An LA fireman lady mocks the idea of carrying a man out of a burning building, Mel Gibson preaches the gospel on Joe Rogan, and libs in New York sentence President Trump.
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As the Los Angeles fires continue to destroy the city, the California governor and former future Democrat presidential nominee Gavin Newsom is asking the White House for help.
I ask you, we've got to deal with this misinformation.
There are hurricane force winds of mis- and disinformation lies.
People want to divide this country.
And we're going to have to address that as well.
And it breaks my heart as people are suffering and struggling that we're up against those hurricane forces as well.
And and that's just a point of personal privilege that I share that with you because it infects real people that are out there.
People I meet every single day, people the mayor has been meeting with and they're having conversations that are not the typical conversations you'd have at this time.
And you wonder where this stuff comes from.
And it's very damaging as well.
But but we're here to get the job done.
Did you catch that?
The governor of California is not asking the White House to help protect his constituents from the historic fire that's still raging.
He is asking the White House to protect him from his constituents' criticism.
A desperate and disgusting plea.
From a politician whose presidential ambitions have just gone up in smoke.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Mel Gibson was just preaching the gospel to and on the Joe Rogan show.
It was really beautiful.
There's so much more to say.
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When you go to tryarmra.com slash NOLS, K-N-A-W-L-A-S, or enter code NOLS, K-N-A-W-L-A-S. That is T-R-Y-A-R-M-R-A. Slash K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Go there, write N-O-W. Collapse happens gradually, then suddenly.
I'm not the first person to observe it.
An L.A. fire lady has gone viral over the past few days for mocking the idea that a woman, a woman firefighter, a concept basically unheard of until about 50 years ago, that a woman firefighter would struggle to carry a big burly man out of that a woman firefighter would struggle to carry a big burly man out You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it's a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you.
It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.
Is she strong enough to do this?
Or you couldn't carry my husband out of a fire, which my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.
You know, if I have to carry your husband out of a burning building?
He's in the wrong place.
Yeah.
Usually people in burning buildings would describe their position as the wrong place.
It's not the right place.
It's not the place they want to be.
That's why we have firemen.
And nobody wants that lady responding to their burning building.
She says, well, you know, when your house is on fire, you want to make sure that the fireman who shows up looks like you.
I'm sorry, the fireman or fire lady who shows up looks like you.
That is not true.
I am a perfectly average-sized, not particularly athletic, swarthy fella.
I don't exactly care about the race of the man who shows up, but I definitely want it to be a guy.
I want the guy to be huge.
I want him not only to be above average in size, I want him to be very much above average in size.
I want him to be very athletic so that he can carry me down flights of stairs.
I want him to be a big Brawny dude.
I don't care if he's a white guy.
I don't care if he's Hispanic.
I don't care if he's a black guy.
In fact, black guys are pretty strong.
They're pretty athletic.
Maybe I would even sort of prefer him to be a big, giant black guy, which is not me.
He wouldn't resemble me, but I would feel a lot better if that were the case, because I would believe that he is likely to save me from the Bernie building.
But if a lady of any sort, straight, Lesbian, white, black, if a lady shows up, I'm going to start sweating even more than I already was with the building on fire.
It should go without saying, but I think it actually has to be said now.
Women should not be firefighters.
For a whole host of reasons.
One, because they're physically weaker than men.
Just a fact.
Two, because it is a disordered society that sends women into burning buildings to save men.
That's just wrong.
It's the same kind of society that sends women to the front lines of combat to catch bullets from jihadis.
It's a bad idea because women are physically weaker than men, but it's also just disordered.
What kind of a sick society, what kind of a perverted society sends women to go catch bullets to protect men?
That's just wrong.
That's a society that doesn't know the difference between men and women.
And I'm not just talking about the people who fall in prey to the transgender ideology.
I'm talking about many people who would even call themselves conservatives.
Because I know what the answer is going to be.
There are going to be people who think that they are conservative, who think that they are on the right wing.
And they're going to say, well look, sure Michael, usually women should not be firefighters.
Usually women should not fight in combat in the military.
But you know, some women can do it.
It really, it should just be about whoever can pass the physical fitness test.
And if you can pass the test, then be my guest.
First of all, what happens when you subject everyone, regardless of sex, to that kind of standard is the standards just get lowered.
That's what happens in police departments.
That's what happens in the fire department.
That's what happens in the military.
But even beyond that, do you see the logical conclusion of that thinking?
This is the thinking that gave us trancing the kids.
This is the thinking that gave us the sexually confused society.
This is the thinking that ripped apart any semblance of chivalry or serious definition of family.
Listen, women can be firefighters.
Usually they won't be, but women can be firefighters so long as they pass the test.
Okay, why not?
That's fine.
Of course women can fight in combat.
You know, if they pass the test.
If they're as physically strong as men.
Of course!
We should support same-sex marriage.
People should have any kind of rights that they want.
It doesn't bother me.
Just don't make me pay for it.
Of course.
And look, adults, if adults want to put on dresses, if they want to chop up their bodies, that's their right.
They're individuals.
That doesn't affect me.
But transgenderism in school curricula, that's crazy.
Do you see the problem with that?
Of course women should be permitted into men's typical spaces.
They should be permitted into the military academy, and the police academy, and the fire academy.
But transgenderism, that's crazy.
You've already accepted.
By accepting the logic of same-sex marriage, by accepting the logic of the LGBT movement, by accepting the logic of feminism, you have accepted the premises that inevitably bring you transgenderism.
And it's all absurd.
And when we see the lady fireman...
She's admitting this on camera saying, yeah, I probably can't pull a man out of a burning building, but sounds like a him problem, doesn't it?
Why is he relying on me?
I'm a lady.
I shouldn't be pulling him out of a building.
She's even admitting that men and women are different, that this is absurd.
But when even the conservatives accept these absurd premises, well, you end up exactly where we are.
Now, there are still some amazing things happening in L.A. James Woods.
Great actor and a conservative actor, one of the few conservative actors.
James Woods was posting on X the other day.
He's always posting on X. He's a very prominent tweeter.
But James Woods was posting and said basically that his house was up in flames.
His house was right where the fire is, and he said it's gone.
I'm evacuated, but it's almost certainly gone.
Then he posted this a couple days later.
A miracle has happened.
We managed to get to our property and our home that we were told is gone forever is still standing.
In this hellish landscape, standing is relative, but smoke and other damage is not like the utter destruction around us, the view from our deck area.
And then he posts from his deck, posts a little video, and everything is just wiped away.
It's just totally gone.
Then, Woods points out, he says, one side untouched, the other utter destruction.
While we rejoice to find our house intact in the midst of a hellscape like this, you can only think of your neighbors.
I think we have the video of both sides of the street.
Somewhere we have the video.
Somewhere hidden in the control room we have the video.
I was so certain that our house was gone a day ago, but the fickle finger of fate decided otherwise.
Now, the fickle finger of fate is an interesting phrase.
That's not exactly the phrase I would use to describe what's going on.
But it is crazy.
You've seen a lot of videos like this.
One side of the street.
Totally fine.
The other side absolutely destroyed.
But this is not the only story we've seen like this.
There's another group of people who had all their property burned down.
One thing remained.
We have video of that too.
A statue of the Virgin Mary, specifically of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is the apparition of Mary, the mother of God, in the Americas, converted millions and millions of people.
Everything burned down, this statue of Mary is still standing.
It's enough to give you goosebumps.
Even if you're the most hardened materialist who thinks that all of these kind of numinous phenomena are pure coincidence, it's enough to give you goosebumps.
Add on top of that, in the Palisades, there was a property that survived.
It's a property owned by Rick Caruso.
It's one of the most beautiful properties in LA. It's the Palisades Shopping Mall.
Now, in the case of Rick Caruso's property, he's the Republican who ran for mayor.
In the case of Rick Caruso's property, he appears to have brought in some private firemen help to help keep the fires off of his property.
So that was a little less providential, perhaps, but Rick Caruso clearly cooperating with the resources he had.
But then I have one more story.
This one was really crazy.
A friend of mine, he's a conservative guy.
He's a friend and colleague of many years.
He has a property in Malibu.
And we were looking at the spread of the fire, and I was texting him, but I didn't want to say, man, your property is gone.
And I was asking for updates every so often, and he showed on the map his neighbor's houses, just X, property gone, X, property gone.
Virtually all of his neighbors had their houses burnt to the ground.
And then, a day or so later, he texts me a picture of his property, completely untouched.
Palm trees on his property.
Completely untouched.
He had a cardboard box of wood on his deck.
Completely untouched.
Not a hint of smoke.
I was seeing footage from his neighbor's ring camera of sparks flying by the property.
The fire got so close to his house that two windows exploded the property otherwise.
His stuff is fine.
I am not Saying we have to read into this all that much.
You know, it's a wicked generation that seeks after signs and wonders, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
However, as a priest friend of mine observes, it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders, and one sees significance in a lot of things, like a statue of the Mother of God standing amid all the ruins, or certain houses survive, certain houses don't.
Providence is tightly knit and imbued with meaning.
It's just eerie, I guess is all I'm saying.
There's so much more to say.
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Now, someone whose house did burn down...
Who is a good right-winger is Mel Gibson.
Mel Gibson, while his house was burning down, was not crying over it.
He wasn't weeping.
He wasn't pulling his hair out in Hollywood.
He was doing the Joe Rogan show while this was happening.
He was laughing with Joe Rogan.
And he was dropping a lot of truth bombs.
He was saying some things that were a little eccentric, but he was dropping a lot of truth bombs.
For instance, he was on the biggest show on the internet.
Drawing a direct link between what the Libs call reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, and pagan infant sacrifice.
How close are we to collapse?
And what are the things that lead to collapse?
It's environmental stuff.
It's human sacrifice.
Yeah.
I mean, we do that.
Kinda.
We do.
Yeah.
Yeah, we do.
We just dress it up.
Yep.
When you find out medications are killing people and they keep prescribing them.
Yeah, and Gibson talks about abortion.
It's abortion.
That's what we do.
When he's got that Mel Gibson look in his eyes, he says, we do it.
We do it to the tune of 1.2 million babies per year.
We do it.
We do it on a scale that the Aztecs or the Hittites or the Canaanites couldn't possibly have imagined.
We sacrifice many, many, many more babies to Moloch than any ancient, devilish, pagan tribe ever.
And that's in the strongest country in the history of the world.
Gibson then doesn't just leave it there talking about natural law and the rights of babies or anything.
He speaks directly about Christianity.
He answers some criticisms of Christianity.
That it's too rigid or it's too judgmental or something like that.
Mel Gibson says, on the Rogan show, this isn't EWTN. This isn't the 700 Club.
He's on the Joe Rogan Experience.
And he says, hey, do you know who the first saint was?
The first.
A canonized saint.
You know who it was?
No.
The first ever confirmed canonization as a saint was Dismas.
You know who Dismas was?
No.
He was the thief on the cross next to Jesus.
Oh.
And he says to him, you're going to be okay this day.
You'll be with me.
Unbaptized, criminal, all that stuff.
Wow.
The lawmaker is above the law.
So there's a lot of mercy.
So he's mentioning this.
I think a lot of people have an idea of Mel Gibson or some arch right-wing traditionalist type of Catholic person or even Protestant Christian as being really judgmental and exclusive and overtly legalistic.
And here's Mel Gibson.
What does he say to Joe Rogan's audience?
He says, you know, the first saint was the criminal on the cross, the good thief.
He was probably a murderer, unbaptized.
He had baptism of desire, clearly, but unbaptized.
Did all sorts of awful things, but he was given a grace by Christ.
He accepted Christ's grace.
And he's the first canonized saint.
It's a message that Mel Gibson is bringing to Joe Rogan's audience of mercy.
An audience that, well, like all of us to some degree, but maybe especially needs mercy.
Is maybe not aware of this notion of mercy.
And then Gibson had the line, I think this was the grand slam of the whole interview.
The whole interview is worth watching, but this to me was the best bit that Gibson had to speak directly to Joe Rogan's audience about the truth of Christianity.
Well, I regard the Gospels as history.
It's a verifiable history.
Some people say, oh, it's a fairy tale.
He never existed, but he did.
There are other accounts, verifiable, historical accounts, outside the biblical ones that also bear this up, that yes, he did exist.
And the other aspect of that is that all the evangelists, the apostles who went out there, every single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief.
And nobody dies for a lie.
Nobody.
So that's...
Part of what I'm doing.
It's like showing nobody dies for a lie.
Yeah.
Well, the resurrection is the one that is the most difficult for people to swallow.
Yes.
That is the one that requires the most faith.
The most faith and the most belief.
Yeah.
Resurrection.
Yeah.
Who gets back up three days later after he gets murdered in public?
Who gets back up under his own power?
Buddha didn't do that.
Right.
You believe that was a real event?
Yeah, I do.
Yeah, I do.
I definitely do.
For all the reasons I just mentioned, you know, the 11 guys going willingly to their deaths for something that they either saw or, you know...
Saw at least this just before and just after effects, and St. John is the only one who actually isn't martyred, but he saw it firsthand.
And then the apostles who saw the resurrected Christ with their eyes, Thomas actually touching his wounds.
Yeah, and 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection, and yeah, I believe it.
And guess what?
Buddha didn't do that, S-H-I-T. Not to be nitpicky, it's a venial sin to use naughty language, but...
It was used for clear rhetorical effect here.
Gibson chose his target really well here, speaking to the Joe Rogan audience.
Because the Joe Rogan audience is normal people.
Normal people who live in our normal culture, which has been influenced by all sorts of kind of wacky religion, especially by Buddhism or a kind of Western conception of Buddhism.
There's even a term in New York, in suburban New York where I grew up, which is the Jubbu, people who are raised reformed Jews, kind of like secular Jews, who become vaguely Buddhist in their spirituality, man.
And it's not just reformed Jews who are subject to this.
It's a ton of people.
They're spiritual but not religious, man.
They don't like that organized religion.
They just kind of want to be in...
Touch with the vibes, you know, in the universe, man.
And they're all kind of vaguely Buddhist.
And Gibson goes right to the heart of that and he says, yeah, Buddha didn't do that.
Buddha wasn't executed publicly and he didn't rise from the dead three days later of his own power.
Only one person has ever done that and that is our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is evangelism, okay?
That is preaching the gospel.
It's not...
The neatest, most formal kind of rhetoric.
Mel Gibson, even, he's speaking a little loosely, like when he says all the apostles died.
Well, they all died eventually, but they weren't all martyred, St. John was.
But it sort of doesn't matter.
To me, what Mel was doing here...
Now, Mel Gibson has a few theological problems, which is why I won't call him St. Mel.
I'll just call him the venerable Mel Gibson.
But what he does here is exactly what St. Paul tells us to do when he says to be all things to all people.
In 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 9, St. Paul says, As to all, I made myself the servant of all, that I might gain the more.
And I became to the Jews a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.
To them that are under the law, as if I were under the law, whereas myself was not under the law.
That I might gain them that were under the law.
To them that were without the law, as if I were without the law.
Whereas I was not without the law of God, but was in the law of Christ.
That I might gain them that were without the law.
To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak.
I became all things to all men, that I might save all.
And I do all things for the gospel's sake, that I may be made partaker thereof.
This is, I think, a brilliant strategy of evangelism.
I think Mel Gibson has done more for evangelism than basically anyone walking around today.
He's definitely in the top ten, okay?
And this strategy, I think, is a great strategy.
This is meeting people where they are.
This is being all things to all men.
This is finding the way in, keeping the end goal in mind, which is conversion, bringing people to Christ, bringing people within the mystical body of Christ.
What Mel Gibson did on the Joe Rogan show, especially that clip at the end, that is a master class.
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Jimmy Carter is dead.
He's still dead.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
So is Jimmy Carter.
However, there's one bit from his funeral that is making the rounds on the internet.
And it's cringy, but it's important to take note of it.
At Jimmy Carter's funeral, this was the music that was played.
Imagine there's no heaven Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try.
They're in a big church.
No hell below us.
There's a choir right next to this guy in a liturgical bar.
Above us only sky.
Imagine all the people The former and current presidents Oh man, that was my reaction Why are you playing this atheist, communist gobbledygook in a cathedral at the funeral of a supposed Christian?
Many people say that...
Jimmy Carter.
Whether you liked him as a president or not, no one can doubt his deep Christian faith.
I don't know.
I'm not here to judge Jimmy Carter's supposed faith.
But that is not the song that is played at the funeral of a Christian.
Imagine there is no heaven.
It's easy if you try.
John Lennon writing about how wonderful it would be if there were no heaven and we could all just live for today like pagans and communists.
If we could just get rid of all this Christianity, you know?
And just live like animals.
Like materialist, communist, pagan animals.
Wouldn't that be so great?
And this is the song.
Who selected this?
Did Jimmy Carter select this in his preparations for his funeral?
I certainly hope not.
His family did.
I don't know.
People say, you know, Jimmy Carter's a Southern Baptist.
I believe he left the Southern Baptist Convention.
He joined some squishier version of Baptist Protestant Christianity.
I don't know.
Whatever that funeral was, that was not a Christian funeral.
Though a lot of people don't really have Christian funerals these days.
Even down to the eulogy.
I've given a couple eulogies, so it happens.
I know it's popular.
But a eulogy is not a traditionally Christian practice.
A eulogy is a pagan practice.
A eulogy to sing a song of praise to the dead.
That's ancient Greece.
That's paganism.
The traditional Christian idea is not that the funeral is a song of praise to the dead.
The idea is that the funeral mass is a mass of prayer for the dead.
It's a praise of Christ.
It's a praise of God for the dead, for their soul, for the repose of their soul.
When we say requiescat in pace, that is a prayer for the dead.
We say, may he rest in peace.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.
Requiem eternam donaei dominat lux perpetuolo cetae, requiescat in pace.
So a prayer to God for the dead, not...
Now we get everything all jumbled.
I hope Jimmy Carter had a sincere Christian faith.
I hope he lived it out.
But whatever that funeral was, it was not Christian.
Turning from a former president to the next president, President Trump was sentenced.
Did you know that?
Did you catch that little news story?
Everyone's preparing for him to reenter the White House.
And yet, The libs are still trying to pretend that he's a criminal who could go to prison.
Now, even the judge, in this case, this is the New York case over falsifying business records for supposed hush money that he supposedly paid to a porn star, even though the whole case was ridiculous from the outset, because if President Trump committed this crime of falsifying business records, it would have been a misdemeanor that was...
Passed the statute of limitations years ago.
So the only way that they could raise it to a felony in New York was to say that he falsified business records in furtherance of some underlying crime, but the prosecution never even proved what the underlying crime was.
In fact, they told the jury, don't worry about identifying the underlying crime.
As long as you think there might have been some crime there at all, then that suffices.
The whole thing was just totally preposterous.
And yet, Trump was found guilty in that kangaroo court, and he was sentenced.
Now, with the sentencing, the judge realized he's not going to put the President of the United States in jail.
So he said, okay, Trump has an unconditional discharge.
It means he will not be punished with prison time or fines or community service.
Trump is going to be engaging in community service for the next four years when he's President of the United States.
So he has no jail time.
He can still vote because the states in which President Trump resides permit felons who have paid their debt to society to vote.
However...
Because of the sentencing, Trump will need to give New York a DNA sample, and President Trump cannot own a gun.
This, to me, is the most absurd part.
The man who, in seven days, will have the sole authority in the country to authorize a nuclear strike, that man can fire a nuclear weapon, but he can't fire a pistol.
Does that make sense to you?
It does not.
And what the Libs will say is, yeah, and that's why he shouldn't be president.
Hold on.
Our Constitution is very clear.
We have a mechanism for choosing a president.
Trump satisfied all of those conditions.
The American people voted for him, not just through their representatives in the Electoral College, but actually the majority of Americans voted for him.
And then he won in an electoral college landslide, and he is the president.
There's no provision of the Constitution that says that a man has to win the majority of the electoral college, and then he can be president unless some judge in New York doesn't like him, unless some crooked politicians in New York decide to trump up charges and illegally prosecute him.
That's not what the Constitution says.
He's the president.
So where did the error occur?
Obviously, it makes no sense that a guy can fire nuclear weapons but not a pistol, not a Glock 19. So where did the error occur?
Was it in making him president or was it in prosecuting him?
It's clear as day.
The error, the threat to our political system, the absurdity lies in prosecuting Trump.
That was the problem.
So, okay, he's got to give a DNA sample to New York.
The embarrassment continues.
I hope there are consequences.
Once the Republicans have a unified government, I hope there are consequences for these dastardly liberal politicians in New York who would make such a mockery of our political order.
Now, how did Trump get sentenced in the first place?
It only happened because the Supreme Court allowed the sentencing to go on.
President Trump's team requested an emergency stay to block the sentencing in New York.
The good judges on the Supreme Court, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh even, they said, yeah, okay, we should block the sentencing.
This is absurd that we're going to sentence a president of the United States for this nonsense in New York.
However, Chief Justice Roberts, a little bit of a squish, and Amy Barrett both sided with the court's liberals to let the sentencing go on.
Now, President Trump's response was surprising.
He didn't just invade against Roberts and Barrett.
He said, I respect the court's opinion.
I think it was actually a very good opinion for us because you saw what they said.
They invited the appeal, the appeal of the whole case, the appeal of the whole conviction in this nonsense case in New York.
And the appeal is on the bigger issue, so we'll see how it works out.
Okay, Trump might have the last laugh.
But also, we need to rethink what kind of judges we're putting on the court.
Okay, maybe...
Roberts and Barrett are playing interdimensional 7D chess here, and it's actually going to give Trump a bigger victory, and they were all being very strategeric, you know, or something like that.
But this happens too often with conservatives, that we appoint judges and they disappoint us.
They act in ways, they rule in ways that contradict how we understand their...
Judicial philosophy.
That never happens for the left.
The left judges basically never disappoint their presidents and the people who voted for their presidents, the presidents who would go on to appoint them.
That never happens.
It does happen for us.
Maybe we need new metrics by which to judge potential judicial candidates.
Right now we have textualism, we have originalism in its older form and in its Scalia form.
Okay, maybe we need, I don't know, a little bit of a sturdier rule of thumb by which to measure these judges so they don't disappoint us and side with the libs too often.
Meanwhile, turning to our current president, Joe Biden is leaving office with the claim that he is leaving America.
I'll use his exact words.
I don't want to misquote him.
The economy I'm leaving America is the best in the world and stronger than ever for all Americans.
Fact check.
Is that true?
A lot of conservatives are saying this is totally preposterous.
This is insane.
The economy's in the gutter.
That's not exactly true either.
And Biden's using clever language here.
He says, stronger than ever for all Americans.
So what he could say is, when you point to other periods of a much stronger economy, say the 1990s clearly, or just after the Second World War, when America was the last superpower in the world, matched a little bit by the Soviet Union, but we were still stronger.
Joe Biden could say, yeah, but back then there was racism or something, or there was sexism.
So it wasn't stronger for all Americans.
But again, to be stronger for all Americans, I don't know.
You can't point to our present economy, I think, and say, well, maybe it's more equal in some measure.
It's actually not.
Actually, the wealth disparities are greater than ever.
And COVID-19, the lockdowns, gave us the biggest transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes in history.
So actually, you couldn't even say it's more equal.
But even if it were just all equal, Harrison Bergeron style, handicapping, leveling to the bottom, you still wouldn't say that that's better for all Americans.
So how does the economy look?
I think a fair view of it, an objective view of it, is the economy is not terrible, but it's certainly been better.
GDP is relatively high, but GDP growth is relatively weak compared to other periods.
Unemployment is fine, but it's not the best we've ever had it.
Manufacturing is weak.
It's not the worst it's ever been, but it's pretty weak.
You know, America had a much stronger manufacturing base earlier, and that was probably better for our national security and for the health of our whole society.
The economy has been really financialized, so it's, I think, overly reliant on financial markets.
We don't actually produce physical goods and stuff, and that really harmed us, mentioning COVID-19.
That harmed us when our supply chains were all interrupted.
So, I don't know, the economy, it's kind of a mixed bag, but it's looking pretty weak.
And in some ways, the economy is absolutely terrible.
By the end of the Biden administration, our national debt will be $34.7 trillion.
That's about 125% of GDP. That is egregious.
That's really bad.
Empires fall for that kind of thing.
So it's not that we have the worst economy imaginable and there's nothing to recommend it.
That statement would be false and it would give liberals an opening to call us kooks and hacks.
But I think any fair assessment of the economy is...
It's pretty weak.
It's looking pretty bad, and it's looking pretty bad in no small part because of the disastrous policies of Joe Biden, though the policies that led us to this point have gone back decades.
Okay, speaking of fairness, my favorite comment on Friday is from Tofu9107, who says, In fairness, it is possible to be a parent to a 20-year-old and to be a parent at 20. And then a grandparent at 40. And then a great-grandparent at 60. You're right.
This is a point that sweet little Elisa made with me last night.
She said, Mac, I'm listening to your show and you said something wrong.
You said that great-grandparents should not be president and that's not true.
I said, how do you figure?
She said, well, back when we had a good society, people would have kids younger and then you could be a great-grandparent by 60. If you keep having kids at 20 and even you have a little leeway.
Maybe one a year down the line has a kid at 25. All right, 65, that's pretty good.
Even two down the line have kids at 25. And then you're president at 70. You can be president at 70. And she's right.
She's right.
I was saying in our decadent society where people don't have kids until they're 30, 35, 40, 45, if they have kids at all, then to be a great grandparent probably puts you in your 80s or 90s.
But you're right.
If we lived in a good society, great-grandparents can and probably should be president because they could be 60-year-olds.
Good point.
Good point, Alisa, and good point, Mr. Tofu.
Speaking of dubious political analysis coming from Joe Biden, we now turn to dubious political analysis coming from the supposed far-right-wing leader in Germany.
This is the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany, Alice Weidel, who had an interview with Elon Musk and made the claim that Adolf Hitler was a communist.
Since I'm an economist, I would like to shed some light on the idea, when we talk about Hitler, on the idea of the National Socialists.
Back then, during the Third Reich, the national socialist, as the word says, they were socialists.
Yeah, very much so.
They nationalized industries like crazy.
Yes, absolutely.
He was a communist and he considered himself as a socialist.
And the biggest success, the biggest success after that terrible era in our history was...
To label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative.
He was exactly the opposite.
He wasn't a conservative.
He wasn't a libertarian.
He was a communist, socialist guy.
So, full stop, no more comment on that.
And we are exactly the opposite.
We are a libertarian, conservative party.
Okay, so what...
This woman has said is literally not true, but there might be a reason why she said it.
But on the surface, what she said is extremely dumb.
Not true.
Hitler, we have Hitler's words.
He actually wrote a lot.
Hitler said, communism is not socialism.
Marxism is not socialism.
The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning.
I shall take socialism away from the socialists.
So he did call his party a socialist party.
This was at a time when every intelligent person seemed to be a socialist.
Socialism is always unintelligent and evil and terrible and stupid, but it was a very popular term.
And so he says, well, I'm a real kind of socialist.
Not you Marx-influenced socialists.
I'm a different kind of socialist.
And so he certainly was not a communist.
He was not a socialist in the sense that we understand socialism.
He also, as she says, was not a libertarian.
That's certainly, Hitler was not a libertarian.
And it's difficult to place Hitler on the left-right spectrum because the terms left and right come from the French Revolution, from the National Assembly, when the Catholic monarchist traditionalists were on the right side of the Assembly Hall and the atheist liberals, Republicans, were on the left side of the hall.
So, was Hitler on the right or on the left?
In some ways, he hearkened back to tradition.
In some ways, he was quite modern and modernist.
He was certainly a statist and practically an atheist.
So, you know, I don't know.
Where does he fall?
Probably that spectrum does not fit all of our modern political ideas.
ideas, in large part because, practically speaking, everyone in politics today would have been on the left of the National Assembly.
They are practically atheists or secularists.
They are liberals.
They embrace the views that come with the so-called enlightenment.
They're either liberals of the left or liberals of the right.
They're either progressive liberals or libertarian liberals or classical liberals, but they're all kind of liberals.
And they're all basically Republicans, lowercase r.
Either advocating democracy or a more representative form of democracy or power to the people or whatever.
They're all basically that.
You'll be hard-pressed to find traditional Catholic monarchists in mainstream politics today, you know, shouting their views from the rooftop.
So this is in part why the left-right paradigm doesn't quite work.
Then you think about this woman, the leader of the far right.
We are told by the media, a party in Germany, they keep comparing this woman to a Nazi.
She is a lesbian libertarian.
That's the furthest right you've got in Germany right now, is a lesbian libertarian who thinks that Hitler was a communist.
If that's the far right, I think the terms left and right have lost basically all of their meaning.
Now, I want to be fair to this woman.
Because I'm not totally opposed to AFD or these sort of right-wing movements coming up in Europe.
What she said is literally false and, at first glance, quite stupid.
But at a deeper level, there's probably a great deal of wisdom here.
Because in our modern political order, Hitler just means the devil.
Hitler just means evil, just means bad.
In our modern political mythos...
Even Hitler wasn't Hitler.
In the traditional understanding of politics, you have the incarnation of absolute good in Christ.
And in our traditional understanding of politics and theology and philosophy, evil does not have an existence of its own.
We get this from Plotinus and the Neoplatonists and up through the Christian tradition.
Evil does not have an existence of its own.
Evil is merely the privation of good.
Okay?
So we don't live in a dualistic, Manichaean society where there's the good force and the evil force and they're just always fighting.
No, no, no.
There is God.
God is sovereign.
God creates everything.
God is good.
God does not create evil.
So evil is merely the privation of the good.
And we have the incarnation of absolute good in the person of Christ.
Even if you're not Christian, that's how our society has understood good, evil, justice, politics for a couple thousand years now.
In liberalism, as Christianity has waned in public, it's been replaced by this new kind of mythos that you have the incarnation of absolute evil.
There's no such thing as good, man.
The incarnation, that can't be real, and God probably doesn't exist.
I don't know if there's any such thing as good, but there's definitely evil.
We all know evil.
We all know sin.
And so in recent historical events, the incarnation of absolute evil is the person of Hitler.
The literal Hitler, quite a bad fellow.
But the mythical representation of Hitler, it takes on this religious significance.
He is the kind of response to Christianity.
He's the absolute incarnation of evil.
Which is why, in politics, whenever you want to attack somebody, you just compare them to Hitler.
It's why when you want to say the opponents are bad, you say they're like the Nazis.
People on the left call the right-wingers Nazis.
People on the right call the left-wingers Nazis.
Just like the leader of AFD is doing in Germany here.
But American Republican conservatives do that too.
When Joe Biden launches his presidential campaign, he compares Trump to Hitler.
We don't talk about Satan anymore.
We certainly don't talk about God all that much, as much as we should, but we talk about Hitler.
So at a deeper level, what the leader of AFD, I think, is doing is basically just playing the hand she's dealt.
She's playing within the circumstances that currently dictate how politics is conducted.
She's saying, okay, well, we can't really have recourse to discussion of absolute good, and we can't really use the language of traditional morality because people don't understand it anymore.
But you know what they do understand?
Hitler, especially in Germany.
So if you want to win an election, you just got to say that the other guy is more like Hitler than you are.
And so that's what she's doing.
It's shallow.
It's, I think, ridiculous.
I think it's a false way of viewing the world.
But from a practical politics standpoint...
People are making fun of her for being stupid.
It's probably a little smarter than people are giving her credit for.
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I've often said that gender-affirming care is health care, it is mental health care, and it can actually be suicide prevention care. - Oh!
I think I'm gonna take some medicine so I can kind of, like, transform into a boy, get surgery.
After the surgery, I didn't really feel any better.
When it stopped being a thing for adults and it started to be a let's teach this to kids.
Total lie.
Manipulation.
It's gaslighting.
Please stop.
He's a boy, not a girl.
How could she do this to my son?
What they're talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children.
I thought fixing me externally would fix me internally.
But of course I was wrong.
The fact that the state thinks that they're more important and have a better say in what happens to your child over the actual parent's opinion is egregious.
Puberty blockers, surgeries, big money makers for hospitals, for physicians.
All I want to do is hold my son.
Are you asking me to lie to parents?
And he said yes.
This is a weaponized use of a parent's sympathy and caring and concern by the left to destroy your child.
Let's tell kids that maybe they can be the opposite sex.
Maybe they actually are the opposite sex.
It is an evil thing to tell children that happiness lies on the other side of puberty blockers or double mastectomies.
