Ep. 1186 - The CDC & Buttigieg Gaslight East Palestine's Water
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The CDC changed its toxicology report on vinyl chloride the month before the vinyl chloride spill in Ohio, Democrat senator John Fetterman checks himself into the hospital for depression, and the cost of eggs passes the cost of beef.
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I want to preface this, I'm not drawing any conclusions, okay?
I'm just making an observation.
And the observation is that just weeks before the massive vinyl chloride leak and burn-off that is currently poisoning East Palestine, Ohio, and likely compromising the air and water across a much larger geographic region, The CDC changed its toxicology report on vinyl chloride and its FAQ page for the first time in 17 years.
Weeks before.
Possibly as little as 11 days before, but certainly it happened at some point in the month before this accident.
So I've got here the toxicology report and the FAQs from 2006.
And here, you just see a lot more information in the 2006 one.
How likely is vinyl chloride to cause cancer?
You see a lot of specific information about an increased risk of liver, brain, lung cancer, cancers of the blood.
How can vinyl chloride affect children?
There's a whole paragraph about that.
Has the federal government made recommendations to protect human health?
Yes.
It says the EPA requires that the amount of vinyl chloride in drinking water not exceed 0.002 milligrams per liter of water.
Talks about how much in terms of parts per million can be in the workplace.
It's pretty thorough.
And then you go to the...
The FAQ on vinyl chloride that just dropped last month, the section on how to protect children is totally gone.
The section on cancer is much simplified.
There's a lot less detail.
The section about how many parts per million or milligrams per liter, that's all gone.
This was January.
What are the odds?
All I'm saying is just the odds are kind of It's kind of weird.
And it isn't nearly as weird as the fact that the whole incident, the whole train derailment, chemical spilling, poison the town incident was depicted in a movie that came out last year.
Six, eight months ago, called White Noise, which was not only filmed in the area in which the actual incident would occur, but even included people from East Palestine as extras in the movie.
One such extra, an East Palestine resident named Ben Ratner, has told reporters, quote, the first half of the movie is all almost exactly what's going on here.
And I'm not making any accusations.
I'm actually not, okay?
I'm not coming to any conclusions.
Even though the CDC and the public authorities more broadly have completely squandered their credibility, in particular over the last few years, and have lied to us on several occasions, you know I am not a conspiracy theorist.
I'm really not.
But I am a coincidence noticer.
And it's weird.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Henry Bierman, who says, Happy Valentine's Day from Dr.
Fauci.
You make my heart stop.
It's not.
It shouldn't be funny.
I guess you either have to laugh or cry, don't you?
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I think I'm going to use that.
It just came to me when I was thinking about these stories.
The White Noise movie, the toxicology report, the FAQ from the CDC. I'm really not a conspiracy theorist.
I always look for the least complex answer for any sort of odd phenomenon.
But I definitely am a coincidence noticer.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that there is some secret shadowy group of people that are doing all sorts of nefarious things.
At the very least, though, there is no such thing as coincidences.
You know, modern libs believe that every strange, no matter how big the miracle is, no matter how in your face some kind of miracle is, they'll say, oh, it's just random chance.
For Christians, though, for people who are traditionally religious, there's no such thing as coincidences because there's providence and there's an order to the universe.
Now, what's going on in this case, in this really bizarre incident in East Palestine, Ohio?
Is that just the broad order of the universe?
Is that just random chance or something else?
I don't know.
I do know that it's also really weird how the authorities are downplaying this incident.
Had this been...
A few weeks ago, had you told me there's going to be an environmental disaster that happens anywhere, anywhere in the West, what's going to happen afterward?
I would have said, well, you're going to get all the usual suspects there.
John Kerry is going to fly in and demand environmental cleanup.
St.
Greta, St.
Greta of the Blessed Sailboat, she's going to come in, she's going to say, how dare you?
Trains derail.
There would be big protests, massive press conferences.
None of that.
None of that has happened.
No environmentalists have shown up to protest.
The authorities haven't shown up.
There's no Joe Biden demanding stricter environmental regulations.
His signature legislative accomplishment last year was passing a green bill, the climate change bill, which he initially told us was an inflation reduction act, but then admitted almost immediately after it passed, no, this is just about the environment.
Okay, you care so much about the environment.
Where are you in East Palestine?
How come nobody's talking about this?
How come everyone wants to play this down?
The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, We're good to go.
Look, rail safety is something that has evolved a lot over the years, but there's clearly more that needs to be done, because while this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing.
So, it's no big deal.
Actually, guys, I know that there is this major derailment where all the water and the air around this area has been poisoned.
And I know that actually about 10% of the country gets its drinking water from roughly around this region.
But, hey, there's a lot of derailments every year.
It's really not a big deal.
Move along, move along.
These are not the droids you're looking for.
It seems like a big deal to me.
And it seems like a big deal that the authorities are saying this is not a big deal.
That's really weird.
Maybe it's that Pete Buttigieg is just trying to CYA. It could be.
Maybe he feels that he's totally exposed here and he's a flop of a transportation secretary.
A job that is essentially a no-show job.
It's one of the least important, least notable jobs in the government.
Pete Buttigieg got it, as the Chinese pointed out in their correct propaganda yesterday.
He got it as a kind of vanity political appointment to appease some of the left-wing base and to check off some politically correct boxes.
But you got to do something, right?
Where are the other people?
Senator J.D. Vance, new senator from Ohio, he's calling BS on the elected officials and the EPA. The EPA, which is saying, oh no, the water is totally safe to drink.
This kind of thing happens all the time.
Move along, move along.
Well, J.D. has a challenge for the EPA administrator.
You know, it reminds me of that scene in Erin Brockovich where she puts the water in front of them and says, if you think it's clean, we brought this water from the community that was affected.
Look, I think that if the EPA administrator wants to stand here and tell people that the tap water is safe, by all means, they should be willing to drink it.
Are you...
No, I just told Tom, I think that if I was living here, I would drink the bottled water for now, better safe than sorry, especially since it's being provided for free.
That's the guidance I would give.
But again, you know, residents are going to make their own decisions on this, but my honest personal advice is I'd be drinking the bottled water right now.
I love the reporter's question.
Maybe he meant it in an innocent way, or maybe it was sort of a gotcha, where J.D. Vance says, look, if you really think this is all fine, EPA administrator, come down here right now and drink the water.
He says, well, will you drink the water?
And J.D. looks a little bit confused almost.
He says, I'm...
No?
Did you not hear what?
No, I wouldn't drink the water.
I think it's poison.
And I would drink the bottled water, especially when it's being provided for free.
I don't believe the EPA administrator.
And I doubt that the EPA administrator believes the EPA administrator.
Does anybody seriously believe after, what, a million gallons of this, or a million pounds, I sort of forget whatever the measurement is, of this vinyl chloride, to say nothing of the other toxic chemicals that leaked out, then were set on fire, turning to phosgene and sulfuric, or hydrochloric acid, rather, and possibly sulfuric acid, but certainly hydrochloric acid, you think that Two weeks after that, the water's fine, the air is fine.
Nobody believes that.
In fact, there's a resident of East Palestine who just went out to show you on video how not fine the water is.
So this resident goes out to a little creek in the woods.
She gets a little piece of wood and throws it into the water.
So the water looks fine at first, but then the minute she disrupts the water with the wood, then you see all the chemicals bubble to the top.
There's rainbow colors everywhere.
Now look at it.
It's an oil slick.
Is it worse than an oil slick, though?
It's much more poisonous than an oil slick.
So it might look fine.
If you're an EPA administrator, you're going and you're testing the water, and you're just testing the water on top, Maybe it looks fine.
Maybe the point that she's making is all the poison was down there at the bottom.
So you throw a rock in, you throw a log in, then all those chemicals rise up to the top.
So sure, we can all trust that the water is safe in East Palestine, Ohio, the minute that Joe Biden or the EPA administrator or Pete Buttigieg or whoever go and drink it.
But none of them are going to do that.
This reminds me of in Indian elections, candidates who are running for office in India will often go to Varanasi, this holy city considered very holy in India.
And that's where the Ganges is.
And they'll go and they'll either wash themselves in the water from the Ganges.
Maybe they'll jump into the water from the Ganges.
Sometimes they'll even drink some of the water from the Ganges, which is horrifying because that's the river where people throw dead bodies.
Bodies that have been burnt along the side of the river or in some cases even with human flesh on it.
And so it's just teeming with bacteria.
And then what happens?
The people get sick.
Well, okay.
I give the politicians some credit, actually, in their own religious tradition.
They're willing to subject themselves to that.
Okay.
Leftist government administrators, drink that water in East Palestine.
Drink that water in East Palestine, which could affect water throughout a lot of the country.
Drink that.
Make us all feel better.
Until they do, I ain't buying it.
Speaking of stuff in the water, speaking of things in the water, turning the freaking frogs gay and maybe turning other people into other things.
The Crane and Company guys broke this story a couple of days ago.
I meant to get to it yesterday.
Fortunately, we're able to get to it today.
The story is from this interview with one of Leah Thomas's teammates.
Leah Thomas is actually named Will Thomas.
He's that hulking dude who swam on the UPenn women's swim team and then beat all the girls and took their trophies.
And he's just obviously a big guy, but he pretends to be a woman.
And so we've all got to pretend that he's a girl and he's smashing the glass ceiling and it's so wonderful and brave and stunning.
So one of Will Thomas's teammates comes out and gives a great interview, which I strongly recommend you go check out at Craney Company, where she says, man, this is gross.
This guy showed up to the locker room.
He strips down naked.
All of us girls had to be subjected to looking at him back when he still had the male parts.
And then she spilled a little bit more tea.
The part that everyone is focusing on from this interview is that Will Thomas' boyfriend, it's a boy who thinks that he's a girl, I don't know.
Will Thomas' paramour was photographed holding up a jar with what appeared to be pickle juice and then two spherical objects in the jar.
So, two.
I don't think they were olives.
I don't think they were little onions that you put in the cocktails.
Okay.
So, that was what everyone was focusing on in this interview with one of Will's competitors.
I misspoke.
Not one of his teammates.
One of his competitors.
And there's something more interesting about the interview, though.
And the pictures that were uncovered.
and the details about Will Thomas' personal life.
There's a bunch of weird satanic stuff.
There's a bunch of really weird sexual stuff that was, if not posted by Will Thomas, at least liked by Will Thomas on Instagram.
Things that talked about autogynephilia.
Autogynephilia is one of the explanations for transgenderism.
There are within, I was going to say historically, but because the whole phenomenon is so modern.
There have been proposed in recent decades two types of transgenderism.
Homosexual men who view themselves as women and also men who are sexually aroused by the thought of them having female genitals.
And that's called autogynophilia.
So, Will Thomas seems to have liked...
Some of these posts about autogynephilia, which might suggest that Will Thomas's identity is a little weirder, is a little more sexual in nature.
But then what I find even more interesting than that is all the weird satanic imagery.
So...
One post liked by Will Thomas jokes that Will will bring about the quote collapse of Western civilization.
Another one is a picture of Will as a demonic dominatrix character.
There are posts that refer to Will Thomas as being in a polycule.
That's a group of sexually confused people who all do weird stuff with one another.
In fact, the person who wrote Nice Polycule is a user named CrybabyHellBitch.
There's another transgender identifying person who has photos in a very sexualized, abusive, kind of fetishistic way.
It's gory and stunning, as one commenter writes.
And so I'm not making any particular claims about Will Thomas or any of Will Thomas's friends or friends with benefits or more than friends.
I just can't help but notice something that I've noticed for a long time.
It's always the same imagery.
It always gets back to weird, devil, demonic, horns and tails and pitchforks kind of imagery.
I made this point at the Grammys when Sam Smith got on stage dressed like a lesbian Lucifer and jiggled around with a bunch of androgynous, transsexual-looking people.
And the clip ended up going viral because my publicists over at Media Matters were very shocked and offended that I made the point that very often depictions of the demonic are quite androgynous or trans, and depictions of transgenderism and androgyny are quite often demonic.
Which is just true.
So when Media Matters posted it, I just retweeted it.
I thought, yeah, that's very true.
What a great point I made.
It's always this kind of imagery, isn't it?
Isn't that a little bit...
Odd.
Isn't that a little bit weird?
It's almost as though you can't really separate the physical from the metaphysical.
It's almost as though symbols matter.
And so the reason that people with these weird sexual desires keep going back to the same symbolism, the same symbols that we've seen all the way back to antiquity, with the bad guy, the little bad red demon with the horns and the pitchfork and the tail and the fangs and the...
Goatee and whatever.
All of these symbols is because they might actually represent something.
Why do we talk about people who struggle with these kinds of psychological problems as having demons?
Today we think that we're just speaking metaphorically.
Oh, it's just a metaphor.
It's a metaphor for chemicals going off in their brains.
Well, I don't even know what that means.
If we're talking about metaphor, we're talking about something beyond the physical world.
But all of us, I don't care how hardened a materialist you are, you behave as though there is something beyond the material world.
You behave as though there is some kind of moral order.
You behave as though there are things that are immaterial that still matter, like loves and joys and mathematics and...
All the intangible things that you can't quite touch or smell or see, but nevertheless you know are there.
And you know those things are often represented by physical objects.
We all behave that way.
And so I just think we need to pay a little more attention to symbols.
I mentioned at the top of the show that I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all.
I'm actually rather grounded and always seek a rational explanation when one is available to me.
But I also can't help but notice things.
And I find that's especially true when we're talking about symbols.
The modern world refuses to acknowledge symbols.
In fact, it explicitly denies symbolism because in its thought, if not in its behavior, it tries to deny that there's any metaphysical reality beneath the physical world.
But for Christians or Jews or Muslims or even pagans or anybody with any even quasi-traditional understanding of religion and man's place in the universe, there is no such thing really as coincidence.
There is a broader providence.
There is meaning.
So if you believe that there is meaning, then there has got to be meaning to the fact that all these sexual deviants keep going back to the same image of that same old devil.
It's got to mean something.
You know who loves talking about signs and symbols and meaning?
And psychology?
Our friend Dr.
Jordan Peterson.
And I'm very excited to announce that we have a new five-part series with Jordan available at Daily Wire Plus.
Here is a first look at the trailer.
What you already know is not sufficient to guide you into the future.
The future is indeterminate.
You cannot compute your way through the present into the future.
You need to use your vision to weave your way through life.
You're gonna face tyrants and you're gonna face mobs.
Is there a vision that can sustain you in the face of that?
You should accept yourself just the way you are.
What does that say about who I should become?
Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way?
So am I done or something?
Get the hell up!
Get your act together.
Adopt some responsibility.
Put your life together.
Develop a vision.
Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within.
be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life.
That sounded so persuasive that I am going to start doing this show in a Canadian accent.
that.
Tomorrow, you're going to see me get on the show, and I'm going to say, I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Buckaroo.
I can't pull it off, but Jordan can.
He's got fabulous advice in this series that can really help you improve your life.
Episode 1 is available now.
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Speaking of demons, really troubling report from the CDC.
Speaking of the CDC too.
It's all kind of looping back today, isn't it?
Very coincidental.
According to a new CDC study, 57% of high school girls reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021.
That is a 58% increase from 2011.
30% seriously considered suicide.
That is a 60% almost increase from 2011.
24% made plans for suicide.
That is a 60% increase from 2011.
42% of high school students overall felt persistent sadness or hopelessness.
22% seriously considered suicide.
18% made a plan for suicide.
10% Attempted suicide.
You might be tempted to say, well, this is a problem from COVID. Because COVID upended the world, locked students at home, and that's why this happened.
The trend long predates COVID. It's not as if it was 2011, and then do-to-do is going along fine, and then boop, there goes COVID. Now it spikes, and then it'll go back to normal.
No, this has been a trend for a long time.
And 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong.
By which I mean...
There is something structural here beyond just the personal problems or personal quirks of these students who are engaging in this.
There is a structural, social problem that is impelling people to do this.
And we don't want to acknowledge any of it.
I don't think it's very complicated.
I think that when you have a national policy that incentivizes the destruction of the family, the entire world for young people, that's probably going to make them pretty sad.
That's going to make them feel pretty hopeless.
When you have an educational apparatus that denies objective truth, that's probably going to make people pretty sad and pretty anxious, pretty hopeless.
When you have an educational apparatus, again, that encourages vice and discourages and mocks virtue, that's going to make people pretty sad and pretty hopeless, I suspect.
When you have a national policy that discourages religion, don't forget, this isn't just the culture and politics is just downstream of the culture.
It's a national policy that bans the Bible from schools and that prescribes weird gay porn in schools.
That's a national policy.
That's probably going to make kids pretty sad and pretty hopeless.
When you have a national policy that encourages kids to deny their true identity and to embrace deviant and false and delusional identities.
National policy from the federal government saying, hey kids, hey boys, you're not really boys, you're a girl.
You need to pump yourself full of all sorts of hormones.
You need to chop off your body parts.
You need to engage in very destructive behavior.
And your parents don't understand you.
Big Daddy Biden, I understand you.
Oh yeah, me, Richard Levine, the very confused, ghoulish Assistant Secretary of Health.
Oh yeah, I understand you.
You just need to go on a bunch of drugs and deny who you really are.
Don't talk to your parents.
Your parents are awful.
They're evil.
They don't really get you.
I get you.
That's probably going to make people feel pretty hopeless.
And when you have a pervasive national policy of denying religion, which means denying hope, people are probably going to be hopeless.
That's a national policy because of a novel and Wrong interpretation of the First Amendment which says that there will be no established religion at the federal level which has been misinterpreted against all of American history and against right reason to say that the state has to be functionally atheist.
It's a very new idea.
We still have blasphemy laws in some states because the states haven't caught up to this new and wrong idea which purports to speak for the American project and the American experiment.
That's going to make people feel hopeless.
If you really believe that there is no meaning to anything, that there is no hope, that you're going to just...
Walk around as a kind of a cosmic accident.
You're nothing more than meat.
You're nothing more than flesh.
You should live for nothing more than your own pleasure.
And then you're going to take a dirt nap and turn to worm food.
You are going to be pretty depressed.
To say nothing of the economic factors, to say nothing of the job prospects don't look as good for young people right now, to say nothing of the economies not looking as good for young people, to say nothing of the prospect of war is higher now than it was 20 years ago.
That's what everyone else is going to focus on.
I think that is actually part and parcel of the same problem, the same materialist lie.
That Barack Obama peddled when he said, well, we need to go into different countries in the Middle East because we need to give them iPhones.
Yep, if we just give people a little bit more money and some iPhones, then they won't want to perpetrate jihad.
Then they'll be peaceful, as if to say that man is just purely an economical being and all we care about is acquiring more stuff.
That is not true.
That doesn't motivate people.
Money will not ultimately make you happy.
We used to know this.
This was really basic stuff in our culture.
And now not even the conservatives half the time believe that.
Is it any wonder that people are depressed?
Is it any wonder that people are suicidal?
Absolutely predictable.
It's absolutely predictable.
That's what we're seeing.
Before we go, speaking of depression, poor Senator John Fetterman has just checked himself into Walter Reed for depression.
He was in a hospital.
It was GW Medical Center a week or two ago.
And people were wondering, is this another stroke?
He's had health problems since the campaign drill, since he had a major stroke, that even the New York Times reports has rendered him unable to process a lot of language.
He has difficulty speaking.
He has difficulty understanding words, especially when he's stressed.
And being a Senator is a stressful job.
It's good that he's getting help.
It's good that he's saying, I can't take this right now, and he's a lot better than the alternative.
Democrats need to let this poor man go home.
The Democrat argument was, even if he's a stroke victim, even if he doesn't have a functioning brain at the moment and he needs to recover, we're going to send him to Washington because it doesn't matter.
You don't need to have a functioning brain to be a senator.
And frankly, you really don't because the point of these senators very often is just to rubber stamp whatever leadership wants them to do.
That was the campaign pitch for this guy.
So, okay, fine.
If that's what they want to do, that's what they want to do.
It's the same argument for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden might not know what end is up, but it's fine.
He'll just go along with whatever the Democrat establishment wants.
Let the poor man go home.
This is obviously ruining his life.
And this is not some random clinical thing.
What you're going to hear is the same nonsense that you're hearing about the kids who are depressed and suicidal.
Say, oh, this is just clinical.
It's clinical depression.
No, you know what?
We just need to prescribe them more pharmaceuticals.
Yeah, that's it.
We'll just give them more drugs and ply them to be numb, and that's really the problem.
No, the depression is a symbol and a symptom of a deeper problem.
John Fetterman has a lot of reason to be down in the dumps.
He's being used by probably his family, certainly by his political party.
He's being put in a terrible spot.
He is genuinely frustrated because he's lost a lot of his abilities, the abilities that he once had.
And he's not being allowed to get the help that he needs.
I'd be pretty down in the dumps too.
The way to fix that is not just apply the guy with more drugs.
The way to fix that is to change the behavior, change the society, change the ritual, change the way that we're all interacting with one another.
Same thing goes for the kids.
Same thing goes for all of us.
These are structural problems, which until we fix those, until we even acknowledge that those exist, we're just going to keep sliding in the same direction.
No question about it.
I want to talk about depressing things.
The cost of eggs has surpassed the price of beef.
Eggs are more expensive than beef right now.
We'll get into that more next week, but that's an amazing statistic.
It makes us feel like we're becoming a third world country.
Our trains don't run.
We've got poison seeping out everywhere.
We can't afford food.
People are depressed.
The average life expectancy is decreasing because of deaths of despair.
We don't have a functioning border.
Whatever we are doing right now, we always want to project our power overseas and say we're going to solve all the world's problems and we need to go spread democracy around the world or whatever.
How about we spread a flourishing society here at home?
We are becoming like a third world country.
Until we get that in check, it's going to be very hard to help the rest of the world.
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Take it away with the first voicemail bag question.
Dear Mr.
Knowles, my name is Noah Meshack, 23 years old.
I've watched every show of yours for the last nine months and haven't heard a question quite like this.
After dating my now ex-wife for four years while in the Marine Corps, we decided to get married about six months before the end of my contract.
One month after getting married, she began having an affair.
After buying a house together, a year and a half of marriage counseling, and some time being separated, she still continued to see him.
After all of that, I decided to divorce her.
It was the hardest decision of my entire life, but I couldn't let the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with continuously break our vows and our vows to God as well as my heart.
I would like to see what you think about this as I hold your opinion with the utmost respect, and I hope to see you on the campaign trail someday.
Thanks, Mr.
Knowles.
Pal, I am sorry to hear about those problems.
That is really, really tough.
One, thank you for your service.
Two, thanks for listening to the show for this long.
And three, really sorry to hear what you're going through.
The first thing that I would do if I were in your position...
Well, I would do exactly what you did.
I think you did the right thing.
You tried to get marriage counseling.
You tried to forgive your wife.
You gave her the opportunity to correct her behavior.
She still wouldn't do it.
So what do you do?
The conflict here is that Many Christians, certainly Catholics, but some other shades of Protestant as well, believe that marriage is indissoluble.
So it's not, can you get divorced?
Do you have a right to get divorced?
It's a denial of the ontological possibility of divorce.
That what God has joined, let no man separate.
So, there is one method available, if you hold to that view.
Which is annulment.
An annulment is not an investigation into things that have happened after the marriage took place.
You know, why did she have this affair?
Who is this guy?
It's a question about was the marriage valid in the first place?
And I don't know.
no, I just don't know enough about your situation to say one way or the other.
It would seem if your wife so quickly started this affair, so quickly and persistently engaged in these behaviors, I wouldn't be surprised, let's say, if she was keeping certain things from you before the marriage. if she was keeping certain things from you before the I would not be surprised at all.
If that were the case...
Probably there is a good argument to be made that the marriage was not valid in the first place.
Again, I don't know.
This is above my pay grade.
You would, if you're Catholic or if you're a member of an ecclesial community that views things this way, you would want to have an annulment investigation to check that out.
In which case, it wasn't a real marriage.
You go on, maybe get remarried or something like that.
Some people...
I believe that adultery is actually a justification for formal divorce, not an annulment, but a divorce.
They have come up with this idea in the recent centuries based on what they view to be the acceptive clause in the Gospel of Matthew that...
No man can separate what God has joined except for porneia is the word, which is often translated as whorishness or adultery or something like that.
This is not the traditional interpretation of that line.
The idea of the acceptive clause is relatively novel in Christianity.
So I wouldn't hang your hat on that if you do happen to be a Christian.
What I would seek here, though, in any case, is some spiritual guidance.
You did the...
thing that we're all supposed to do, which is marriage counseling, if one finds oneself in this situation.
But now your problems are Almost purely spiritual.
What do you do now?
And so that is my view.
That's my kind of truncated version of my view of where you go from here and what the situation looks like.
But I would pursue more expert spiritual advice.
And we can all pray for you in the meantime.
Really, really tough situation that you're in.
And I guess, as all suffering is, An opportunity to be sanctified, although one is very often not happy for the opportunity to be sanctified in suffering while one is going through it.
But that is a central Christian idea, is that our suffering binds us to the suffering of our Lord on the cross.
I mean, St.
Paul writes about this Quite clearly, and this is the traditional understanding.
Though it's sometimes easier to view it in the rearview mirror than it is while you're going through it.
Next question.
Hey Michael, Matt here in Des Moines, Iowa calling.
I'm a small business owner, but more importantly than that, I am a believer in Christ as well as a husband and a father.
I have a very strong desire to be involved in local politics on the city level, the county level, be at school board meetings, standing up and speaking what's right and true.
But I do have a fear that doing so could negatively affect my business.
I work in a very liberal industry.
I've seen others be blacklisted for doing what's right.
And I have employees.
So I'm worried that if I stand up and say something, whether it's true or not, I could be negatively affected.
My ability to provide for my family would be affected.
And the ability of my employees to provide for their families would be affected.
So I'm wondering if you could give us some advice on when to do that.
When do you stand up?
Is there a good way to do that that could mitigate those effects?
Or is it just on or off?
Throw caution to the wind and say the thing and deal with the consequences later.
Thanks for your time, Michael.
God bless you.
Have a great one.
The first thing you have to recognize is that business is political.
In recent decades, there have been some libertarian sloganeers who have tried to suggest that business is not political.
That politics is just for the politicians and the government.
But business, the private sector, that's not really political.
But it is political because political just means public.
Politics just refers to public life.
It's how we all get along together.
It's much more intricate and it's much more complex than just a senator and a congressman and going to the ballot box on Tuesday.
Politics is all of public life.
And frankly, the way businesses operate, the way that zoning is done in your town, the way that schools are established, the way that neighbor interacts with neighbor...
That constitutes much more of politics than what some congressman says at a press conference.
So, I think you need to recognize that you are in politics already.
And even the illusion that some businesses were not political was simply that.
It was an illusion.
Businesses certainly had standards that they had to observe.
They had an ideology that they were following, even during the height of what we might call the liberal consensus in the middle to the slightly post-middle part of the 20th century.
So you're already there.
And therefore, if you're engaging in politics, you have to be prudent.
You need to articulate your convictions, do the right thing, don't do things that are immoral and unjust, but within prudential limits because politics exists in reality with real people and it applies eternal principles to changing circumstances.
So I would recommend in these questions as ever, prudence.
Don't lie about what you believe.
Don't compromise on the things that you hold most dear.
But you don't need to be flamboyant about it either.
You don't need to wear...
We're called to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Hi, Michael.
My name is Caitlin, and I've really enjoyed listening to your show for the past two years.
I first discovered you when I stumbled upon the Wall Street Bets sea shanty video on YouTube, and since then I've been hooked.
So, I have a question for you today.
I am the worship leader at my church, and I recently discovered that there are at least five guys in our church who are involved in Freemasonry, and that's a little bit concerning because of the research I've been doing.
I've kind of discovered that it has some satanic roots And that the further up you get in the organization, the more they tell you that actually it's Satan you're worshiping and not God, like they say at the beginning when you're initiated.
Anyway, I'm just kind of concerned about my congregation because I don't want these guys to start recruiting other people and people to be led astray.
Especially as the worship leader, I feel a sense of responsibility.
So do you have any thoughts on anything I can do or thoughts on Freemasonry?
I'd love to hear your opinion.
Thank you so much.
Certainly.
I don't know anything they tell you about Satan in the highest levels of Freemasonry.
I'm not a Mason myself, so I don't know about that.
I've certainly heard rumors.
We've all heard rumors like that.
But I would say, even putting that aside for a second, because I just don't know the reality of that.
At a really basic level, the problem with Freemasonry and why a Christian really can't be a Freemason is that it is a...
Kind of a rival religion.
It has all of the aspects of a religion.
It has its own initiation rituals, its own burial rituals, its own altar, its own garments, its own...
It has even its own higher beliefs in as much as it makes a kind of religion out of naturalism and rationalism.
This is why it crops up.
During the Enlightenment, this is why the first enemy of Freemasonry was the Catholic Church.
It was established, again, I know Freemasonry has changed over the centuries, but an objective, a major objective of Freemasonry in the earliest days was to dismantle the Catholic Church, which it viewed as a kind of supernatural and tyrannical body.
And it was going to, following the In doctrines of the Enlightenment, it was going to bring about this new kind of religious view based on naturalism and rationalism.
It also posits indifferentism, which is the idea that it doesn't matter what formal religion you adhere to, that all of those can be equally pleasing to God.
And so, plenty of people believe those ideas.
That's why I'm not really knocking the Freemasons in particular.
Lots of people believe those ideas today.
But those ideas are not compatible with Anything even slightly resembling an orthodox understanding of Christianity.
So that would be the problem.
I don't think you need to go to the idea that your buddies who essentially joined a fraternity, and I know people who have been involved in Freemasonry, and they think it's just a fun thing to do, and it's a fraternity, and it's no big deal.
So I don't think you need to impugn their motives or I think that they're intentionally worshipping the devil or anything like that.
But you just might point out that when we participate in certain rituals and in certain organizations and we sign off on certain creeds and certain dogmas, sometimes those can contradict other creeds and dogmas that we have assented to.
And when those two things are in conflict, well, you have to pick one.
If you want to be consistent, you don't want to violate the law of non-contradiction.
And so you've got to pick one.
And if you've got to pick one, I guess you would probably agree with me that I would recommend the church.
But it's a modern world, so many people don't make that choice.
