Ep. 1481 - The Wild "Antisemitism" Bill Explained In 3 Mins
Police shut down the campus intifada, House Republicans censor the Bible, and Chris Pratt gets in trouble for knocking down an ugly house.
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Ep.1481
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The Trump indictments have been making him more popular with voters by the day.
And the Democrat Party is descending into civil war thanks to disagreement over the war in Gaza.
All Republicans had to do is keep their mouths shut, sit back, and watch their numbers go up.
But Republicans, you see, Republicans love nothing more than clutching defeat from the jaws of victory.
So instead of sitting back and letting their opponents destroy themselves, they decided to pass a bill yesterday to censor the Bible.
I'm not joking.
We'll get into it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Before the Republicans shot themselves in the foot, you had even establishment liberals starting to break ranks over this Israel-Gaza wedge issue on the American left, up to and including Stephen Colbert.
We will get to that in a moment.
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The Israel-Gaza wedge issue on the American left is most clear on the college campuses.
You've seen these crazy protests, these encampments, the occupation of university buildings cropping up all over the country, all over different kinds of schools, state schools, Ivy League schools, West Coast schools, East Coast schools, schools in the middle.
I have mentioned before, the kids are communists, they're all really weird, probably for public order they should all just be expelled and sent back to their parents' basements.
But, as a political matter, I fully support These protests, I fully support them.
I want these weirdo protesters, these half lesbian gender bending jihadis who are demanding more snacks and flavored seltzers as humanitarian aid.
I want them to be in front of microphones and cameras every single day from now until the election.
Okay, I will personally donate to their snack Fund, assuming the protests can go on.
If that means that they become the face of the Democrat Party, they keep irking the Democrat establishment, and they cause our opponents on the left to descend even further into chaos.
It's just so, you could not ask for a better representative of the American left in 2024 than some gender studies major, sexually confused, keffiyeh wearing, lunatic socialist.
It's just so great, but the fun is over.
The cops are shutting it down.
A number of New York City cops showed up to probably the most prominent one of these protests that is up at Columbia.
You know what's funny is that these keffiyehs, they're very confusing because some are wearing the Palestine keffiyeh, it's black and white, but then some are wearing the Saudi keffiyeh, which is weird because that's the red and white one, but the Saudi keffiyeh, you know, the headscarf, the Saudis kind of support the Israelis and the Saudis oppose Iran and Iran backs the Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas and Hezbollah.
So not that these people know any of that.
They don't know anything.
They probably don't know how to read.
They couldn't pick out Gaza or the state of Israel on a map.
And now all of their ignorant ranting is over because the cops arrested a bunch of them at Columbia.
About 300 people between Columbia and City College of New York.
Not just in New York, also in Wisconsin.
I was just at UW-Madison.
Well, cops showed up.
They cleared out an anti-Israel encampment there at UW-Madison.
Also down in Florida, law enforcement officials showed up.
They actually used tear gas at the University of South Florida to clear out the campus Intifada there.
Now, as a matter of Justice and objective standards, I guess it's good.
I mean, these people are complete lunatics.
They have no right to shut down universities.
They have no right to occupy halls.
They have no right to sleep on the street.
To quote Rudy Giuliani during the last version of this, which was the Occupy Wall Street protests, sleeping on the street is a dysfunctional act that harms the individual and society.
These kids, you know, probably shouldn't have graduated the eighth grade, much less be enrolled at a university.
But, politically, it does benefit us and it exposes, very honestly, it exposes some of the real problems on the American left.
So, happily, for us, politically, I don't think that these cops are going to stop the protests.
And I think it's going to continue.
And I think that's good for conservatives.
Some people have raised concern.
They've said, you know, Michael, we thought those BLM protests might be good for conservatives in 2020, but they weren't good for conservatives.
They just destroyed our businesses and killed people and locked us all down and then Biden won anyway.
First of all, I never encouraged the BLM protests, which were really riots and looting and murder.
I never encouraged them, even as a matter of political operation, because the BLM riots and the pro-Palestine liberation protests politically function totally different.
The BLM riots united the left.
The BLM riots targeted the left's enemies, the enemies of the leftist base and the enemies of the establishment.
The BLM riots advanced the interests of the entire Democrat Party, of the radical anarchist base by literally attacking white people and capitalists and conservatives and Trump supporters.
But politically, it also created conditions to further lock people down, shut down the economy, which they were already trying to do during COVID, and advance new political measures to respond to systemic racism, and to keep pushing the DEI agenda, which the establishment favors.
It was a total win across the board for the Democrats.
That is not the case with the pro-Palestine liberation protests.
Unlike BLM, the Israel-Gaza war is a wedge issue for the Democrats.
The base hates the state of Israel.
The radical leftist base, wearing the keffiyehs at Columbia right now, hates the state of Israel.
The Democrat establishment still broadly supports the state of Israel.
Americans broadly support the state of Israel.
So this is an especially bad issue for the Democrats.
Because they need their base.
Their base, that's the foot soldiers.
Those are the guys who need to go out there and vote.
Those are the guys who, at least ostensibly, are forming and expressing the ideology of the left.
But they are totally out of touch with the leadership, the establishment of the Democrat Party.
And with most Americans.
So it's just this perfect wedge issue.
The more that these people talk, the worse things are for Biden and the Democrats.
The worse things are for the American left, the better things are for the American right, which ultimately means the better things are for the United States.
It's not even just a battle between the unwashed, dirty, hippie leftists who are the base and the leadership.
Even among the Democrat leadership, You're seeing people break ranks.
Stephen Colbert came out on his late night show that not all that many people watch, but it still holds a position of prominence and status in the liberal establishment.
He came out and defended the protesters.
One of the biggest stories right now is the nationwide pro-Palestinian student protests around college campuses in the United States in what's being called perhaps the most significant student movement since the anti-Vietnam campus protests of the late 1960s.
They're even bigger than the protests when I was in college in the 80s when students held rallies declaring, I want my MTV and is this how you spell apartheid?
The protests ramped up a couple of weeks ago after students erected tents on Columbia University's main lawn to show solidarity with Gaza.
And the university president took the controversial step of calling in the police to arrest those involved.
Now, even if you don't agree with the subjects of their protests, as long as they are peaceful, students should be allowed to protest.
It's their First Amendment right.
That is the kind of idealism you learn in college.
It's one of the few college lessons you can use your whole life.
Okay, so Colbert is generally wrong about this.
Students don't have some right to take over, even if they do it peacefully, even if they don't have rifles like the black student radicals of the Willard Straight Hall, Columbia, take over in the 60s.
If they go in and they just ask for Pringles, but they shut down a building, They don't have a right to do that.
You don't have a right to sleep on the street.
You don't have a right to camp out in the quad.
You don't have a right to harass Jewish students who are just trying to go to class.
You don't have a right to shut down classrooms.
This isn't even an open public forum for a debate.
It's not like these students are members of Congress.
Not that Congress isn't all that open forum for a debate.
We'll get to that in just a second.
But it's a school.
You're supposed to learn.
You're students.
There are professors and there are students.
The professors are the betters of the students.
At least that's how it's supposed to be.
The students are supposed to obey the professors, listen to them, try to gain some of their wisdom, follow the rules.
Schools are acting as a kind of parent for the students.
It's not some free-for-all.
And a university is not supposed to be a democracy, for goodness sakes.
It's a school.
It's not supposed to be ordered toward just everyone doing whatever the hell they want.
It's supposed to be ordered toward the truth and toward wisdom.
You saw this ideology.
Really breakthrough in about 2015 at Yale when some young girl was shrieking about something, I don't know, it was probably BLM or something like that, and oh no, I remember what it was.
It was that a one of the masters of the residential colleges, so this is kind of like the social leader, he's a professor of the life of the dorm, his wife sent out an email In response to one of these DEI university administrative emails that warned Yale University students about how they could dress and could not dress for Halloween.
You'd like to think if a kid makes it to the age of 18, he knows how to dress himself.
You like to think if you're at any university, certainly an elite university, you know how to dress yourself.
But the administration came out and said, oh, you can't wear anything offensive, and if you're a white guy, don't wear a sombrero, that kind of stuff.
And the master of this college, his wife responded to the email and said, hey, you know, you guys are adults.
You can dress yourselves.
And that is what led to the student radical saying, no, we can't.
We can't dress ourselves and we need to ban all offensive Halloween costumes.
And this one student ended up shrieking at her professor, who's a very prominent scholar.
She said, this is not about creating an intellectual space.
This is about creating a place of comfort and home for us here.
Yale University is not about an intellectual space, and maybe these days that's true.
It's about making us all feel really comfortable and happy.
That's absurd, but that's the ideology that Stephen Colbert is advancing.
He's taking their side, and there are going to be a lot of other people.
This is why the whole campus protest issue pretty much doesn't involve conservatives.
It's just a fight between leftists and other leftists.
The leftists who run the schools, and the leftists who attend the schools, and the leftists in the media who cover the schools, and the leftist entertainers who are now having to talk about the schools and who entertain them.
It's all just, it's left on left violence.
So all we had to do was stand back.
And let the contradictions within the American left and the tensions and the fissures just deepen and deepen.
That is good because it will help to destroy the American left, which is an ideological cancer on American society.
But Republicans can't do that.
So what do we do?
We interrupt the leftists from destroying themselves to censor the Bible.
There's so much more to say.
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The House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, though there was an overwhelming majority of members of Congress.
So huge numbers of Republicans and Democrats, voted yesterday to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.
Okay, and you always got to be careful about these titles.
You know, the title of the bill, the nicer the title of the bill sounds, the worse the bill is, usually.
The Give People Candies and Puppies Act of 2024, you know that's going to be one of the worst bills ever.
So, people say Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.
Well, yeah, okay, we don't want people to hate the Jews and stuff, and we want to call attention to unjust racial cruelty.
Okay, that's great.
So, what does the bill actually do?
It censors the Bible.
Oh, and it limits the amount that Americans are allowed to criticize a foreign government.
That's what it does.
The bill passed in the House.
It hasn't quite made it to the Senate yet.
Would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
What is the Civil Rights Act?
It is federal anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on Shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics, and national origin.
So there's already this law in the books that says you can't discriminate based on these criteria, but The Republicans and some Democrats in Congress want to go further and they want to create a special protection for the Jews.
But look, we're at a time where their Jew hatred really is on the rise.
So in principle, I have no problem with, you know, trying to make sure that we have standards and norms and we don't become barbarians.
In principle, I don't have anything wrong with that.
But the way they do it here.
It is obviously unconstitutional, and it's not even just me saying it.
Jerry Nadler, who is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, he is a huge lib.
He's a Jew himself.
He came out and he said, this bill threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech.
He goes further, speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination.
The bill sweeps too broadly.
Yeah, I hate to agree with Jerry Nadler.
It drives me crazy.
But he's completely right.
This bill is insane.
So, what is the definition?
The bill actually doesn't even quite define anti-Semitism.
It's the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, it doesn't define anti-Semitism.
It says, hey, we're going to defer to this other group, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, we're going to defer to their definition of anti-Semitism.
Okay, well I guess the IHRA could change the definition of antisemitism as they like.
So we're now outsourcing a major provision of the Civil Rights Act of Title VI.
Christopher Caldwell has called the Civil Rights Act a kind of second constitution.
This is a big law that really affects the way Americans live.
The IHRA defines antisemitism.
Okay, yeah, I guess I agree with that, but that's so vague.
Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and or their property toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
Okay.
Yeah, I guess I agree with that.
But that's so vague.
Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews.
Yeah, it is.
It is a percent.
Which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews, but may not.
So it's either hatred or not hatred of Jews, and it's rhetorical or it's physical, and it's directed toward Jews or non-Jews, or the property of Jews or non-Jews, or the Jewish community or religious facilities.
So it's just nothing, right?
That is not a definition.
It says, yeah, anti-Semitism can be anything.
But then it gives examples.
Okay, at least we're getting some examples.
Now we know what we're banning as a matter of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
What is it?
First one.
This list goes on and on.
It's like 10 or 11 bullet points.
Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Yeah, okay.
I think we all say that's bad.
That if that's the definition of antisemitism, I guess you'd have to define harm.
Do we mean harm in the sense of like actual harm or do we mean harm in the sense of like that the liberals now mean it of, you know, offending anyone's feelings ever about anything.
But yeah, generally, I think we would all say, yeah, that's okay.
If you're calling for aiding or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of some ideology, yeah, that that's bad.
That's obviously bad.
That should not be tolerated.
That's terrible.
Okay.
Number two.
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such, or the power of Jews as a collective, such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy, or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government, or other social institutions.
Okay, now hold on.
So there, just the Jews controlling the media thing.
I'm pretty sure every host on the Daily Wire has, like, on backstage made jokes about that.
You know, the Jews in Hollywood or something, like, including our Jewish hosts.
So are they not allowed to make jokes about that?
Andrew Klavan, ethnically Jewish, religiously Christian.
He's a convert.
Wrote an excellent book about it.
He's not allowed to make that joke.
That's illegal now.
That's unlawful discrimination.
If it became subject to a Title VI investigation, Drew would be in violation of the law.
I think Ben has probably made the joke before.
Ben's not allowed to make that joke, and none of us are?
Really?
Can we make those kinds of jokes about other people?
If we make a joke about the Italians running the mob, is that now again?
It's the exact same kind of joke.
The Italians do run the mob, actually.
You're not allowed to do that?
No, that part... Really?
That seems very...
Unfair.
It seems very extreme.
It seems like that would criminalize all sorts of speech that all sorts of people make that can be perfectly anodyne and non-hateful and all the rest.
Number three, accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group or even acts committed by non-Jews.
Yeah, I think it's wrong to blame a whole group of people for things that just individuals or a smaller subset of them have done.
Sure.
But the left doesn't believe that.
The left does that all the time.
Every single white person in the country and in the world is supposedly now responsible for slavery, you know, that took place in just one part of the country.
Or that persisted and grew in just one part of the country and was really only involved one to two or three percent of the population there.
But every single white person ever is responsible.
So we don't follow that.
I'm fine with this in principle, but we don't apply that to any other group.
That's totally selective in its enforcement.
Then Then we get on, at a certain, by the end of this list, we come to realize the Republicans are now actually censoring the Bible.
We'll get to that in one second.
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What else is the House going to ban?
What other aspects of speech are House Republicans going to ban now?
Well, according to the examples of the new definition of anti-Semitism that will be prohibited under Title VI, We find denying the fact scope mechanisms, for example, gas chambers, or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of the National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II.
So we're talking about the Holocaust.
And number five is related, accusing the Jews as a people or Israel as a state of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
Okay, I think most people, I would say the vast majority of people, don't deny any of those things.
But this is America.
There are laws against that in Germany.
In Germany, if you question any aspect of World War II, you could be in violation of the law.
You could be jailed.
Most Americans accept the historical account.
I mean, there's some fringe people, I guess, who don't.
But most Americans don't.
But this is America.
Germany has been criticized, I think rightly, for the severity of these sorts of laws.
We're going to import that into America where this doesn't really seem to be much of a social problem?
I don't know, that seems kind of extreme.
It seems like it kind of comes out of nowhere.
Number six, accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide than to the interests of their own nations.
Okay, so I agree it's wrong and very impolite to accuse a guy who's a Jew just because he's a Jew of not being loyal to America.
That's very impolite.
It's very unjust.
But let's say a guy's a dual citizen.
And let's say it's not the state of Israel.
Let's say a guy's a dual citizen of America and China.
And let's say that the guy really supports China.
Is it, well I guess this doesn't mention China, but would it not be at least reasonable to raise the question of, hey man, if you're a dual citizen of America and China, maybe Do you have some loyalty to China?
You're a citizen.
You haven't renounced your citizenship of that country.
Is it possible that that would come into conflict?
Maybe.
So I agree.
I mean, if this were written a little bit better, you could say, yeah, that's quite wrong.
But then again, just see how broad, how obviously unconstitutional this is.
And how selective.
We can ask that about other dual citizens.
I don't know.
It doesn't even really get into citizenship or Jewish citizens.
It doesn't get into do they have Israeli citizenship or this or that.
Again, so broad.
Then denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Okay.
Not to be too pedantic about this.
Most nation states are racist endeavors.
Not this isn't singling out Israel at all this is actually just broadening it to most nation states.
Most nation states revolve around some ethnic group that makes it I mean the word racism doesn't really mean very much anymore if it means anything at all but It's about a group of people.
The state of Israel was founded 70 years ago.
The modern nation state of Israel was founded 70 years ago to be a state and homeland for a specific, not even race, tribe of people, like an actual tribe.
Can you not say that now?
Can we not say that England was a country founded for the descendants of the Angles?
The English people?
The Irish is a country for the Irish people?
I guess you can't say that.
Or maybe you can say that about those countries, but you can't say it about the state of Israel?
Nuts.
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Okay, so first of all, I'm talking about double standards here.
Are you kidding me?
This whole list?
But second of all, no two nations are alike.
So, for instance, we expect things of the United States that we don't expect of other democratic nations because we're the global hegemon.
We're the world empire.
We are surrounded by two oceans.
We have certain geographic protections.
We have certain cultural habits.
That just make us different.
I know in modern liberal life we want to pretend every nation's the same.
You go to the United Nations and, you know, our country and the nation of Mauritius or something are put on the same pedestal.
We're all just equal among the nations.
But, like, not really.
That's not how nations have ever worked.
So that very vague.
Number nine.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism, for example, claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Okay.
As I've mentioned on this show before, it is actually theologically important that our Lord is executed by the Roman state, by a representative of Caesar, because the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is a sacrifice for the whole world, for all of mankind.
And Rome, in the fullness of time, our Lord is born under the reign of Caesar Augustus, the emperor, the prince of peace, of terrestrial peace, he's the true prince of peace, our Lord.
He has the right to rule.
Dante writes about this in Monarchy.
So, the sacrifice by the civil authority that has the right to rule the whole world is a sacrifice for the whole world.
All of that's very important.
Also, the scripture is very clear that our Lord is handed over to the Romans by the Jewish high priests.
St.
Paul writes explicitly that The Jews killed Jesus in the sense that the representatives of the Jews, the Jewish high priests, handed him over to the Romans, and then when Pontius Pilate says, I've washed my hands of this, I don't think we should kill this guy, he's innocent, nevertheless, they insist that he be killed.
This is not a cause to blame modern Jews for killing Jesus.
In fact, The crucifixion and the harrowing of hell and the resurrection we sing on Easter is, we actually celebrate the fall of man that gave us the crucifixion and the resurrection because we say, oh, happy fault that one for us so great, so glorious, a redeemer.
All of that said, if this law goes into effect, if this modifies the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, then when we look on college campuses, that's what we're talking about here with Title VI, if there's a Bible study on a campus, That reads the Bible, that reads 1 Thessalonians, that reads the writings of St.
Paul, that reads the Gospel of St.
John, that reads the Passion Account.
Is that Bible study going to lose funding?
Is that school going to lose funding?
Some of the most important Catholic masses of the year, Good Friday and Palm Sunday, which reads the passion narrative, talk about this, would violate the letter of the law here.
So are the Catholic groups on campus going to lose funding now?
Are the schools going to lose funding because of this?
Just completely insane.
And then the final provision.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
So you can't criticize a foreign government.
One specific foreign government, according to this new definition, according to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, if the House Republicans get their way.
Are you kidding me?
Now, you might say, okay, look, you can criticize the Israeli government, but you can't compare them to the Nazis.
And I think Nazi comparisons are extremely overdone and stupid and evidence that someone doesn't know any other historical event besides World War II.
Maybe the fall of Rome, but that's about it.
But still, that's how we argue.
I mean, they call Trump Hitler.
Every modern political rhetorical jibe somehow gets back to Hitler and the Nazis.
So what this law would say is, yeah, you're not allowed to criticize Israel in the way that we all criticize anything in politics.
Completely nuts.
A terrible law, manifestly unconstitutional, terrible for America, terrible for the state of Israel, terrible for Jewish people all over the world.
Just completely idiotic.
I can't...
And it's such a dumb time.
Oh man, guys.
And it's so painful to me because I wrote a book encouraging conservatives to recognize that the American speech tradition does permit standards and norms and we can enforce these things and we actually should limit some of the speech that's gotten out of control like obscenity and threats and all the rest of it.
And so I say, hey, hey, Republicans, do you think maybe we could start enforcing the regular American speech tradition?
So yeah, best we can do is ban the Bible and criticism of Israel.
What?
No!
What?
It doesn't even accomplish.
The thing that it should accomplish, which is, they say, look, we're at a moment of rising Jew hatred.
I think that's true, and we like the Jews.
I like the Jews.
I mean, there's some, the left doesn't seem to like the Jews, and there's some fringe people on the right who don't like the Jews.
I quite like the Jews.
I'm rather philo-Semitic myself.
So they say, okay, so what we're gonna do is, we're gonna ban criticism of the State of Israel and the Bible.
Okay.
Okay, man, well, I guess the Republicans just can't win for losing.
Now, what you can do, is you can subscribe to the Michael Knolls YouTube channel.
Smash the like button and ring the bell.
Speaking of religious issues, the Associated Press is shocked, horrified I think, by the shift among American Catholics toward tradition, toward orthodoxy.
Headline, a step back in time.
America's Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways.
And then here's the, I love this open, It was the music that changed first.
Or maybe that's just when people at the Pale Brick Catholic Church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening.
The choir director, a fixture at St.
Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone.
Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.
So much was changing.
Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession.
You know, like the central reason of our need for a savior and a sacrament of the Holy Catholic Church.
They were focusing on that.
They were focusing on the sacraments.
Priests were rarely seen without cassocks.
Priests all of a sudden were wearing the things that priests are supposed to wear.
They weren't wearing tank tops and board shorts.
Altar girls for a time were banned.
A feminist sexual revolution novelty, a social fad, went away for the tradition of 2,000 years.
It's so strange.
At the Parrish Elementary School, students began hearing about abortion and hell.
They began hearing about the fundamental non-negotiable right to life and about hell, which is the place that we're going to go if we don't have a savior, which is, again, the central mystery of the faith, or the central fact of the faith.
It was like a step back in time, said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.
It's not just St.
Maria Goretti.
It goes on.
Across the church, all these trads are coming up.
All these people who don't like the hippie, you know, 1970s saccharine hymns and the denial or suppression of orthodoxy and tradition in 2000 years.
What does this mean?
I love this, this guy goes, Father Reverend John Forliti, he's 87, he goes, they say they're trying to restore what us old guys ruined.
Doug Kessel, another 72-year-old priest, says they're just waiting for us to die.
These are the boomer priests who, you know, tried to usher in the age of Aquarius, basically, sneered at tradition and tried to suppress aspects of orthodoxy and disregarded many of the sacraments and all.
And it turns out they did all this in the wake of Vatican II in the 1960s because they said, this is how we're going to bring the youth back into the church.
And guess what happened?
The pews emptied out.
No one came.
And now the youth are actually telling them, no, you know what we want?
We want the truth.
We want orthodoxy.
We want tradition.
We don't want these saccharine, insipid, effeminate hymns and the denial of the faith.
Or denial of so much visible aspect of the faith.
And then someone goes, this is the last bit of this article I'll read, I don't want my daughter to be Catholic, says Christine Hammond, whose family left the parish when this new outlook spilled into the church's school.
Not if this is the Roman Catholic Church that is coming.
I don't want my daughter to be Catholic.
If people are going to start practicing the faith that was practiced for 1,965 or 1,970 years, then there was kind of a little interruption after Vatican II when some Catholic groups went kind of crazy, and then, I don't want, if Catholicism means practicing the Catholic faith, I don't want any part of that.
What is this about?
At a theological level, it's a vindication of the promise from our Lord, which is that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church.
We're going to try to mess it up as best we can, and still, and still, the Church will endure.
Because our Lord promises never to leave the Church, and that's why the Church is the enduring institution in our civilization.
Two thousand years, no one else can claim it.
What else is this about?
Even beyond the religious level.
We are in a free-floating, subjectivist, liberal, individualist moment in our culture where we want to be liberated, where people say they want to be liberated from everything, where we can't know anything for certain, everything is just up in the air, we can't even really say what a woman is, and people want to liberate themselves from their very own bodies.
And reasonable people recognize this is immiserating us, it's completely nuts, and we want something to hold on to.
There is a major wave of religious conversion going on.
A lot of it is focused on the Catholic Church because it's the oldest one.
It's the most enduring.
There's just the most inertia there.
I think there are theological reasons for that too, but it's just the most grounded one.
We are all floating in outer space in this culture and people want To be grounded again in the truth, in just anything that they can hold on to.
That's why.
The libs will cry, but that's what's going on.
My favorite comment yesterday is from jamesp7478 who says, the protesters went from we want an intifada to bring us some enchiladas.
Ah, RIP Campus Intifada.
It was really, it was really stupid well it lasted.
You know, I can't say it was totally fun because they did, you know, cause a nuisance and shut down classes and stuff.
And I can't, I can't say it was even all that dangerous in the sense that they were such losers and so hapless.
But I can say it was really stupid while it lasted, and that is kind of amusing.
Speaking of tradition, this story's a few days old, but I have to get to it, because no one is defending Chris Pratt.
Chris Pratt, the movie star, is in a lot of trouble.
He and his wife, Arnold Schwarzenegger's daughter, they just bought a home in Brentwood, California.
The home is a mid-century modern home, so it looks just like a kind of a flat Modernist.
Not a cube.
It's not like the modern cube house.
It's like a flat little rectangle.
And it's mid-century modern.
And it's ugly.
And it's inefficient.
And it's... They just, they bought it for like 12 or 13 million bucks and they're gonna knock it down and build a nice house.
And everyone's up in arms.
Outrage, according to a news report, after actor Chris Pratt destroys iconic, iconic, one of the most overused words in the world, mid-century home in L.A.
Architectural preservationists were outraged last week as word spread that actor Chris Pratt and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, daughter of the former governor, had demolished the Zimmerman House, a mid-century home designed by Greg Elwood that advocates argue was an icon Twenty-eighth century residential construction in the state.
I know this is unpopular.
This might be as unpopular as my Christine Ohm dog take.
I don't really see a problem with it.
There are two reasons.
Why people like mid-century modern architecture.
The first reason is nostalgia.
The second reason is bad taste.
And it's bad taste that reflects perverse desires and a perverse outlook.
Okay?
Because mid-century modern... I have an affection for it.
You know, I have an affection because I remember my grandparents' house and I... Some of that mid-century architecture, even in a different architectural style, the doo-wop style of like the The motels down the Jersey Shore in the Wildwoods.
I have a great affection for it because I have nostalgia.
I went there a lot, and I agree with the preservationists.
We should preserve examples even of ugly architecture.
But we don't need to preserve them all, okay?
We can, you know, save some of the nice ones, or none of them are nice, I guess, but save some of them.
But we don't need to save all of them, and we can bring in a little objectivity here.
Mid-century mod was bad.
It's lib, it's bad, it's clinical, it's ugly.
I know there's something kind of fun about roleplaying that you're Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, you know, sipping a martini on an Eames chair in your mid-century modern house.
But it's nostalgia, guys.
It's not beautiful.
And we don't, they accuse us conservatives of wanting to just go back to the 1950s.
I don't want to go back to the architectural styles.
I know there are plenty of things, and you can't go back in time anyway.
I just, I want a culture that is beautiful and good, cares about the truth, is pleasant and nice to live in, and Mid-Century Mod actually is not, ain't doing that.
Mid-century modernism in America is the American expression of other modernist movements like the Bauhaus movement from Walter Gropius, the international style, and here are some of the things that these guys would say.
Gropius in 1927 said that there have been four great social epochs.
The epoch of the tribe, These will be reflected in art and architecture.
The epoch of the tribe, the epoch of the family, the epoch of the individual, and then what Gropius said we were moving into in modernism was the epoch, quote, which is to be socialistic in its orientation.
So the flattening of homes, the removal of ornamentation from homes that you see in mid-century modernism, Gropius said, no, quote, sentimental hanging on to a past that is no longer alive.
So, no ornamentation.
He described ornamentation as a blight, okay?
I like ornamentation.
I go to Grand Central Station in New York, which is a part of the Beaux-Arts movement, you know, Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau, even some of Art Deco, which is moving a little more modern.
There's ornamentation, especially in Beaux-Arts.
It's beautiful, it's lovely, it's rich.
You go down the street there and you see the Gothic Cathedral of St.
Patrick's.
That's beautiful.
And then you get to modern architecture and it's just flat and clinical and sterile and ugly and just, it makes you feel inhuman.
Makes you feel, I don't know, it just makes you feel, it leaves you cold is what it does.
A true modern architect, writes Gropius, is one who tries to shape our new conception of life, one who refuses to live by repeating the forms and ornaments of our ancestors.
Very lib, very modern.
I like the forms and ornaments of our ancestors.
I like tradition.
I don't want a radical break with all of my forebears who preceded me.
How about Le Corbusier?
Says the new architecture, quote, has for its first duty in this period of renewal that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house.
That even down to the roof, you look at that house that Chris Pratt just knocked down, the roof is flat.
This is one of the defining characteristics of mid-century modern.
What does that say?
It means that we're not pointing up to anything.
It's not a traditional roof that points up to heaven, lifts your eyes up.
It's flat.
There ain't no heaven here in modernism.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I don't think I am.
I think that other people are not reading enough into it.
And it's an important moment for conservatives to remember, we don't just want to go back.
I guess there are some who do.
And this is really the problem with the Republican Party and the conservative movement, is we want to conserve the liberalism of 20 years ago.
That's really what it comes down to.
The conservatives today, today I guess we want to conserve what, 1999?
And in the 90s they wanted to conserve what?
And in the 90s, they wanted to conserve what?
The 70s.
In the 70s, they wanted to conserve the 50s.
That ain't going to do it though, man.
That just, that just means you're slow liberals.
It just means you're not hip liberals.
Okay?
But I don't, I don't want to get into time machine.
Time machines don't exist.
And I don't, I got in trouble once for saying, I don't want to return to 2012.
I want to return to 1220.
By which I meant, I probably want to go a little further back actually, before those nominalists and William of Ockham started getting high-handed.
I want to preserve things that are true, that are, that are grounded, that are That will stand the test of time.
Tradition is not just something old, it's actually something durable.
We have a tradition today because that old thing was so durable and lots of other old things passed away.
We are not merely slow liberals.
At least I'm not.
I'm not any kind of liberal.
I'm a conservative.
I want good, true, beautiful things that allow me to flourish, that allow my political order to achieve the basic charge of any state and any society, which is do good and avoid evil, and cultivate good tastes and impel people to be their very best selves.
And you're not going to be your very best self in an ugly clinical house designed for a robot.
