Ep. 1015 - Jimmy Kimmel's Tears Don't Stop Bad People
Basic policing seems to have failed in Texas, Biden tries to ban AR-15s, and Disney ramps up its campaign to trans the kids.
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New facts are emerging out of the Texas Elementary School where that awful shooting took place this week.
And these new facts somehow make the whole thing even more horrible because they suggest that the horror might have been prevented.
We're talking about simple facts here.
The doors to the school were unlocked.
The killer entered through an unmonitored door in the back.
There was no armed guard on duty anywhere on the school premises.
Had even just those circumstances been different?
Of course, it's no guarantee that the shooter would have been stopped or that the death toll would have been lower.
But it certainly would have reduced the likelihood that the shooter could have done what he did.
And it's precisely these sorts of facts that activists in the media are trying to deny.
I say this tonight with the hope, not with an expectation, but with the hope that people like Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott and John Cornyn, people who were elected by Texans, will actually listen to it.
Instead of going right to gun control laws don't work and we need armed teachers and guards at schools.
If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards, you haven't been paying attention to what's going on.
There was an armed guard in Buffalo.
There was an armed guard in Parkland.
There was an armed guard in Uvalde.
They had armed guards.
So what Jimmy Kimmel just said is not true.
It's not true with regard to this shooting that we just saw in Texas.
I'm not even saying he's lying.
He probably just doesn't know.
But that falsehood, and for some people that lie, is essential to the agenda.
And the agenda here is not so much about improving the safety of schools as it is about enacting the mostly unrelated gun control laws that liberals have wanted for decades.
All the very same laws that, as even the Washington Post admits, wouldn't have stopped the mass shootings.
There are lots of gun laws that Democrats want and that Republicans and voters more broadly, actually, will never let them pass.
For sure, there are.
There are plenty of gun laws that Republicans want that Democrats won't let them pass.
That's true, too.
But then there are really basic laws that theoretically could be passed that would go a long way toward protecting schools, funding armed guards, upgrading school buildings to better secure the doors.
These are not particularly ideological reforms.
These are not an opportunity to score big partisan points.
These are just basic safety precautions to protect schools, which is why we are almost certainly not going to get them.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
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Not everything has to be an extreme partisan fight.
Practically speaking, I guess it does these days.
But it shouldn't have to be a big partisan fight.
There are some really basic things about society that we can all agree on.
I would hope.
At least until very recently we could all agree on.
A leftist would not want to use this tumbler to drink delicious tears or sparkling water or whatever you're drinking.
They wouldn't want to use this tumbler because it says leftist tears.
Just like I wouldn't want to use a tumbler that says conservative tears.
But at the very least, we should both be able to agree that you should drink sparkling water out of a cup rather than out of, I don't know, a kazoo.
There are basic facts about reality that we should all be able to agree on that don't necessarily need to have a Republican color or a Democrat color or a left or right.
Not everything has to be about ideology.
The reason it feels like it does is because the left's political program is about upending society.
The left's political program is essentially revolutionary.
That's been true not just for the past 20 years.
It's been true going back to the French Revolution.
It's been true further back than that.
That we've got to remake the whole world anew.
And all of the inherited wisdom of the past, it's not wisdom at all.
It's terrible.
It's awful.
It's bigoted.
It's making us all miserable.
We've got to get rid of it.
But there is a lot of wisdom in the past.
We actually have learned things over the history of humanity.
Really basic things.
Doesn't necessarily need to be about rights and entitlement and high-minded philosophy.
It can just be, hey, lock the doors when you want to stay safe.
Hey, have single points of entry.
Hey, have people whose job it is to protect other people when they're a soft target.
Really, really simple stuff.
There was an interview in Chicago.
It took place yesterday or the day before.
This was conducted by a Fox affiliate in Chicago.
So not Fox News, the center-right news channel, but just a regular old network affiliate.
They're conducting the interview on the street about guns in Chicago.
During the interview, some dude comes out and brandishes a pistol at the cameraman.
Around 7 o'clock this morning, at the corner of Clark and Hubbard, while our reporter was in the middle of a live report about gun violence in Chicago, a man walked up and pointed what appeared to be a firearm at our crew.
Right now, police are calling this man a person of interest, accused of aggravated assault with a firearm.
This guy who brandished the gun on the street at The Reporter, he doesn't look like he's been living on the street for the past two years.
He doesn't look like necessarily some schizophrenic, drug-addicted, derelict roaming the streets.
He's fairly well-dressed.
He seems fairly clean.
He doesn't seem sane in that no sane person should be brandishing a weapon on the street.
But really, he just seems...
He seems bold.
He seems like he knows there aren't going to be any consequences for this kind of behavior.
And why?
Because there won't be.
Because throughout many of our major cities run by leftists people are not arrested for crimes.
Because for the past two years, the left has run on defunding the police and abolishing police departments and installing far-left DAs that just won't prosecute people for crime.
And then during COVID, they emptied out the jails.
And they just say, they're sending a message to the criminals, hey, do whatever you want.
We're not going to stop you.
So is it any wonder that people like this are emboldened in Chicago?
Do you know what would stop this kind of behavior?
It doesn't need to be some pie in the sky, really extremely sophisticated ideological thing.
Arrest the criminals.
Arrest him.
That dude should be nabbed immediately.
He should go to jail for a long time.
He should be punished, not just a plea deal slap on the hand.
Well, society failed him.
Well, he had a tough upbringing.
And let's just divert him into a nice special nonprofit program where No!
Punish him!
He's a bad guy.
And if you don't want him to remain a bad guy, if you want him to become a better guy, then punish him.
Enforce basic laws.
Is that so much to ask?
These days, I guess it is.
Because none of the people now who are clamoring, do something, do something, do something, none of them seem to care at all about fixing the problems that they're claiming to want to fix.
They're all just pushing the same old ideological agenda that they were pushing 10 months ago, two years ago, 10 years ago.
Joe Biden now has gone off and made this entire effort, which should be about protecting schools, into an effort to ban AR-15s.
Thank you.
No one needs an AR-15.
Something designed for no other purpose, none, other than to kill human beings.
There's no other rationale for its existence than to kill them as quickly and as brutally as possible.
It's not exactly true because you can kill squirrels with an AR-15.
I think you could even kill deer, though it wouldn't be particularly...
But to his...
It's also...
AR-15s are not the quickest way to kill people because they're not...
Contrary to what the left would have you believe, they're not fully automatic weapons.
They're not assault rifles.
A fully automatic weapon, you pull the trigger and a spray of bullets comes out.
A semi-automatic weapon, you pull the trigger, one bullet comes out, you pull the trigger again, another bullet comes out.
So what he's saying technically is not true.
But to his broader point, he says, these guns kill people.
And he's implying that that's a bad thing for guns to do.
That is the purpose of guns.
That is the purpose of the Second Amendment.
That is the purpose of the right to self-defense.
Is that if someone comes to attack you, you have the right to defend yourself.
That's what they're for.
People are not buying these guns to go hunt squirrels.
And he's insinuating that this is a bad thing.
What is his solution?
What is his solution?
If he's saying that the problem with the AR-15 is they're designed to kill people, then that means we have to get rid of all the guns.
But not just the AR-15s, handguns are designed to kill people.
In fact, handguns are much more directly designed to kill people than any of the rifles are, or any of the shotguns are.
So then you have to get rid of all the guns.
Are you going to do that, Joe Biden?
No, you'd have to repeal the Second Amendment.
Are you going to do that?
No, you can't do that.
And most people don't want you to do that.
So what are you going to do?
Are you going to...
Are you going to pass laws in contravention of the Second Amendment?
Are you going to try to change the interpretation of the Second Amendment?
Are you going to just confiscate all the guns without repealing the Second Amendment?
There are more guns than people in America.
So what is the practical effect of what he's proposing?
Nothing.
Philosophically it's incoherent.
Constitutionally, it's incoherent.
Legally, it's incoherent.
But even put all that aside, those are the ideological debates and the philosophies.
Just practically, it's not going to happen.
It's completely fantastical.
So then what is he doing?
He's not doing anything.
He's running his mouth, and he's trying to score cheap campaign points.
But in practice, he is accomplishing absolutely nothing productive.
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Now the Libs, they're not just exploiting the tragedy to push the same old laws that are somewhat related to the tragedy, but largely unrelated, the same old gun laws.
Now they're exploiting it to push their views of abortion.
Julia Ioff, who is a blue-check journo, a liberal journalist...
Though, basically, I repeat myself.
When you say journalist, usually you're referring to a liberal.
She just tweeted out, quote, What if you could perform an abortion with an AR-15?
You would defend AR-15s?
I guess.
What point is she trying to make here?
What if you could perform an abortion with an AR-15?
Well, actually, you can perform an abortion with an AR-15, strictly speaking.
Probably not safest for the mother, but you could.
What is an abortion?
Abortion is killing a little baby.
What point is she making here?
I think she's undermining her own argument, but she's trying to insinuate that Republicans care very much about babies when they're in the womb, but they don't care about children when they're outside the womb.
Because if they cared about children outside the womb, they would ban AR-15s, even though banning AR-15s would have almost certainly zero effect on any of these mass shooting incidents.
Even though banning AR-15s, which we did by the way, we did it in the 90s and it just didn't do anything to the murder rate, even though these claims ban the AR-15s and all of the other proposals that the Democrats have made in recent years would not have stopped the mass shootings as even the Washington Post admits.
So what point are you making?
Well, Republicans are bad.
It's all this vague insinuation without any facts whatsoever.
It's all just this, do something, do something.
What do you want to do?
Yelling do something and mocking people for offering their prayers does not make you virtuous.
It's no more productive than the people who are trying to do something and perhaps failing.
It's certainly no more productive than them.
It's far less productive, I think.
And it's far more crass because you're exploiting an incident that we should all agree is tragic and there might be some things, some really basic safety precautions we could do to at least amp up the safety of the schools.
And you're using that and you're ignoring the proposals to make the schools safer and you're just moving on to get to your regular old hobby horse and get to your regular old pet project in politics.
In this case, abortion, which is entirely unrelated.
But they're so obsessed with abortion because they know how bad this makes them look.
They're so obsessed with abortion because they know that abortion is the logical conclusion of their entire political agenda, which is about liberation and individual autonomy and selfishness, ultimately.
Me, me, me.
I will do whatever I want.
Alistair Crowley said that...
What was the line?
To do...
To do your will is the entirety of the law.
Do what thou wilt, and that is the entirety of the law.
It's a hideous perversion, inversion of Christianity.
And it just boils down to what we all know the left is after, which is selfishness.
I mean my, I mean my, I mean my.
And they know that that's the logical conclusion.
They know that that's ugly.
At a really basic level, be selfish is not a persuasive political platform.
But they have to keep defending it, especially now that abortion is potentially about to be restricted.
There was a gal on TikTok.
I didn't believe this was legitimate at first.
A gal on TikTok breastfeeding her child, defending abortion.
I could have killed you, but I chose to let you live.
I chose to let her live.
As in, I had a choice?
All women should have a choice.
Do you realize what you just said?
Killed.
I cannot wrap my brain around this, no matter how I look at it.
If you don't want to use the word kill, that's fine.
If you want to use the word kill, that's fine.
When you use hand sanitizer, you kill germs.
I could have simply chosen to let you not exist, but I let you exist.
I let you form past the zygote phase.
Is that better?
So yes, I realize what I just said, and I stand by it.
If you want to get an abortion, get an abortion.
If you don't want to get an abortion, don't get an abortion, but don't try to oppress my rights.
You gotta hand it to her.
This stone-cold psycho is at least being honest about the whole thing.
She's saying, right now, I could have killed you, and I chose not to kill you.
And I know you pro-abortion people out there, you fellow pro-abortion people, you don't want me to use the word kill.
You want me to use some other euphemism.
And she kind of makes fun of the euphemisms.
I let you form past the zygote phase, which of course the zygote refers to the extremely brief period of time when a baby is a single cell and then it almost instantly is no longer a zygote.
You can use whatever euphemism you want.
You're still talking about the same living human being.
She says, okay, I can use all these euphemisms, but it just means kill, right?
And yeah, that's what we should be defending.
That's what abortion is.
And I want my right, my license, to kill the baby.
And in this case, I chose not to, but my choice, my exercise of the will, absent all reason and justice, is the most important political value, and that's that.
And if you don't like it, tough.
She is saying the quiet part out loud, and it is extremely disturbing to watch her say it, period, but certainly say it while breastfeeding, and certainly say it to her baby.
But that's it.
That's what the logic of abortion is.
And I thank her.
I am indebted to her for not hiding it and not trying to deceive everybody.
No, that's it.
If you find that appealing, then you support abortion.
If you find that ghastly and unthinkable, then you're pro-life.
And maybe you haven't worked out all the abstract and all the really high sophisticated philosophy and biology, but if you recoil at that video and you say, whoa, man, this is wrong, you are pro-life.
Just as this gal has followed her pro-abortion ideas to their logical conclusion, you just need to follow your pro-life instincts to their logical conclusion.
It's not just her.
There was a gal...
She's a BLM activist.
My friend Andy Ngo just pointed this out yesterday.
She's on Twitter by the name Hidden Agenda.
I'm not going to read all of this.
She sent out a long narrative of her getting an abortion.
But here's what she said.
She said, I didn't know when I was going to be ready to share my story, but I guess I was never going to be ready.
Just effing angry.
So here goes nothing.
I got an abortion and it saved my effing life.
Then she says, I'm sorry.
She showed up and she was told that she was about 26, 27 weeks pregnant.
And it goes, update, checked my MyChart to confirm and I was 27 weeks and 6 days, closer to 28 weeks pregnant.
This is pretty much almost exactly as pregnant as sweet little Elisa is right now with our baby who's kicking all the time, who's moving all the time, who's responding to a ton of stimuli, who is a fully formed baby.
When you're 28 weeks pregnant, you are very, very formed.
You are identifiably human and living in every single way.
And she says she went in, and she said, I want an abortion, and there were only a few places where that is even still legal, even today in America.
She got the shot to...
Kill the baby.
A shot through her stomach.
And then she says, Monday, January 17th, 2022, at approximately 6.30 p.m., after a grueling night filled with so much pain that I needed an epidural, morphine, and fentanyl, I gave birth to a just over 2-pound 7-inch girl with no heartbeat.
And...
She wanted this.
She couldn't wait another 36 weeks you can deliver.
She couldn't wait another 8 weeks to deliver this baby that she hated, her own child, and just give the baby up for adoption to the many, many, many couples who are trying to adopt.
She wouldn't do that.
She said, no, I'm not going to allow you to live.
It wasn't even about avoiding birth.
I'm at least glad that this woman has debunked the lie that pro-lifers are in favor of forced birth and that abortion somehow allows you to avoid birth.
No, this woman didn't avoid birth.
She said she gave birth to a baby girl.
The only difference is that the baby girl that she gave birth to was dead because she had already killed her.
But she still gave birth.
She just so hated this baby.
And was so insistent on exercising her will, her selfish will, even to the point of killing others, even to the point of killing her own child, that she was willing to give birth and go through exactly all the same pain and all the same discomfort for a dead baby.
This is the conclusion.
Drew Clavin talks about this, talk about logical conclusions.
He says that one of the things that brought him back to Christianity was actually the Marquis de Sade.
The Marquis de Sade is where we get the word sadism from.
He's one of, probably the most famous psycho in the history of the world.
And he was a pornographer and a killer and a psycho and also a philosopher.
A philosopher of torture and sadism and selfishness.
And at the bottom of the Marquis de Sade's philosophy is this one question.
Why is your pain any more important than my pleasure?
Why should I care about you at all, even to the point of torture, even to the point of death?
If I want something, why do I have to care about any of that, even to the point of killing my own kid?
Well, she's following that to its logical conclusion.
Getting rid of all the propaganda, all the fake facts.
It's not a baby.
The baby's not alive.
The baby's not a person.
The baby doesn't have to be born.
No, she's saying none of that's true.
This is a human baby.
I'm giving birth.
I just want to kill it.
If you recoil at that, just as this woman has followed abortion to its logical conclusion, if you recoil in any way, you are pro-life.
Just follow those views to their logical conclusion.
It's evil stuff.
It's evil.
It's the only way you can describe that.
There's no just totally clinical, neutral language we can use to describe the pistons firing in the brain.
No, it's just evil.
Good and evil are real.
They're much more real than a lot of our scientific jargon that we use to deny these basic things that we all know to be true.
Good and evil, the things that people intuit, the moral realities that people intuit using their common sense, are much more real than the jargony abstractions that we all cook up in our postmodern philosophy and sociology.
And the left wants to deny good and evil, because the left's program is revolutionary.
The left's program is undoing, upending everything that has been established.
You really see Marx take this to its logical conclusion in its fullest expression when Karl Marx says that he wants to engage in the ruthless criticism of all that exists, which is where we get things like critical theory from, critical race theory.
We hear a lot about critical legal theory.
This withering, ruthless criticism of everything, all that exists.
Everything in society, not just the laws, but the customs, not just the customs, but the institutions, not just the institutions, but the family, the basic institution, not just the family, but human nature itself, sex, boys and girls, the way we relate to one another, the way we relate to ourselves.
All of that has to be upended.
And in order to do that, you have to deny the reality of good and evil, true and false, right and wrong, which we all can interpret.
This is why Gavin Newsom, governor of California, I think unwittingly It gave away the Democrats' game here in responding to the shooting that took place in Texas.
Governor Abbott, Greg Abbott of Texas, talked about the realities of evil and the dangers of mental illness and the dangers of isolation and loneliness and the problems of community fracture and losing some of these basic common sense measures that can protect the community.
And Gavin Newsom, all the way from California, decided to take potshots at him for having the audacity, the gall to mention evil.
Do not give in to the cynicism and all the crap that you heard today in that press conference around evil and mental health that completely belies the fact that there's only one nation on planet Earth that separates itself from all other nations, and that's the United States of America.
And the perversion of a Second Amendment that begins around well-regulated, well-regulated gun policy.
So what he said factually there is not true, and you hear it repeated a lot by the left, which is that the United States is the outlier in the whole world.
We have more mass killings than anybody.
It's not even close, and the only reason for that is because we have guns here.
The claim is just not true.
It's not true when you adjust for population.
We have a pretty large population.
When you adjust for population size, we're actually kind of toward the middle of the pack when you look at mass killing incidents, when you look at rates of violent crime and murder.
We're far closer to the middle of the pack.
In the 40s, in the 50s, than we are number one far and away.
That's not true.
So the libs are manipulating statistics to make that claim.
That's what he's doing there.
But forget about the statistics.
You know I don't really believe in statistics.
I'm happy to cite them when they back up my opinion as they do just now.
But you have your statistics, I have my statistics, and there are lies, damn lies in statistics.
The craziest thing that Newsom just said there is, ignore the cynicism you heard today about the realities of evil.
He's saying that to talk about evil is to be cynical, when in fact that is the opposite of cynicism.
Cynicism is indifference toward the truth.
Cynicism is the denial of truth.
You see the perfect example of cynicism when Christ is before Pontius Pilate and Christ says, I am the truth, and Pontius Pilate says, what is truth?
That is the perfect expression of cynicism.
What is truth?
That's what Gavin Newsom's saying.
He said, what is evil?
What is good and bad?
What is true and false?
What is evil?
Come on.
What is goodness?
You're using those silly old terms?
No, that's not real.
We're just talking about statistics.
That is cynicism.
He is the cynical guy, which is no surprise, of course, because the Libs always project.
The Libs are always accusing their opponents of the things that they themselves are doing.
How cynical.
The only thing that might mitigate his culpability here is that Gavin Newsom probably doesn't even understand the irony of what he's saying.
But he is the one pushing cynicism here.
Woe to those who call good evil and evil good.
And you're seeing it in the elementary schools.
There was an elementary school in Wisconsin, which is now investigating a school counselor for quote-unquote immoral conduct.
What was the immoral conduct?
This counselor opposes not just transgenderism, but opposes transing the kids.
And this is considered immoral by the school.
Melissa Darling received a letter from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, April 29th, warning her that her state-issued license could be revoked if the investigation finds she engaged in immoral conduct at a rally.
They want to determine whether she said F transgenderism on video and whether she said that she does not believe that children should have access to cross-sex hormones or surgery.
I don't think the immoral conduct is that she said the F word.
I suspect every teacher at that school and every staff member at that school has used the F word at some point.
She said, you do not believe that children should be put on cross-sex hormones and have their bodies mutilated.
That's considered immoral.
Of course, it is immoral to do that to children.
It is moral not to do that to children.
There's no neutrality here.
It's not just that they've said, look, we're going to keep an open mind and be very liberal.
No, they took the old standard, which is mutilating kids' bodies and confusing them sexually is wrong.
And they've said, no, that's right.
And not doing that is wrong.
Disney Plus is doing this.
We will get to the mailbag.
I'm always running late, as per usual.
Disney Plus.
Disney got dragged for promoting the weird sex stuff with the little kids.
Disney right now is doubling down on that and producing drag queen content for little kids on Disney Plus.
Hello, and welcome to the Disney Plus This Is Me Pride Celebration Spectacular.
I'm Nina West, and I'm here to guide you through a magical, musical, and meaningful celebration of the LGBTQ plus community.
GLSEN's mission is to create safe and inclusive schools for LGBTQ plus students in grades K through 12.
And Disney Plus is so proud to support this wonderful organization.
For more information, visit www.glsen.org forward slash pride.
What are you going to do about it?
They've already been dragged through the mud, Disney, and they don't care.
They're doubling down on trying to pervert the kids.
They're doubling down on pushing perverted sexual ideologies on little kids.
And they're saying this is totally neutral.
Look, this is neutral.
We're not pushing a moral view one way or the other.
It's just open, it's liberal, it's inclusive, it's diverse.
How cynical do you have to be to say that sort of thing?
Woe to those who call good evil evil good.
If you believe that there is no moral component here, if you believe that you can just live in a totally neutral world where the realities of right and wrong and good and bad and true and false don't matter, Then you are as naive as can be.
You're so naive you could believe Gavin Newsom.
You're so naive that you could believe Joe Biden and the rest of these people who are pushing their radical moral agenda on you.
And for so long the conservatives just roll over.
They don't even know that it's happening.
You know, for countless actors and comedians in Hollywood who dare to push the wrong sequence of keys on their phone or breathe the wrong way into a microphone.
They pay with their careers, torn away from them by a savage, woke mob.
Like my friend Gina Carano.
Gina Carano tweeted unthinkable thoughts such as neighbors should be nice to each other.
And elections should be fair.
She was immediately thrown out of the cast of The Mandalorian.
She was banished from the magical kingdom.
The whole thing was an atrocity.
And at The Daily Wire, we will not stand for it.
That's why we fought back by hiring Gina and starring her in our new summer blockbuster, Terror on the Prairie, which premieres exclusively on The Daily Wire on June 14th.
Set on the plains of Montana, this gritty thriller follows a family of pioneers as they defend themselves from a vicious gang of outlaws hellbent, On Revenge.
We are giving you a sneak peek next week when the trailer will drop on June 1st.
To top it all off, the official Terror on the Prayer movie poster is in our shop right now.
Go to dailywire.com slash shop.
Become a member today, dailywire.com slash shop.
We also have my favorite time of the week coming up, the mailbag sponsored by Pure Talk.
I love Pure Talk because they have a great service and they have great phones and they're terrific.
But even more than that, somehow even more than that, I love Pure Talk because they're sponsoring our new voicemail bag so that you can send your voicemails into the show and I get to hear your dulcet tones.
Go to puretalk.com, enter promo code NOLSPODCAST to save 50% off your first month.
Let's get to the first voicemail bag.
Hi, Michael.
Huge fan of the show.
I just wanted to get your take on something.
I recently found this book titled Good Grief Rituals, and while I was optimistic when I first came across it, it didn't take me long to realize that a lot of these, quote, rituals were hippy-dippy, tree-hugging, something you'd find at the bottom of Anthony Kennedy's bong.
So, with that being said, I wanted to ask you, How do you use religion, Christianity, to help you deal with grief and loss?
Because that's something I have always struggled with.
You don't use it, first of all.
There's a quote of C.S. Lewis that I go back to again and again because it's so good.
He says, If you look for truth, you might find comfort in the end.
If you look for comfort, you will find neither truth nor comfort, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin and in the end despair.
It's one thing to lecture on how to deal with grief on a sunny day.
This is what C.S. Lewis actually did in his book The Problem of Pain.
It's another thing to deal with grief in real life, which is something that C.S. Lewis acknowledged in his book A Grief Observed, talking about the death of his wife.
When I was in high school, I had to deal with a grief.
And I was an atheist, and I remained atheistic and agnostic for some time after that.
But I did find myself in the same position you were in.
I was looking, how do I process this grief?
How do I deal with it?
What do I do?
You just want to talk to the person again.
You have all of these natural longings.
And when you start searching...
In our secular confused age, you end up with all of these hippy, dippy, really bizarre, sometimes occult, sometimes scientistic, sometimes really out there kind of rituals.
And none of it is satisfying and none of it is coherent.
Religion, Christianity, will help you to deal with grief.
It won't erase grief.
Grief is just a part of the human condition.
Jesus wept.
It's the shortest verse of the Bible.
He wept at the death of his friend Lazarus.
Two seconds before he raises Lazarus from the dead.
That tells you something about the reality of grief.
The inevitability of grief in this world.
But it will help you to make sense of it.
Because true religion makes sense.
That's what makes it true religion.
And that's what makes sense for that matter.
So, in a very straightforward way.
How do I process grief now?
My Savior lives.
I have confidence that good triumphs over evil.
I have confidence in the immortality of the human soul.
I have confidence in salvation for those who...
Who seek it.
Or not even those who seek it.
Those who cooperate with God's grace.
I have confidence in that.
I think that those are facts.
That's why hope is not merely wishful thinking.
That's why hope is not just soft optimism.
Hope is a theological virtue and a fact grounded not just on poetry and aphorisms, but grounded on the journalism of the gospel.
So, that grounds my hope.
But it does not mean...
That you will avoid grief.
It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
You will have to deal with that.
It reminds me of that distinction that a priest friend of mine, Father George Rutler, made between optimism and pessimism.
He said that the difference between a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist is that a Scottish pessimist says things can't get any worse and a Scottish optimist says, oh yes, they can.
In a way, what religion does, what Christianity does, is it gives you hope Because it tells you how bad things really are.
And it doesn't sugarcoat that.
It tells you the reality of how bad things are.
Things are so bad that God had to send his only begotten son to the world to be tortured and killed to save the world.
And that's how we treated him.
So that ain't sugarcoating anything.
But there is a happy ending, which is why on Easter, when we're talking about eternal life and the resurrection, this is why on Easter, Christians chant, O happy fault, the fault, the fault of man in the Garden of Eden, O happy fault that one for us so great, so glorious redeemer.
Even in your grief, that can point one's eyes up toward hope.
Next, voicemail beg.
Hey Michael, this is Thomas, long-time listener, first-time mailbag submitter.
I have an idea about the abortion conversation which I want to run by you.
I think it was confirmed by your talk with the woman a couple weeks ago.
It seems to me that it's an unproductive conversation to have with anyone who has a strong belief on the issue.
Now, I say that because you're either talking to another pro-lifer and you're preaching to the choir, or you're talking to a diehard abortionist who I would say has a fundamentally incompatible view of reality.
We believe that abortion kills a living human being and that that is evil.
They believe that there is no life to kill.
Point is, if we're having a conversation with them, we're talking in completely different directions.
Now, I guess the silver lining is that those who aren't as firm in their position can have their minds changed.
But when it comes to those diehard abortionists, what is the value in having a conversation with them?
I have to correct you here.
The diehard abortionists do not question that the life is a life.
I have found, in my experience.
The squishy pro-abortion people will try to tell you, well, the life isn't really a life.
Well, the baby's not really a baby.
But the hardcore ones are the ones that I read today, that I showed you today on TikTok.
And the ones that I've been talking to and debating for the past few weeks.
They acknowledge, or Naomi Wolf even.
She may have changed her view on abortion, but in the 90s she said...
If we want to defend abortion, we have to acknowledge the baby's a baby, the baby's alive, and mommy needs to kill the baby and all of the baby's humanity if she wants to be equal to men.
I'm paraphrasing her argument.
Those are the hardcore people.
And so the value, I think, in having that conversation is to have it publicly.
Because hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Maybe you will convince them.
But even if not, when you have that debate publicly, You are showing people the logical conclusions of the two sides.
The premises and the logical conclusions of the two sides.
You can get rid of some of the nonsense and some of the false information about the abortion debate.
And then you just come down to, okay, I think that we should not merely live for our own whims and wills and we should recognize the eternal moral order and we should not kill our babies.
Versus I think we should be, the pro-abortion side would say, I think we should be able to commit any evil that we want if that is our will.
And if we will not even to call it evil, then we can do that too.
Those are the conclusions.
And so I think that can be very helpful because it shows people who are watching the debate, huh, I don't know, I haven't totally thought about this thing, but...
That guy sounds kind of reasonable, and I basically seem to agree with his, and that lady sounds like a stone-cold freaking killer psycho.
And so even though in my mind I agree with her position, she seems like a total psycho.
And the reality of the situation is making me think maybe that guy's right, and I think that can be persuasive to people on the other side.
When you're talking to the squishy people in the middle and they're the ones who say, well, who knows?
Who knows when life begins?
The mystery of human life.
I think it's actually much easier to convince them.
You say, well, look, it's a human being.
We now know that the egg and the sperm come together and they cease to be...
The egg and the sperm, and they create a new, different, in-kind, unique human entity that is alive, that satisfies all of these scientifically agreed-upon characteristics of life.
So no matter what you think about whether or not it's okay to kill these people, you have to acknowledge two things.
It's human, and it's alive.
I've had two big abortion debates on my YouTube channel in the last few weeks, and both of these gals who agreed to came on Admitted that.
And they're defenders of abortion.
But at least they admitted, yeah, okay, you're right, there's no getting out of this.
Scientifically, ontologically, it's living and it's human.
So I think it can be productive, but it's not always productive in the way people think.
Sometimes it's productive for the people listening to the debate itself.
All right, next voicemail bag.
Hey, Michael.
My name is Cooper.
I'm a huge fan of the show.
I love what you guys do at The Daily Wire.
I wanted to ask you, how do we, as conservatives, deal with the crazy people on our side?
My whole family is conservative, and during 2020, they went off the deep end.
With everything that happened, you know, this coronavirus, the election, all of that, it made them start to buy into a lot of other conspiracy theories that aren't true.
For example, my mother's a flat earther now.
None of my family members believe that we landed on the moon other than me.
They thought that Trump was still in control and like he was running things from the shadows or whatever.
But I've shown them evidence to disprove their theories and they just don't listen to it.
So how can I bring them back from insanity?
They don't even listen to the Daily Wire anymore.
Because they think that you guys aren't far right enough.
I hope to get a response, and I hope you have a wonderful day, man.
Thanks for what you do.
Even me, I'm not far right enough.
I'm to the right of Genghis Khan.
But okay, so first of all, the place to begin is, politics is a team sport.
Politics involves loyalty.
And you don't need to feel embarrassed.
On every team, there's going to be some people who are a little out there and a little weird and we all have our foibles.
You don't need to feel embarrassed of the people on your side to try to score points with the people on the other side.
There is no conspiracy theory held by anyone on the right that is crazier than the conspiracy theories held by the mainstream left.
Namely, babies aren't babies and boys are actually secretly girls.
Okay, those are the craziest conspiracy theories I've ever heard.
They're crazier than the flat earth.
They're crazier than we didn't go to the moon.
They're crazier than anything I've ever heard from the right.
Now, some people on the right will fall into things that are just not true.
I wish that Trump were still running the country.
He's obviously not.
So, if you begin, I think, you can begin from two places.
It's more of an attitudinal question than it is even a substance question.
If you begin from, oh mom, come on, don't say that, you're going to make us all look stupid, to the libs, and then they're going to think we're crazy, and I'm one of the smart conservatives, and don't say that, then she's going to recoil from you.
And she's going to say, well, you're probably in on the evil Illuminati Freemason cabal too, and so, you know, you're, get out of here, you.
But if you come at it from, hey, mom, look, yeah, the libs are completely out of their minds, and they've lied to us about everything, and the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth these days is about six to nine months, so that's true.
But, you know, the earth is not flat, actually, and here's the evidence for it, and look, but I wish Trump were still in charge, but he's not in charge, and we can, I don't know, try to make him in charge again, but...
If you come at it from that perspective, if you think about politics more as a distinction between your friends and your allies and your enemies and your opponents, and you realize that that is just in a practical way, that's how you're going to begin the art of politics, and that politics is not merely loyalties and alliances, but also has to do with logic and has to do with reason and has to do with objective truth, but you don't deny the team sport aspect of it, then I think you're going to be more persuasive.
There are some conservatives who, their first instinct is to throw their own guys under the bus.
And I just don't think that, I think politically that's stupid, and I don't think it's a particularly virtuous way to conduct politics.
One more question, let's do a real mailbag one, a written one.
Shannon, hey Michael, you've said recently that the ends don't justify the means and you wouldn't commit a sin to solve a larger problem.
I have a question, would you lie to a Nazi about Jews hiding in your attic?
If you are so strict in your deontology, could it not be argued that an otherwise sinful act might be motivated by goodwill and duty such as the Nazi example?
In your view, how can there be any just wars?
Thanks and love the show.
Oh, well, those are two separate questions.
In terms of the Nazis show up and I'm hiding Jews in my attic, what do I say?
Is a lie justified?
I am with Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
This issue has been debated for the entire history of the West, but I'm with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
I do not think that lies are justified.
I think that lies are intrinsically wrong.
Now, I might be able to use my language in such a way that I could convey something that is true in itself, but that the Nazis would not believe to be true.
So you could say...
If I were near a hill and they said, do you have any Jews in your house?
I can say, I saw them running up.
I saw them running.
And you point and you could even point at the hill.
Now you saw the Jew that you're hiding running up your stairs.
But the Nazis could interpret that as he's running up the hill.
They might take off.
That's possible.
Now, even that might be a little bit morally suspect.
Some people have made arguments that lies can be justified.
And there are serious philosophers who have made arguments that a certain kind of lie could possibly be justified because people do not have the...
That a lie does not involve...
It's merely conveying false information that you know to be false, but it is conveying false information that you know to be false to people who have the right to know that information.
So if the people don't have the right to know that information, then it's not really a lie.
I think that reasoning is a little weak to me.
Now to your second question, how can there be just wars?
Because people do have a natural right to self-defense and they're...
There is a legitimate claim that our calls to be peaceable and make peace among nations is not a blanket license to allow the cruel to rape the earth.
Also, going back to my good buddy, St.
Thomas Aquinas, this has been fleshed out over the centuries, and there is no Christian call to pacifism.
That has never, never really been understood in the mainstream history of Christianity.
There is, though, to go back also to my other dead friend, C.S. Lewis, he has an excellent essay on why he's not a pacifist.
We're two minutes over, so I can't really get into it now, but that would be a good essay for Memorial Day weekend reading, and maybe we'll get into it more next week.
I'm Michael Knowles.
Have a good Memorial Day.
We'll see you next time.
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Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
