Republicans learn a very important lesson in the South Carolina primary, comedian Shane Gillis shows a huge difference between the right and the left when he makes some jokes about mental handicaps on Saturday Night Live, and a member of the United States Air Force lights himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy to protest the war in the Middle East.
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South Carolinians went to the polls on Saturday to pick the Republican nominee for president, and they picked Trump, surprising precisely no one.
Trump beat Haley by a roughly 20 point margin, 60 to 40, also surprising no one.
So if the story surprises no one, why would I even mention it?
Because buried inside this not very newsworthy outcome is something that does matter.
The result in South Carolina was within three points of the polling average leading up to it.
That, after the Iowa caucuses turned out to be within four points of the polling average, even the New Hampshire primary, which came just after DeSantis shook up the whole race by dropping out, even New Hampshire came in pretty close to the polling average.
Which means, this year, in this race, the polls seem to be accurate.
And the polls currently have Trump beating Biden in seven swing states.
Which means, much as conservatives love to despair, we're always trying to explain how the whole West is lost.
Despite all the unfair advantages that the Democrats have in the electoral process, it is simply a fact right now that Donald Trump could very well be the next President of the United States.
I'm Michael Nolse.
This is the Michael Nolse Show.
Shane Gillis, who got fired from SNL before he could ever even really appear on it, just hosted SNL.
Now, he got fired because he made a sort of slightly politically incorrect joke.
Shane Gillis is probably a big lib, but he got fired for not quite being woke enough.
And not since Norm Macdonald, coming back to host after he got fired, has so triumphant a return ever happened.
What does it mean for comedy?
What does it mean for the culture?
What does it mean for the ratings on network TV?
We'll get to that in one second.
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Pretty good news.
There's actually pretty good stuff in the news.
The people who run the network TV and Saturday Night Live and the culture and the comedy, They're realizing that they got nothing, so they're bringing back people who they previously fired— The polls seem pretty reliable, and right now the polls have Donald Trump up by a fair bit.
It just seems like people are more in touch with reality, and our political order is even more in touch with reality than it has been in a long time.
Why?
Why are voters turning on Biden?
They're turning on Biden for a number of reasons.
The economy is terrible.
Our dollars are worth a lot less than they were four years ago.
We've got this invasion at the southern border where Joe Biden's compromise was going to be letting 8,500 people a day come in, foreigners, which is completely insane.
Joe Biden has already let in over 6 million foreigners over just three years.
No one likes that, including Democrats, including immigrants themselves, and nobody likes a totally open border.
The prospect of World War 3 in Ukraine, in the Middle East, all over the place, that doesn't look really, really good.
But mostly, I think more important maybe than any of those things, even including the economy, is how much the liberals have lost the common sense.
How far out there the liberals currently seem.
They seem totally out of touch with biology.
They think men can be women.
They seem totally out of touch with ordinary voters who they call insurrectionists and terrorists and whatever.
They seem totally out of touch with the American tradition.
They now claim that if you believe that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, that you are a radical, fringe, anti-American extremist.
The one thing that unites all of them, because there's many different groups orbiting Trump, but the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalists is very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority.
They don't come from Congress.
They don't come from the Supreme Court.
They come from God.
Can you imagine these Christian nationalists?
That lady is the national investigative reporter for Politico.
So, I don't, not a lot of people read Politico, but that is one of the establishment organs of Washington DC.
She's there speaking on MSNBC.
And I'm not quite sure how this casting session went.
I assume it was that the executives at NBC, they said, okay, we need someone To come on and do a segment on Christianity, religion, natural law, political philosophy, and American history.
And then this lady raised her hand and she said, well, I don't know anything at all about any of those things.
And the NBC producer said, oh, you're perfect.
All right, well, let's get you on.
I guess Politico would have had to make that decision first.
This woman speaking She says there's a big difference between Christianity and Christian nationalism.
She never explains what that difference is because these people just hate Christianity and they hate any expression of Christianity in public life.
Maybe, maybe, maybe if you never let on to anyone that you're a Christian and you just keep it as a big little secret in your head, maybe they won't totally hate you for that, but they probably will too.
They'll think that because they find Christianity to be synonymous with Bigotry, backwardsness, a lack of progressive revolutionary fervor.
So they hate it.
They hate Christianity, and they even hate the most basic kind of watered-down view that God gave us rights.
Which happens to be a view shared by our founding fathers, including the most liberal among them, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Our country is grounded on the idea that our Creator endowed us with certain unalienable rights.
Even that.
We're talking about guys who were deists and freemasons in the 18th century.
Even that is too radically Christian.
For the national investigative reporter Politico and for MSNBC.
But it is awkward for them right now because they are clearly on the cutting edge of wokeness.
The Politico people and the MSNBC people, they are where the young Democrat base is.
Which is extremely anti-Christian, extremely anti-American, extremely woke.
The problem for them is that their president and their nominee for 2024 is Father Time, who knew Thomas Jefferson personally.
And because of that, because Joe Biden, whatever you want to say about him, is not woke, he's cynical, he doesn't believe anything, he goes which way the wind blows, but he's not woke because of that.
Anytime these woke people try to malign ordinary views that everyone held until five or ten years ago, there's a clip of Joe Biden articulating precisely those views.
I believe all Americans are born with certain inalienable rights.
As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution.
My rights are not derived from any government.
My rights are not derived from any majority.
My rights are because I exist.
I have certain rights.
They're given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our Creator, and they represent the essence of human dignity.
Totally unobjectionable.
You can see all the other members of the Senate who are listening to Joe blather on.
They're not even paying attention to him.
Their heads are down at their paper.
They're writing.
No one's even listening to them.
It was so obvious.
Now, though, that's considered the radical, extreme, Christian nationalist position.
I guess the most troubling part of the MSNBC lady and the Politico story, it's not so much the radicalism.
I can deal with political radicals.
Sometimes political radicals make the easiest converts.
Often it is the case that the extreme atheist is the one who's going to convert with true zeal and become a Christian.
Sometimes it's the most ardent, crazy, color-haired leftist who's a lesbian, you know, Marxist, who's going to become the most trad conservative.
Because they're taking ideas seriously, and they're reading, and they're engaging, and they're having conversations.
And so, while their minds are moving, their minds might move in the right direction.
That happens.
Look, I'm a convert from atheism to, or a revert rather, from atheism to Christianity.
It happens.
What's really troubling here is the ignorance that this woman, who has a position of authority within our political establishment, she's a top reporter at what's considered to be a top outlet, who's on a relatively mainstream cable news channel, she's out there.
This woman has clearly never read the Declaration of Independence.
If she has, she doesn't remember a word of it.
We're talking about the most famous line of the Declaration.
This woman doesn't know anything about American history, to say nothing of political philosophy, to say nothing of religion.
She doesn't know anything about anything.
And she's theoretically one of the best educated people on these subjects.
That is a problem that the United States We can get over political radicalism because it tends to come in spurts and then it can be pushed away as the American people realize that these guys have lost the common sense.
But a blithe ignorance forced upon us by public schooling, by Hollywood, by the news media, by this news media, this kind of ignorance that they're pushing on us, that sort of thing, much more difficult to recover from.
Speaking of our constitutional order, I have got the chef's kiss, greatest political article to come out all year.
Nothing will ever top this.
We're in February and it's already the best of the year from the Atlantic.
How Democrats could disqualify Trump if the Supreme Court doesn't.
Without clear guidance from the court, House Democrats suggest that they might not certify a Trump win on January 6th.
I kid you not.
I'm looking, I'm waiting for the irony.
I'm looking at the article.
I'm not, not seeing a ton of irony.
The Atlantic isn't even suggesting it out of the fevered imaginations of its editors.
They're saying House Democrats are suggesting that they might not certify a Trump win on January 6th.
We were told.
We are still being told and have been told for years that the House has no right not to certify a presidential election, that the Vice President has no right not to certify a presidential election, that no one has a right to challenge slights of Electors, even if the election has all the rules changed, in some cases illegally, in some cases constitutionally, even then there is no right whatsoever if you even suggest such a thing.
You're a traitor, an insurrectionist.
You should be thrown into solitary confinement with all of the other Midwestern grannies and Florida selfie takers from the Capitol.
Unless you're a Democrat.
And they mean it.
They really mean this sincerely.
It was all crocodile tears, all the talk of January 6th, the worst day in the history of this or any republic.
It was all fake.
It was all crocodile tears.
Of course it was.
You know how we know that?
Because the premise of all the January 6th crocodile tears was that no one would ever question the results of a presidential election, which is something the Democrats do every single time they lose.
For almost my entire life, every time the Democrats lose, they whine and they cry and they say it's illegitimate.
They did it to George W. Bush.
There were members of the House of Representatives who took to the floor and said, this is an illegitimate election.
They challenged it in the courts.
They took it up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court finally decided the election.
There was nowhere else to go.
They would have dragged that thing out forever.
While the Democrats were shedding their crocodile tears over January 6th, Stacey Abrams was still pretending to have been elected governor of Georgia.
Hillary Clinton insinuated that the 2016 election was not legitimate.
It just on and on and on.
And so you knew it was fake, but there were squishes who said no.
We must recognize that the Democrats, they have a point here.
I stand on principles.
It's unacceptable to suggest that we slow the certification of the vote to establish an electoral commission just like they did in 1876.
Wait, never mind.
I mean, it's totally unprecedented and it's never happened before.
No, guys.
Guys.
It was always fake.
So what do we do about this?
What do we do when we know that the Democrats whine and cry and complain and accuse us of doing the exact same thing that they regularly do and that they plan to do in 2024?
It's a reminder that we need to, one, stop falling for their cynical tricks, and two, we need to get a little bit more comfortable wielding power in a way that's legal and constitutional and keeping with historical precedent, but that is robust, that's a little bit aggressive.
It gets down to a principle.
That you sometimes hear colloquially.
And the principle is, it is better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
You ever hear that expression?
It's better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
If you're in a situation where your life is endangered and you got to fight back and either you're gonna allow yourself to become a victim and possibly be killed by the aggressor or you're gonna defend yourself and possibly, we hope not, but possibly you would kill the aggressor.
What are you supposed to do?
Lay down and risk your life or defend yourself?
You have a right to defend yourself.
And just as a matter of prudence, it is better to be judged for your actions in defending yourself than to be killed and then carried by pallbearers to your grave.
Okay, so taking this out of the realm of the literal and bringing it back into the realm of the political and the figurative.
We always seem to worry that any Democrat action that in any way could imperil any legal precedent, if we do that, we'll be blamed.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to lose, but we're going to lose with dignity.
So we can say, oh, it wasn't us who upset political precedent.
It was those nasty, dastardly Democrats.
And that's a great way to get carried by six politically.
Okay, far, far better to take matters into your own hands, political matters into your own hands, and to defend your political interests, and to defend your whole political order, okay?
And if that means that you gotta question certain elections, and if that means that you've got to raise objections to, say, the unconstitutional voting procedures in places like Pennsylvania, and if that means that you gotta actually fight politically, We should do that.
Much more to say first, though.
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Now, speaking of President Trump, Trump was just in South Carolina campaigning before Saturday's primary election, where he won by 20 points.
And he went off, man.
He was campaigning on all sorts of issues.
Then at one point, he just starts impersonating Joe Biden.
You know, when I imitate Biden, because he can't find his way off the stage, as you all know.
He makes a speech that lasts usually about a minute and a half because the octane starts to wear off.
You ever notice he starts off strong within about two minutes, he can't talk anymore.
And then he walks off.
You ever notice he always goes like this?
Trump turns.
You just listen to Trump turns.
When he kind of does this thing with his body and it turns and he leans.
Then he comes back up to the mic.
And he's looking, he's totally lost.
There's stairs all over the place.
He can go there, there, here.
He could jump off the front of the damn platform.
But he always goes like this.
It's just a weird lean point, which Biden does too.
There's a stair right there, right?
Then he starts.
Now Trump is just wandering.
He's just wandering around the stage.
You see his allies and his aides are just kind of laughing.
He's turned around.
Trump's facing the wrong direction.
I play all of that not to make some point about the economy or migration or whatever.
To point out, that is a political skill.
Donald Trump has a political skill that no other politician has had in my lifetime, which is that he is very, very funny.
He is the funniest stand-up comedian in the United States.
This was the South Park take, actually, on Trump's first run for president in 2016, was that he turns into a stand-up comedy routine when he's up there doing a rally.
The spotlight comes on, he might as well light a cigarette, put his drink on his stool, and start doing a bit.
That's what he's doing here.
And that's very valuable.
And you're going to hear people, even in the Republican Party, they're going to say, well, but what about policy?
What about seriousness?
Yeah, it's good.
Look, the guy had better policy during his term as president than any president in my lifetime.
So actually, I think his policy was pretty good.
I'm not saying it was perfect.
I'm just saying it was quite good.
It was really quite good.
But beyond that, this is a political skill, and this allows you to connect to people, which in a democracy is the most important thing you can do politically.
He can do it better than anyone I know.
And have seen in my lifetime.
Don't underestimate that.
Because what he's showing here, too, is that he's energetic and quick on his feet.
These are the two things Biden is not.
And that fact about Biden is the actual object of the comedy routine that he's doing.
And then he doesn't just reserve the comedy for Biden.
He goes out, and right when he takes the stage, he starts doing a bit on white voters and black voters.
These lights are so bright in my eyes that I can't see too many people out there.
But I can only see the black ones.
I can't see any white ones.
That's how far I've come.
That's how far I've come.
That's a long, that's a long way, isn't it?
We've come a long way together.
Now, of course, you know that the libs and the squishes in the Republican Party, they immediately said, this is so embarrassing.
It's so racist and offensive.
First of all, what's racist about it?
I don't even, I don't know that that word means anything anymore, but if it, I certainly don't know how that would be racist.
He walks in, he goes, the lights are really, really bright.
I can't really see anything.
The only nearest thing I can see is the black people.
Look at all these black people here.
This is great.
We've come a long way, haven't we?
What do you mean we've come a long way?
Because we were told when Trump started running, he's a racist.
He's terrible.
And don't forget, black voters vote 90% for the Democrat Party.
So in as much as Donald Trump can pull away any Black voters or any prominent black endorsements, that's a big win for the Republican Party.
And Trump has done that to varying degrees.
And the current polling in 2024 shows numbers that I frankly just cannot believe in terms of how he's doing among the black male vote.
We've never seen it actually reflected at the polls.
If Trump is able to pull off even half of it, it would be extraordinarily impressive.
But this is funny stuff.
The median black voter would not find that offensive.
Maybe some crazy gender studies graduate from Harvard, black voter, would say, this is very offensive for Donald Trump to say.
He can only see the black voters.
But an ordinary black voter, an ordinary person, period, will find that very funny.
That's a good bit.
And it gets to something that Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist and very successful left-wing political theorist and organizer, he pointed out, which is, you win when you have the common sense.
And you lose when you don't have the common sense.
And what leftist radicals, what he was lamenting at the time, was leftist radicals had lost the common sense.
Ordinary people didn't care for the leftist theories of revolution.
They didn't want to give up their way of life.
They didn't want to give up their families and their communities.
And the leftists were frustrated by that.
And so the left, paying attention to Antonio Gramsci, tried to gather the common sense.
In many ways, the election is going to come down to who can seem less weird, less extreme, less fringy, and who can seem more normal.
Joe Biden's whole campaign in 2020 was, I'm the normal guy.
I'm a return to normalcy.
Well, it doesn't seem very normal under Biden, and Biden can't say his own name anymore.
So Donald Trump has a real opportunity if he can capitalize on his political gifts and seem just like an ordinary, normal guy.
There's much more to say.
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People have written into me in frustration.
Because they want to submit questions to the mailbag and to the voicemail bag, but they don't know how to do it.
So I'm going to tell you.
Here it is.
Write it down.
If you're driving, pull over.
Go to dailywire.com.
Log in.
Then go to the Michael Knowles Show page.
Then, all you have to do, you click on the mailbag icon on the left side, and then boom!
An email box is going to pop up.
There you can write your written question, or what I prefer, I like the voice mailbag.
So you just attach your audio file to your question.
Keep it to 60 seconds so we can actually put it on the air.
How are you going to record your audio file?
However you want.
On your phone, on your computer, I don't care.
You do it.
Make it a video.
Whatever it is.
You just attach that file right there in the email.
Boom.
Send it in and we can put you in the show on Friday.
Speaking of comedy, Shane Gillis made his triumphant return to Saturday Night Live.
Shane Gillis was fired from Saturday Night Live before he even got to start because some vaguely politically incorrect clip of him came out and because he's a white guy and you're not allowed he's and he's relatively normal and you're not allowed to be any of those things anymore.
They booted him off the show, but then the show's not doing that well and Shane Gillis has done very well, so they invited him back to host.
Reminds me a lot of when they fired Norm MacDonald because he kept making politically incorrect jokes about how OJ was obviously guilty.
So they fired him from Weekend Update, he leaves the show, and then they invite him back to guest host.
just a season later.
And he pointed out, he said, yeah, that's kind of funny.
Last season, I wasn't funny enough to even be a member of the show.
And this season, I'm funny enough to host the show.
So it either means one of two things.
Either I've gotten a lot funnier, which I haven't, or the show blows.
And it was clearly the latter.
So Shane Gillis, he was a little nicer about it.
Here is just a little snippet of his opening monologue.
I'll tell you this.
I don't know if you guys, if you can tell by looking at me, but I do have family members with Down syndrome.
It almost got me. - Yep.
I dodged it, but it nicked me.
It nicked me.
No, I brought up Down Syndrome.
You can always tell who's never been around Down Syndrome when you bring it up.
Like, if I tell people, if I'm like, yeah, I have family members with Down Syndrome, people that have never been around it are always like, oh.
Like, it's the end of the world.
Like, oh, are they okay?
Are they doing it?
It's like, they're doing better than everybody I know.
They're the only ones having a good time pretty consistently.
They're not worried about the election.
They're having a good time.
This made me think of a strange phenomenon in politics.
I'm not saying Shane Gillis is a conservative.
He's probably a big lib.
He's just, he's relatively normal.
This is what even made me think of it.
But take Shane Gillis out of it for a second.
I thought that's a funny joke.
Conservatives will sometimes make jokes about mentally retarded people.
We will, conservatives will sometimes make jokes about the phenomenon of mental retardation.
We might even use the word retard or retarded.
And we will also celebrate mentally retarded people and we will vigorously defend the right to life of mentally retarded people.
We'll do all those things.
Will recoil at the mere utterance of the word retarded or retard.
They will yell at you if you use the word.
They will be shocked and appalled.
They'll clutch their pearls.
And simultaneously, they will openly advocate for the total extermination of all mentally retarded people in the womb because they are mentally retarded.
Isn't that a little weird?
It seems to me It is a more moral and justifiable thing to make jokes about mental retardation and to defend the right to life of mentally retarded people than it is to not use that naughty word that starts with an R and then openly call for the mass killing of anyone who might be even slightly mentally retarded, which is what the liberals do.
In Iceland, when they now have a Truly genocidal program if you are diagnosed with Down syndrome in the womb, which by the way is very, very often inaccurate.
A lot of those in the womb diagnoses, oh there's going to be a problem with your baby, better kill it.
A lot of those, most of those turn out to be false.
No, we actually don't know the outcomes because very often parents will just kill their babies on the bad advice of their doctors.
But I remember a few years ago, Iceland announced, we've eradicated Down syndrome from our country.
Say, oh wow, they cured Down syndrome?
You realize, wait a second, there's no cure for Down syndrome.
Oh, you're just killing all of them.
You're killing all the Down syndrome people.
Okay, I wouldn't brag about that.
That seems, I wouldn't do it.
And if you're going to do it, I definitely wouldn't tell people you do it.
Because it's very, very evil.
But they probably don't use the word retarded.
They would never make a joke about Down syndrome like Shane Gillis did.
You know, they would never, that's very, they would just murder all of them.
Like, that seems kind of wrong.
I bet, I would be willing to bet a small amount of money that Media Matters breaks out this clip today.
Because I said the word retarded.
You're right.
I will say the word retarded and I might even if I were hosting SNL, I might even make a joke about mental retardation.
But you know what I wouldn't do?
I wouldn't kill retarded people.
In fact, I would celebrate them.
Because to Shane Gelles' point, specifically people with Down syndrome are just consistently self-reporting very high levels of happiness.
So his joke there is, how's your cousin who has Down syndrome doing?
I don't know, better than all of you.
That's real.
That's true.
That's why that joke is funny.
It's because it's true.
The libs though, they won't laugh at that.
They won't laugh, and then they'll try to exterminate a whole group of people.
That's not very funny either.
I agree.
Speaking of the right to life, there is a slightly unfortunate political turn of events on the Republican side.
As a result of the Alabama Supreme Court rightly concluding that the Alabama state constitution prohibits not only abortion, but the buying and selling of human babies in the form of embryos, in the form of the surrogacy industry and IVF.
As a result of that, Some Republicans are coming out to defend IVF, probably because they think that being opposed to IVF will hurt them in the 2024 election.
So Carrie Lake did this, and President Trump did this as well.
President Trump came out, he tweeted, or posted on Truth Social, Under my leadership, the Republican Party will always support the creation of strong, thriving, healthy American families.
That's great, we love that.
We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder.
Totally agree, that's great.
That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every state in America.
I don't know about that one.
Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, conservative Christians, and pro-life Americans, I strongly support the availability for couples who are trying to have a precious baby.
IVF, I think, actually, when you get into the nitty-gritty, is a little more controversial than that.
Today, I'm calling on the Alabama legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in Alabama.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
I mean, the state constitution is pretty clear.
The Republican Party should always be on the side of the miracle of life and the side of mothers, fathers, and their beautiful babies.
IVF, that's certainly true.
IVF is an important part of that.
Not so sure.
And our great Republican Party will always be with you in your quest for the ultimate joy in life.
Okay, I get it.
I get why people support IVF.
I also get why people would subscribe to this YouTube channel.
What you have to do is ring that bell, subscribe to the Michael Nellis YouTube channel, subscribe, ring it, smash, ding dong, whatever you got to do.
Thank you, appreciate that.
I understand why people support IVF, because infertility is very, very painful.
For two years, sweet little Elise and I actually struggled to conceive our first child, and I speak with a little bit of experience.
I understand just a little bit how extremely painful that is.
I get it.
And we went to a fertility specialist, finally.
And you know what they do, the fertility specialists?
They sell you IVF.
They are salesmen for IVF.
And IVF and surrogacy is...
I guess it's a market for babies.
What you're selling is a human being, which is morally questionable in itself to say nothing about the ways in which IVF actually is practiced with the creation of multiple human beings who are then left to just be put in a freezer indefinitely and then maybe destroyed, killed if you don't use them.
It's very morally dubious, but people don't pay attention to that.
Don't pay attention to it because they're offered this extreme temptation for a very deep desire of their heart during an extremely painful period of their lives.
I get it.
I get why people have done it, okay?
I don't think it would be advisable for the Republican Party to come out as the party of IVF right now.
And I'm not even saying that the Republican Party should be running against IVF.
I totally sympathize with Donald Trump's political instincts.
That this would be an unpopular campaign theme.
Yeah, I'm not saying you run on immigration, the economy, and banning IVF everywhere.
I'm not saying that that would be a politically wise idea.
I guess if I were advising President Trump, what I would urge here is just caution.
This is a novel bioethical debate because this is a very new technology for virtually all of human history.
We had no ability to do this kind of thing, to create human beings in petri dishes, in labs, and then freeze them, and then implant them, and then sell them.
And sometimes you, this has happened even last year, there's a big lawsuit about this.
You mix the wrong sperm with the wrong egg, and oopsie-daisy, you just made a human being who has a mother and a father who have never met each other.
And whatever happens to that human being, it's not going to be ideal.
Because if you allow the human being to live, the human being is not going to know one of his parents, or it's going to split up multiple marriages, or it's who knows.
Or you're just going to destroy that human being.
You're going to kill him because you're treating that human being like an object rather than a proper subject with rights.
These are things a lot of people don't think about.
But it's a novel idea, and so I would just urge caution.
That would be my advice here.
We all want strong families, we all want...
We hear that the vast majority of people support IVF.
That's not exactly true.
I mean, the Catholic Church utterly prohibits it.
And lots of other Christians have all sorts of moral questions about it.
And Jews have moral questions about it.
And everybody has some moral questions.
It's such a novel idea.
I'm not really knocking Trump here.
I get it politically.
Even Viktor Orban in Hungary, who is the best on family policy of anyone in the West, even he has supported IVF.
And so I understand it's kind of a new thing and people haven't thought about it all the way through.
So I'm totally sympathetic to President Trump's gut feeling here.
If I were, if I were advising the president, I would just urge a little bit of caution on this matter.
Maybe just don't make it A top political issue one way or the other.
I think Alabama is following their state supreme court.
Alabama is following the state constitution.
Alabama, I think, is following a bioethically wise course here.
But we have laboratories of democracy.
This debate will play out over some time, and one can hope and pray that the correct conclusion will be reached.
Republicans, we don't need to shoot ourselves in the foot on this issue, would be my humble suggestion.
Now, speaking of life and death, And really disturbing stories.
There's a guy, I think a current member of the United States Air Force, who just showed up to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC and lit himself on fire to protest the war in the Middle East.
Here is, I'm not going to show the clip of him actually burning and screaming.
Here is what he has to say just before he goes and does it.
I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.
I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all.
This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Okay, so this guy obviously has a big screw loose and then he poured gasoline over himself and killed himself.
What interests me about this story is not so much the Middle East conflict, as I've said before, you know, the Middle East conflict, I think, is basically intractable.
I totally understand, or I totally sympathize with both sides of the conflict, meaning I can, I'm not saying I empathize with it, but I sympathize.
I understand how being on either side, you could arrive at the conclusions you've arrived at, and I don't really see any reconciliation.
It's just a, it's a very longstanding A land battle, and it's going to continue.
To me it seems, amid all the human tragedy, the best thing to do would be to just kind of wind it down and satisfy no one, to try to maintain something like the status quo.
Neither side is going to be amenable to that, so I get it.
This guy seems to be strongly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel.
He's using the language of the radical left, you know, attacking colonizers, which is kind of ironic coming from a member of the United States military.
You know, the United States is the global empire, so we began as a colonial project.
We've engaged in many colonial projects over the years.
But this is the language of the extreme left now that divides the world into colonizers and colonized and all the rest of it.
The reason that this story interests me, other than we should pray for the repose of this man's soul and his poor family and whatever craziness was going on in his head, it's not the stuff he was talking about in the Middle East.
It's the question of whether or not it is ever justified to kill yourself.
At a personal level or at the stage of some grand political protest, because coincidentally, providentially, I was just reading some St.
Augustine today on this very subject, which we'll get to in one second.
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My favorite comment comes from Cybergirl who says, Michael, I love your quote, there's nothing hateful about reality.
You're correct, there is not, yet I find it so strange that the left finds reality really hateful.
That's true.
It's...
From the very beginning, you know, it goes back to the devil in the Garden of Eden who tempts mankind by saying, ye shall be as gods.
Surely you will not die if you eat the apple, ye shall be as gods.
It's that temptation.
We're in the season of Lent right now, the temptation of the Antichrist when he tempts Christ in the wilderness and he says, turn these stones into bread.
And he says, cast yourself down from this height and you won't splatter on the ground.
Control the whole world.
All of these kingdoms can be yours if you just bow down to me, the Antichrist.
All of that.
is the temptation to unreality.
Okay, it's the temptation ultimately to reject the reality of the created world.
And so why do the libs fall into that?
And that's why they often seem demonic in their political activity.
And why now they even use multiple pronouns You know, my name is Legion for we are many.
It's yeah, not good.
Reality is good.
I would strongly recommend you accept reality.
Okay.
Back to this Air Force guy who did not accept reality.
This American service member lights himself on fire and kills himself because he really loves the Palestine Liberation Movement, I guess, and he really hates the Israeli state.
Okay.
Is it ever justified to kill yourself for a personal matter or a political matter?
The Christian answer simply is no.
St.
Augustine writes about this in The City of God.
Lucretia, who was a Roman noblewoman who was raped, she kills herself.
And her suicide is seen as inaugurating the shift from the Roman kingdom into the Roman Republic.
And then on the flip side of that, you see Cato.
Cato is probably one of, if not the most famous suicides in all of history.
Cato kills himself because he doesn't want to submit to Caesar.
And so St.
Augustine takes this up because the example of Cato has been probably the biggest pro-suicide example in all of history.
does not put Cato into hell.
Even though Cato is a suicide, he doesn't, because he sees Cato as an emblem of liberty, that he resists Caesar taking over and ending the Roman Republic, and that there might be even something admirable about Cato killing himself.
St.
Augustine says that's all bunk, though.
He says, no, if Cato really thought this were admirable, why would he have counseled his son not to kill himself?
If this were something really good, wouldn't he have said, hey, son, I want good for you, too.
Son, you should kill yourself, too.
He doesn't say that to his son, though.
His son goes and he can get a pardon from Caesar.
Cato just does it.
Why?
Because true liberty exists not in just the ability to do whatever we wish, whenever we want to do it, as I've said frequently on this show, but it's the right to do what we ought to do.
And so a man can be free in prison.
A man can be free, and is sometimes at his most free, actually, when he is experiencing the outward signs of bondage.
Because we're not just bodies, we're also souls.
And true freedom is living in the right way, in accordance with God's will for us.
It's not just, you know, Not doing what other people tell you to do.
True freedom is following the truth.
And true slavery is when you reject the truth and you cultivate all sorts of nasty sins and vices and you become a slave to your own appetites.
That's a true kind of slavery.
So, it's simply contrary to the natural law to kill yourself.
Certainly contrary to charity and to the will of God.
And there's no excuse for it, ever, under any circumstances.
Getting back to the favorite comment of the week.
This was the point of my CPAC speech.
I said, you know, there's such a thing as the natural law.
There are natural institutions.
Marriage is one such institution.
And if you don't like what marriage has always meant everywhere in the history of the world, don't blame me.
I didn't invent it.
It wasn't conservatives who invented it.
It's not a mere social...
Construction.
It's something that is knowable by our reason.
You don't need the Bible, necessarily.
You don't need the wisdom of the prophets, necessarily.
You can just know through your human reason, perceiving reality, certain things.
Do good and avoid evil.
That would be the foundation of the natural law.
But all of this thinking has gone away.
And so, people who have a little bit of a screw loose, and they get very obsessed with a foreign war in the Middle East, they'll go and light themselves on fire.
And say that it's some great act of virtue.
It's not.
It's a terrible, terrible sin.
So, we should pray for that guy and make sure that we don't all drive ourselves equally crazy.
Now, speaking of supporting families, as President Trump wants to do, there is a par for the course sort of story in our modern welfare state.
A mother just blew $6,000 in public money On a vacation for herself.
And I guess she took the kids on the vacation, too.
But something tells me she was indulging herself a lot on this vacation.
The D.C.
government has a pilot program launched a couple years ago to offer more than 100 low-income mothers almost $1,100 in cash payments.
No strings attached.
So it's not food stamps.
It's not home heating subsidies.
It's just $10,800 cash.
Do with it what you want.
And what did this woman do with it?
She blew it on a Miami vacation.
She's a mother of three, 27-year-old Kennethia Miller.
She took the lump sum of almost 11 grand.
She's a stay-at-home mother who lives on welfare.
So, the notion of the welfare queen that you've heard about since at least the Reagan administration, liberals say that woman doesn't exist.
She does exist.
It's this woman.
This is the welfare queen.
And she said she spent some of the money on essentials, not a ton, But she spent most of the money taking herself and her baby daddy and the children, at least she brought the children, on this Miami vacation.
She said, these are her exact words.
The other side is, I wanted to blow it.
I wanted to have some fun.
She said she wanted her children to experience something she would not have been able to provide without the money.
And now they won't experience food because she blew all the money on Miami.
The Libs love to talk about root causes.
They say, we can't just arrest the illegal aliens at our border.
We need to get to the root causes of migration.
We can't just prosecute violent criminals on the streets of New York.
No, no, no.
We've got to get at the root problems of crime.
And they're half right.
I mean, it's not an either-or, okay?
You can do both.
You can arrest the criminals who are breaking the law, and you actually have to.
It's an obligation of justice.
But, yeah, we also should address root problems.
And what are these root causes?
Well, the root causes of crime in the streets, yeah, fatherlessness is a big problem.
And some of the root causes, the fact that we now actively discourage marriage as a matter of public policy.
That's bad!
We should encourage marriage.
We should stop pretending that marriage is something other than what it is.
We should stop pretending that marriage is just the sort of thing that one can undertake on a whim and encourage no-fault divorce.
Yeah, we should stop all that stuff.
I agree.
And we should encourage marriage in public life.
But what's the root cause of this woman's poverty?
The root cause of this woman's poverty is she can't be trusted with money.
She doesn't know how to use it.
Okay, you want to get to root causes.
These are her exact words.
I wanted to blow it.
She said, now I'm thinking about, now that I have some of this money, I'm thinking about getting a savings account.
I'm going to try to keep 50 bucks in it, at least.
Good.
Yeah, you should keep 50 bucks at least in your savings account.
But if you just got 11 grand, you should keep a lot more than 50 bucks in your savings account.
The root cause here of this woman's poverty is the fact that she's not married.
She should be encouraged to get married.
And if she's going to have a lot of children out of wedlock, there should be a social pressure for her to get married and to stay married.
There should be a social pressure for the men who get her pregnant to marry her, a strong social pressure.
It should not be encouraged or tolerated.
There should be a legal pressure for this stuff to happen.
And then if she is going to receive public assistance, which I guess she should because we don't want the kids to go hungry, this should not be no strings attached.
She proved it.
She proved the conservative point here.
That woman cannot be trusted with free money.
Very few people can be trusted with free money.
This is like why when people win the lottery, they just go bankrupt a lot, and it ruins a lot of their lives, in many cases, because they don't know how to handle it.
Because you think you want money, but you don't really want money.
What you want is the kind of lifestyle that leads you to get money in the first place.
If you just received, you know, Jeff Bezos's bank account, it would probably last you for a while because it's a big bank account, but you'd probably just ruin yourself if you didn't know how to handle that kind of money, if you hadn't cultivated The habits of virtue that allow you to live a good life that coincidentally, in some cases, in many cases, will lead you to amass some material wealth as well.
Not going to work, man.
You got to address the whole human person.
We are not merely economic agents.
We're not merely material.
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