Ep. 1354 - Deepfake Porn & Biden's Solution For Gaza
Joe Biden makes a Norm joke his Mideast policy, a waitress complains that a bachelor’s in Marketing didn’t score her a $200k-per-year job, and deepfake porn threatens ordinary women.
Ep.1354
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A US Navy destroyer shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from the Iran-backed jihadis in Yemen.
And so finally, President Biden addressed the nation last night as the nation sleepwalks toward World War III.
Here's what he had to say.
If Putin attacks a NATO ally, we will defend every inch of NATO which a treaty requires and calls for.
We'll have something that we do not seek Make it clear, we do not seek.
We do not seek to have American troops fighting in Russia.
are fighting against Russia.
And what's this one?
Not exactly encouraging.
But while Biden was demanding more money and weapons for Ukraine and Israel, without any particularly strategic vision, he did manage to focus on an under-discussed aspect of the new war in the Middle East.
And that, of course, is the Islamophobic backlash.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community, And so many others are outraged and hearty saying to yourselves, here we go again with Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9-11.
Here we go again.
If Joe Biden's sentiment sounded familiar, that's because it has been uttered before as part of a famous bit by the late great comedian Norm Macdonald.
Well, I can't say my friend's name, but he said his biggest fear
is that ISIS or some terrorist group like that would get a hold of a dirty bomb and explode it over a major city within the United States and kill tens of millions of people because then the blowback against
Innocent Muslims would be absolutely terrible.
Yes, that's right.
That's true.
All right, let's do some jokes.
I know tonight we're going to World War III and there was wars and we're deploying and I know that there was a horrible terrorist attack in Israel, killed a thousand civilians, but the real issue is the potential For Islamophobia.
Come on, Jack.
When Norm said it, it was a joke.
When Joe Biden said it, he was a joke.
And I am Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers.
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Deep fake porn is spreading everywhere.
We're not gonna show you the porn, but we are gonna go into it in just a moment.
First, though, before we move off of Joe Biden's completely disastrous policy in World War III, he also managed to dox some of the most lethal and important soldiers that we have fighting for us.
The White House met with U.S.
Special Forces in Israel.
Oh, yeah, by the way, we already have troops on the ground in Israel.
I know a lot of people don't know that.
A lot of people are saying, we shouldn't get involved.
Listen, we gotta stop before the U.S.
gets involved here.
We're already very involved.
We've got a lot of Navy ships over there, aircraft carriers.
We've got a destroyer that ended up firing on three missiles that seemed to be heading for Israel and fired on a bunch of drones that may have been hovering over the U.S.
Navy destroyer.
We're in it.
And we've got Special Forces on the ground.
And to put the cherry on top, Joe Biden is doxing the U.S.
Special Forces.
He posted on Instagram, this is on the White House Instagram, Joe Biden shaking hands with a bunch of Delta Force, I guess.
It says, in Israel, President Biden met with first responders to thank them for their bravery and work they're doing in response to the Hamas terrorist attacks.
The White House deleted this rather quickly because they realized that the pictures showed the faces of these troops and showed some of their tattoos.
We've posted a version where the faces and the tattoos are blurred out.
White House then said, as soon as this was brought to our attention, we immediately deleted the photo.
We regret the error and any issues this may have caused.
Issues such as maybe the end of their military careers, issues such as maybe the targeting of them and their families by Hamas terrorists, and all sorts of terrorists around the world, and all sorts of other foreign adversaries, even state adversaries, who now have the identities of some of our most important military assets.
I don't think Joe Biden did this on purpose.
I would be shocked if he did this on purpose.
He did it out of incompetence.
His administration did this out of incompetence.
The social media team, the photographers who took the pictures, the people who posted this, the spokesmen who made excuses for this.
It's just so incompetent.
It's so careless.
And this is the way Joe Biden operates.
This is the way the liberal establishment broadly operates.
And carelessness When taken to this kind of extreme, is downright criminal.
How much can go wrong in three years?
21, 22, 23.
Less than three years.
22, 23, less than three years.
The economy in chaos, inflation through the roof, first major war in Europe since World War II, war breaking out in the Middle East that is already involving the United States and Lebanon and Syria war breaking out in the Middle East that is already involving the United States and Lebanon and Syria How many things can go wrong in such a short period of time?
When Donald Trump was president, things were good.
And then COVID happened and we locked the country down and they rigged the election and now we've got this guy who doesn't know what his name is who can't even speak when he's addressing the nation on the prospect of World War III and the world is being thrown into chaos.
And is it because they're evil?
Yeah, in some ways they are evil.
They advocate for very evil things like killing lots of babies and destroying the family and backing some of our enemies sometimes.
Sure, but a lot of the time they're just So negligent and careless that the world goes up in smoke and they say, oh, I don't know, why can't I even speak?
That's not my fault.
But it is.
This degree of negligence from all of these people at the top is downright criminal.
Things were going very well, and they, to quote Barack Obama, never underestimate Joe Biden's ability to F things up.
Speaking of incompetence, there's a waitress who's gone viral on TikTok for complaining that she doesn't make $200,000 a year, despite the fact that she has a bachelor's degree in business marketing.
I have a bone to pick with America!
So I'm headed to my serving job.
I f***ing hate it.
I f***ing hate it.
Tell me why I make more money serving.
I have my literal business marketing degree that put me in a cute $80,000 in debt and I make more serving sushi rolls because I've been applying to marketing jobs for weeks now and the pay cut is insane.
Insane!
But the jobs that are like a cute $150,000 to $200,000 a year, I'm not getting those.
I'm a 20, almost 25-year-old, my birthday's soon, almost 25-year-old chick going against, you know, corporate-ass America, people with so much experience.
All I got is my degree.
You know, people say, get your degree, but then they don't talk about how you need experience.
The degree was the experience.
Honey, relax.
The degree was not the experience.
I pity her.
I don't pity the extreme entitlement.
This woman is saying, hey, I'm a 25-year-old chick, I don't have any experience really in anything, and I need to make $200,000 a year because I got some almost certainly meaningless degree and I took out some debt and I made poor financial decisions.
And the culture encouraged me to make those poor financial decisions, but I'm 25 years old and I want to make $200,000.
Did you make $200,000 at 25 years old?
If you're listening to this show right now, have you made $200,000 ever?
Have the vast majority of people ever made $200,000, let alone at 25?
What planet is this woman living on where she thinks that is something that, I suppose that's something to shoot for later on in your career if you're willing to put in some hard work.
But where you think you're just entitled to 200 grand, that's a lot of money!
And you're 25!
No 25, unless you're working on Wall Street or in a handful of very, very high paying jobs, no 25 year old makes that.
And she makes an observation here that she thinks is an indictment of our economic system.
But it's not actually.
She is ironically undermining her point when she says, I can make more money waiting tables than I can pursuing my career.
We'll get to that in one second because we do have to talk about that.
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She can make more money waiting tables.
That's true.
You can make relatively decent money waiting tables.
I've waited tables.
Probably many of you who are listening to this right now have waited tables.
You can.
The downside of waiting tables is there's not necessarily a ton of job growth.
There can be, if you really want to dig into the restaurant business and then, I don't know, become a head waiter, become a manager, maybe, who knows, open a restaurant.
Like, there are paths for growth, but generally speaking, if you are Just going to be a waiter, then you can make relatively decent money depending on the restaurant, depending on the clients, but there's going to be a ceiling there.
This woman wants to blow past that ceiling.
She wants to make $200,000 a year.
But if you want to make $200,000 a year, you got to do a lot of grunt work first before you can get on that path.
You don't get some of the benefits of just having a job if you want to have this more risky and ambitious kind of career.
In my first jobs in politics, my very first job in politics, I made, I did the math, I received a monthly stipend.
I was a teenager.
I made 75 cents an hour.
That was my first job.
It was a campaign job in politics.
And then one time, while working for the campaign, I got a speeding ticket for 300 bucks.
So that reduced my earnings to like 50 cents an hour.
I think about my first jobs in the media, I'm sure I wasn't paid anything.
And even when I was paid something, it was very hit or miss.
If you want to have a career, one of these things that's a little tougher to find and that involves more risk, you're going to have to do a lot of grunt work.
Now, the mistake here is this woman went way into debt to get a degree that is meaningless.
No undergraduate business degree, in my estimation, is worth $80,000 because it's not experience, and the employers don't view that as experience.
And you're going to learn a lot more with on-the-job training.
I'm the last conservative, I think, one of the last conservatives who promotes university education, but only in certain circumstances, at certain universities, and specifically if you're studying something that will not directly get you a job.
I think the point of it is to study dusty old books and to read old philosophers and poets and historians.
You can do that better at a university than you can other places.
On your own, on YouTube, sitting around in a bull session somewhere.
Universities are still in some ways better at doing that than other places.
No university is better at teaching you business marketing than a company is.
A company is always going to be better at that.
And this woman's just been duped, and so she's 80 grand in the hole, and she's been fed a pack of lies that if she goes to Palookaville University and gives them a bunch of money, she'll get some piece of paper that's going to give her a bazillion dollars, and that's just not true.
But if she is ambitious, If she's really ambitious, then she will give up the waitering job and she will accept the lower pay in the short term for bigger payoffs in the long term.
This is the political issue here.
And you see it at the personal level and you see it at the political.
We as a country used to be willing to defer gratification.
You think of the Pilgrims who came over here in 1620?
They deferred comfort for their whole lives, they really never had any, and they just worked very hard with that Pilgrim Puritan work ethic, and over time they built up a prosperous country.
Now we get to enjoy the fruits of that, and we hope that we can pass that on to our children.
I don't think we think that way anymore.
We just want the short-term profit.
We want the quick money.
We don't think about the future.
We don't have children.
And when we do have children, the inheritance that we leave them is a mountain of debt.
Speaking of trying to get jobs, Jim Jordan is back in it.
I was dismayed yesterday.
I was crestfallen because Jim Jordan seemed to signal that he was pulling out of the speaker race and they were going to do some complete nonsense where they were going to empower the temporary default speaker with some extra power.
So basically, the Republicans would be giving up their speakership.
And then Jim came back and he said, I'm not dropping out.
I'll just say this, we made the pitch to members on the resolution as a way to lower the temperature and get back to work.
We decided that wasn't where we're going to go.
I'm still running for Speaker and I plan to go to the floor and get the votes and win this race.
But I want to go talk with a few of my colleagues.
Particularly I want to talk with the 20 individuals who voted against me so that we can move forward and begin to work for the American people.
My man, that's great.
There is not a single chance that conservatives will ever get a better speaker candidate in the near future.
Jim Jordan is rock solid compared to the speaker candidates that we've had basically for my entire lifetime.
So we got to make it happen.
The great thing about Jordan is he's not just some rock-ribbed, bomb-throwing conservative who appeals to the far right but doesn't appeal to anyone else.
He's a very measured, serious, sensible, reasonable guy.
He can work with his colleagues.
He's not one of these Coup d'etat plotters who voted to oust McCarthy.
He's in some ways a party guy.
He goes along with, is a team player, but he is also a man of conviction and he is by far the most conservative speaker candidate we've had.
In my lifetime.
There are these 20 holdouts here, these squishes, these liberals, these jerks.
I suspect that Jim will not refer to them in those terms that I'm referring to them in.
He'll probably work with them.
I hope he prides away those votes.
The speaker vote is scheduled for this morning, so this could change in real time.
Whatever happens on that speaker vote, I hope he sticks it out.
He's a good candidate, and there's not a chance Republicans are going to get a better candidate.
So the only alternative then, even if you're a squish, moderate, liberal, whatever, is the alternative is you just have a fake default speaker without any power, which means you've just empowered the Democrats, which means they have effectively control of the whole government.
Which is maybe what some of these liberal Republicans want.
These liberal Republicans, a lot of them up in New York, that's probably what they want.
And candidates who are looking to primary them should keep that in mind.
Speaking of the House of Representatives, I just want to touch on this briefly because you probably haven't seen very much of it in the news, but yesterday at the U.S.
Capitol, there was an... INSURRECTION!
That was the worst!
It was the worst day ever in the history of the Capitol!
Except according to the mainstream media, and except according to the Democrats, they're going to block out those pictures.
What happened yesterday?
I'm using this mocking term, insurrection, because that's the way that we talk about January 6th, but what happened yesterday was much worse than January 6th.
You had a bunch of pro-Hamas leftists who marched all through the Capitol complex, interrupting official congressional proceedings.
As bad or worse than whatever happened on January 6th, the very worst day.
Our sacred democracy has never recovered.
And they'll face no consequences whatsoever.
You didn't even hear about it.
If you heard about it, you heard about it from me or a handful of other conservatives.
But there they are, people defending a terrorist organization, Hamas, chanting Yelling, screaming, invading official proceedings, busting in while members are trying to speak and conduct their business.
No consequences at all.
I don't mention this to suggest that we should arrest all these people.
I mean, we could.
That'd be fine, I guess, to give them a taste of their own medicine.
I mention it to remind you that one, January 6th, Was not even anywhere close to resembling what the liberals told you it was.
But two, to show you the power of the media.
Because for people who are not listening to this show, who don't pay very close attention to politics, they've just got this image seared into their mind that there was this attempted armed insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021.
We almost lost our government.
This temple of democracy almost came crumbling down.
But thankfully Nancy Pelosi and the good guys won after the insurrectionists murdered dozens of cops and almost killed AOC or whatever.
None of that happened.
that happened.
What happened yesterday by the liberals was as bad or worse, and you never heard it because of the power of the media.
And especially now as we're hurtling toward World War Three, keep that in mind when you're seeing actual war propaganda coming out from, I can't even say both sides, from all sides, because there are multiple conflicts here.
Don't let your emotions run away with you.
Don't, if you were fooled by January 6th, don't be fooled again.
To quote a great political philosopher, George W. Bush, fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, well, the point is you're not gonna fool me again.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Ben Peasley, 6394, who says, I half expected Michael to mention the launch of Jeremy's bras and undergarments during the Victoria's Secret section of today's show.
Jeremy's negligee is one of our more provocative projects, obviously scheduled for 2024.
The problem is Jeremy is still overseas in Hungary shooting Pendragon, so we haven't had time to do the photo shoot of him wearing the negligee.
But once he gets back, We can do the photo shoot, we can then post those photos with Jeremy's bras and undergarments, and then we can all set our eyes and even our mind's eye on fire so that we can try to forget those images.
Speaking of Republicans trying to get votes, Tim Scott.
Does not seem to be doing very well in the presidential race.
Remember there's a presidential race going on?
A lot of people sort of forgot that.
Tim Scott's Super PAC is pulling millions of dollars from TV ads.
So New York Times is reporting that trust in the Mission PAC signaled it would cut millions in TV ads because after millions of dollars in TV ad buys, Tim Scott's numbers have hardly budged.
And Rob Collins, who's co-chairman of the Tim Scott Super PAC, says, we aren't going to waste our money when the electorate isn't focused or ready for a Trump alternative.
We've done the research.
We've studied the focus groups.
We've been following Tim on the trail.
This electorate is locked up, and money spent on mass media is not going to change minds until we get a lot closer to voting.
Okay, so they're saying, Tim Scott's still in the We're still backing Tim Scott, but the TV ads were running so far.
People like Trump's too much still so we got to wait for them to like Trump a little bit less and then then the numbers can start to budge.
I don't really think that this issue is about Tim Scott or Donald Trump or any of the candidates.
I think the reason that it's smart for the Scott Pack to pull the millions out of TV ads is because TV ads don't work nearly as well as they used to.
Because it's 2023, not 1993.
TV ads do not matter that much.
Linear TV, so that's cable and network TV, make up less than half of TV viewership now.
Which doesn't even make, what does that mean?
It means that when people watch TV, when you sit down on your couch, you are probably, you are most likely watching streaming services.
Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, hopefully DailyWirePlus, hopefully BentKey.
You're not watching cable.
I have never personally subscribed to cable, ever, in my entire life.
I've been on cable TV many, many times.
That is part of my job.
I still have never subscribed.
I don't know maybe any Millennials who subscribe to TV.
Very, very few, if any.
Do Zoomers subscribe to cable TV or network TV?
Also, the targeting is just way worse on TV.
With digital ad targeting, they know every single thing about us.
Every thought that pops into our head, our iPhone somehow records, and then you get the ads delivered to you.
So, this is a generational issue.
And you're seeing it reflected, by the way, in the campaigns.
Donald Trump, I know he's not exactly a spring chicken, though he seems fairly energetic.
Donald Trump is running a campaign that appeals to young voters.
Much more than, say, the Pence campaign.
Much more than, say, the Tim Scott campaign.
Or the Nikki Haley campaign.
I like all three of those people personally.
They're very nice people.
But it is simply a fact their campaigns are more appealing toward boomers and maybe some of the Gen Xers.
Who appeals to the Millennials and Zoomers?
It's Ron DeSantis.
It's Donald Trump.
It's Vivek Ramaswamy.
It's Doug Burgum.
No, maybe not Doug Burgum.
It's those guys.
And those are the guys who are campaigning mostly online and in inventive ways, not on TV.
Speaking of watching things on screens, this is a story I've been teasing for a couple days.
Deep fake porn might finally destroy civilization.
You know, some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of fate to know that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.
And frankly, it's not going to be fire or ice, it's going to be deep fake porn.
Because there's a new article just came out from, I think, Wired.
Deep fake videos are skyrocketing.
The biggest search engines in the world are funneling a ton of clicks to these websites.
They're mostly not for just fun little jokes.
It's largely for porn since all developments on the internet are driven by porn.
The deepfakes, apparently there are at least a quarter million videos or thereabout that have been uploaded to the top 35 websites set up either exclusively or partially to have deepfake porn videos in the past seven years, according to the researcher.
Over the first nine months of this year, 113,000 videos were uploaded to these websites.
So these are just Like weird, specifically deepfake porn websites.
That's not even taking into account the major porn websites which constitute the lion's share of the internet.
The deepfake porn issue has affected celebrities and some celebrities have sued over this and they've taken all sorts of legal action.
My fear, my greater fear for this is it's going to, it probably already is, but I suspect it's going to affect just ordinary people who don't have a public profile.
And who's going to drive it?
It's going to be people who are addicted to porn, who's addicted to porn, young men, and older men, I guess, and increasingly some women.
And what they're going to do, you see how mid-journey works right now, you see how chat GPT works, you can put in a very complex command, you know, the Pixar movie of Michael Knowles eating a tuna hoagie in Timbuktu, and 60 seconds later you get this image that looks very accurate.
Pretty soon it's going to, if it isn't already, it's going to be that cute girl in my math class doing unspeakable things in whatever sort of setting and it's going to spit that out too.
In fact, according to this report, it already is.
And then what happens?
That is a form of, I don't think I'm overstating it, that's a form of digital rape.
You are being violated to such a degree.
And yet right now it seems like there's no real legal recourse because it's all just kind of fake.
It would be the rudimentary way of doing this would be if you cut out a picture of someone's head and you just pasted it on the picture of another person's body.
But it's not even really another person's body.
It's just a fake body created by a computer.
But it looks as though you are putting this person in a position that is extremely shameful and embarrassing and disgraceful.
So what do you do about that?
On the one hand, just as a political matter, we're never going to be able to trust videos and photos again, which maybe is a good thing.
It'll reduce, to some degree, political scandal and allow us to talk more about issues.
It's going to severely hamper our ability to adjudicate important political questions like war.
We're not going to know what we can trust.
Already in this war, you're seeing that issue.
Because you're seeing AI-generated images that look indistinguishable, almost, from actual videos of the war.
And then at the personal level you're going to see, you're going to see people, you're going to see young people, you're going to see people in high school, you're going to see people in college being violated in this way.
So what do you do?
We have to get ahead of this issue just like in the 90s the Republicans and Democrats came together to try to get ahead of the internet porn issue until some stupid liberal judges shot it down based on an erroneous reading of the Constitution.
We've got to try to get ahead of this.
I think you go after The same way we go after prostitution, which is that maybe you try to punish the customers, the users, but ultimately I think you've got to punish the pimps.
And in this case, that means you've got to punish the hosts.
You've got to punish the people who are hosting and encouraging this stuff.
Which means you might have to rewrite parts of one of those laws from the 1990s, the Communications Decency Act, to stop giving so much protection to big internet companies that host this kind of smut.
But just as you would go after a pimp for human trafficking, I think you've got to go after those producers, because obviously you're not going to go after the girl.
You could go after the consumer, but in many cases the consumers of this kind of porn are going to be teenage boys.
And so what are you going to do?
You're going to lock up a teenage boy for Maybe you will, but you're going to lock up a lot of teenage boys in America.
We've got to take a more proactive stance as a political order and say, if you, an adult with a bank account, with a business, who are preying on young girls and young men with this kind of smut, if you engage in that kind of business, you go to jail for a long, long time.
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Finally, finally, we've arrived at my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you in the mailbag.
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Take it away.
Hello, Mark!
This is sweet little Brian from the village named after a mud turtle.
I was curious.
Since you have fully embraced and vibed and are living the PSL lifestyle and allowing your inner white girl to burst out of you, I have become concerned.
Did all of those herbs and spices get to your brain and turn you into a hippie?
Causing you to pick up the sitar and play the Star Spangled Banner for your outro?
If that is the case, I believe that, for the good of society, and especially for the good of you and the other poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, pumpkin spice must be eradicated from public life entirely.
The whole preposterous hysteria of a flavoring at every level.
And since you're man enough to embrace your inner 16 year old white girl, I will take your lead and someone's up mine to tell you, like I know you're like on the daily wire, but like you're a daily friend to me.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate all of the magnificent diction in that question, but to the question itself, have the pumpkin spices gone to my head and turned me into a big hippie?
It's a fear.
It's a fear, but you'll notice I was playing the Star Spangled Banner, and when I play Sitar, In part because I'm not a good sitar player, but in part because I don't want to accidentally perform some, you know, Hindu liturgies or something, which is obviously intimately tied in with Indian classical music.
I tend to play Western music on the sitar.
That's what I do.
And so like, like Christians going in and taking certain pagan rituals and traditions and just baptizing them and claiming them for ourselves.
Which is something that has happened much less frequently in history than is often claimed.
People say, oh, Christmas is pagan, or Easter is pagan, and none of that is really true.
But certain little tiny things do come from pagan traditions.
So, too, that's what I'm doing with the sitar.
We are making sitar great again.
Next question.
Howdy, howdy again, Mr. Knowles.
It is Slot My Bass coming at you with another question.
So, I really would like to know, what is your secret to staying calm and staying happy?
With all of the stress and anger that comes with debating politics and the liberals, obviously they have a lot of anger so they're not as level-headed as we are, but sometimes we can get caught up in the moment, we can get angry, we can become irrational, but I want to know what is your secret to staying level-headed, staying calm, and being collective in the face of all of this stress and stupidity?
Thanks again as always!
One secret is just practicing.
It's true of any habit.
Just the more you do it, the easier it becomes to do it.
But the other secret is, I...
I'm a big fan of providence.
I really like providence.
I believe in providence.
I believe that God has an order for the world and there is a story here that is unfolding with my cooperation and with the cooperation of my free will.
I'm not saying I'm merely a passive actor here, but that God ultimately is in control of this story.
We can know the beginning of the story, we know the middle of the story, we know the end of the story.
Things unfold in a way that can be Marvelous, and that are more marvelous than whatever I could think of.
There's a good line from Alexander Pope which is that, all nature is but art unknown to thee, all chance direction which thou canst not see.
There's a line my friend Father George Ruttler has used which is, he says, a wicked generation seeks signs and wonders, and I'm not the first to say it, but a stupid generation ignores signs and wonders.
And so if I'm Having a rough day, things keep happening to me that are outside of my control, and they inconvenience me or irritate me, I will sometimes get a little bit of a kick out of it.
I'll say, well, this is happening for some reason.
It's not mine to know exactly what that reason is necessarily, and so I'll be grateful for whatever God has given me.
When I was doing the interview with Father Rehill, the exorcist, We kept having audio problems.
We didn't think we were going to have any audio problems.
We should have gotten a 25-minute run without some clanging noise outside.
And yet, seven minutes in, audio problems.
I said, cut.
All right, we restart.
Another seven minutes goes by.
Audio problems.
Cut.
Okay, here we go.
Restart.
This happens, I think, about four times.
I turned to Father Rehill.
I said, hey, does this happen to you a lot?
He says, Michael, it's the story of my life.
I said, oh, got it.
Okay.
Just keep rolling next time.
Sort of things that can happen amid spiritual warfare, and so I find a great deal of delight about that.
There's something bigger going on in the story than whatever particular activity I'm trying to accomplish.
Next question.
Dear Michael, according to Catholic doctrine, can non-Catholic Christians go to heaven?
I haven't been able to find a straightforward answer to this online.
Thank you so much.
I make no pronouncements over who goes to heaven and who goes to hell because I do not possess the keys to the kingdom of heaven and it is not the case that whatever I bind on earth will be bound in heaven and what I loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
If you are baptized and you have faith, that's a good place to start.
But we know from John that there are certain sins which are mortal, and so...
How do we have our sins forgiven?
Our Lord, in the Gospel, establishes a way.
He breathes on the Apostles, and he says, receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you retain are retained.
And then we see this through the entire history of the Church.
So, I have many loved ones who are outside of Holy Mother Church to varying degrees, and in certain cases, I hope Intensely and pray for God's extraordinary mercy.
But, if you want what I consider to be a sure thing, I would avail yourself of the sacraments that Holy Mother Church dispenses.
How's that for an answer?
I wouldn't say you're without hope.
I would never say that sort of thing.
And, you know, Christ being crucified on the cross, he turns to the good thief and he says, today you'll be with me in paradise.
The good thief has not received formal sacraments, although he received the true meaning of the sacrament himself right there on the cross.
But if it were me, I would recommend veiling yourself of all of the opportunities for God's grace.
Next question.
Hi, Michael.
Arun here.
I'd like to get your thoughts on free speech in light of last weekend's attack on Israel by Hamas, because I learned about it in an odd way.
Over the weekend, I saw some rumblings of this attack on Twitter, but I figured that this was just another rocket attack that would likely be blocked by the Iron Dome, which would minimize casualties, and that Israel would make a proportionate response, and, you know, then we could all go home.
Uh, but I watched Ben Shapiro on Monday, mostly, because you were on vacation, and after watching the videos he had compiled of Hamas' attack, I only then realized that Hamas had essentially perpetrated a holocaust in microcosm.
I mean, these are by far the worst images I've ever seen in my life.
And the only reason I know about any of this is because Hamas decided to post their war crimes on social media.
Now, I'm familiar with the model of free speech that you've laid out in Speechless, and I'm sympathetic to it.
But the principal reason that I and many others are aware of the depths of Hamas's depravity and their anti-Semitism It seems to me that if people with evil beliefs wish to talk about those beliefs, it is a good idea for us to grant them the right to speak freely so that we can know that they believe these things and so that we can act accordingly.
So, I'm curious, how do you think that the principle of free speech applies to evil and demonic people such as the members of Hamas?
Thank you, as always, for your wisdom.
Arun, typically an excellent question, and your observation is quite right, but it cuts both ways, which is Hamas committed these particularly egregious atrocities in part to upload it to social media.
It wasn't the Israelis, it wasn't the Westerners who were uploading these videos, at first at least, it was Hamas uploading these videos.
Because the purpose of terrorism is to target civilians, to achieve a political purpose, and to scare the hell out of civilians, and in this case basically to convince the Jews who are living in the Holy Land that it would be smarter for them to live in New York than to live surrounded by enemies.
So, if not for social media, If not for the ability to publicize these crimes, would the crimes even have been so egregious?
Maybe, but I think it's indisputable that Hamas was playing to the cameras.
They implicitly admit that themselves when they upload all of those videos.
So, to your point though, without trying to skirt the issue, I think that there can be good uses of making exceptions to rules of propriety and standards on social media to expose the barbarity of a particular crime, to achieve a particular political purpose, to shed some light on a significant historical event.
Absolutely.
I think still on Twitter there are rules against snuff films you're not on social media generally you're not allowed to upload a regular old snuff film and yet we are seeing videos of people being killed so that is technically a snuff film but you see that kind of exception already I would just Make those judgment calls as a matter of prudence.
I wouldn't make it as a matter of some firm ideological principle that we always need to see all sorts of gruesome videos.
I don't see what would be achieved by that, and a lot of bad things could result as a consequence.
Okay, we'll get to one written mailbag before we get to the Kremlachrem in the Membrum Segmentum, and we'll get to more mailbag there.
From Nashon, hey sexy Mike!
I'm a high schooler.
Oh, no.
Generally speaking, the high schoolers should not use my proper... Only the adults should use my proper title.
I'm a high schooler taking a class on government and was recently learning about the Iran-Contra scandal.
Since you're a big proponent of Reagan, I wanted to know your thoughts on it, or if the class is just teaching me wrong.
Thanks.
Iran-Contra was fine.
The only problem is that it didn't go far enough.
Iran-Contra was when the Reagan administration It would appear without the knowledge of the President, was trading arms for hostages in Iran, and then using some of the money.
There was an embargo with Iran, so they couldn't legally sell the arms, but they were selling arms to Iran anyway, to try to get hostages out of Iran.
And then they were taking some of the money that was made from the arm sales to fund the Contras, who were opposing the Communists in Nicaragua.
And I don't really see the issue with it.
The problem was, the legal issue there was that there was no money appropriated to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
It was obviously a good thing to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
There's no question about that.
It was the right-wingers versus the communists.
And in virtually any of those circumstances, you want to oppose the... I mean, communists are very, very evil people, and their ideology is very, very evil and diabolical.
So that was good.
We don't want communists taking over Latin America.
There were hostages in Iran.
You want to get the hostages back.
You don't want to do it in a way that's going to encourage terrorists to steal more of your people.
So they did it somewhat surreptitiously.
And the issue was that they circumvented the legal means.
But we continue to do this.
I mean, that's how we gave Ukraine $6 billion over the last few months.
Remember?
Congress didn't want to appropriate more funds to the Ukraine war so the DOD just pretended that they found six billion dollars in a couch cushion and they said no no actually the money was because the weapons were cheaper than we thought they were so anyway here's another six billion dollars.
That was money that we sent to Ukraine that was not really appropriated.
They just did some kind of funny math on the books and sent the weapons over there.
It's the same thing as Iran-Contra.
I guess the only difference is there was a clear right and wrong in the case of what was going on in Iran-Contra and Nicaragua.
And the Reagan administration was on the right side of things.
And in the case of the Biden administration, they have no strategic vision.
And often they're funding people who aren't so great.
That's my view on it.
So maybe you were taught correctly.
You might have been taught the facts of it and then just told it was a bad thing.
There was nothing wrong about it at all.
It's a shame that as many Reagan administration staffers had to suffer consequences as they did.
Okay, it's Fake Headline Friday, baby.
The rest of the show continues now.
You do not want to miss it.
Head on over to the Kremlider Kreml, the Membrum Segmentum.
