Ep. 1153 - Andrew Tate Arrested After Fight With Greta Thunberg
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The most controversial man on the Internet gets arrested after attacking St. Greta of the Sailboat, Pope Benedict dies; and a newly elected Republican congressman pretends to be an educated, gay, Jewish banker.
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A newly elected Republican congressman got caught pretending to be an educated gay Jewish banker when none of those things were true.
And the head of NASA says that China might be on the verge of conquering the moon.
We have no time to waste.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
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Where to begin?
Where to...
Do we begin with Andrew Tate?
Do we begin with the Pope?
Do we begin with the Chinese about to conquer the moon?
No.
I want to begin with George Santos.
I'm not saying it's the most important story, but it's the one that tickles me the most.
George Santos, the newly elected Republican congressman who has been caught telling some lies, embellishing his resume just a little bit to the point where we don't know if anything about this guy's biography is true or not.
George Santos claimed that he is Jewish, that a family name of his is Zabrovsky, but that he didn't carry that family name on because after the Second World War, the family wanted to hide that they were Jewish.
He claimed that he worked for Goldman Sachs, and not only that he worked for Goldman Sachs, but he actually went to Anthony Scaramucci's SALT conference, a financial conference, and criticized Goldman Sachs while he was working for them.
He claimed that he is a graduate of Baruch College, NYU, that he attended Horace Mann School, which is a very elite prep school in New York.
He claimed, he claims that he is gay.
And then it turns out maybe none of that is true.
And when I say maybe none of that is true, I mean even the gay part might not be true.
Because it turns out that this guy was married to a woman recently.
Less than two weeks before he launched his first congressional campaign in 2020.
How this is only coming out now, I don't really know.
I thought Maggie Haberman actually had a pretty good observation on this, which is that this is in many ways a story about the collapse of local news.
That national news is not paying attention to every congressional race, and so you only find out about this stuff after the guys get elected.
They should have figured out that none of this was true.
He eventually came to admit that he's not Jewish.
But that he said he was Jew-ish, meaning he had a little bit of Jewish heritage in his family line.
Well, he didn't really work for Goldman Sachs, but he kind of worked for a company that, I don't know, had a bank account or something.
So, you know, it's kind of like working for Goldman Sachs.
And the education stuff was just completely made up.
I mean, there's no record of any of this stuff.
I can't go that hard against George Santos.
Because...
I think, look, maybe he's got some Jewish blood back in his family life.
I don't know, maybe he does.
Maybe there was a Jewish milkman somewhere in Latin America or wherever the Santoses are from.
But whether he's Jewish or not, he's not one 1,024th Native American, right?
George Santos hasn't based his entire career on pretending to be an ethnicity that he is not.
Unlike, say...
U.S. Senator, former Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.
George Santos lied about his education.
That's true.
Certainly wouldn't be the first politician to do it.
In fact, the sitting Democrat president of the United States, Joe Biden, had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race specifically for lying about his education.
What law school did you attend and where did you place in that class?
And the other question is, could you quickly...
I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.
I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.
In the first year in law school, I decided I didn't want to be in law school, and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class, and then decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school, and in fact ended up in the top half of my class.
I won the international moot court competition.
I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year.
I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits, only need 123 credits, and I'd be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you'd like, Frank.
None of that was true.
Not one single thing there was true.
The only claim that Joe Biden made...
Where he continues to maintain that it was true, but there's no evidence that it was, is that he won the mock trial competition.
But there's no evidence of that.
He didn't graduate in the top half of his class.
He didn't graduate with three degrees.
He wasn't the political science student of the year.
None of that.
He didn't have an academic scholarship, a full academic right.
He was there on financial aid because his family didn't have a lot of money.
But none of that was true.
He completely made that up.
The guy's the sitting president.
So I can't Get all that angry at George Santos.
He's clearly a weird guy.
He's clearly not to be trusted.
He's clearly just a lying politician, like so many of them are.
But he doesn't seem to be especially a lying politician, certainly no more so than Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
To me, what this story is about is not about this unbelievable, unprecedented, crazy congressman.
No, they're all, not all of them, but many of them are extremely nuts.
And it's not about even the collapse of local news that that plays part of it.
This is a story about what confers prestige in the United States.
This is a guy who probably is not Jewish and who is pretending to be Because, although we are told that in America, the way to have privilege and the way to gain prestige is to be a white man, that isn't actually true.
That is why white people regularly pretend to be members of aggrieved racial minority groups.
That's why Rachel Dolezal pretends to be black.
That's why that white Jewish NYU professor pretends to be black.
That is why George Santos is pretending to be Jewish.
He probably couldn't claim to be black, but he can claim to be a member of a different racial minority.
George Santos may or may not be a gay guy.
I don't know.
He might be sexually attracted to men.
He may not be.
I don't know.
But what we are told in our society is that if you're straight, you've got it all going on for you.
You've got all the privilege.
And if you're a gay guy, you're a member of an aggrieved, terrible minority group.
Yeah, except it's the people who can claim membership in those aggrieved victim groups.
Those are the people who have the actual privilege in the United States.
I was explaining this story to some friends and family members of mine.
They said, wait, the guy pretended to be Jewish?
Hold on, you're telling me the guy embellished the fact that he's gay?
Yes.
Because those things confer status.
And the groups that you don't want to be a part of, the groups that are actually ostracized in our culture are the straight people and the white people and the Christians.
And it's exactly the inverse of what the libs tell us that it is.
Speaking of prestige, the top G, Andrew Tate, has been arrested in Romania.
Who is Andrew Tate?
I don't really know.
I have watched some videos from the man because my producers forced me to.
They said, Michael, we want your reaction to this guy.
He's taken over the internet.
He became the most googled man in the world.
He's clearly pretty wealthy.
He claims to be a trillionaire.
I don't think he's really a trillionaire.
But he claims to be wealthy.
And he's gotten a lot of attention because he says things that are sometimes very right-wing.
I don't really think of him as a conservative or a total right-winger, but he says certain things that clearly upset the liberal establishment.
And so he's been arrested in Romania for sex trafficking.
And he got arrested, by the way, right after he got into a Twitter fight with Greta Thunberg.
I think that was probably the straw that broke the camel's back.
Forget sex trafficking, forget tax fraud, forget whatever they're going to throw at him.
You are not allowed to criticize St.
Greta of the Blessed Sailboat.
If you do that, you will be destroyed by our liberal establishment.
So he's arrested.
The prosecutors have alleged that Andrew Tate and his brother are suspects in an organized crime ring that sexually exploited at least six women who were allegedly recruited, housed, and forced into performing porn videos for sale online.
Now, I know that the authorities are corrupt and And the system is set up to destroy anybody who in any way criticizes the liberal establishment and you can indict a ham sandwich and all of that.
But, what was the guy doing in Romania?
Why did this guy, he lived there, why did he move to Romania in recent years?
Which is kind of a corrupt country that's known for sex trafficking and all sorts of nefarious activities.
Well, I get that the authorities are corrupt and the system's designed to destroy anybody who questions the liberal establishment and you're going to die to him sandwich.
But hasn't the guy admitted on camera many, many times to running an OnlyFans agency and to being a pimp, to just put it really bluntly?
Isn't that a lot of his career is actually bragging about being a pimp?
And so he brags about being a pimp, and then he gets arrested for being a pimp.
I understand that the pimps and the hustlers and the sex traffickers on the left, they don't get arrested.
They get to continue their criminal activities for decades and decades.
Jeffrey Epstein gets to live on his island, and even after he is arrested, he gets a sweetheart deal at the Palm Beach fake prison.
I'm not denying that there's some double standard, but the guy's a pimp, right?
Is the guy a pimp?
I don't know.
That's kind of what it seemed like to me.
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The story that we're being told about the Andrew Tate arrest is obviously silly.
Part of the story was that Andrew Tate gets into this Twitter fight with Greta Thunberg, where he's bragging about how he's got all these cars and they spew all of this terrible poison into the atmosphere.
And then Greta responded in this kind of childish way.
And then, but then when Andrew Tate released a response to that, he had a takeout pizza box.
And the authorities were able to locate him by looking at the address on the takeout pizza box.
And that was obviously bogus.
That was clearly a lie because we know that the authorities have been tracking Andrew Tate.
If you seriously believe that Andrew Tate has not been surveilled by intelligence agencies for the past many months, then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
This is the most talked about guy in the world.
He's got this kind of weird, shady business life.
He's suddenly making lots of money.
Obviously, the authorities knew where this guy was, and then the pizza box thing was just the excuse to go in and get him.
Is it fair that they went after him when they don't prosecute their own pimps and hustlers and human traffickers?
No.
But I said this in my very first video that I did when I didn't know anything about Andrew Tate, and they put the clips of him in front of me.
And I said, well, he's saying many things that are at least somewhat true, some things that are entirely true.
And he's clearly got the right...
His heart is almost in the right place.
He's trying for something.
He's questioning the liberal establishment.
He's beginning to grapple with the fact that maybe God does exist.
Maybe there is a moral order.
But I don't quite understand it yet.
But the guy's a pimp, and he's got to stop pimping, okay?
It's not...
It is not based to live your life like a street-hustling degenerate.
It's not based and conservative and trad and all of that to run an OnlyFans agency.
It's not based and trad and conservative to be in your 30s and not even looking to getting married.
If you're not going to get married, looking to joining the priesthood or consecrating your singlehood.
But bragging about how many women you sleep with and driving your Bugattis around, that's not...
You play stupid games, you're going to win stupid prizes, okay?
That's all I'm saying.
If you go on air and you question the liberal establishment and you attack the powers that be, and then you brag about committing actions that can be prosecuted, don't be surprised when you get prosecuted, okay?
Just a basic rule of politics.
It's true that your enemies, if they have sufficient power, can get you on anything.
Don't give them an opening.
Not the wisest thing to do.
Speaking of weird sex stuff, terrible story out of Texas.
This is a story that we've been tracking, I guess, for years at this point.
The story of Jeffrey Younger.
You've probably heard of it.
Jeffrey Younger is this father who is trying to save his son from being castrated and transed by his lunatic ex-wife.
Jeffrey Younger, he's in Texas.
We've followed this story pretty closely.
And the Texas Supreme Court has just ruled against Jeffrey Younger preventing the chemical castration of his son.
So, this means now that Younger's ex-wife can take their son to California to have him quote-unquote medically transitioned.
This mother is a complete loony tune, obviously doing very, very evil things.
She's a pediatrician.
Jeff Younger has accused this woman of using their children to help advertise her inclusive gender-affirming practice.
So surprise, surprise, this woman's job is to trans the kids, and she decides one day that her son is really a girl.
And when their son first started saying this, Jeff Younger pulled out his phone.
He said, I want to document this for the future when this becomes a Inevitably a legal matter.
Son, why do you think you're a girl?
You're a boy, right?
No.
I'm a girl.
Who told you you were a girl?
Mommy.
When did she tell you you were a girl?
Because I love girls.
Oh, I see.
So mommy told you you were a girl?
Uh-huh.
You know, I was divorced a few years ago.
When my child...
Hit his third birthday, and this happened during the divorce.
Hit his third birthday.
He started telling me that he was a girl.
And I immediately pulled out my video and videotaped him and asked him, why do you think you're a girl?
You can see this video at SaveJames.com.
It's the first time I heard about this.
Okay.
What happened was all of his authority figures, right?
His mom, his sisters, his older sisters, his teacher, the policeman at school, the librarian, the principals, the lunch lady, all of his authority figures were telling him he was a girl.
And I was the only one.
And me and his priest were the only one telling him that he was born.
And he really just didn't believe me.
Absolutely heartbreaking story.
Your heart breaks for this dad, Jeff Younger.
Your heart breaks, obviously, for the kid.
It's difficult not to be filled with a righteous anger at this horrible mother who is castrating her kid.
Everyone is viewing this as a story about transgenderism.
The new gender ideology.
Or as a story about grooming.
Sure, it's all of those things.
Fundamentally, this is a story about divorce.
When did all of this start to happen?
When did the kid first say that he's a girl?
When did the mother first start moving to mess up his genitals and his hormones?
You heard Jeff Younger say it.
It was during the divorce.
Right during the divorce, coincidentally, the kid starts to go kind of crazy, or the mother drives the kid crazy.
Many such cases, that's what happens.
Why is the kid in this terrible state that he's in?
Because Jeff Younger has no say over his kid's life because they're divorced, and because our current divorce regime allows crazy mothers to leave whenever they want to.
Again, I don't know the details of their divorce, maybe.
He instigated, I don't know.
But when divorce happens, the fathers have very little say.
In the raising of their kids.
A lot of times conservatives, when we fight political battles, we just want to treat symptoms.
We want to treat the immediate problem that we're looking at right now.
And so in this case, it's so clear.
You want to treat the transgenderism.
We've got to stop the transgenderism.
We've got to stop the grooming of kids.
Yeah, that's the immediate problem.
But the cause of that problem, the sickness that is driving it, especially in this case, We're good to go.
Marriage as the bedrock political institution is predicated on the fact that men and women are different and complementary to one another.
But there are many so-called conservatives today who accept the absurd notion of gay marriage.
And they do it because they have gay friends and they don't want to seem mean and they don't want to seem phobic.
But put all of that aside.
I don't think it's mean or phobic or anything like that to acknowledge that marriage can only have one meaning, which is the perpetual union of a man and a woman for the good of the spouses and the sake of the generation and education of children.
If we are to accept that men and women are really different, the second we lose that, The second we stop defending marriage, the second, forget about the gay marriage redefinition thing for a second.
The second that we grant no-fault divorce, the second that we grant that marriage is just, I don't know, a consensual temporary union of two people while they titillate one another, and then once the thrill is gone, they leave and move on.
Children be damned, family be damned.
The second that we admit that, and many conservatives admit that, many conservatives have no problem with lax divorce laws.
Many conservatives have no problem redefining marriage.
Many conservatives have no problem with transgenderism.
As long as you're 18, as long as you make the decision to chop off your genitals.
Well, if we're going to grant that, then even the conservatives are not going to admit there's a difference between men and women.
And then they're certainly not going to admit that there's a difference in the roles of men and women.
They're certainly not going to admit that men have a leadership role.
Husbands have a leadership role within the marriage to be the head of one's own household.
And so the problem is just going to fester.
And we can whine until we're blue in the face about transgenderism and the child abuse.
But you're not going to address the root causes of it.
So then what are we even talking about?
It's a sad story, and there are going to be many, many more sad stories just like this if we don't get serious about what is allowing these things to happen.
We should not be distracted by the crazy consequences of the political regime that we're living under.
We've got to get down to the problem.
When did all this stuff start cropping up?
Why did it start cropping up?
It is a consequence of the sexual revolution.
It's a consequence of the 1960s.
And a lot of Republicans and conservatives are okay with that.
It's why I can't really totally defend Andrew Tate.
Because Andrew Tate loves the sexual revolution.
Andrew Tate has profited.
He's made millions and millions of dollars off of the sexual revolution.
Okay, I guess you can buy some more Bugattis.
But you're not going to conserve anything of our traditional culture.
You're not going to stand up for civilization if you're doing that.
And frankly, the Republican establishment, the rhino, conservative, squishy establishment, we're basically all Andrew Tate in this situation.
We've traded our patrimony and our civilization for some fancy Bugattis and some fun with loose women on the side.
Not great stuff, okay?
Not great stuff at all.
I don't know about you, but it seemed like the Christmas season came and went this year, didn't it?
One minute, you're sitting there around the tree opening presents.
The next, it's time to take the tree down.
Although on that point, I've got to tell you folks, I know people have taken their decorations down.
It is still Christmas.
Christmas is not one day.
Christmas is 12 days.
That's why there's a song called The 12 Days of Christmas.
Okay, so if you took your decorations down...
Put them back up.
You have three more days.
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Speaking of transgenderism, the trans bathroom issue is almost certainly going to be headed to the Supreme Court.
This is a story not a lot of people have talked about, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals just held up in a 7-4 decision that the St.
John's County School Board policy barring girls who identify as boys from using the high school boys restroom does not violate the student's constitutional right to equal protection or Title IX. Title IX is the federal civil rights law that bars discrimination based on sex, which the Supreme Court has already said covers sexual orientation and gender identity, so they've already squished into the transgender camp on that.
But the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision...
It differs on the substance from a decision two years ago by the Fourth Circuit which struck down a similar policy in Virginia.
So what that means is you've now got a disagreement among the circuits.
And disagreement among the circuits is when you get a case to go up to the Supreme Court.
So it seems very likely to me that the Supreme Court not only will be presented with this case, but will have to accept this case.
And so that means that you will finally get A clear national decision on the transgender bathroom issue, which has been brewing now for, what, eight or nine years?
I mean, this has been going on since the Obama administration.
You saw this first push to let boys into the girls' room, and then Obama...
Then there were laws in North Carolina to stop the boys from going into the girls' room.
Then Obama couldn't handle that.
He said, nope, we're going to...
Dog nabbit, we're going to let those boys go into the girls' room.
And so they made a federal policy.
They used the Department of Education to try to force boys into the girls' room.
You saw a big political battle for years about this.
Now it could possibly be resolved.
Some people are not going to be happy about that.
You're going to have the extreme libertarian types say, well, the government should have no say over this.
Come on, the government, we need to get big government out of our bathrooms.
And if a school district wants boys to go into the girls' bathrooms, well, that's the school district's decision.
And you, or the real extreme libertarians would say, use whatever bathroom you want, you know, you're fully autonomous, do whatever you want with your own body.
Then you're going to see people who are a little bit more conservative, they're going to say, well, I don't want boys in the girls' bathroom, but I don't want the federal government making this decision, I want it to be left to the states.
You saw a similar argument with regard to abortion and marriage, by the way.
There are some people who believe that we shouldn't ban abortion nationally.
We should just leave it to the states.
That's the kind of middle ground conservative libertarian position.
Or with marriage.
Well, we shouldn't have a national marriage definition.
We should just leave it to the states.
If Massachusetts wants to redefine marriage to effectively abolish what marriage is, that's their right to do so.
And if Texas and Tennessee want to keep the traditional definition of marriage, well, that's their right to do so too.
And I just don't think that works.
I think on a lot of issues that does work.
Okay, I totally support subsidiarity.
I think federalism can be a wonderful thing.
And on all sorts of issues, maybe some gun laws, maybe even drug laws in some cases.
There's all sorts of cases in which the decision should be made at the most local level possible.
But when we get down to really fundamental stuff, like what is a man, what is a woman...
I don't think you can leave that up to the states.
Antonin Scalia made this point, actually, on the question of gay marriage.
He said, I don't think you can just leave it up to the states, because what happens then when a married couple of two men leave Massachusetts and they move to Tennessee?
Is their marriage, quote-unquote, going to be recognized?
On certain really basic things, you need to come to some conclusions if society is going to do anything at all.
The principle of subsidiarity, the principle of federalism, is that you always want questions to be answered at the most local level possible.
Well, you can't answer questions of what is a man, what is a woman, what is marriage, and really basic stuff at the county level or at the township level.
Certain things really do have to be answered at the tippy-top level.
That's why we have a federal government.
That's why we have a national capital.
So I think we can win this battle.
I do think the Supreme Court reads public opinion surveys.
I think the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
I think it's very, very clear that the vast majority of Americans oppose this transgender nonsense, especially as it pertains to kids.
I think so.
I don't know.
Neil Gorsuch has been really kind of squishy on this issue, but I think we could do it.
Republicans just need to cut out the you-do-you kind of claptrap, okay?
Oren McIntyre, one of my favorite tweeters, has a line.
He articulates a well-established principle, and he articulates it pretty clearly.
He has said that the side that wants to win is always going to defeat the side that just wants to be left alone.
Really important principle for politics.
The side that wants to win is always going to defeat the side that just wants to be left alone.
We should win this decision.
It is absolutely unacceptable to let boys use the girls' bathroom, especially in high schools.
The Daily Wire broke the story that probably threw Virginia to the Republicans in the election of Glenn Youngkin, which is that Loudoun County schools, because of their stupid bathroom policy, allowed boys to go into the girl's bathroom, and a girl was raped by a boy in the girl's bathroom, and then the superintendent of the school covered it and a girl was raped by a boy in the girl's bathroom, and then the superintendent of the school covered it up because it was clear that this policy enabled this kind What happened?
The kid did the same damn thing at the other school.
This is unacceptable.
It leads to terrible practical outcomes, and it is just anthropologically absurd that boys can really be girls and girls can really be boys.
We need to just say no to this.
And we need to stand firm on that.
We have to have the courage to wield the force of our political order to say no.
Just say no.
Other governments are doing it.
Even the Swiss are doing it.
Is there any nicer country than the Swiss?
These guys are so go along to get along, they remain neutral in every single war.
And the Swiss government has just rejected transgender ideology.
The Swiss Federal Council just said, in response to two proposals from Parliament, Quote, the binary gender model is still strongly anchored in Swiss society.
The social preconditions for the introduction of a third gender or for a general waiver of the gender entry in the civil registry currently are not there.
The government has to weigh in on certain things.
If even the Swiss can do it, we should be able to do it too.
France, you know, for goodness sakes, the French, this was last summer, I think.
Emmanuel Macron, leader of France, came out and he said, wokeism is an American export and we don't want it.
This wokeism, this political correctness.
This is France.
This is a pretty lib society.
They say, but this woke thing, all this crazy, we don't do that here.
That's foreign.
That's something that the American society is exporting around the world.
And I think he was right about that.
The silver lining in the storm cloud of all this transgenderism is, I think, that it is reminding Republicans and conservatives who have gone real squishy and become real relativists in recent years, who have unfortunately...
We've accepted the worst premises of the Enlightenment and of the last 300-400 years in philosophical history to ultimately conclude that we really can't really know anything at all and what is good and what is bad and what is true and what is false and maybe one man's good is another man's bad and you do you and I, we can't, you know, all of this silly nonsense.
What the transgender issue, I think, is showing Republicans is there are some absolutes.
There are some things that we can know.
It's not all just relativism, throw your hands up in the air, give everyone maximal individual autonomy because we can't really conclude anything at all.
Uncertain things we actually can know, okay?
Like when you start chopping off kids' genitals, we know that's bad.
And we can say it, and we can stand up for it, and we have to stand up for that.
Which brings me to, speaking of the development of thought and attacking the tyranny of subjectivism and trying to reestablish absolute truths in a confused world, Pope Benedict.
Pope Benedict died at the ripe old age of 95 over the Christmas break.
And Pope Benedict, a Marlboro man, by the way.
So of all the many aspects of his legacy that are going to be debated in the coming years and decades, I'm just waiting for Philip Morris to put out a bargaining campaign because Pope Benedict lived for a very long time and he famously liked to smoke a cigarette every now and again.
But that was the least important aspect of Pope Benedict's legacy.
It is entirely possible that I would not be Catholic today if not for Pope Benedict.
Specifically because Pope Benedict Re-permitted the traditional Latin Mass after decades and decades of official suppression from the Vatican.
And the Latin Mass, the traditional Latin Mass, which is almost 2,000 years old, which is about a lot more than just the use of Latin in the liturgy, but it's about the entire focus and orientation of the liturgy.
The traditional Latin Mass, everybody is focused at the altar.
The priest is facing the altar.
He's not facing the people.
It's oriented toward God, the true object of worship.
It's much more solemn.
It's much more reverent.
Pope Benedict re-permitted that.
And it was the Latin Mass, the smells and the bells and the mystery and the reverence and the elevation that helped me in my reversion to the church.
But he did so much more than that.
He offered the Regensburg Address.
I think it's probably the most important speech of the 21st century.
In which he attacked the tyranny of subjectivism.
In which he attacked this ridiculous idea in our modern society that we can't really know anything at all.
In which he, I think, completely gutted the pretenses of scientism.
The idea that we can't really know anything other than...
What exists in the physical world.
So, so important.
And it was really important that Pope Benedict did this because this is an aspect of his legacy that not a lot of people are talking about.
But we think of Pope Benedict as a conservative, much more conservative than the current Pope, Pope Francis.
But Pope Benedict started out as a liberal.
Pope Benedict was one of the framers of the Second Vatican Council, which was the most liberal event in the history of the Catholic Church.
He was one of the theologians who framed the council.
And he reminds me a lot, actually, of Wordsworth, of the poet William Wordsworth, who started out as a liberal and became a conservative.
All of these romantic poets started out, they were all in thrall of the French Revolution.
And it was just, in that age, to be young, it was bliss.
And they were all just so gung-ho about this liberal revolution.
And then most of them died young.
But Wordsworth lived to the age of 80, I believe.
And he became much more conservative because he saw the fruits of that liberal revolution play out.
And I think you can see a similar path in the life of Pope Benedict.
Pope Benedict, an absolute genius.
I mean, just the most brilliant theologian and prominent theologian of his age.
And I think you see, after the Second Vatican Council and this liberalization within the church, You see Benedict then trying to constrain that, trying to limit that.
Uh, And then in recent years, he's written about the spirit of the 1960s and how poisonous it was for the civilization and how it had effects within the church, but it was also caused in part by the church and by cracks and fissures within the church.
And it...
His legacy will be debated and significant for decades, if not centuries, but would encourage everybody, Catholic or not, maybe just say a prayer for Pope Benedict, a very, very important figure, and one of those who, even if he had been much more liberal in his youth, has helped to point the way back Toward a more sensible, sane, conservative, Christian civilization.
And that, I suspect, will be his legacy.
You know, we've got the voice mailbag coming up on Friday brought to us by Pure Talk.
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Speaking of Supreme Pontiffs, real and imagined, a wonderful way to start the new year.
For the first time in 40 years, Dr.
Fauci is no longer in the government.
Dr.
Fauci is gone.
We just breathe a sigh of relief.
His last day of public service was December 30th.
He recently sat down with the New York Times for an interview.
So here he goes.
This is, after half a century, Fauci prepares for life after government.
And I love this.
This is the first line of the article.
The walls in Dr.
Anthony S. Fauci's home office are adorned with portraits of him, drawn and painted by some of his many fans.
The most striking one is by the singer Joan Baez.
The two of them, he said, have become pretty good friends over the years.
Tells you everything you need to know about Anthony Fauci.
The walls of his home office are covered in pictures of himself.
This is quite a stark contrast with the late Pope Benedict.
For many modern people, Dr.
Fauci is the Pope.
And certainly for the two and a half years of the height of the COVID hysteria, Dr.
Fauci had more, not only scientific, but spiritual authority than anybody else on earth.
He really was the secular Pope.
And you see this huge contrast.
Pope Benedict...
One of the most humble men in public life ever, certainly of our lifetimes.
Dr.
Fauci, one of the most prideful men ever.
He said, I am science.
I am the representative of science.
Whatever I decree is the truth.
Dr.
Fauci never admitted he was wrong about anything.
Even when he got caught in lies, even when he admitted the lies, he didn't want to acknowledge that there was anything wrong about that.
And it is no coincidence, no mere coincidence at least, that Dr.
Fauci's life's work has been about just inculcating this dictatorship of scientism.
That if something can't be looked at under a microscope, it's not real, it has no authority.
Dr.
Fauci says, because I am the scientist, I don't have political views.
He actually said this.
I'm slightly paraphrasing.
I don't have political views that I make public.
I just talk about the science.
I just talk about what works.
But what does that mean?
If you're advocating for political lockdowns, if you're advocating for mass vaccinations and even coerced vaccinations in some cases, that involves all sorts of philosophical, epistemological, ontological, theological premises that he's not acknowledging.
Why does this man have the right to force his opinion on everybody else?
Why does this man think that his scientific observations therefore lead to the conclusion that we need to lock down the economy, for instance?
All of these philosophical premises that he says, well, you just have to accept all of them because I am the science.
He doesn't even acknowledge that they exist.
That is scientism.
So much of Benedict's work It was opposed to that.
It was about knocking down scientism.
Benedict actually, I guess this was right when he became Pope, though it's only been released now.
He released a spiritual testament.
It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's the final part.
Benedict wrote, stand firm in the faith, do not be confused.
Often it seems as if science, on the one hand the natural sciences, on the other historical research, especially the exegesis of the holy scriptures, has irrefutable insights to offer that are contrary to the Catholic faith.
So what he's saying is present day science, where people are studying chemicals today, and...
Historical science where you look to the past and you look at aspects of, I don't know, the theory of evolution or geology or whatever.
But it's all about science.
He says, I have witnessed from times long past the changes in natural science.
And have seen how apparent certainties against the faith vanished, proving themselves not to be science, but philosophical interpretations only apparently belonging to science.
Just as, moreover, it is in dialogue with the natural sciences that faith has learned to understand the limits of the scope of its affirmations, and thus its own specificity for 60 years now.
I have accompanied the path of theology, especially biblical studies, and have seen seemingly unshakable theses collapse with the changing generations.
Which turned out to be mere hypotheses.
The liberal generation.
The existentialist generation.
The Marxist generation.
I have seen and see how out of the tangle of hypotheses, the reasonableness of faith has emerged and is emerging anew.
Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth, and the life.
And the church, in all her shortcomings, is truly his body.
Absolutely beautiful.
Eloquent as ever.
Benedict, not only a brilliant thinker, but also a very good writer.
Often those two things go hand in hand.
Whose legacy is going to look better 10 years from now?
50 years from now?
200 years from now?
Dr.
Fauci or Pope Benedict?
We know.
We can already look at it with the distance of five days.
Fauci's legacy looks preposterous.
The claims that he made...
Based on his authority of science...
Have collapsed.
Going back to the 80s...
The guy bungled AIDS... He bungled everything...
And especially COVID... Pope Benedict...
In his humility...
In fettering his reason, his very high capacity for reason, to substantial things, to eternal truths, to the weight of the magisterium, to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to things that have endured and will endure forever, Benedict's legacy...
We'll come out much stronger.
That's what he's saying.
He's saying, I've seen it.
You hear this all the time when people say, well, the science is clear about global warming.
Science is so clear, we've got to upend the whole society.
We need a great reset of society, completely upend the economy and the political order because the science is so clear.
But the science that is so clear today about global warming It was so clear 50 years ago about global cooling.
And that's not just a talking point from the right that wants to deny climate change.
This was written about not only in popular magazines and newspapers, but in scientific journals from some of the most esteemed scientists in the world.
I write about this at length.
There's a chapter about this in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for order.
I'm glad we stopped the bell, even in the new year.
Benedict is saying, I've seen this happen.
And he can see it happen in part because he just lived to be a very ripe old age, 95 years old.
And you see this throughout history.
What's that old line?
They say, if you're not a liberal by the time you're 17, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative by the time you're 30, you have no brain.
People tend to become more conservative over time.
And especially when that conservatism is grounded in something real.
Not the shallow, non-theistic conservatism of, you know, go out and make money and you do you and drive some Bugattis.
But real, deep conservatism where we're conserving human nature, where we're conserving the very best in our society and civilization.
That is going to give you a much stronger perspective as well.
Speaking of scientific certainties...
NASA is warning that China is about to conquer the moon.
We don't have time to get to it today.
That'll be my little teaser for tomorrow.
Get ready for the Chinese to conquer the moon.
We will delve that scientific certainty...
Tomorrow.
We don't have time because right now we are going to speak with Harmeet Dillon, who is challenging RNC Chairman Ronna McDaniel for the leadership of the Republican National Committee.
We've been a little bit philosophical today.
We've been a little bit far afield because, you know, look, it's Christmas time, all right?
We're still thinking about eternal things.
But we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of politics right now that's on the member block.
You do not want to miss it.
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