners and all the rest of it, the median age is like 82 and there's no babies whatsoever and no one's really taking it all that seriously.
And yet, the boomers still are dominating.
This matters, I think, to people who are not Catholic as well.
It reflects, like the architecture issue, it reflects this broader division in our society between the age of Aquarius types, the people in the 60s and 70s who said, we're going to knock down every institution, we're going to rebuild society from the very beginning, we're going to get rid of every vestige of the past.
The only way that America can ever be great is if we get rid of our whole past.
Can't learn anything from tradition, it's just a bunch of white, racist, rich, evil, patriarchal men.
And then there's the tradition.
And a lot of people, especially a lot of young people, especially a lot of people who listen to this show, realize, oh, the tradition's a pretty beautiful thing.
This ugly, modern, desiccated world.
This is not quite so beautiful, but Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Bach, Brahms.
Wow, there's some really good stuff here, guys.
Wow, the glories of our civilization.
Huh, maybe we can learn something from that spirit of humility compared to the pride of modernity.
That humility before the tradition.
That is something that people long for.
There's an African member of the Catholic Episcopacy, Cardinal Serra.
Cardinal Serra is a really wonderful, very traditional guy.
He's butted heads with Pope Francis at times.
A lot of people, myself included, have thought he would be a great candidate for the Pope, and it would be kind of funny, because he's black, obviously, so we'd say, you know, how dare you liberals not want to support the first black Pope, but he's more conservative than virtually anybody.
Yeah.
Anybody in the College of Cardinals.
But Cardinal Sarah made this point about tradition versus ugly modernity.
And Cardinal Sarah said, quote, I am an African.
Let me say clearly, the liturgy is not the place to promote my culture.
Rather, it is the place where my culture is baptized, where my culture is taken up into the divine.
The power of silence against the dictatorship of noise.
Beautiful, beautiful stuff.
So you see this in liturgy.
The reformers want to have, I don't know, sombreros and maracas or something in the Mexican liturgies.
And then, I don't know, all sorts of stuff all around the world.
They want the church to become more worldly.
And what Cardinal Serra is saying is, no, no, no.
Make my culture more divine.
Make my culture more heavenly.
Lift my culture up.
This is true in the issue of immigration.
There are some people who believe that we need to bring immigrants into this country and that we all need to assimilate to them.
And we need to have not a melting pot, but a salad bowl where it's just, you know, in this neighborhood it's going to be all Mexican.
And in this neighborhood it's going to be all Irish.
And in this neighborhood it's going to be all black.
And in this neighborhood, we're all just going to preserve our culture.
No.
That's not how it works.
It's got to mix a little bit.
We've got to assimilate.
We're either going to have a nation or we're not going to have a nation.
People are coming to America for a reason.
They're not coming to America from Guatemala because Guatemala is so great.
They're coming to America because they think America is better than Guatemala.
So don't turn America into Guatemala.
It doesn't make sense.
Why are people coming to the church?
To lift their eyes up to heaven.
To escape worldliness.
And yet, so many of the reformers want to turn the church into just another non-governmental organization or something.
This is the importance of education.
Right now, You've heard this whole debate over critical race theory.
A lot of the reformers will say, no, critical race theory, it's not real.
It's just an academic movement that's taught in a handful of law schools.
It's not affecting your kids.
Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.
Well, there's a report out now.
A Virginia public school district sent a PowerPoint to teachers explaining how to explicitly implement critical race theory in the classroom.
This is the Fairfax County Public School.
Sent out the resource as a teacher-facing item.
So it's not meant to be seen by the kids and not meant to be seen by the parents and certainly not meant to be seen by you or me as we're reporting it on this show.
But it's talking about critical race theory.
How to include, quote, culturally relevant pedagogy, institutional systemic racism, anti-racism education, anti-hate education, blah, blah, blah.
And the district rightly defines critical race theory as a, quote, interpretive framework that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression.
And in adopting this approach, critical race theory scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of prejudice and all the rest of it.
So Don Lemon recently on CNN was trying to peddle this silly idea that critical race theory, it's not being taught in schools.
No, it's just a couple people at Harvard Law School, but that's it.
It's not being taught to your kids or anything.
And Ross Douthat from the New York Times, the more conservative writer at the New York Times, he smacked that down.
You're encouraging kids, white kids, to have sort of, in effect, cultivate a kind of sense of their own whiteness, with the idea being that if you encourage that, these kids will then be able to sort of recognize their own white privilege and transcend it.
But that's a lot of where the controversy is, right?
It's about these programs that aren't teaching about the history of racism, aren't even teaching about sort of contemporary effects of racism.
They're specifically saying, you know, White kids, especially, need to think of themselves in these categories and in these ways.
And that's, I think, a big part of what people are reacting against.
Yeah, listen, I don't know if that, in fact, is happening.
But, I mean, Ross, we should say that critical race theory is not being taught.
It's not part of the curriculum for elementary or grade school students.
It's something that's taught in law schools, just so we know.
But that's not exactly right.
Critical race theory is an incredibly influential set of ideas that has solid influence in No, but Ross, I'm going to just completely ignore everything you've said for the past 40 seconds and just beep-boop.
Critical race theory, not in schools.
Beep-beep-boop.
And then Ross Stafford, who's a very thoughtful person, says, did you not just listen to it?
No, that's not right, Don.
It obviously is.
Ideas have consequences.
And even ideas that begin in a law school We'll have an effect.
Well, certainly an idea that begins in a law school is going to have an effect on the broader legal community and on the law and the way that we govern ourselves in our country.
And it's going to have an effect on pedagogy down the line, as it has including in elementary schools.
Here's one of the ideas.
So Ibram Kendi, who is, I think he's the second or third leading civil rights leader in this country.
As you all know, I'm the number one.
I'm the preeminent civil rights leader in this country, according to the book charts on Amazon.
So Ibram Kendi, he's one of the lesser civil rights leaders, I suppose.
And he says, I'm not a critical race theorist.
And then other people say, no, he is a critical race theorist.
And the reality is he is pushing ideas that have been popularized and developed by the critical race theorists, namely whiteness bad, whiteness pervasive, blackness always equals victimhood.
Kennedy has gone so far.
He even now says that what is criminal is defined by race.
I don't know if I'd necessarily agree with scholars who make the case that black communities have criminogenic conditions.
And the reason I'm saying this is because what is criminalized has historically been based on race and power.
And even how certain criminalized or decriminalized acts have also been racialized.
So when people hear about that person who was drinking and driving or that person who killed somebody because they were drinking and driving, it doesn't cause them to think They don't perceive that as them thereby living in a dangerous neighborhood.
So I'm just emphasizing this, Ezra, because even what we consider to be violence, even what we consider to be crime, is highly racialized.
And therefore, what neighborhoods we consider to be criminal-like and dangerous becomes highly racialized.
You know what?
You know what?
I'm going to say this in the spirit of charity.
Ibram Kendi has a point here.
What we consider criminal has become very racialized.
Burning down the country in the name of Black Lives Matter and killing lots of people and stealing lots of property, that's not considered criminal anymore because the people doing it are at least in large part black and because they're doing it in the name of Black Lives Matter.
So that's good.
That's mostly peaceful.
And dancing around the Capitol and taking Pelosi's electorate, that's considered the worst act of terrorism in American history because a lot of those people were white and it was done on behalf of a white president.
Yeah, Kendi, you're making a good point.
Not sure if it's the point you think you're making, but you're making a good point.
We'll have to leave it there.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
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On today's episode, Senator Rand Paul and Dr.
Anthony Fauci spar over gain-of-function research, teachers groups gather to discuss race and social justice, and negotiations over the infrastructure bill appear to be wrapping up.
