Ep. 1642 - Superman Is Political, Says Director James Gunn
Joe Manchin calls the Democrat brand "toxic," James Gunn calls his Superman movie "political," and a Saudi national attacks a Christmas market in Germany.
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Ep.1642
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As we finish up an extraordinary political year, Republicans have a lot to celebrate.
The Democrat brand has become entirely toxic.
And it is not just the conservatives saying it.
That is the description given by one of the most prominent Democrats in the country.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
James Gunn, the man behind the new Superman, says the movie is, in fact, political.
There's so much more to say.
First, though, go to tryarmrut.com slash Knowles.
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For those of you watching the show rather than merely listening on your iPod and your MySpace and your Razor phones, whatever you listen to it on, or terrestrial radio, I am in my home office right now.
So welcome, Shay Knowles.
I am here because Mr. Jeremy Boring, the god king of the Daily Wire, thought it would be a really smart idea to tell the entire staff that they could have two weeks off around Christmas.
And he said, but if your supervisor says you can't have the time off, then you got to listen to him.
And I don't know, I don't probably technically supervise anyone, but I said I wanted to do my show on the 23rd.
But now I look like a big jerk.
Jeremy's the hero.
I look like a huge jerk because I'm making people work.
So anyway, the compromise was, we'll do the show, but we'll do it from home.
So not everyone has to come into the office.
But I have to do the show.
2024 has been one of the winningest years for conservatives in my life, and as it wraps up, things are only getting better, and I'm not going to miss a show.
When I can hear top Democrats like Joe Manchin describe how the Democrat Party has become toxic.
Do you still consider yourself a Democrat?
I am not a Democrat in the form of what the Democratic Party has turned itself into, the national brand, absolutely not.
And they know that.
They're all good people on both sides.
But what do you think is the reason for, you said, you're not a Democrat.
What caused Joe Manchin to divorce himself from the Democratic Party?
Here's what I told them.
I said, you ought to figure out how you lost somebody like me.
I was born as a Democrat because of my grandfather's love of FDR. I was a very strong Democrat because of my family's love of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
I came through the whole iteration and I was a Democrat in West Virginia and it has always been a 75-80% plurality of Democrats, registered Democrats.
But there was a split.
I was never in the liberal side of it.
I was never in the establishment side.
So I always had to fight my way through.
What is the shift on social issues?
The brand got so bad.
The D brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of it's just it's toxic.
And the D brand is basically this.
The brand is toxic.
There are going to be people who say, look, Joe Manchin, he was never all that liberal.
He was never all that progressive.
Don't listen to him.
You know, he's a dino, a Democrat in name only.
Hold on.
The reason this is so shocking, the reason this is so encouraging for conservatives is not because Joe Manchin was some big progressive.
He wasn't, but he's a pretty popular guy.
He is a prominent Democrat politician.
He's been a U.S. Senator for a long time.
And what he's saying is, look, the Democrats have been progressive for a long time.
I've still stuck with the party because the brand was strong.
Now the brand is toxic.
That's the key.
It's not as though the big change of events is the Democrats have become progressive.
The Democrats have been progressive since the 60s.
But the brand was still good.
Somehow the brand was still selling to the American people.
There were a lot of guys, like Joe Manchin, who would say, I'm proud to be a Democrat.
He says, today, you know, you can barely get elected dog catcher if you're a Democrat.
The brand has become toxic, in part because of the progressivism, but even beyond ideology, in part because of the corruption, in part because of the rank hypocrisy, in part because they lost the common sense and they don't speak to the American people.
Even the New York Times is doing a little bit of soul searching here, emphasis on soul.
The Times has this piece out.
Spiritual Dems ask party to take a leap of faith.
As the Democrat Party wanders in the post-election wilderness after the bruising defeats of 2024, some of its newer leaders are tapping into an ancient form of connection, religion.
And it goes through just a few examples that they named.
In Texas, a young lawmaker who could run statewide is urging his fellow white progressives to embrace discussion of faith in politics.
In Georgia, a black pastor and U.S. senator is reclaiming religious language from those on the right who, he suggests, have twisted it to their own ends.
In Pennsylvania, the Jewish governor, this is Josh Shapiro, His faith is a central part of his public identity, which is why the Democrats wouldn't pick him for VP, because they hate the Jews now.
But anyway, he says that the Jewish governor there has made this evident in his campaign advertising and his major speeches, and even at a recent Christmas tree lighting.
If y'all have not seen National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, take it from this Jewish guy, Governor Josh Shapiro said, as he addressed a holiday celebration in Harrisburg.
First, put a pause there.
The New York Times can't help themselves.
Democrats manifestly are not going to fix their religion problem if they do this.
They say he's at a Christmas tree lighting.
He's talking about the Christmas tree lighting, and then they say at a holiday celebration.
What holiday do you think they're celebrating a Christmas tree lighting, guys?
At the Christmas tree lighting, I think you're allowed to call it Christmas.
And stop pretending that they're celebrating Kwanzaa.
Anyway, he says, you know, take it from this Jewish guy.
You better go out and rent that movie, National Lampoon Christmas Vacation.
This is smart of these Democrats to realize that they have a faith problem.
They have a religion problem.
This is smart.
It will be good for America if the Democrats can get back in touch with anything even resembling true religion.
Because everyone has a kind of religion.
Everyone has to worship someone, like Bob Dylan taught us.
But there's a big difference between the worship of self, which is really what the Democrats come down to, or the worship of weird sex through the LGBTism, or the worship of demons through the crystals in the New Age and the woo-woo, and true religion, where you worship God, the one God.
Nevertheless, Democrats realize, okay, we have this religion problem.
The right has claimed religion.
We have lost religion.
We've been anti-religion.
So this is smart of these Democrats from an electoral standpoint.
It would be good for America because our country is predicated on belief in God.
This was what I was talking about at TPUSA. I just got back.
I was at TPUSA's AmericaFest.
I'll get into more of that later.
It was an absolutely unbelievable event.
It was the most impressive political convention.
Maybe with the exception of the RNC that took place two days after Trump was shot.
Maybe with the exception of the $60 million RNC. And even that gave a run for its money.
This was an incredible event.
My speech on the main stage at AmericaFest was on this point, coincidentally.
I said, look, we've brought a lot of people who used to be Democrats into the Republican Party.
This election, we brought in two Democrat presidential candidates, Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy.
We brought in one in five black guys.
We brought in 46% of Hispanics.
We brought in a ton of women.
We brought in Joe Rogan.
He was a Bernie bro.
We brought Elon Musk.
He was kind of a lib.
We brought in a lot of people.
Who would have called themselves Democrats not long ago.
And that's good.
I'm glad.
I welcome them, and especially their votes.
But the fear of a big tent is that when you have a big tent, you lose the party identity.
So what do we believe?
And I said, the first thing we believe is that God exists, and that we can know this with certainty.
And I'm not just up there Bible-thumping, preaching to the choir.
I mean this as a matter of urgent...
National policy and something that the great men of our civilization have always known, even the ones who were heterodox in their religion.
You can know a lot about God through revelation, through private experience, through all sorts of things.
But you can know the existence of God with human reason from the created world.
Our country is predicated on that idea, going all the way back to the Founding Fathers, going back to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
We have to agree on that in order to have a coherent conservatism.
There's so much more to say.
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As the Democrats do their soul-searching, they realize that they need to get back to religion or they're never going to win again.
The insight here is this point that I made at TPUSA. What do we have to believe in order to be even remotely conservative?
We have to believe that God exists and that we can know that with certainty.
We can know this with certainty because you can know...
A cause from its effect.
When you observe an effect, you can know its cause.
We know this because if you look at Hamlet, you can know that Shakespeare exists.
You can know something about Shakespeare.
When you look at an object in motion, you can know with certainty that there is a mover who put that object in motion.
There are many other arguments for God, but it doesn't require revelation.
You can know it using your reason from the natural world.
The reason this is so important for politics is man is made in the image of God.
So what we think about God is going to reflect what we think about ourselves.
And we're the people that make up the society.
So because we understand at least a little bit about God, we know that we're made in the image of God.
We know that we have will and reason.
Not every animal has will and reason.
We're actually the only one.
Most animals have instinct and appetite.
That's it.
But we have will and reason.
That's how we can think about justice.
That's why we can be held liable for our actions.
You don't put a pit bull on trial for biting a toddler, but you would put a human being on trial.
At least we used to before the George Soros DAs let everyone off the hook.
But you do put a human being on trial in principle for acting unjustly.
In fact, you have someone called a judge who judges him because we're capable of that abstract reason.
That really matters because the premise of self-government is that we have reason, that we can deliberate, that we can think about things abstractly, that we can have the kind of country that we are supposed to have.
So we have to agree on what is God.
We have to agree on what is man.
We have to agree on what is law.
It's an ordinance of reason for the common good.
And then we have to agree on what is politics.
And what is politics comes down to the family.
It doesn't come down to the individual.
Some people say politics comes from the words for poly, many, and tics, blood-sucking leeches.
But that's actually a false etymology.
Politics comes down to...
The polis, the city-state in ancient Greece, and it means public.
What we do in public.
So an individual is not public.
It's not a society.
The smallest society, the bedrock of politics, is the family.
That's why the libs, trying to upend our politics, are always attacking the family.
I said, look, I haven't even touched on policy yet.
I'm not talking about immigration.
We have to believe this on immigration.
We have to believe this on IVF. We have to believe this on taxes.
No, no, no.
We can debate all those things.
But you have to have those basic...
Premises in agreement.
And there are going to be atheists and secularists and libs who disagree with that.
And I'm just telling you, it doesn't make sense to be a conservative if you don't agree with all that.
I'm not even saying you have to be a Christian.
I'm not even saying you have to believe in revelation.
You should, but I'm not saying you have to in order to get this point about politics.
But you at least have to accept the fact that God exists.
Because if God doesn't exist, then you don't get the natural law.
If you don't get the natural law, you don't get anything even resembling our system of government.
Now, glad the Democrats are getting the point.
I want to make sure the new Republicans get that point, too.
In terms of AmericaFest, just briefly...
It was the best one yet.
I've had to miss a few of the America Fests and the Student Action Summits because my wife keeps being inconveniently pregnant when these events go on.
But I've been to a number of them over the years.
And the first one, I would say, was about 3,000 attendees.
It was very impressive.
The next one, I forget, what was it, 5,000, 6,000 attendees?
Really, really impressive stuff.
I missed one or two in the middle.
This year, it was 20,000 people.
And even beyond speaking on the main stage, I was doing all sorts of interviews and little breakouts, walking around, chatting with people.
We had a Mayflower cigar party afterward.
I was even getting the pulse of people who were there.
Sometimes it was their first TPSA event, sometimes it was their 100th.
And I said, what do you think about it?
And they said, this is amazing.
One woman, she's of a certain age, probably in her 50s, maybe, probably in her 50s.
She said, she was previously a Democrat, this is her first time, and she said, wow, everyone's just so happy.
Everyone's so relaxed.
Everyone's so joyful.
And that's true.
And that's not always true at conservative events.
I think part of what made this America Fest so great, beyond Charlie Kirk's a genius, and he's just an amazing political organizer, beyond the election year, though that was part of it, beyond just the years of growth it's had, Welcome to my show!
Because it's real, man.
We really did win.
We really won everything.
That's why so many people showed up.
That's why everyone was just relaxed and cool and happy.
It's real, guys.
And that gives us a wonderful opportunity to build on all that winning.
President Trump showed up.
I had to fly out.
I was only there one night.
But he showed up two days later.
And he had this to say at TPUSA. With a stroke of my pen on day one, we're going to stop the transgender lunacy.
And I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high school.
And we will keep men out of women's sports.
Thank you.
And that will likewise be done on day one.
Should I do day one, day two, or day three?
How about day one, right?
Under the Trump administration, it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.
That's one minute, ten seconds on the trans issue.
And this guy's got more fuel in the tank here.
He could probably go for an hour on this issue.
And the audience is going crazy for it.
Why?
Why?
Conservatives have been talking about this issue for years now.
As one of the early people on this issue, I think my first speaking tour was called Men Are Not Women and Other Uncomfortable Truths.
Why?
Because this is a signal issue.
And this kind of thing proves it.
I did that speaking tour, I think, in 2017. Matt had the huge movie, What is a Woman?
When did that come out?
2020?
2021?
Here we are, 2024. And Trump is talking about, the president-elect is talking about this on the stage, and it's getting huge applause.
Why?
Why so much focus on this?
Because it's a signal issue.
It gets back to what I was just talking about.
I said you have to, your political movement has to understand that God exists and that man being made in the image and likeness of God has will and intellect.
And the law derives from the natural law, which the intelligence that created everything has made and which man, sharing in some of that intelligence, can perceive and think through.
And that there are just facts.
And man has two parts.
There's the male part and the female part.
Men and women, we go together.
We're complementary, but we're not indistinguishable.
This is basic stuff.
Trump realizes it's not just about keeping women's bathrooms for themselves.
That's an important issue.
It's a matter of justice.
It's not just about the sports leagues.
Most people don't really care about it, but it's a matter of justice.
It's that I think the trans issue was extremely important.
I think you talk to the one in five black guys who voted for Trump and you say, hey, what are some of the things that made you vote Republican?
I bet you that issue is going to come up a lot.
You talk to 46% of Hispanics.
You talk to women, especially women of a certain age.
That is going to come up.
A signal issue.
So there's Trump.
He's the man.
He's totally crushing it at TPUSA. At the same time, The House of Representatives finally passes a spending bill.
You remember they had that continuing resolution.
They had this awful 1,500 plus page pork laden nonsense that enshrined a ton of political correctness into the U.S. code and was just total garbage.
That got shot down because Trump and Elon said to shoot it down.
But the bill that the House passed, though better, did not include a key provision that Trump wanted.
So, the House passed this bill.
The Senate passed it 85 to 11. However, a proposal to suspend the debt limit for two years, which is what Trump wanted because he didn't want to have to deal with the fight over raising the debt limit in the early part of his term, that failed.
38 Republicans joined with Democrats to vote against that.
So, according to reporting from Burgess Everett of Semaphore, Trump is not happy that the spending deal doesn't include the debt ceiling, according to the person who spoke with him this PM. Not clear he'll publicly try to stop the bill in the Senate, but Trump's not thrilled the bill doesn't contain his main ask.
So, what does this mean?
This means Trump is now going to face this fight in March.
It's always this big fight, do you raise the debt limit?
We have a debt limit, but it's absurd because we always raise the debt limit, so there's really no debt limit.
It just creates a moment of political crisis when the leadership of the House and Senate can twist arms in the Congress to get what they want.
And so Trump doesn't want to have to deal with that.
So he says, punt it.
Punt it off until I've enacted more of my agenda.
You're going to raise the debt limit eventually anyway.
Don't make me deal with this fight.
Just deal with it either under Biden or punt it so far into the future I don't need to worry about it.
And yet Congress said no.
In part because They're more afraid of their constituents than they are of Trump.
That's the best read on it.
In part because they ideologically believe it looks bad, even though I think Trump's point is totally defensible, which is this debt limit's fake anyway.
Don't make me hold the bag for it.
In any case, the political takeaway is Trump does not really have a total lock on either the House or the Senate.
We used to think That, okay, he's going to face trouble in the Senate because they have six-year terms and some of them are kind of squishy and don't like Trump.
But he's got the House.
Mike Johnson's always hanging around Trump.
No, he doesn't have either.
Which means this seriously damages Trump's chance of being able to push through the mass deportations, which is a mainstream public issue.
It seriously damages his chances of draining the bureaucracy.
It seriously damages his chances maybe even of tariffs, depending on how Trump tries to institute the tariffs.
This really imperils his agenda.
I'm not saying that we should just lift the debt limit indefinitely.
It's not a limit, though, so it's a silly euphemism to use.
But the fact that Trump can't, through sheer tyranny of will, marshal these votes means that the actual controversial parts of his agenda, yikes.
I'm not so sure that the Congress is going to let that go through, no matter what the American people wanted.
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Further evidence that Trump's hold on the GOP is not as complete as some have thought.
Laura Trump, his daughter-in-law, has just withdrawn from consideration for the Senate seat to replace Marco Rubio after Marco Rubio becomes Secretary of State.
Rubio, senator from Florida, is going to go be Trump's secretary of state.
That leaves an open seat.
Governor Ron DeSantis has to appoint someone to fill that seat for now.
And Laura Trump, the president's daughter-in-law, who recently ran the RNC very successfully with Michael Watley, she had expressed some interest.
Well, she just tweeted this.
After an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many, I have decided to remove my name from consideration for the U.S. Senate.
I do have a big announcement that I'm excited to share in January, so stay tuned.
I remain passionate about public service, look forward to serving our country again in the future.
She wants to serve the country again, but how?
In the meantime, I wish Governor DeSantis the best of luck with this appointment.
So she's got a little point in here to say, it's DeSantis' choice, but I'm withdrawing.
So she says she's doing it willingly.
Some are speculating, maybe it's not willing, maybe she just thought she wasn't going to get it.
This is further evidence that even today, Trump does not totally dominate the GOP. Some people are going to celebrate that fact.
There are people in the GOP who still don't like Trump.
Despite him winning the popular vote for a Republican for the first time in 20 years, despite him winning, bringing in whole new swaths of voters who would never vote for someone like Mitt Romney or John McCain or more standard Republicans, there are many, especially in the GOP consulting class, beltway class, who still don't like Trump.
But there are going to be some people who are a little more disappointed, who were hoping that Trump, having brought such fresh air into the GOP, Trump having won such a massive election with unified government, that he would get a little bit more of what he wants.
This, to me, and maybe I'm just reading too deeply into it, but any sign I see of Trump not being able to do what he wants to do, in this case, look, I don't even know if President Trump wanted his daughter-in-law to be a U.S. senator, but if he did, the fact that she withdrew like this, I don't know, makes me think...
He really doesn't dominate the political class even as he is this American original who has an overwhelming amount of support from the American people.
There seems to be a disconnect there.
Now, who runs the GOP? According to Hillary Clinton...
The GOP is taking orders from Elon Musk.
Here is what my cousin-in-law, Hillary Clinton, had to say.
If you're just catching up, the Republican Party taking orders from the world's richest man is on course to shut down the government over the holidays.
She can't say what holiday it is.
It's Christmas, Hillary.
I guess she didn't get the memo from the New York Times about how they are supposed to have religion again.
Stopping paychecks for our troops and nutrition benefits for low-income families just in time for Christmas.
Yeah, that's what the GOP is doing.
Give me a break.
This line of attack, you're going to see this ramp up.
You're going to see more and more people saying, Elon Musk really controls the GOP. Elon Musk, he's pulling the puppet strings of Donald Trump.
You're going to expect to hear a lot more of this.
And it's total nonsense.
The immediate purpose of it is to create a divide between Trump and Elon because their partnership has been extremely powerful for both of those men and for our country and for the Republican Party.
So here she's trying to draw a little wedge.
Hey Trump, you're taking your orders from Elon, aren't you?
Ha ha, you're not really in control.
It's totally ridiculous.
For goodness sakes, one of the first things Trump announced when he became president, when he was elected president, was that he was going to end the electric vehicle tax credit.
Okay?
Immediately after Elon spends all this money, all this time on the campaign trail to help Trump, Trump comes out and he goes, yeah, well, that's really nice.
Thank you, Elon.
But I'm going to take away your biggest government subsidy for your electric cars.
And what does Elon say?
Out of principle, he says he supports that policy because he thinks it's, you know, unnecessary for his car company to succeed.
He's probably right.
They're still going to keep up this line.
It's the same line they used about Rush Limbaugh in 2009. It was totally ridiculous with Rush.
Love Rush Limbaugh.
Rush was the man.
I hosted his radio show.
I have the mug that they gave me when I hosted Rush's show over there on my wall.
I really love the guy.
But he was not the de facto leader of the GOP, as Democrat operatives tried to pretend for a few weeks in 2009, just as Elon Musk is not the de facto leader of the Republican Party.
Trump is the leader of the party.
And even still, Trump has more control over the GOP, probably, than any figure since Reagan.
And even still, there are people who don't want to put his agenda into action.
Now, moving to the cultural front, James Gunn, the man behind Superman, has just come out.
And I reviewed the Superman trailer pretty much live on the show last time.
And...
I said, oh, this actually looks pretty good.
Superman looks like Superman.
He kisses a pretty girl.
There are no, you know, Lebanese lesbian pygmies.
It's, look, wow, it looks normal.
It looks good.
But he came out, and he said it's a political piece.
And so now all the headlines, James Gunn, he's going to make a woke Superman.
And I thought, I said, look, he could.
I don't know, I've only seen a 60-second trailer.
But I thought it didn't look like that to me.
What does James Gunn actually say about the movie?
He says, we do have a battered Superman in the beginning.
That is our country.
Battered.
I believe in the goodness of human beings, and I believe that most people in this country, despite their ideological beliefs, their politics are doing their best to get by and be good people, despite what it may seem like to the other side.
This movie's about that.
It's about the basic kindness of human beings.
And that it can be seen as uncool and under siege by some of the darker voices or some of the louder voices.
It's about basic kindness on human beings.
It's a noble premise and one that seems designed to appeal across the political spectrum.
It's a moral call to embrace decency and optimism.
Hold on.
That actually sounds pretty good.
Because even, you think about the beginning.
This battered, bloody Superman at the beginning.
That's our country.
How is that a woke point?
How is that a leftist point?
Biden's the president.
Biden's the president when the trailer comes out.
If the country is battered and broken, Democrats have been governing for four years.
And government, leftists have dominated the culture for 60 years.
So I don't view that as a woke or leftist point.
I view that as either a non-partisan point, or if it's partisan, it's anti-democrat.
And this whole thing says, I believe in the goodness of human beings.
That most people are doing their best.
They're trying to help.
That's a good point, too.
Man is corrupted, but we are made in the image of God.
Remember that point I said at the beginning that is really important?
It's a basic conservative tenet.
We're fallen through original sin, but we do retain something of the image of God.
We do retain some ability to have intellect and to have will.
We can't save ourselves.
We're not going to get to heaven without God's grace.
But we can cooperate with God's grace.
We can cultivate habits of virtue.
We can do something.
Even when I think about the other side of the political aisle, most of the time, well really all of the time I guess in principle, when people are doing really bad things, they're trying to do good things.
Because desire is aimed at some good.
When we...
This is also why I hammer it on the show all the time that freedom is not the ability to do whatever we wish but the right to do what we ought.
That's the classical definition of freedom, not the liberal definition.
Well, what that comes from is an observation that willing, like willing to do something...
Comes from a conception of the good.
We don't will things that we don't in some way think are good.
Now people can be mistaken all the time.
Like when the left murders babies.
They are aiming at a good.
They're aiming at the good of women's liberation and independence and the dismantling of the patriarchy or whatever they would say.
But they are aiming at some good.
Most of the time they deny that they're killing a baby in the process.
They use all sorts of euphemisms.
They say it's not a baby, it's a clump of cells or whatever.
They're doing that because they're aiming at some good.
They're just wrong.
So the point that James Gunn is making here, you know, there are people, they're doing their best.
There's a kind of basic goodness, but they screw it up sometimes.
That's why our country's battered.
That's like classic conservative stuff.
It's about the kindness of human beings, not the darker voices that are louder.
What are the loudest voices in the country?
The loudest dark voices in the country are the libs.
They're the ones always shrieking.
Conservatives don't shriek that much.
Go to any political rally.
We're actually pretty demure.
We're pretty quiet.
The libs are always screaming.
Remember the first time Trump got elected?
No!
And they're all shrieking.
They have the women's march with the crazy hats that are based on genitalia.
The libs who are loud and screech and scream and they burn down the city for BLM. And they throw bombs at my explosives at the wall when I go on stage in Pittsburgh.
They're the loud ones.
Sounds like he's talking about them.
To embrace decency and optimism.
I would prefer to say hope.
That's all conservative stuff.
So you're saying, Michael, are you putting lipstick on a pig here?
Michael, are you wish casting?
Are you trying too hard here?
James Gunn's a huge lib.
Maybe he is a huge lib.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about James Gunn and I don't watch these movies.
But maybe I'll have to watch this one.
Because it is entirely possible that James Gunn is a huge lib and that he will make a good movie.
That is possible.
It is entirely possible that James Gunn will think he's making a movie about how bad Trump is and how good the libs are and how we need transgender bathrooms all over the place.
But if he is a good filmmaker, he could still accidentally make the conservative movie.
I wonder this about Greta Gerwig.
I think Greta Gerwig is a phenomenal filmmaker.
I think she's excellent.
I think Lady Bird is one of the best movies of the last couple decades.
I think Barbie was superb.
I know it's a somewhat controversial opinion.
But it was superb.
Deeply conservative.
Deeply religious.
Very reactionary almost.
The movie begins with Barbie and feminism coming on the scene and leading girls to kill their babies.
And it ends with a woman saying, forget about my career.
She's speaking to God and she says, the thing I want to do is have a child.
And it ends at the gynecologist's office, not at the job interview.
Deeply, deeply conservative movie.
So I don't know.
And maybe Greta Gerwig's a secret right-winger.
I don't know.
But I also think Greta Gerwig might think of herself as kind of a liberal, but she's just a really good filmmaker.
And so when she's telling a story truthfully, because it connects to reality, she tells a conservative story.
That's my point at the beginning.
When I say the non-negotiables that we have to work with, they're just about accepting basic aspects of reality, including the foundation of reality, which is that God exists.
And if you deny that, you're just going to get really confused really quickly.
Now, speaking of religion, speaking of culture, really, really Terrible story coming out of Germany.
A major attack on a Christmas market.
Many people injured.
A number of people dead right before Christmas.
We will get to that story in a moment.
First, I'll tell you my favorite comment on Friday.
It's from the Trad Dad Show.
It says, Elon will make history as the first African-American Speaker of the House.
That's possible, I guess.
He could be the Speaker of the House.
Can you be the Speaker of the House if you're simultaneously running six or seven companies?
I don't know.
Maybe.
You don't need to be a member of Congress.
Maybe you could.
Back to a really, really devastating story that broke over the weekend.
CNN reported it this way.
A driver who ran the car into a crowded Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, killing at least five people and injuring more than 200, has been identified.
He's a 50-year-old Saudi Arabian citizen who's lived in Germany for more than a decade and worked as a doctor.
So really awful.
We should pray for the people who died and for the families and the people who are injured still.
Awful.
Christmas market attack right before Christmas.
We've heard this story before.
Then you find out he's a Saudi.
He's got an Arab name.
Oh, here we go.
This is the consequences of the Islamization of Europe.
Here's where the story gets weird.
This guy, the suspect, is not Muslim.
He's an atheist.
In fact, he claimed asylum or was seeking asylum in Germany because he's an atheist.
In fact, this guy invaded against the Islamization of Europe.
He was attacking Germany in part because he hates that Germany is allowing in so many Muslims like he could have been and that that's leading to the Islamization of Europe.
He's saying, I fled Saudi Arabia, I come to Germany and Germany is turning into Saudi Arabia.
So this is all according to reports that he's not a Muslim, he's an atheist.
And I think that buttresses the point I was making earlier, though coincidentally, I suppose.
Atheism is a big threat because other groups, people who engage in heresies or Islam or whatever, that can be a threat to your polity too.
But atheism is a fundamental threat because if you accept atheism, nothing makes sense.
And you end up in the world of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche.
And neither of those worlds looks good.
But right now, what is the state of Germany?
Right now, 18% or more of the German population has immigrated since 1950. One in five Germans, almost, is not German.
Not ethnically German.
Usually from Islamic countries.
And you think, okay, well, we'll just have to take a hard line on Islam.
No.
No, in this case, the problem is the guy wasn't Muslim.
It's worse.
The guy was an atheist.
The turning away from God, the collapse of faith in the West, is the most likely thing to kill the West.
And it could kill the West a lot faster than people think.
Now, speaking of populations mixing, The Guardian has a story out.
The story of an uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian rainforest.
Headline, photographs reveal first glimpse of uncontacted Amazon community.
Exclusive automatic cameras in the Brazilian rainforest show images of the Masako people who are flourishing despite environmental threats.
These are cameras that were just set up so the group remains uncontacted, truly, by the white man or any kind of civilized man.
The pictures of a group of men offer the outside world its first glimpse of the community and give further evidence the population is growing.
Well, that's good.
This uncontacted tribe surviving on roaches and dirt is able to have kids and grow its population.
America, the richest people in the history of the world, can't do that.
We haven't had above replacement birth rates since 1971. Maybe we should go move to the jungle and eat bugs.
Then maybe we could have a flourishing country.
I'm not in any way being ironic.
That's crazy.
That's not even the point I wanted to make, but that is such a shocking fact of this article.
These people who are naked, running through the jungle, who probably think these cameras are, you know, alien deities who have shown up.
These people have a more ordered and serious society than America in the year of our Lord, 2024. That's really bad.
Now, the article goes on.
The group is known as the Masako after the river that runs through their lands.
But no one knows what they call themselves.
No one's talked to these people.
We just call them Masako.
While their language, social fabric, and beliefs remain a mystery.
So there's this big question that comes up, which is, they're uncontacted.
Should we contact them?
On the one hand, they're naked and they're likely having their grandmothers eaten by jaguars and things, leopards.
And they don't have running water.
Well, they have rivers.
They probably don't have very stable sources of food.
They probably don't have a particularly robust system of law and order.
They don't have iPhones.
They don't have dentistry.
So should we contact them?
On the one hand, you say, yes, we certainly should.
On the other hand, you say, no, these people.
They're so preserved.
Wow.
It's like an amber.
It's like a zoo.
If we keep the cameras there, we can see what it was like.
Primitive man.
Or even the real hippy-dippy types will say, no, they're living the really perfect way.
And look, there's something to recommend their lifestyle.
They're growing and we're not.
So they're doing something right.
But still, I bet there's a lot of problems with this tribe running around naked in the jungle.
So, some people say, no, no, we've got to preserve them.
We shouldn't contact them.
Now, others would say, it's cruel not to contact them.
You have so much you could give them.
You could offer them.
You could give them, you know, potato chips and iPhones or something.
But other people say, no, no, no, but you might infect them with the diseases and the pathologies of the West.
And that's a fair point, too.
Both sides actually make fair points.
Because the question is not, should we contact them or should we not contact them?
The question is, what would we be bringing them?
What would we contact them for?
If you told me we're going to contact them to teach them about atheism and doomscrolling and porn and fentanyl, we're going to teach them all those great wonders of life in the 21st century, I would say, you know what?
Leave them alone.
They seem to be actually doing fine on their own.
If, on the other hand, you say, we're going to contact them to make disciples of all nations and teach them about the love of God, the love of Christ, who is incarnate, and we're about to celebrate the incarnation, who died to redeem mankind and fulfills the old law, And promises everlasting life.
And we're going to do, actually, what the first explorers to the Americas did.
Men like Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortes, the conquistadors.
These great, brave men who brought civilization to the Americas.
Helped to give us our country.
I would say, go full steam ahead.
That's a charitable thing to do.
That's very good for the uncontacted tribe.
That's what the West used to do when we called our civilization Christendom and we had a good, thriving civilization.
Now we have a dying civilization that is being invaded by people who have other religions or, worse yet, they don't bring their religion here.
Worse yet, they adopt our lack of religion and drive cars into Christmas markets.
Yeah, well, we don't want to spread that.
You're right.
I'm anti-contacting to spread the sicknesses that have infected modernity, liberal modernity.
But if we're going to go back to the old school, yeah.
Bring them the truth.
Bring them the truth.
So much of modernity is based on falsehood.
What are we going to do?
We're going to bring them transgenderism?
That's false.
We would be confusing them.
We would be leading them further from the truth if we did that.
Or we can bring them the love of God.
Bringing them closer to the truth.
God who is the truth.
Christ who is the truth.
Yeah, good.
Let's do that.
That's a good idea.
There's an amazing story that's just come out.
Also, Wall Street Journal.
It's about surprising psychosis treatments.
I only have one minute left, and I hate to leave you before Christmas on psychosis treatments, but this is an amazing story.
Surprising psychosis treatment that works.
Learning to live with the voices.
It's a journal article.
It talks about this guy, Noah, whose family spent $150,000 on his psych care and it didn't really work and he was hearing voices and he was really upset and really crazy.
He thought that he knocked down the Twin Towers and that he caused COVID and he was schizophrenic and had all these problems.
So no treatment worked.
He tried this new treatment.
That's now gaining some steam.
Which is teaching people with psychosis to live with the imagined voices.
To work with it, to understand them as false.
Not to take a bunch of drugs that are going to screw up their whole heads and maybe lead them to suicide.
But just to learn to live with this problem.
If it cannot be cured in some helpful way.
And that is helpful.
I guess this is kind of the through line of the whole show.
It's teaching people to understand the limitations that they cannot break through.
Liberal modernity says we've got to break every limitation.
We've got to break the limitations of biology.
We've got to break everything.
We've got to make ourselves gods.
But this says, understand there are limitations and have a healthy resignation and try to live with them.
And that is going to be more likely to make you flourish.
Flourishing comes from learning to live within limits rather than constantly trying to deny or obliterate them.
That's only going to make you crazier.
That's only going to make you...
That's going to drive you truly mad.
We're about to learn.
I mean, for goodness sake, God himself takes on certain limitations in Christmas, in the Nativity.
He's so unintimidated by the evils of the world.
He enters into the world as a baby, as the most vulnerable being he possibly can, and conquers death.
You can do that.
You can do that even in your human nature, in cooperation with God.
