Ep. 928 - "Build Back Better" = Train Robberies And Cop Killings
A Democrat politician pulls his own bill to help pregnant women after accidentally admitting that pro-lifers are right, the CDC changes the meaning of “fully vaccinated,” and a government meeting in Alaska begins with an invocation by a Satanist.
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Sometimes people accuse me of not being bipartisan enough on this show.
They accuse me of focusing on the good things Republicans do and the bad things Democrats do.
So in the spirit of bipartisanship, I want to bring up a terrific bill that a Democrat state representative filed last week in Oklahoma.
The legislator's name is Forrest Bennett, and his bill is HB 3129, which, in his words, quote, codifies that a father's financial responsibility to his baby and their mom begins at conception.
If Oklahoma is going to restrict a woman's right to choose, we sure better make sure the man involved can't just walk away from his responsibility.
Now this is a great bill.
It protects vulnerable single mothers, it stops deadbeat dads from abandoning their kids, and it acknowledges that life begins at conception.
Which apparently was just too much for this legislator and his Democrat pals because he just pulled his own bill after finding out that pro-lifers liked it.
So much for that.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment on Friday comes from Anonymous.
It says, I feel sorry for the lady trying to translate President potted plants babbling into understandable sign language.
I agree with you.
I do have a great deal of sympathy for poor Jen Psaki.
She was getting dragged over the weekend for something that she had said.
We'll try to get to that if we have time.
I do.
I feel that's probably the hardest job in the world.
This This saga of the Oklahoma state representative was so funny.
It illustrated not just the Democrats' absolute incoherence on the issue of life and abortion.
It also demonstrated that the Democrats have no idea what we believe.
This guy tweeted it out.
He tweeted out what I just read to you.
Here's the bill.
It's great.
If women aren't going to have the ability to get abortions, then men need to stick around and protect those women.
And all the pro-lifers, it went completely viral, all the pro-lifers said, great, awesome, love it.
Let's do it.
And then when this Democrat found out the pro-lifers liked it, which he did not expect, then he said, oh, okay, never mind, I'm pulling the bill.
Yeah, I was going to try to help abandoned, vulnerable, pregnant single mothers when I thought it was going to irritate all the pro-lifers.
But now that I know that you like it, yeah, never mind.
Screw you, ladies.
Deal with it yourself.
You're on your own.
Throwing you under the bus just to own the cons.
That's what this man is doing.
Obviously, conservatives love this bill.
The pro-abortion people think that the pro-lifers would hate this bill because the pro-abortion people truly believe that the only reason the pro-lifers are pro-life is because pro-lifers hate women.
Even the half of pro-lifers who are women, or more than half of pro-lifers probably who are women, they hate women too.
That's the only reason that anyone wants to take away the license to abortion.
This guy is absolutely shocked.
The only conservative pushback, I saw it all, and we're talking one or two little posts around the internet, was to say that fathers ought to have even more rights.
Not to say the father should be able to run away if they impregnate a woman, but to point out that family courts are pretty tough on the fathers very often.
That fathers, in cases of divorce or in cases of a woman getting pregnant and the two not getting married, fathers don't have quite as many rights as the women.
So the answer to that, of course, is just make divorce more difficult.
The conservative answer to that is certainly still not men should abandon women.
It's that it should be much more difficult for men to abandon women and women to abandon men and to break up marriages which are based on public vows.
The real story here is one of political misunderstanding.
I speak with some credibility on this, by the way, too, because I did support abortion.
When I was first getting into politics as a teenager, I couldn't understand the pro-life position.
I was an atheist.
I was from a very liberal place.
I don't think I knew a single pro-lifer.
I don't think I knew a single one.
And so I just assumed, oh, that's it, and I believed everything I heard on CNN, and I believed everything I heard in the mainstream media, and I just thought the pro-lifers hated women.
And then, later on, I looked into it, I did some reading, I spoke to a bioethicist, I was debating it, and when I thought about the issue itself, not just the psychobabble political motivations of my opponents, when I thought about the actual issue of abortion, well, it was so clear.
The baby's a baby, the baby's human, the baby's alive, and you shouldn't be able to kill it.
Okay, it's so clear.
And the pro-lifers were some of the most pro-woman people I've ever met, and obviously pro-family.
The left does not understand what we think.
To some degree, there's misunderstanding going in the other direction as well.
But I think generally, the right understands what the left thinks.
There was Jonathan Haidt's study that he had done some years ago, social scientist, on how the left understands the right, the right understands the left.
He concluded that the right understands the left much better than the left understands the right.
I see the argument for abortion.
The argument for abortion is that sometimes people accidentally get pregnant and And this affects women differently than men, and so if women and men are supposed to be exactly the same and completely indiscernible, then women need to be able to kill the baby.
That's the argument.
That was the argument in the 60s.
It's the argument today.
It's just a ghastly argument.
But I see the motivations from a misunderstanding of liberty that this comes from.
It's not just because the pro-abortion people hate babies or something like that.
It's because they have a misunderstanding of human nature and the relationship between liberty and life and all the other sorts of rights and obligations that we have.
But I don't think that they understand the pro-life side that well.
You can tell.
I was just down at the March for Life in D.C. speaking at the Students for Life Summit on Saturday.
And when you see the two groups there, you see the pro-lifers, nice, normal, they look normal, they sound normal, they're praying, they're happy, they've got nice signs.
And then you look at the pro-abortion people and they're shrieking like harpies and satyrs and they've got all sorts of Crazy presentations about them and they're screaming profanities.
Well, which group do you think understands reality better?
Which group seems more grounded?
Who do you want to be when you grow up?
These words can be very confusing.
Pro-life.
That's clear enough.
You support the life.
Pro-choice.
Well, okay.
The choice to do what, my friend?
Speaking of life and death, the CDC, on a completely different topic, the CDC is changing the meaning of fully vaccinated.
Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, has come out and said that fully vaccinated is a term that's going to be retired.
The new term that we're all going to use is up-to-date.
What we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be, should be, based on when they got their last vaccine.
So importantly, right now, we're pivoting our language.
We really want to make sure people are up to date.
That means if you recently got your second dose, you're not eligible for a booster, you're up to date.
If you are eligible for a booster and you haven't gotten it, you're not up to date and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date.
Up to date, up to date, up to date, up to date.
She's really drilling this new phrase home.
What happened to fully vaccinated?
How come we're changing the euphemisms here?
You know that the left uses the manipulation of language and euphemisms to control our politics.
I wrote a book on the subject.
It's called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Thank you to everyone who has read it already.
The left needs to change euphemisms for two reasons.
The first one is when the old euphemisms become demonstrably false.
Or the second one is when the old euphemisms are no longer working on people.
Or very often it's both.
So here you see that the old euphemism, fully vaccinated, is no longer representative of the truth because the first two vaccines are insufficient.
And so you need to get a third vaccine.
You need to get a booster, sometimes a fourth vaccine.
In Israel, they did a study.
The fourth vaccine is no longer sufficient against the Omicron variant of COVID.
So now they're talking about a fifth vaccine.
So manifestly, fully vaccinated is no longer fully vaccinated.
But if you keep just moving the goalposts and changing the definition of fully vaccinated, then the word fully doesn't mean anything.
So they've got to change it to up-to-date.
Fully vaccinated is a definite period of time.
Up-to-date is a subscription model.
Up-to-date, you can update all the time.
You see this with global warming, which began as global cooling.
There was global cooling, then that was demonstrably false, and it didn't work on people.
Then you had global warming.
And then, particularly during the hiatus, the hiatus in warming, which is still debated among climate scientists whether it happened, how serious it was, but it is thought that there was a hiatus from 1998 to 2013 in which the world didn't really warm up that much.
So global warming became...
Demonstrably false and no longer working on people.
So then they changed it to climate change.
Climate change never became demonstrably false because it's an unfalsifiable euphemism.
But it did stop working on people.
So then it changed to climate catastrophe or climate crisis.
Sometimes people just refer to it as climate.
You're a climate denier.
As though I deny the sunshine and the water and the clouds.
You're a climate denier.
They have to change these euphemisms constantly and And then people catch up, and they'll change them again, and it goes on and on and on and on, and you are never up to date.
Speaking of words, the New York City Police Commissioner just spoke over the past few days over a terrible attack on police officers in Harlem.
Two officers were shot.
One of them was killed while responding to a domestic call up in Harlem, which used to be a terrible neighborhood.
Then it got much, much better, much, much safer, and now it's getting terrible again.
Here's the police commissioner.
Tonight, a 22-year-old son, husband, officer, and friend was killed because he did what we asked him to do.
Countless officers line the halls of this hallway after carrying him in and grieve for their brother, while praying with everything they have for the other.
I am struggling to find the words to express the tragedy we are enduring.
We're mourning And we're angry.
We have four times this month rushed to the scene of NYPD officers shot by violent criminals in possession of deadly illegal guns.
I'll ask Mayor Adams if he wants to say a few words.
The police commissioner has a lot of passion in her voice.
Obviously this is a tragic event.
But she doesn't have a lot of substance in her speech.
You notice that?
She says she's struggling to find the words.
I've got the words.
Here are very simple words.
Mayor Adams, fire your weak prosecutors who are refusing to prosecute criminals and put those criminals in jail.
Those are pretty simple words.
But she can't find them.
I don't know why.
Look, maybe it's because she's serving the mayor of New York, the weak mayor of New York, who refuses to deal with the crime issue.
And so maybe she doesn't feel that she has the political capital to talk about this.
But if she's simply struggling to find the words, let me give you the words.
Mayor Adams, fire your derelict prosecutors who refuse to do their jobs and put criminals in jail.
Very, very simple words.
Most offensive about this speech.
Did you hear that little bit she gets in there?
She says, this happened, she insinuated quite strongly, this happened because of illegal guns.
That's what's changed in New York, is that there are guns around.
There have been guns around New York for a very long time.
Illegal guns, too, for a very long time.
Clearly the gun laws aren't working that well.
What has changed in the past few years is not that there are new gun sales in New York, legal or illegal.
What has changed is not that there are new guns being manufactured that are dramatically different from the old guns that were being manufactured.
What has changed in New York is that prosecutors won't do their job.
Because there is a new leftist idea that the police are bad and criminals are put upon and we need to be tougher on the cops and weaker on the criminals.
And when criminals riot and loot and burn down buildings during BLM, especially in New York, we're just going to let them off the hook.
We're going to give them much lower charges when we charge them at all.
And for the majority of them, the vast majority of them, we're just going to let them off completely.
And then you're surprised when crime goes up.
When the administration in New York says, the de Blasio administration in particular, the one right before this new mayor, says certain crimes are no longer going to be considered crimes.
And then when the prosecutors come in and say, even when you do commit the crimes, we're not going to charge you for them.
And then you're shocked when crime goes up.
So, fine.
I'm not...
I'm not saying that this woman has it entirely in her power.
She's the police commissioner.
But spare me the sanctimony.
Spare me the emotion if you're not going to put any substance behind it.
You're right there.
The mayor's right there in the room.
There are the words.
Feel free to borrow them from me.
I won't be offended at all.
Speaking of New York, the governor of New York doesn't seem to be any better than the failed leadership of the city of New York.
Governor Kathy Hochul, who took over after Governor Andrew Cuomo was found to be a little too handsy with his staff, which was really just the excuse to kick him out because of his scandals over COVID.
When he pretended to be the greatest leader in the country on COVID, turned out he was hiding numbers, hiding death numbers and sickness numbers, and the thousands of senior citizens who were killed in New York in nursing homes because of his stupid policies.
He was hiding them, including from federal investigators.
So Democrats decided, okay, we're finally going to kick this guy out and we're going to use the sex scandal to do it.
So Kathy Hochul takes over afterwards.
And Kathy Hochul doubles down on the same stupid policies.
Not the exact same ones, but the same COVID policies.
Incompetence that you saw from Andrew Cuomo.
So now two years in, Governor Kathy Hochul is still insisting on all sorts of crazy COVID measures, even for kids in schools, even measures that have been demonstrated to be not particularly effective, even for kids who are not at particularly grave risk from COVID. And you know what her excuse is for this?
Her excuse is kids are resilient.
I know people are tired, but I'll also say one thing about the kids.
My daughter had a meltdown over having to put sneakers on to go to kindergarten.
She got used to wearing sneakers in school.
They adapt better than adults do.
And I'm really proud of the parents who made sure that their kids understood this is for their safety and got it done.
But we're looking forward to the day we can lift the school as well as the business requirements.
We truly am.
That'll be a very fabulous day.
Your little children have to cover their faces so they can never see anybody's smiles and they can't really go see their friends and they've got to be completely isolated from their peers.
Even when they are in the same building together, they've got to be walled off into pods and their education is going to be severely compromised and their social development is going to be really, really compromised.
But hey, Kathy Hochul's kid didn't want to wear sneakers one time, so it's basically the same.
Kids are resilient.
You know, kids are just resilient.
I hate that phrase.
That is one of the dumbest phrases in our entire political discourse.
Kids are resilient is the shrug of adults harming kids.
Kids are resilient.
It's fine.
Are they?
Kids are also easily traumatized.
No, they're resilient.
Kids also have trouble articulating the suffering that they're enduring because of what you are doing to them.
Because they're kids, so they haven't been educated yet.
Their vocabulary is not as large.
Their introspection, their analytical skills are not as great.
So they just can't tell you the trauma that you're inflicting on them when you lock them away from society for two years, you psychos.
But don't worry, kids are resilient.
Everybody suffers.
Everybody suffers in this world.
We're not going to abolish suffering.
This is a fact of life.
Kids suffer too.
Sometimes it is inevitable.
I'm not saying that every time a child suffers, it's necessarily someone's fault.
You can necessarily fix it.
You should necessarily feel terrible about it.
No.
People are going to suffer.
It's part of growing up.
But do not pretend that the suffering that you inflict, that you, Kathy Hochul, and other people who use this phrase, inflict, is without consequence.
That it's just totally fine.
You probably hear this phrase most with divorce.
Oh, kids are resilient.
It's fine.
Or if a mother is moving a kid around from place to place and putting him in bad circumstances.
Well, don't worry.
Kids are resilient.
No, you're harming these kids.
You are harming them.
And...
I'm not saying that you need to go take a long walk off a short pier because of it.
People make mistakes.
Bad things happen.
But don't excuse it.
It's not...
Fix it.
Fix it.
And don't just say, well, don't worry.
They can bounce back.
No.
In some ways, kids are more resilient in the sense that they're malleable.
But in some ways, they're much less resilient than adults who have had time to mature and have a more balanced view of the world.
And have developed certain calluses because of suffering they've gone through.
Don't worry, it's fine.
Hey, my kid couldn't tie her shoes one day, so let's lock them up for another three years.
What a joke.
Speaking of how the radicals are messing with our kids in schools, another disturbing story out of an elementary school in Oregon.
Oregon.
Gosh.
That place.
A lot of stories coming out of Oregon.
Fourth graders at Raleigh Hills Elementary School, located in Beaverton, Oregon, were just presented with a slideshow a couple of weeks ago.
Daily Wire just learned this.
Unveiling the formation of a QSA club.
That's Queer Sexuality Alliance, something to that effect.
So there's an LGBT club for fourth graders in this school.
And the LGBT club is recruiting the students, and it's being presented to the students, and the parents have no idea.
There is no parental consent required.
One of the slides from this club, it says, what will we do?
We'll have conversations about identity, gender, equal rights, and social issues that are important to you.
We'll explore LGBTQ plus history and activism.
We will discuss personal struggles.
Now we're getting real creepy.
We're going to groom you kids is what they're implying.
We're going to discuss personal struggles and successes in a supportive space.
We're going to advocate for change in our school and community.
We're going to advocate for change?
Changing what?
We're going to talk about your personal struggles in the sexuality club for nine-year-olds.
What personal struggles?
If you are having personal struggles in your sexual relationships at nine, you should be recommended to a school counselor.
This should be discourage.
Nine-year-olds shouldn't be doing that.
But instead it's being encouraged.
And the parents have no right to say anything about it.
And frankly, by the logic of our culture right now, really by the logic of all cultures and societies, given the premises we're starting with, there's actually no reason for the parents to be involved.
This is something that conservatives don't quite understand about.
there's really no reason for the conservatives to be involved if you accept all the radical premises to begin with.
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Thursday, we'll be right back with a lot more.
So these creepy pervert degenerate administrators at an elementary school in Oregon are recruiting their nine-year-old kids to join LGBTQ club and convince little Johnny that he's really little Jane.
This is obviously very creepy, very wrong.
The people who are pushing this should certainly be fired, if not prosecuted.
And the part that everyone's focusing on is that the parents weren't even informed.
The parents were, like, that's the worst part of this.
I understand why people are focusing on parental consent.
Because not only the left, but also the right, now believes that consent is the be-all and end-all of politics.
And there's nothing deeper that we can talk about.
It's all just about procedure.
Well, we all just need to consent.
And if you want to consent to mutilate your body or do a ton of drugs or whatever, that's totally fine.
But you've got to make sure that you get consent.
All they care about is procedural norms.
You see this even in some pro-life advocacy, where they say, look, I'm not telling New Yorkers and Californians that they need to ban abortion.
I'm just saying the Supreme Court has no right to do it.
So we've got to send it back to the states.
And then if the people want to kill a zillion babies a year in Illinois, that's totally fine.
But it's not totally fine.
The procedure matters.
It's true.
The court shouldn't take rights away from the states and from the people.
But the substance matters, too.
We also shouldn't kill babies.
Yes, the procedure matters.
Parents should have a say over their kids' education, obviously.
Parents should have some say in how their kids are raised.
But the substance matters, too.
Namely, we shouldn't be teaching kids gender theory when they're nine years old, pretending that all sorts of eccentric sexual ideologies are totally fine.
Probably the only sexual ideology that you're not allowed to teach in this elementary school is that men are not women, and men should marry women, and they should live in a monogamous...
Household for life and have a family and procreate.
I bet you would be taken to court if you taught that in this school, but you can teach everything else.
Why?
The reason for this, it actually makes perfect sense, is that while we often think that our substantive views are downstream of procedural norms, very often it's the opposite.
I'm using sort of technical language here.
So what I mean by that is we think that the things we actually believe about what is good and true and beautiful come downstream of how we come to decide them.
Is it the court?
Is it we the people?
Is it the teachers?
Is it the PTA? We all come together and we deliberate and then we form our substantive views out of that.
But very often it's the opposite.
Very often it's the things that we think are good and true and beautiful and That decide how we decide other questions.
So our culture has decided that LGBTQ +, there are now 5,000 other letters to it, is good, true, and completely beyond debate.
Not even just that, you know, two fellas like each other on a Navy ship out at sea and, you know, that's one thing.
No, we're saying that even the tea, okay, we're talking about boys can chop up their bodies and pump themselves full of hormones and actually become women.
That, in our culture, is considered unassailable.
If you question that in your job, in your school, you can be kicked out.
You can be kicked out of both of those places.
You can certainly be punished.
And depending on how you do it, you might even be charged with a crime.
There was a bill in California signed into law in 2017 that said that if healthcare workers misgender, quote unquote, their patients, they could be prosecuted.
Misgender meaning properly gender.
Meaning there's a man who thinks he's a woman and the healthcare worker says, hello sir.
That healthcare worker could be prosecuted according to the law.
Now it's been extremely controversial since it was passed, but We have decided that that is the case.
So, of course, if LGBTQ is totally fine and unassailable and beyond reproach and beyond debate, then why would you need the parent's permission?
Why would you allow some bigoted, hateful, false-minded parent to question something that we as a culture have decided is unquestionable?
We've concluded the substantive issue.
And so the procedure is going to change.
Whereas 10 years ago, you would have needed at least to get a parent's permission slip for a club like this.
Probably you wouldn't even have a club like this.
Today, that's been decided.
We live in a society.
The only way to have a society is for certain things to be settled.
We need to speak the same language.
We need to believe many if not most of the same things.
We need to have plenty of areas of the public discourse where you just take everything for granted.
That's how all societies work.
And the left understands this, which is how they've completely transformed what we believe.
And the right refuses to understand this, and they bury their head in the sands.
And they say, well, I'm not going to force my opinions on you.
You do you and I'll do me and I just support individual freedom.
And it's not really freedom at all.
It just gives the left the whole playing ground.
Now, there are ways to fight back.
There's a great way.
I've got to give Chris Ruffo credit because he was one of the pioneers on this.
Christopher Ruffo is at the Manhattan Institute.
He's the guy who really popularized the crusade against critical race theory.
Chris Ruffo had this brilliant idea to make the issue of banning critical race theory not merely one of banning something from the curriculum, though that's what we're about.
He wanted to make it about curriculum transparency.
Such a brilliant phrase, really a brilliant tactic.
Because when you hear from someone that they want to ban something, especially in a classroom, After decades and decades of the false ideology of academic freedom, we just recoil from that.
Even many conservatives recoil.
They say, I don't want to ban anything.
I just don't want my kid to be taught that white people are evil and men are actually women.
But I don't want to ban anything.
Come on, I'm not one of those censors.
I'm not against academic freedom.
So what Chris Ruffo suggested was, okay, well, let's make it about curriculum transparency.
We all love transparency in our modern, liberal, democratic age.
So let's just, hey, teachers...
Let's just have you post your curricula on the internet so that the parents can see what happens.
And then they'll make up their own minds.
And we'll see what happens from there.
Because we know that these teachers are teaching false, hideous, dangerous, destructive things in the classroom.
The minute parents see it, they're going to freak out.
During COVID, this was one of the few silver linings in the storm cloud of COVID.
Parents got to see what their kids are being taught because the classroom came through a laptop into the living room of people's apartments and houses.
The parents said, what?
And you even had administrators and teachers during the remote teaching of COVID say, hey, make sure that the parents aren't in the room when the kids are being taught this stuff because they're going to lose their minds, as rightly they did.
So NBC News now has this piece.
Anti-critical race theory activists have a new focus.
Curriculum transparency.
That's really bad.
And this is really dangerous because transparency is a liberal value, but it's forcing an ideological shift.
That's right, that's exactly what it's doing.
The conservatives here have put liberals on the opposite side of transparency.
They're now fighting against transparency.
This would be a good example...
Of something that I've suggested for a while now, which is not just that politics is downstream of culture, meaning culture affects politics.
The movies, what we listen to, the way we talk, the media, sure, that affects our government, sure.
But politics also affects culture.
The government also affects the civil society.
Because curriculum transparency is a law.
It's a regulation passed by the government, very rarely adopted voluntarily by the school districts.
It's something where the school board or the Department of Education or the governor is going to have to come in and say, we need curriculum transparency, and the libs are going to scream and howl about it, and then the parents are going to see what's in the curricula, and they're going to push back against it.
Republicans just want a governorship in very liberal Virginia.
On this issue.
Because while there might be ideological rigidity on taxes, entitlements, immigration, foreign policy, whatever, on education, on how kids are being raised, there's much more of an opportunity for conservatives to bring over people who are not traditionally on the right.
Really, really smart move.
Education requires limits.
Free speech.
I love free speech.
Free speech requires limits.
There's no such thing as perfectly absolute free speech.
It's not possible.
We live in a society.
All societies are going to have to speak a common language.
They're going to have to have some taboos.
They're going to have to have some limits on what you can say, what you can't say.
True free speech requires certain limits.
Religious freedom, even.
Religious freedom.
In order to truly have religious freedom, you need limits on what religious freedom is.
Great example of it.
I was just reading the Radio Kenai news outlet.
You know, reading about Kenai, Alaska, as one does.
And I noticed that at a government assembly meeting in the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly...
There was just an invocation given by a Satanist.
So each year, this is according to Radio Kanae, a list of residents sign up to give an invocation to the Kanae Peninsula Borough Assembly meetings, a list that already is filled up for this coming calendar year.
The policy states that the assembly allows for an invocation, which could include a short prayer or a solemnizing message to be offered at the beginning of the meetings for the benefit of the assembly to accommodate the spiritual needs of public officials.
And for the past few years, and just happening again last Tuesday, Satanists are showing up.
Iris Fontana signed up to give a Satanic Temple invocation, which several members of the community objected to, including an assembly member who called upon residents to silently stand strong in prayer, citing scripture from Matthew 4.10.
I'm not going to read the invocation, because I don't think Satanists should be encouraged in our society.
But, this is what's happening.
It's religious freedom, right?
Isn't that what religious freedom means?
Doesn't religious freedom mean that the Satanists should be allowed to hail their dark lord and call upon the devil to control this world?
Listen here.
Listen here.
I might not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death of your right to say it.
I might not agree with hailing Satan, prince of the underworld, the father of lies, the embodiment of evil, but I will defend to your death.
No, I won't.
I won't.
I'm not going to defend that right.
I don't think you have that right.
I don't think the founding fathers understood satanic invocations as being covered by religious liberty.
I think that if someone had shown up to the Continental Congress to give a satanic invocation, not only would this not be applauded by those liberal-minded founding fathers, probably they would go out and gather kindling for the stake that they would burn that person at.
Certainly in earlier America they would do that.
We know, I think we all know, that...
Whatever religious liberty means in America, it does not mean Satanists opening up our government meetings.
So I think we need to start from that.
If we want to get back to any normal understanding of what freedom means in America, let's start from there.
We know that Satanists are not what our founding fathers were talking about when they talk about the blessings of liberty and no establishment of religion and the various...
Okay, so then what does that mean for what religious freedom actually is?
In the United States tradition...
In the United States tradition, God is referenced in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.
The entire country is predicated on the idea that our creator, God, has given us certain unalienable rights, namely the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Not Satan.
Satan didn't give us those rights.
Satan didn't create us as God.
Satan is the enemy of God.
He rebelled against God and got shot down to hell, and now he's being tormented for eternity.
God is mentioned in many official United States documents.
God is on our money.
On our money, it says, in God we trust.
In our National Pledge of Allegiance, we say, one nation under God.
Our nation was founded, even before the founding of the American Republic, our whole country, which dates back much further, was founded by extremely zealous Christians.
It's a Christian country.
That means that if you do not accept certain, at least basic premises of Christianity, if you do not go along with certain basic elements at least, Then you don't really have a place here.
I'm not saying you've got to be in daily Mass and receiving all the sacraments.
I'm sure the Founding Fathers wouldn't have said that either.
But if you do not believe, for instance, that the good Lord gives us certain rights, that we have a right to life, that that life is ordered toward pursuing liberty, and that this is conducive toward the pursuit of happiness, if you don't believe that, then America doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for you, does it?
You certainly don't have a right to undermine all of those things.
Liberty cannot coherently be used to undermine liberty.
You don't have a First Amendment right, for instance, to destroy the First Amendment.
That doesn't make any sense.
For much of US history, we've had blasphemy laws.
If you blaspheme against God, the Christian God, you could be prosecuted.
Now we think that's unshocking, unbelievable, so un-American.
No, it's only been considered un-American for the past 50 years or so.
Only since cultural revolutionaries had a hostile takeover of our political processes of the government and kicked the Bible out of schools, kicked prayer out of schools, and kicked Christianity out of the public square and exalted Satanism.
Literally exalted Satanism in multiple places.
So, if we want to restore some semblance of American religious liberty, I think we've got to realize that somewhere we went off the track.
And we need to stop tolerating freaking Baphomet at government assemblies.
This is not complicated, folks.
Good grief.
If you find yourself on the same side as a horned demon, switch sides.
Something's gone wrong.
It's not going to end well for you.
Speaking of Satan...
There is a group of abortion activists who are pretending to be Catholic.
They call themselves the Catholics for choice.
You've got to put Catholics in quotes and choice in quotes.
Because what they really mean is leftists for abortion.
But they're trying to infiltrate and subvert the Catholic Church.
Because the Catholic Church is the most prominent pro-life institution in the entire world.
So, over the weekend, this was the March for Life weekend, this group of abortion activists projected images and texts onto a church, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. It said, pro-choice Catholics, you're not alone, lots of different messages supporting abortion.
Now, the cardinal and the leader of the church in D.C. is a very liberal person.
Prelate.
This guy, when Donald Trump visited this shrine, actually, this cardinal got angry.
He actually objected to the President of the United States visiting a Catholic shrine in a very respectful way.
I really disagreed with that.
I thought he was playing politics.
He's obviously a liberal cardinal.
But here, his response to what these abortion activists did was indistinguishable from what a very conservative cardinal would have said.
He wrote, This is Cardinal Wilton Gregory.
He said, Those whose antics projected words on the outside of the church building demonstrated by those pranks that they really are external to the church.
And they did so at night.
John 1330.
That's all he said.
John 1330.
If you go look up in your Bible or your Bible app, what is John 1330?
It's the verse in which Christ identifies Judas Iscariot as his betrayer.
He's calling them Judas.
This is a really important lesson for modernity, for the whole modern world, from the Catholic Church, even from a relatively liberal Catholic bishop.
The lesson is this.
There are limits to self-definition.
There are limits to self-expression.
We don't understand that anymore.
The left certainly does, and they believe that you can identify however you want to identify.
But even a lot of conservatives don't understand that anymore.
They think that, look, if I want to be something, then I can be that.
I'll pull myself up by my bootstraps, by golly, and you're not going to tell me that I can't do that.
It's a conservatism because it's so heavily tinged by libertarianism.
It's very skeptical of any authority, and it doesn't want to be told what it is.
It doesn't want to have these definitions imposed on them.
But there are limits to self-definition.
What the Cardinal is saying here is, you can call yourselves Catholic, but you're not.
You're not because you are clearly not in communion with the Church, and you're not repentant, and you're not accessing the sacraments, so you really are external to the Church.
And when you talk about direct cooperation in an abortion, that incurs excommunication automatically.
Excommunication, meaning literally being cut off.
It means you can't receive the communion, but it also means you're being cut off from the church.
You're out.
And it doesn't matter how you self-identify.
And you might say, well, in my heart of hearts, I feel as though I'm a Christian.
Well, fine.
In my heart of hearts, I might feel like I'm a goldfish, but I'm not.
It's not up to you to decide that.
There actually is authority that imposes definitions, and you can't just totally change the reality by changing all of the words.
That's a very important lesson to take away, and it's the only way that conservatives are ever going to be able to regain any kind of ground in this battle.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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