Ep. 1152 - Arresting Christians For Praying Makes Us The Bad Guys
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A woman is arrested for silently praying in Great Britain, Media Matters calls me an anti-LGBTQ bully, and a new report shows that COVID accelerated a trend of atheism in the United States.
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It's almost Christmas and many of you are probably planning on praying over the next few days, which is why I want to take this opportunity to warn you that if you do plan to pray and you happen to be in Britain, that could land you in jail.
Before I ask you any questions about what's going on today, I have to caution you, which is just your rights, which is you do not have to say anything.
It may harm your defence if you do not mention one question.
Something that you later on in court, anything you do so may be giving it.
What are you here for today?
Physically, I'm just standing here.
Okay.
Why here of all places?
I know you don't live here by.
This is an abortion center.
Okay.
That's why you're standing here.
Is you standing here part of the protest?
No.
I'm not protesting.
Are you praying?
I might be praying in my head.
So I'll ask you once more, will you voluntarily come with us now to the police station for me to ask you some questions about today and other days where there are allegations that you've broken public space of protection order?
If I've got a choice, then no.
Okay, well then you're under arrest.
I can't suspicion of failing to comply with the public's basis protection order, which is going to be anti-social behavior, climate policing after 2014.
Now, of course, again, you do not have to say anything.
It may harm your defense.
If you do not mention one question, something to mention later on in court, anything you do say, you may be given in the case.
Now, I would like to think that this sort of evil police action, cartoonishly evil police action, is only taking place in the United Kingdom.
But it's happening here too.
The FBI regularly and increasingly targets pro-lifers who pray outside of abortion mills.
And then they arrest them on trumped up charges that the pro-lifers are obstructing or intimidating people who are seeking to kill their children.
The UK might be a little bit ahead of the curve here, but not by much.
People are being arrested for praying silently in their heads.
And I love my country.
And I love my ancestral country, Great Britain.
And I love my whole civilization.
And I have always been raised to believe that we are the good guys.
But in recent decades...
We've sanctioned the killing of almost a million babies a year.
In recent years, we've essentially abolished marriage.
We've started grooming and castrating little kids and pumping them full of hormones and mutilating their bodies.
And now we're arresting Christians for praying silently in their heads.
So, I don't want to be a downer or anything, but I've got to ask a very British question.
Are we the baddies?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from T.M.E. Shu, who says, Zelensky played Congress the same way he plays the piano.
I'm not going to explain that one.
If you want to find out, you've got to look it up.
But I don't recommend that you do look it up.
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Are we the baddies?
Are we the baddies?
Speaking of our civilization projecting our power abroad, there's a new academic report that the United States Marines have received demanding that they stop calling their drill instructors sir and ma'am.
So our Marines, our wonderful, brave, valiant Marines who sacrifice a lot to defend our country and our way of life, they sign up and they end up working for these woke lunatics who tell them that they can't call their drill instructors sir or ma'am because they might misgender the drill instructor.
This, according to a 739-page report from the University of Pittsburgh, this was catalyzed by a new congressional mandate, so it's our stupid politicians forcing this nonsense on the Marines.
It's featured PhD biologists Bradley C. Nindel and Mida Lovelacker and 22 academics telling Marines that they need to, quote, replace gendered identifiers, For example, sir or ma'am in the primary salutation or response to drill instructors with gender-neutral language,
such as drill instructor or senior drill instructor, senior, DI, or SDI. Employing gender-neutral identifiers eliminates the possibility of misgendering drill instructors, which can unintentionally offend or cause discord.
We're never going to win another war again, are we?
We had a good run.
The U.S. did a pretty good job winning wars for most of our history.
Our men and women in uniform are just as tough as nails as they always have been.
But if the people leading our military don't, they're afraid of misgendering, we're not going to win anymore, we're Maybe we've still got a little bit of gusto left in us, but as long as these military leaders remain in place, we are totally screwed.
Which is not great, because the United States, whether we want to admit it or not, administers a global empire.
We don't make laws like the bill up on Capitol Hill.
We're not just a little nation surrounded by oceans.
We have a global empire.
We have states overseas.
We've got one state, Hawaii, just in the middle of the Pacific.
We have basically total control over the European continent because we are the military for Europe.
That's what NATO does.
We run the United Nations, so we have a role as the world superpower.
And we are currently fighting an imperial war with Russia over the territory of Ukraine and whether Ukraine will join NATO or join the European Union or become part of Russia or maintain a kind of quasi-independence that allows it to be a buffer state to play great powers off of one another.
You saw this when our vassal, Vladimir Zelensky, came over to the US and lobbied for more money so that we will help fund that war against Russia.
And the Democrats were happy to have him.
They They flew him out here to use him and the emotion behind the war in Ukraine to convince Republicans to vote for the stupid omnibus spending package, the $1.7 trillion spending package, some of which will go toward funding this war in Ukraine.
And one of the images that came out of this whole It's a doctored image.
It's not an authentic image.
But it's an image of Nancy Pelosi and other congressmen holding up an American flag.
But then the bottom of the American flag is no longer red and white.
It's yellow and blue.
It's the Ukrainian flag.
And the stars, it's no longer all the stars.
It's got these little Ukrainian symbols there too.
So it's not a real image.
But it does refer to a real sense, I think.
All these big libs changing their profile pictures and their names on social media to include the Ukrainian flag, which is crazy.
My family is Italian.
I love Italy.
I'm not going to put an Italian flag in my handle because I'm an American.
I'm not an Italian.
That's disloyal to do that.
I've got British ancestry, as I mentioned in the open.
I'm not going to put the Union Jack in my hand.
But all these libs, they're putting the Ukrainian flag.
And then I was looking at that.
I said, wow, this is the new imperial standard.
The red, white, and blue with the Ukraine thing at the bottom.
And I thought, well, if we're going to have an imperial flag...
I guess America and Ukraine as a mashup is better than the current imperial standard, which is just the pride flag.
That is effectively the flag of the American empire.
It's the flag we raise over our conquered territories overseas.
It's the flag that the liberal imperialists all use.
They all prefer the rainbow flag to the red, white, and blue.
It's a flag that denotes not just a particular place with a particular people as the American flag does, as all other national flags do, but it denotes universal values.
So it really does denote a global empire of liberalism.
So you have all of these libs who use these kind of flags.
They never talk about The nation and the people and the particular interests of the United States, it's always this abstract stuff.
It's always spreading democracy, spreading human rights, spreading gay rights, spreading this right and that right, and all these abstract concepts all over the world.
That is a claim of domination.
That is a claim of imperialism, saying that individual nations have no right to rule themselves.
People who have...
Their own traditions have no right to maintain those traditions.
And, this is the most important part as far as I'm concerned, Even we conservatives here in America have no right to our own traditions.
Christians here in America, here in Britain, here all over the West, have no right to our own traditions.
We don't get to go to church.
They're going to shut down the churches during COVID. They're going to leave the pot stores open.
They're going to leave the casinos open, but they're going to shut down the churches.
And then even after they reopen the churches after COVID, they're not going to let you pray silently outside of an abortion process.
That's the problem for me.
The problem for me is not even so much this debate between nationalism and imperialism, or nationalism and globalism.
In the way that politics is actually functioning today, that is an important distinction.
But the Middle Ages were great, and there was plenty of empire in the Middle Ages.
Nationalism is in many ways a product of liberal modernity.
So it's not just that I'm some hardcore nationalist.
Far from it.
But if we're going to have imperialism, if we're going to have an empire, I'd like it to be a good Christian empire where we get to keep our traditions and worship God correctly and we don't get arrested for praying.
What we have instead is this hideous, liberal, atheistic kind of empire that promotes all the worst aspects of our culture and suppresses all the best parts of it.
Well, I don't think we want any part of that.
And that is why you'll hear Republicans being called Putin stooges and appeasers and all the rest because we don't care about the war in Ukraine.
Well, that's why.
It's about a lot more than Ukraine.
It's about this question of if we are going to administer a global empire, if we're going to spread our values around the world, what values are we spreading?
Are we spreading truth, justice, and God, and religion, and virtue, and family, and prosperity?
Or...
Are we spreading abortion and transing the kids and arresting people for praying?
What is it?
Unfortunately, right now it's the latter.
Is it any wonder that we don't want to fund the empire?
No, we want to get back to basics.
We want to get back to religion.
We want to get back to God.
When you want to do that, you've got to check out Bible in a Year with Father Mike Schmitz.
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Go check it out right now, ascensionpress.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Speaking of the rainbow flag,
did you know that I am apparently an anti-LGBTQ bigot?
That's true.
That according to Media Matters, apparently.
Media Matters has a rundown of Tim Pool's guests from the year, and they say extremists, bigots, and conspiracy theorists.
YouTuber Tim Pool's 2022 guests in review.
And I was really honored to make the list.
It's sort of a best of.
So they go through all these guys, you know, let's see, where am I? I want to skip over everybody else.
I just want to get to me.
They've got, I think, a number of other Daily Wire people did too.
Okay, here we go.
Top of the page.
Far-right figure Lauren Southern was on TimCast multiple times this year.
Southern has a history of pushing racist propaganda and white nationalist rhetoric.
And then you get to me.
The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles is an anti-LGBTQ bully.
Poole hosted Knowles in April.
By the way, Poole hosted Knowles like five days ago too, so they clearly aren't up on their extremism.
Then it goes on and on.
But I think Brett made it.
I think Walsh made it.
I think Jeremy made it.
Yeah, here we go.
Ben.
Ben's on here.
It's kind of...
Maybe Drew.
All of us.
But I ranked up here as an anti-LGBTQ bully.
I performed in my first musical theater production at the age of eight.
When I was a child, I took...
Jazz, ballroom, and tap dancing lessons.
I graduated from the gayest university in the United States.
I have lived most of my life on the coasts.
A disproportionate number of my friends are very, very gay.
I regularly drink port and sherry at the end of the night.
I... I just...
How did I become...
I like to think I'm a nice open mind.
How did I become an anti-LGBTQ bully?
Do you know why?
You know what they cite?
They link that phrase.
It's because I said on Tim Pool's show...
Maybe it was on my own show.
I don't remember exactly the context.
I said that there's no such thing as gay marriage.
That marriage intrinsically involves sexual difference.
And so because I stated a plain fact of language and anthropology, that makes me an anti-LGBTQ bully.
Why do I mention it?
One, I mention it because I absolutely adore my publicists over at Media Matters.
I thank them very much for keeping me in the news and top of everybody's mind.
The other reason I mention it is to show you what a lie it was when the left told us, when we were a little further up that slippery slope, they said, listen, why do you care what people do in their own homes?
Well, that's not exactly what we're talking about.
We're talking about political matters, the nature of marriage, the nature of man and woman, and the nature of the Constitution, and the degree to which the Constitution even has a say over these sorts of matters.
And so they say, well, come on!
You're just being a weirdo.
Why do you care what people do in their homes?
Okay, we said.
Do whatever you want in your own homes.
Okay, we'll even pretend that it's in the Constitution, that you have a right to do whatever weird sex stuff you want to do in your homes.
Okay, fine.
Alright, and that's why we also need civil unions.
That's all.
We just want civil unions, okay?
Just recognize that certain legal privileges, that you can have them in a union between two men, just as between a man and a woman.
They said, oh, I don't know, because it kind of then blurs the definition.
They said, what do you care?
Why are you...
Come on, that's all we want.
Okay.
Then they said, we're going to redefine marriage.
They said, well, hold on, man.
Marriage, that's the fundamental political institution.
For all of human history everywhere in the world, people have thought marriage means a certain thing.
Now you're telling me it doesn't mean that at all.
You're actually abolishing the institution of marriage.
They said, that's all we want to do.
That's all we want to do is just redefine marriage a little bit.
But you guys, you can still, it's not going to threaten your marriage.
You can run your business.
You can have your life.
You can have your church.
Okay.
Then what did they do?
They just passed this quote-unquote Respect for Marriage Act.
Which outlaws businesses refusing to participate in a gay marriage.
Now, if you are a Christian, all I did was articulate the Catholic view of marriage, which also happens to be, with some exception, the Protestant view of marriage, which also happens to be the Jewish view of marriage, which also happens to be the Muslim view of marriage, which also happens to be the view of marriage of every Christian.
Even semi-reasonable agnostic or atheist for all, pagan for all of human history.
They say it makes you a bully.
That's how it goes.
And had we stood a little firmer on our principles and on reality, further up that slippery slope, and had we not allowed the libs and the squishes to tell us to stop being such fuddy-duddies and to just, you know, come on, get with the times and get hip and cool, man, we wouldn't be where we are.
Now, all of the sexual madness that you were seeing, the castrating little kids, the pride flags flying everywhere from our state capitals to Kandahar, the now prohibition of people to refuse to participate in a so-called gay marriage, All of that flows directly from those battles that we conceded further up the slippery slope.
It should remind us of how to fight moving into the future.
Now, beyond the empire of the rainbow, beyond the American empire abroad, the political order is a little bit shaky at home.
There is a really, really dumb piece in Vox.
Vox is a left-wing outlet.
They call themselves explanatory journalism.
I love that descriptor.
Explanatory journalism, as opposed to really dumb, stupid, doesn't teach you anything journalism.
Which I guess describes most journalism, actually.
But Vox, I say, we're a very special kind of journalism.
We explain things.
Unlike all those dumb, idiotic journalistic outlets.
So the headline is Sotomayor and Kagan need to think about retiring.
The U.S. Senate is a fundamentally broken institution.
Democratic judges need to account for that in their retirement decisions.
This is by Ilhan Millhiser, who's a big lib.
He is a senior correspondent at Fox, and he's focused on the Supreme Court.
The decline of liberal democracy in the United States, fine by me.
Certainly, America was not founded to be a liberal democracy.
It should not be a liberal democracy.
The phrase liberal democracy only came to describe the United States really in the middle to late part of the 20th century.
So forget about that.
But you get where he's coming from.
And he says, we've now lived with the consequences of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's late life arrogance for more than two years.
Arrogance.
You see, the arrogant RBG decided she wasn't going to retire.
She was going to die in office, die on the bench, and then she was replaced.
And she was replaced by a conservative, and this was terrible, according to Millhiser.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, much like other justices on the left and on the right, have said, no, we are not going to time our retirement decisions to when a president of our party...
Because we're judges.
We are not supposed to be partisan.
Obviously, we have partisan leanings.
Obviously, we were appointed by presidents.
Sometimes the justices disappoint the presidents and the parties that appoint them.
But the idea, at least, is that they're supposed to be above the petty squabbling of partisan politics.
We need at least one institution to at least pretend to do that at least some of the time.
Ian Millhiser, Vox.com, totally, completely wrong here.
What they are doing is expressing the worst kind of degrading, leveling tendencies of democracy.
We in the United States...
We have a broadly democratic government.
It's not purely a democratic government, but there's a big democratic representation.
And we don't have a monarchy here.
We have elements of monarchy in the presidency, but we don't have a monarchy.
We explicitly don't have a monarchy.
And whatever you think about monarchy, a lot of Americans hate the idea of monarchy.
But one of the good things that monarchy does is it gives a nation a kind of dignity.
At least in the pomp and the circumstance, if not in the personal comportment of the monarchs.
Though in Britain, you just had one of the most dignified monarchs in history.
But even just the pomp and circumstance, even just the big castles and the grand parades, it gives the nation a sense of dignity.
That the monarch as sovereign gives the nation a sense that there is something above just the petty little squabbling over this tax policy or that tax policy.
This is why the royals are not permitted to behave in a party political sort of way.
Because you want the country to look up and say, oh, there's something that unifies all of us.
In the United States, because we're not a monarchy, the Supreme Court has served that function before.
That it's above the election cycles.
That it's above public opinion polls.
That the building that it operates in is one of the grandest buildings in our country.
It's a big, nice, solid, grand building with nice, big, serious columns.
And the justices, they don't wear business suits.
They wear robes.
And they're supposed to elevate themselves above this.
That's why they hang out together.
That's why Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were buddies.
And they'd go riding camels, or elephants, rather, and things.
They'd go on vacation.
I think they were genuinely friends, but it was important to see that they were friends.
Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas apparently are kind of friends.
It's good to see that.
America needs something like that.
But the leveling Democrats don't want us to have any dignity at all.
They want to take us all right down to the gutter and totally gut the last institution that ever even sometimes kind of lends itself to dignity.
It's not good.
It's a big fight we're in.
We've got to amp ourselves up for the fight.
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Just before we all break for Christmas, the Senate has passed that ridiculous omnibus bill, $1.7 trillion spending package, passed it on Thursday with a 68 to 29 vote, with at least 18 Republicans joining Democrats to push this massive omnibus over the line.
The Republican senators who voted for it were all the usual suspects, the Romneys of the world, but even some who are generally pretty good.
Really, really pathetic.
I made the point on the show yesterday that no Republican needed to vote for this spending bill.
No Republican needed to do it.
The Democrats could just have owned it.
The Republicans are about to take over the House.
That will give the Republicans a lot more leverage because spending bills, first of all, originate in the House, and the House is needed to get them through to get it up to the presidency.
They could have passed a short-term spending plan if they wanted to avoid the government shutdown, and then they could have had a proper debate about this in January.
They didn't do it because they didn't want to do it.
The Republicans who voted for this didn't vote for it because they had to.
Because what else would happen?
The government would shut down.
The war in Ukraine would collapse.
Whatever nonsense.
No.
They certainly didn't vote for it because it was going to take on any problems that Americans actually care about, like the southern border or the economy.
They didn't do that.
The bill is going to make inflation much worse, and the border is wide open.
And while we're all debating this bill, Joe Biden is flying illegal aliens into red states like my own state of Tennessee.
So it's not that at all.
The Republicans who voted for this wanted to vote for it because we are very often governed not by two parties fighting each other tooth and nail over principle and policy, but rather by a uniparty that sometimes duke out issues in the performance of opposition, but it's really a false opposition.
Now, the House can move on to really serious business.
Now they can finally get into really serious things, such as releasing Trump's tax returns.
Remember the other day when Mitch McConnell, he was interviewed about the omnibus, and he said, the number one priority for Republicans is to the war in Ukraine.
Hello to my little friend.
Remember when he did that?
This might be even more ridiculous than that.
Some Republicans care about the war in Ukraine.
I don't know a single Republican who cares about Trump's taxes.
And so there's the House.
The House is Wile E. Coyote and they're chasing the roadrunner, Donald Trump.
And they say, we've got him now.
And they've got the Acme Anvil.
And they say, we're going to release his tax returns.
The walls are closing in.
We've got him.
Do they have him?
You listening out there.
Probably disproportionately conservative and Republican.
Many of you, I'm sure, love Donald Trump.
Many of you probably don't like Donald Trump that much.
Whatever you think about Trump, is there anything that could be in Donald Trump's taxes that would change your opinion of him?
Anything?
Anything.
Like, I don't think there's really bad stuff in there.
In fact, in the last tax fraud case against the Trump Organization, the one that was brought up in New York, what they discovered was that Trump was actually overpaying his taxes in that he was artificially inflating the value of his businesses to try to get better loans, and it was kind of a complex thing.
But I don't think there's going to be bad stuff.
But even if there were, let's say that Donald Trump...
We're, I don't know, paying off the mob to do some construction project in New York and doing this and burying a body here.
Would any of that change your opinion of Donald Trump?
No, of course not.
So I assume this will be an absolutely...
They're just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
They just want to stop this guy.
And it's a reminder that the Democrats keep trying to stop this guy and kill his campaign in the cradle.
Why?
Why?
It is not because they think that Donald Trump is so super easy to beat in 2024.
If Democrats were making a bet right now...
That Donald Trump is the easiest candidate for them to beat in 2024?
They would be doing everything they can to make sure he's the nominee.
And they would be doing everything they can to kill Ron DeSantis' campaign in the cradle, or kill Tim Scott's campaign in the cradle, or kill Nikki Haley's, or Mike Pence's, or Mike Pompeo's, or Ted Cruz's, or anybody's.
Only some of these people have actually said that they are running or will run, but there are plenty of people, Josh Hawley or whoever, there are a lot of people who could run.
But they're going after Trump.
Why?
Because though they tell us that Trump will be super easy to beat, they don't seem to believe it themselves.
Speaking of changing minds, there's a story, another bit of a downer story.
Well, luckily we'll have an upper before we all head into Christmas with the mailbag and the voicemail bag.
Make sure you get your questions in for after we come back from Christmas.
But this is a little bit of a downer.
Church attendance and general belief in God has dropped in the United States over the past few years.
No surprise there.
COVID appeared to accelerate the trend.
Church attendance has dropped by roughly 45% since the start of the COVID lockdowns.
A Gallup survey released over the summer found that belief in God sunk to an all-time low this year, down to 81%.
It also identified young individuals and leftists as being the most likely not to believe in God.
Nothing really surprising there.
It's actually somewhat edifying or gratifying that at least 81% of people still sort of at least believe in God.
But the key here is shutting down the churches coincided not only with a drop in belief in God, but with an acceleration of a drop in the belief in God.
And I suspect it was probably the main driver.
And it gets back to a principle that we sometimes talk about on the show, which is the principle lex orandi, lex credendi.
The way that you worship will determine the way that you believe.
And we've been using all sorts of Latin phrases on the show this year.
We've got Vox Populi, Vox Dei from Elon Musk.
Now we've got this Lex Arandi, Lex Credendi.
It's really important.
And there is an impulse, even among modern Christian people, to say, well, it doesn't matter how I pray.
I don't need to pray on my knees.
I don't need to receive the sacraments.
I don't need to go to church in person.
I can just do it all kind of in my head.
No, you can't.
You are a body.
You're a soul, but you're also a body.
And we live in time and space, and you've got to actually do this stuff.
And when you pray, and when you go to church, and when you have Christmas dinner, don't forget they shut down our Christmas dinners, too.
And you have your family over, and you even read Twas the Night Before Christmas.
You even engage in certain rituals that are...
Not religious or only tangentially religious, but you do these things that are associated with your religion, you are more likely to believe in your religion.
Because we are not pure reason.
We're not just brains floating in the air or something like that.
We're bodies.
You've got to get it in your muscle memory.
This is why if you want to memorize a poem or a speech or a script or something...
It helps to say it out loud, really exaggerate your mouth movements, because you get it in that muscle memory.
If you want to get good at a sport, I am reliably informed, what you got to do is you got to swing that bat a lot, and you got to get it into your muscle memory.
You don't just read it in a book and think about it.
You don't even just read it in your Bible and think about that and pray in your head.
People are getting arrested out there for praying, even silently, even in their own heads.
So I get why people are intimidated.
Do not be intimidated.
Do not let these liberal, secularist, atheist jerks get you down, stomp on your joy, especially at Christmas time.
Don't forget, our Lord has overcome the world.
Christmas is almost here.
It's almost officially here.
We're just a couple days away.
Many of you are already Daily Wire Plus members, and you get to enjoy the great content that we have released this year.
What is a woman?
Terror on the Prairie.
The greatest lie ever sold.
If you've not been able to enjoy it because you're not a member, then take advantage of our 30% holiday sale.
This also applies to gift membership, so do not miss this opportunity to get everyone on your list an annual gift membership from Daily Wire Plus with code HOLIDAY at checkout.
Since joining Daily Wire Plus, Jordan Peterson has just ramped up his already busy schedule, and we've been reaping the rewards.
Earlier this fall, Jordan and our production team went to Washington, D.C. to film a beautiful and engaging documentary on the Museum of the Bible called Logos and Literacy.
In it, Jordan meets with historians, theologians, and philosophers to discuss the history of the Bible and its influence on the world.
Jordan sent us a note to say how happy he was with the way it turned out.
He actually watched it twice.
And I imagine he said something like, I really liked that.
That was a very good piece of film.
I don't know what he actually said, but I know he said it in a very compelling Canadian sort of voice.
No doubt you will want to do the same.
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Finally, finally, we've arrived at my favorite time of the week.
The mailbag, sponsored by Pure Talk.
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Take it away.
Hi, Michael.
It's Elise again.
I wanted to press you further about a question you received last week about how a wife can serve her husband.
I have also been searching for an answer to this question.
My husband is very self-sufficient and rarely asks me to do anything for him.
I feel like there is this higher goal that God is calling me to as a wife that I'm not reaching simply by doing his laundry when he hasn't done it himself or cooking him dinner or things like that.
All the resources about marriage I've looked into seem to be encouraging the wife to ask for more from her husband, and rarely do they acknowledge God's design for a woman to serve and a man to love, which is frustrating.
If you have any specific examples of deeper ways to fulfill this calling, or if it really is just about the everyday tasks that make his life easier, I would love to hear it.
Thanks so much, and God bless you.
Based.
Next.
Very, very.
Is that what the kids call it these days?
Thank you so much for that excellent question.
Your hunch is right.
Serving your husband and acting in the role of a wife and a mother and the matriarch of a family is not just about the little things.
The little things are a huge part of it because women excel at the little things in a way that men do not.
Men seek after big, glorious endeavors all the time.
And frankly, we often neglect the little things that most productive work is actually made of.
So we are not nearly as organized as women are.
We're often not as meticulous or fastidious in certain sort of banal tasks as women can be.
So those little acts of love, you know, cooking breakfast for your husband or doing the laundry or whatever, those really do matter.
But there is much more to that, to being a wife in a marriage than just that.
I think with Sweet Little Elisa...
She's the only person that I allow to write my show, that I beg to write my show, because she gets it.
And it's not just that she and I have the same mind.
We don't really have the same mind.
We have complementary minds.
She complements things that I miss, that I don't quite see.
She sees it.
And she can say it.
And we speak the same language.
And we often, and this is true of married couples...
We often don't even need to speak to be able to communicate.
Just a little glance or just a little look.
And that happens more and more over time the longer that you are married.
I don't know exactly how to establish that.
But you have to...
I don't know.
And I don't know what your husband does.
So, you know, certain jobs are going to lend themselves more to this than others.
Sweet little Elisa listens to my show every single day.
Because I, of course, force her to.
No, she voluntarily listens to my show.
And she'll give me thoughts on it.
And it's always constructive.
And it's...
She's just really plugged in.
She knows exactly what I am doing.
Probably more so than I even know what she is doing.
And I live where she works.
You know?
And I am the father of the children who she is raising.
And, you know, the other things that she's doing as well.
But we're just so...
Plugged in on what each other is doing that I can say, it can be 10 o'clock at night, I'll be lying there, I'll say, I don't know what to talk about.
And she'll say, oh yeah, well did you see this thing today?
You've got to put this in the show.
And I think, not only did this woman cook me dinner and clean my clothing, she just wrote my show.
She just did my whole show.
It's pretty good.
You want to be involved in pretty much every aspect of your lives together.
Next question.
Hello, Miguel.
You have talked about the rapidly decreasing sperm count since the 1950s.
Joe Rogan has had on several people as well discussing this over the past couple years.
Given this, if the trend continues, aren't we as a society obligated to embrace more artificial forms of reproduction like IVF? Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea of this at all, but if it continues to get harder and harder to reproduce, And we do nothing as a society, say, decreasing pesticides, petrochemicals, banning vegans.
Do we have any other choice as a species?
Also, as a note, I expect this problem to continue, especially with the trans agenda making a bunch of our kids infertile.
I guess the question is, would God rather our species go extinct or have some fertilized eggs frozen away?
It's a tough question.
I don't think it's a tough question, because good ends do not justify immoral means.
And I think that IVF is intrinsically immoral.
And I know it's a tough one, because a lot of people out there got their kids through IVF, and a lot of people out there may have been conceived themselves through IVF. This is not to say that you're certainly going to burn in hell.
This is not to say that the kids conceived through IVF are not as valuable as the kids conceived not through IVF. Any more than it would be to say that a kid conceived through rape is somehow not as valuable as a kid conceived in the conjugal act between a married mother and father.
But it is to say that certain actions are immoral.
And I think that in the case of IVF, it's immoral.
For one, you're separating the conjugal act from the procreative act, which is disordered and I think gravely sinful.
Even if you're not willing to go with me that far...
You are establishing the domination of technology and industry and perhaps even the state over the origin and destiny of human life.
Very, very dangerous and, I think, quite immoral.
Third, the way that you get the male contribution to IVF is...
Intrinsically disordered and deeply shameful and the sort of thing that when one does it, one closes one's blinds and there's a good reason for that.
So you wouldn't want to do that either.
And then of course, those are the four problems before you even get to the issue of you're creating human beings in a petri dish and then freezing them away indefinitely.
Not acceptable.
And then in some cases, you're implanting them, and then it doesn't catch.
And then people will kill them for abortion if too many of the embryos catch in the womb.
And this doesn't even take into account what happens when...
People mix up the petri dishes and they put the wrong baby into the wrong mother.
And it doesn't take into account what happens through surrogacy, where women are basically rented out as cattle.
They're rented out as just vessels by wealthy gay men or even just wealthy couples who struggle with infertility.
So the whole process is...
Immoral.
And you wouldn't see it necessarily when you just think, well, I want to have a kid and this is a technology to do it.
What could be wrong?
Isn't that pro-life?
No.
It is a good end.
The kid is a good end.
But good ends do not justify immoral means.
Another reason is...
The sperm counts have dropped in no small part because people are just fatter and lazier than they used to be.
So obesity has skyrocketed, and sedentary lifestyles have become much more widespread.
But there are multiple studies that show that when people lose some weight, when guys lose some weight and get off the couch, their sperm count jumps back up pretty quickly.
Maybe not to the level that it ought to be, because environmental factors and chemicals and things like that play a role in it too.
But no, I don't think that...
Any sort of good end would justify immoral actions.
We're not consequentialists like the Libs.
But in this case, there are so many simpler remedies than that.
Okay, next question.
Hey, Michael.
I'm a long-time listener, but this is my first time submitting a question for the mailbag.
I'm a homeschooling Latin Mass mom of three little girls.
You had mentioned on your show the other day about near occasions of sin, and that's a perfect segue into my question for you.
What do you think about people kissing before they get married, like even if you're engaged and all of that?
To me, that's always seemed like a near occasion of sin because, I mean, we know where kissing leads.
So, just wanted to get your opinion on that.
Thanks and love the show.
Great question.
You might have seen my heart was fluttering out of my chest when you said I'm a Latin mass attending, homeschooling mother who listens to your show all the time.
So that's great.
And not at all surprised by your extremely trad question.
Is it okay to forget about the other stuff people do before marriage?
Is it okay to kiss before marriage?
I think it probably is.
I think it probably is.
But I take seriously your fear here, which is we all know what kissing leads to.
And that's true.
I guess it depends on the kind of kissing and where you're kissing and the circumstances of the kissing.
That's true.
But we also know where going out to dinner leads.
Going out to dinner, that's what happens before you start kissing, and kissing is what happens before you start doing that other thing, and then doing that other thing is what happens before you start doing that other thing, as you're definitely not supposed to do before marriage.
So one has to have some prudence here.
And a kiss can be an elevating experience.
I don't think that a kiss necessarily needs to lead you into the willful entertainment of impure thoughts and desires.
I don't think that it necessarily needs to lead you into committing a sinful act or anything like that.
But it's something you've got to be careful of.
It's true.
Hi, Michael.
My name is Courtney, and I've been listening to you for, I don't know, about a year or so now.
I discovered you around the same time I became a subscriber to Daily Wire.
Anyways, I have a cousin who just posted on social media about a week ago that he just became a certified Reiki person, or teacher, or whatever you call it.
And, uh...
After watching your interview with Angela, I got very, very uncomfortable with this.
And I was just wondering what you thought I should do.
If I should just pray for him, talk to him, something.
I'm not really sure.
Anyways, love your show and can't wait to see what you say.
Thank you.
Have a very Merry Christmas.
Thank you.
I hope that you have a very Merry Christmas as well.
Yeah, that's bad juju.
Your buddy should not be doing Reiki stuff.
And he probably doesn't know.
I mean, I've known people, and I've had friends of friends who have gotten into Reiki, and they don't know.
I mean, they're just hippies.
They don't know any better.
So, yes, I would pray for your friend, but I probably would confront him about it, depending on how close you guys are.
You know, you could do it in a funny way.
It doesn't have to be this very somber, well, you know, I have been running this over in my head for two weeks, and we have to sit down and have an intervention.
You could just say, hey, buddy, you know, you're doing the Reiki thing.
Just so you know, you're worshipping demons, and you shouldn't do that, because demons are real, and they're very bad, and the thing you're doing is not good.
And so, bro, just quit worshipping the demons and, like, go to church and be a normal person, please.
That's one way to do it.
It's kind of funny, but it's also true.
There's actually more voice mailbag that I want to get to.
We will get to it on the member block, but I don't want to leave without getting into at least one real old-fashioned written mailbag.
From Austin.
Hello, Michael.
I'm 21 years old.
I have a very conflicting situation at the moment.
I have not so slowly watched my 12-year-old sister go from first dating one of her female friends to calling herself non-binary.
To now starting to go by a guy's name.
I'd like to speak up to my dad about my problems with it.
However, he's always right and will call me uneducated if I communicate my points in a less than perfect manner.
I'm going home for Christmas, and I fully expect to be corrected if I say her pronouns or name the wrong way.
Any advice?
Thanks for the great podcast and Merry Christmas.
Oh, that's a tough one, Austin.
And it's weird that it's your dad who's really into all the weird trans stuff.
Sometimes mothers are really into it, but usually dads are a little more level-headed and not as brought in emotionally on when their kids get into weird sex stuff.
So that's really bizarre.
It's really funny that you are sort of the rational one in this family of libs.
But, you know, she's your sister.
You have to love her and should love her.
And you have to respect your parents and honor your parents.
But you can respectfully say, you know, Dad, this is really bad, and it's going to really screw up your daughter, and here's the evidence, and here are all the detransitioners who talk about what a terrible thing this is, and actually men just can't become women, and women can't become men, and I don't know if your family has any even hint of religion, but you could say this is actually opposed by the church and the church, you know, and you guys, you just lost it here.
And dad and mama and sis, I'm happy to love you and honor you as much as I possibly can, but you can't make me lie.
Okay, so you don't need to walk in there and host a screening of, you know, what is a woman or anything like that.
But you really can't lie.
So I wouldn't use the pronouns.
You can try to avoid it to keep the peace at Christmas, maybe.
You probably can't avoid it, though, totally.
I would just...
One has to speak the truth in love.
So make sure you do the love part.
But you've got to tell the truth.
Now, speaking of Walsh, it is the season of good tidings and cheer.
And...
I am forced under duress and coercion here by the Daily Wire and by some bets that apparently we have made to give just a really big shout out to the old big burly bearded sweet daddy himself, the one and only Matthew Walsh.
His sweet baby gang is second to no other sweet baby gang.
I just can't get enough of this guy.
Who wrote this?
Just ask sweet little Elisa.
She bought me a ton of Mount Walsh merchandise for my birthday.
Now you're making me lie.
And it's so good that I asked for more of it for Christmas.
He's got this incredible superfan gift bundle, which...
As a superfan myself, I've been trying to get my hands on.
The bundle comes with a ton of What is a Woman stuff and cooking supplies and stickers and even a Johnny the Walrus plushie.
I actually do want a Johnny the Walrus plushie.
Those are great.
Which, if you haven't read it, Johnny the Walrus, it's a great book.
And it's got words in it.
That's nice.
They put that in there.
Anyway, I'm just so happy to be buddies with Matt.
And I definitely was not forced to say any of this because of some election bet or whatever that I don't even remember.
All of this comes from the heart of And it's just a spur-of-the-moment inclination to give the man praise that he deserves more than anybody else here at The Daily Wire.
Certainly deserves more praise than whoever wrote this.
Matt, you're truly one of a kind.
Matt Walsh Show, streaming every Monday through Friday, 1.30 Eastern, dailywire.com.
We've got a lot more show coming up.
It's Fake Headline Friday, so I need your help.
Before you all go to the airport and miss your flights because the snowstorm is canceling every flight in the country, before you head down, hunker down, and eat some nice turkey or seven fishes if you're Italian, I need you to help me figure out which is the fake headline for Fake Headline Friday.