President Trump's "big beautiful bill" passes in the House by a single vote, more comes out about the "Free Palestine" murderer and his victims, and Kanye West gives up antisemitism.
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Into what's actually going on in the non-cigar-related news.
President Trump's big, beautiful bill passes the House by one vote.
The free Palestine murderer releases a manifesto.
We're learning a lot more about him.
And about his victims.
And Kanye, related story, announces that he is done with antisemitism.
I'm Michael Knowles.
the Michael Knowles Show.
This cigar is so good.
And any cigar launch date, when I get to smoke a cigar on my show, that's a nice day.
You'll get notes, by the way, of chicory.
You'll get notes of cardamom.
You'll get notes of oak and a little hint of caramel, okay?
Now, you're probably wondering, how is the guy who just came out with a song called Heil Hitler, how is he now done with anti-Semitism?
It is because, and you know how much I hate to say this, I told you so.
There is a great deal more to say about this in many subjects.
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Biggest political news going on right now.
The House of Representatives has just passed President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.
What is the Big Beautiful Bill?
I actually hadn't even really talked about this bill so much when it was working its way through the House.
The Big Beautiful Bill is everything that Trump needs to get his second term agenda started at the legislative level.
He's passed a zillion executive orders, but at the legislative level, with a razor-thin majority in the House, President Trump had to get this bill through.
The bill extends the 2017 tax cuts, makes those tax cuts permanent.
Really, really important to extend those tax cuts because they're about to expire, and if they expire, everyone's going to have a massive tax hike.
So I sat down with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant a few weeks ago at the White House, and I asked him how the bill was working its way through Congress, and he said it's a pass-fail measure.
The administration needed to get this win.
You know, the Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, so it'll make its way through the Senate.
The bill is being passed through a process of reconciliation, so they don't need 60 votes.
They only need 51 votes.
They will get 51 votes.
It's not a big deal.
The House was always the sticking point because of that razor-thin majority and because getting the Republicans together in the House is like herding cats, but they did it.
So kudos to President Trump and Speaker Johnson and all the whips.
They did a great job, got that through.
What else does the big, beautiful bill do?
It does all sorts of things that are nice for conservatives.
Prohibits Medicaid money from going toward trans and kids.
That's a good thing.
It allocates more money for border security.
There's a lot in it.
It's a huge bill.
One of the knocks on the bill is it spends a lot of money, but our government just spends a lot of money.
And so we can either spend the money on good things, or we can throw our hands in the air and not get anything done, wait for the Democrats to come in and spend the money on really, really bad things.
Overall, this is good.
This was a pass-fail.
The Trump administration needed to get past this hurdle.
They successfully got past this hurdle.
The Trump agenda is no longer in existential peril.
Now we can build on what happens from here.
Moving into other D.C.-related news, we talked yesterday about this awful shooting after a Jewish event.
This young Jewish couple was murdered by a guy.
The alleged shooter was screamed, free, free Palestine afterward.
We're learning more about him.
He had a manifesto.
I'm not going to read this guy's manifesto.
It does not deserve a public reading.
However, if the manifesto is real, comes out from Ken Klippenstein, I think, but if it's real, sometimes these published manifestos are real, sometimes they're hoaxes, but assuming it's real, it includes all the stuff you'd expect.
Free Palestine, and then just whining about the usual leftist causes.
Going all the way back to the Vietnam War.
In this guy's manifesto, he's whining about the Vietnam War and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
So this is a run-of-the-mill leftist, and to me, this is the most interesting story about this shooter's background.
Some people are claiming online that there is a photo of the shooter with the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, along with a bunch of other leftist agitators, the United Working Families Group, United for All Neighborhoods, whatever.
I don't know.
I'm not convinced of this, so I'm certainly not reporting this as fact.
It's making the rounds.
He's a guy who vaguely looks like the shooter, but I don't know.
It almost doesn't matter, because we know with certainty that the alleged shooter was from Chicago.
And two, was active in leftist groups in Chicago.
And not only the super-duper fringe ones, but was part of, well, the ordinary assemblage of left-wing groups that you see in cities like Chicago, especially in Chicago.
One of the groups was the Another one reportedly was the Answers Coalition, a left-wing group about the Middle East.
He seems to have graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago, typical left-wing state school in a very left-wing place.
What do we do about this?
There are all sorts of these groups, these community organizing groups, all these little cells that are inclined toward left-wing agitation that are funded by private money.
Some of them are funded by laundered public money.
One example that I give of this is that when Elon was looking at the way taxpayer money was being funded through USAID, a lot of that money would go out of the United States and then come right back into the United States.
So USAID, for instance, was funding the Tide Center.
The Tide Center was then taking that money and spending the money on BLM activism, BLM activism in the United States, to destroy our communities and extort companies and politicians to demand even more taxpayer money for this nonsense.
And the cycle goes on and on and on.
What we have to do as conservatives here.
It's clamped down on some of this stuff.
And that's going to run counter to the narrative that we've heard for the past five or ten years on the right, which is that we need more free speech, and we need to answer bad speech with more speech, and we shouldn't clamp down on anything.
Nah, we've got to ditch that.
OK, we we need to have standards and norms, something I talk about on the show a lot.
We need more surveillance on these left wing groups that are radicals, that are contrary to the interests of the United States.
They're contrary to our political tradition.
And when you're calling for the destruction of the country, the dismantling of the country, when you're calling in some cases for violence, then it is the legitimate role of the civil authority to go in and discourage those groups.
Okay, we have let them run amok for far too long.
We let them run amok a lot in the 60s and 70s, and there were other terrorist attacks then as a result of it.
So we got to be able to flex our muscles a little bit.
This is something that Trump and the Trump movement is a little more comfortable with than the feckless Republicans that have existed for most of the past few decades.
We got to get more comfortable with it.
We have a right to feel safe on our streets.
We have a right to exclude from the public square.
Really pernicious ideas and movements.
That's not a fascist, reactionary, authoritarian kind of program.
That's the same sort of thing William F. Buckley Jr. was calling for when he founded the modern conservative movement.
That is mainstream stuff.
It should almost sound milquetoast, frankly.
We need to do that.
More on the victims is coming out.
There's a real irony to this.
These victims were targeted ostensibly because they're Jews.
It was free Palestine from the river to the sea.
It was after the American Jewish Committee gala.
This poor young couple in their 20s are planning on getting engaged next week.
The male victim in this case, Jeroen Leshinsky, who's a Christian.
According to reporting from the New York Times and according to this guy's friends, he grew up in a culturally mixed family with a Jewish father and a Christian mother and was a practicing Christian.
According to Ronan Chauval, the dean of the Argoman Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, where Mr. Lashinsky participated in a year-long program in classical liberal conservative thought after earning a master's degree in government diplomacy.
He was a devout Christian, Dr. Chauval said, but he had tied his fate to the people of Israel.
So this guy, I think he was born in Germany and was deeply tied to Israel.
He was a Christian.
It's not that that should make it really any better if you kill innocent people.
That's just wrong.
That's just immoral and unjust.
But there's this deep irony here that this guy who was targeted because he's a Jew is a Christian.
He believed in Christ.
Not that that would have made any difference to the enemies of the Jews, enemies of Christians, apparently.
Enemies of our civilization.
Enemies of our country as well.
The people who are going out there with the Kefi is shrieking about colonization and free, free Palestine and the river to the sea and all that stuff.
You think they love America?
You think they're on the side of the patriotic Americans?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
And, you know, on this civilizational point, some have observed that Judaism is contrary to Christianity, which is true.
Modern rabbinic Judaism.
By definition, rejects Christianity.
Now, Christians would say that Christianity is the fulfillment of the Old Testament and Judaism.
Obviously, especially in the first century, there were a lot of Jewish converts to Christianity, and there were Jewish converts to Christianity even up until today.
But it's true that Judaism is contrary to Christianity because it rejects the resurrection.
Some have floated the idea of an alliance with Muslims.
And I'm happy to have Muslims vote for Republicans, and that's great stuff.
And in some ways I can talk to Muslims much more easily than to atheist liberals, because at least they understand that God exists.
But while we're pointing out that Jews reject the resurrection, we should also point out that Muslims reject the crucifixion.
Muslims, it's in the Quran, do not believe that Christ was crucified.
And it reminds me of a line from St. Paul, which is, many are walking now and I tell you even weeping.
Who are enemies of the cross of Christ.
That line causes people to scratch their heads sometimes.
It's unfortunate to reject the resurrection and everyone should recognize the resurrection because it really happened and there's a lot of evidence for it and it's a great sign of our hope that we have, that our Redeemer lives.
Christ conquers death on the cross, on the crucifixion.
The cross is the axle on which the entire cosmos turns.
And if you think that we can just paper over That fundamental distinction, you have ignored at the very least 1,400 years of history in our civilization.
Now, in the midst of this awful news story out of D.C., a very surprising headline to some people, it's actually not that surprising to me, Kanye West, the auteur behind Heil Hitler, is rejecting anti-Semitism.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Kanye West rejects anti-Semitism.
I covered on the show a week or two ago, this song, Heil Hitler, taking the internet by storm before it was taken down from all the platforms other than X. I think one of the only places on YouTube you can still hear even part of the song is on my reaction to it.
And I had a different reaction than pretty much everyone had to the song.
There were a lot of people who said, this is awful, Kanye is exalting Hitler, and he's a Nazi, and this is terrible, and no one should listen to it, we should take it down.
That wasn't my reaction.
Similarly, there was a reaction from people who like Hitler and don't like the Jews and said, this is awesome!
Kanye is exalting Hitler and he doesn't like the Jews and everyone should listen to this song.
And that also was not my reaction because I listened to the song and because I take Kanye West seriously as a popular artist and I recognize that he actually does have a talent in popular music.
And I said, hold on, what's he doing here?
And then when you listen to the lyrics, you realize he opens up, he says...
I'm really messed up, and I can't see my kids, and I became a Nazi.
I'm the villain.
Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, all my ninjas are Nazis, Heil Hitler.
That's the song.
I said, well, that's really interesting because if you just listen to the lyrics, If he says, I'm a bad guy now, I'm the villain, so therefore I'm a Nazi, so therefore Heil Hitler, then he's saying the Nazis and Hitler are bad.
You don't need an advanced degree in music criticism or literary criticism to recognize that's what he's saying.
That's the plain meaning of what he's saying.
So, well, that's kind of weird.
What does that mean?
This guy was saying, I got all these problems and I'm not in my right mind.
I'm full of wrath and anger and I'm hooked on drugs and I've got all these perversions.
I'm just in a really bad place and I'm not thinking clearly.
So now I'm a Nazi and I'm the villain.
And I said, in my review of the song, I said, yeah, the song's kind of a bop, really.
Just listen to it, you know?
Forget about the lyrics.
You just listen to it.
It's kind of a bop.
And then even the images in the song were really interesting because it was all these black guys wearing animal skins.
As if to say we're not human beings.
We're not intellectual.
We're not using our intellect and our will in a reasonable way.
We've just become animals and we're instinct and wrath.
And I said, the music is interesting and the lyrics, if you pay attention to them, are interesting too.
If you can get past the initial shock of the song, you say, what's he really saying here?
There's clearly a more esoteric meaning to the song.
And then Kanye West posted this yesterday.
Tweets out, I'm done with anti-Semitism.
Next tweet, I love all people.
Next tweet, God forgive me for the pain I've caused.
Next tweet, I forgive those who've caused me pain.
Next tweet, thank you God.
Next tweet, and this is the tweet that explains a lot of it.
I simply got a FaceTime from my kids, and I want to save the world again.
That last tweet...
Because you could see a world in which Kanye were being ironic.
Yeah, I'm done with anti-Semitism.
Wink, wink.
Heil Hitler or something.
I'm done with anti-Semitism.
I love all people.
And then he said, God forgive me the pain I've caused.
Would he really just joke about that?
It doesn't sound like a joke.
I forgive those who've caused me pain.
He has been caused pain.
And he said, I forgive those.
Thank you, God.
I don't think he would joke with that kind of a tweet.
And then the explanatory tweet.
I simply got A single FaceTime call from my kids, and I want to be a good guy again.
I want to save the world again.
I want to be a good guy.
I asked the question.
Man, I'd love to say, I told you so on this one.
I said, the whole point of Kanye's song is, I'm the bad guy.
And the question that it raises is, how can I be a good guy again?
And then he gives the answer right here.
This is the answer.
Wow.
The inciting incident of the song was...
And now I'm willing to become the worst villain imaginable, which is to say a Nazi, in our mythos, in the popular imagination.
But the obvious question was, how can I be a good guy again?
And he gives you the answer.
Okay, you fixed the inciting incident.
I can see my kids again.
Well, thank God.
And you have to remember that before Kanye did his Hitler album and before he started wearing the KKK uniforms, before he did all that, He did put out an album a few years ago called Jesus is King, which was, by pop music standards, a pretty beautiful album.
And you've got to remember, even now, what, 15, 20 years ago, Kanye put out one of the most popular songs of the 2000s, Jesus Walks.
God, show me the way because the devil's trying to keep me down.
Jesus walks with me.
So there's this tension in Kanye's songs, which is why, if you judge Kanye, Based on some tweet or based on some shallow reading of his music, you're going to miss the good stuff.
Because Kanye West, I'm not saying Kanye West, I'm not even saying he doesn't hate the Jews.
Or that he doesn't have Nazi sympathies or whatever.
I'm not even denying an exoteric meaning.
I'm not denying that he's hooked on nitrous oxide.
I'm not denying that he likes watching men be intimate with his women.
I am not denying that he's full of wrath.
All the things that he has said, I'm not denying that those things have some kind of literal truth to it.
But Kanye West is not primarily a philosopher or a political commentator or a historian or any of that.
Kanye West, if he is anything at all, is an artist.
A popular artist.
And so, the value that an artist brings is in his art.
When artists start mouthing off about some stupid political campaign or something, they're usually much less interesting.
Forget about Kanye, that's true.
Taylor Swift, or any of these people.
We always say, hey artists, shut your mouths and do your art, and stop talking about politics where you have no expertise, and where you're not particularly talented.
But the value that the artist brings is in the art, and the art that Kanye has made, by popular music standards, again, I'm not comparing it with Bach or something, but by popular standards, is quite interesting.
And for anyone who was paying attention to him as an artist, you would have noticed that.
That was all there.
And so you wouldn't be surprised when Kanye sends out a bunch of tweets like that.
Those tweets are a total vindication of the point of view that I was articulating in my take on the song.
And again, it doesn't take a genius, really.
You just have to recognize who people are and what they're doing.
This was the subject of my...
Don't change the world.
That's not primarily your job.
Primarily your job is to interpret the world.
This is in the story of Christ visiting Mary and Martha.
Mary symbolizes contemplation.
Martha, the act of life.
Christ says to Martha, your sister Mary has the better part.
It will not be taken away from her.
We don't want to change the world because the world just is as it is.
You actually can't change the world.
Because you can't fundamentally change reality.
Your job is to see the world as it is.
And do the right thing within the world.
Take the next right step for you.
Recognize the meaning behind the world.
The great love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Allow that, the meaning behind the creation of the world, to change you.
And a consequence of this is you'll have lower blood pressure.
Okay?
Your life will go a lot better.
When you're not constantly banging your head against the wall because you can't understand the world.
And indeed, that was in the Kanye song.
He said, I'm just so full or I'm so angry because he couldn't make sense of the world.
He lost his sense.
And the tweets yesterday signify, I'm getting my sense back.
Pretty good stuff.
No, no, he could completely go off the rails tomorrow.
I mean, that is something that artists sometimes fall into.
But what he's saying here is an answer to the song.
I'm the bad guy now.
How do I become a good guy again?
There's a little bit, you see the answer.
Just a little bit.
One simple phone call.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Stray1239, who says, reporter, what would it take for you to believe that there is not a genocide in South Africa?
Me.
If they stopped doing a genocide in South Africa.
Yeah, I guess if major politicians in South Africa stopped chanting, I guess if they stopped saying that, for instance, that would be one step in the right direction.
Or if the sitting president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, doesn't start laughing when President Trump plays that clip in the Oval Office, that would be one of the first things that would tune me in to that.
Speaking of art, we turn to artificial intelligence.
Speaking of art and the absolute Self-destruction of the establishment media.
The Chicago Sun-Times just published a summer reading list for 2025.
They've got all sorts of books on there by authors you probably have heard of, some of them at least.
There's one problem with the summer reading list.
Many of the books don't exist.
Was this a big gag?
Is this some kind of modern art?
No, no, no.
They meant to publish a summer reading list.
It's just that no one wrote it.
The guy who was supposed to write it plugged it into artificial intelligence, one of the AI platforms.
And the AI platform spit out an article with a bunch of books that don't exist.
And this guy sent it to his editor, and then his editor published it.
This is not just...
This is not even just an employee turning in some bad work to his boss with AI.
The assignment that the writer turned in was about reading.
It was about writing.
It was about literature.
And no one involved, all the way up to publication, seems to have read much of anything at all.
Absolutely pathetic.
I've used AI a little bit.
I use it now sometimes more than I use Google.
I never use it for writing because it's not good at writing.
And I won't use a ghostwriter.
I'm very precious about my writing.
Because writing is a reflection of thought.
So if I give away my writing, I'm really giving away my thought.
But I will use it sometimes for research.
Hey, spit me out 20 studies on this subject.
Hey, spit me out 10 books that could help point me in the right direction on a subject.
I have to triple-check it every time because the AI is not reliable.
And sometimes the AI will spit out books that don't exist, citations that are totally false.
It's a little better on scientific studies, but maybe a scientific study that doesn't exist.
AI can be a great tool to aid in your research.
I don't encourage you to use it for your writing.
It's bad writing, and more to the point, it will make your writing worse when you actually do have to write.
The way that people currently use AI— If you use AI in order to augment your own learning and your own thought and your own writing, it could be helpful.
If you're going to use it as the vast majority of people appear to be using it, which is to substitute in for your own reading and substitute in for your own writing, you're going to become a grunting baboon, indistinguishable from the dumb idol that you worship.
That's what's really happening.
I was talking about this the other day, sweet little Lisa.
The way people correspond now, they get an email.
We get some long document.
They have AI read the document for them.
Then they have AI respond to the document for them.
Then they send it to someone else.
And then the person they're sending it to has AI read it and has AI write it.
It's just computers talking to each other.
And we lose our ability to speak.
We certainly lose our ability to write.
I've noticed this for 15, 20 years.
Just working, both as a student and then into the professional world and in politics.
People are terrible at writing.
People are terrible at spelling these days.
That was before AI hit.
You have to be very, very careful.
My friend Spencer Clavin made a good point.
When the Bible tells us not to worship dumb idols lest we become like them, this is what he's talking about.
When we worship the dumb idol, the box of rocks that is AI, we will become like that dumb idol.
We'll think we're getting smarter.
We will lose our ability to speak the distinguishing feature of human beings.
Speaking of embarrassing moments, Caroline Leavitt, press secretary of the White House, just completely destroyed a CNN, I'm sorry, an NBC lady, Yamiche, Yamiche something or other, over President Trump's South Africa meeting.
Listen to the exchange.
The president showed a video that he said showed more than a thousand burial sites of white South Africans that he said were murdered.
We know that that was not true and that the video wasn't showing that.
So I wonder, why did the president choose to show that it's not true that the video was showing a burial site?
It is unsubstantiated that that's the case.
No, it is true that that video showed the crosses that represented which is what the President claimed.
The video showed images of crosses in South Africa And those crosses are representing their lives.
Those crosses are representing their lives in the fact that they are now dead and their government did nothing about it.
Are you disputing that there is no I think the fact that the video showed what the president claimed it showed because it did not show that.
But even more, what I'm asking you is who at the white...
It showed white crosses representing people who have perished because of racial persecution.
White House verifies the videos that the president shows, and what protocols are in place when there's unsubstantiated information being put out for the world and world leaders to show.
Yamiche, what's unsubstantiated about the video?
The video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government Listen to this exchange.
Listen to this obtuse woman from NBC.
She's referring to the conversation in the Oval Office.
And Trump said, he says, listen, here's a big South African politician chanting, kill the boy, kill the farmer, shoot the kill!
And the South African presidents were laughing, chuckling about it.
And then everyone's, all the liberal reporters trying to get him off the subject.
And he says, no, look, look at all these reports.
All the dead South African white farmers being murdered by their neighbors and being persecuted by the government.
He says, look, look at this.
A thousand crosses laid out.
For the dead white farmers.
And then as a stray remark, he says, it's a burial site.
That's a stray remark.
And he says, you know, but these are here to mark the dead farmers.
And that's what this obtuse reporter gloms onto.
Says, oh, actually, fact check.
The murdered white farmers weren't actually buried exactly, immediately underneath the white crosses.
Fact check, 10,000 Pinocchios.
I mean, yeah, they were all murdered, and that is all real, but they were buried in a slightly different place.
So, fact check, how are we going to correctify this misinformation?
You want to talk about missing the point?
Now, of course, this woman at NBC, she's not missing the point, she's trying to evade the point.
White farmers are being slaughtered in South Africa because they're white farmers.
They're being killed by their countrymen and it's being encouraged by their government.
Which is why a small number of them are asking to be led into the United States as refugees.
And the Libs have finally found the one group of refugees they don't like.
Actual refugees, not just economic migrants.
And they don't like them because they're white.
Talk about obtuse.
And I listened to this exchange.
I wanted to bang my head against a wall.
Actually, fact check, the South African farmers were buried a quarter mile down the road, not directly underneath the crosses, 10,000 Pinocchios.
Keep it up, lady.
Keep it up.
Oh, I hope this is the line.
I hope this is the line from the libs and the media going into the midterm elections in 2028.
Yeah.
White people are being murdered because of their skin color, and terrorists in America are murdering Jews, a Christian Jew, actually, because they're Jews and they don't like Israel or whatever.
And MS-13 gangsters are raping and killing university students, young girls in America.
But, you know, actually, technically, here's why that's all fine.
Please, please, let that be your headlines.
We're not going to have to deal with a one-vote majority anymore in the U.S. House.
If that's the case, we're going to run these lunatics right out of town if that is your line.
I have much more to say and do.
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Take it away.
Hi, Michael.
I hope all is well.
I know my fiancé loves me, but I'm scared he is starting to think of me as a sugar mama.
He's always paid for everything, even though I make more money than him.
However, we have been discussing weddings, and he seems upset about the amount he spent on the engagement ring that he bought for me.
He expects me to pay for the entire wedding.
I have more money than him, so I don't mind, but I don't want him to think of me as a sugar mama.
I also never wanted a big wedding, but he's a bridezilla.
The band that he wants is almost $15,000 alone.
He's also been hinting that he wants me to buy him a side-by-side that costs $25,000 on top of the elaborate wedding for which he expects for me to pay.
It scares me because a friend that introduced me to him said he always wanted to meet a rich girl.
I'm by no means rich, but I have significantly more than him.
I worked so hard to get to a seven-figure net worth and I don't want to lose it.
I would prefer to save my money and buy a house for the two of us.
Another short subject is that he wants to move in now, that we're engaged.
I've always said I wanted to wait until marriage.
I plan to have a prenup drawn even though I don't believe in divorce.
Another issue is that my dad won't attend my wedding because my fiancé is a holiday Catholic whereby he only attends church on Christmas Eve, and I'm Christian.
My fiancé and I are both upset that my dad refuses to attend.
I need advice.
That might be hard for you to hear, but I think you actually asked me the question so that I could tell you that.
Sounds to me like you see a lot of red flags, and I see a lot of red flags too, and you want permission not to marry this guy.
That's very impressive you've amassed a seven-figure net worth.
As a single woman, you've got over a million dollars.
That's pretty impressive.
But you say, okay, well, hold on.
He wants me to pay for something.
He paid for this, and he wants me to pay for that.
I thought you were getting married.
If you're getting married, it's all going to be the same money.
Your money is going to be his money.
His money is going to be your money.
It's all the same.
Now, you say that you view marriage this way because you say you refuse to accept divorce, but then you say you want a prenup.
Which is to say, you do accept divorce in principle.
You're torn on these things.
You say, he wants the big band for the wedding.
I'm kind of a cheapskate.
Elisa's like that too.
We're similar in our view of money.
So we did not have a band at the wedding.
I prefer bands to DJs, but it was too expensive.
And the band that we were looking at was only like $10,000.
Then he says he wants a side-by-side.
I don't even know what that is.
All this stuff, please buy me this, buy me that.
I want to move in.
That's a big red flag.
You want to move in before you're married.
Why?
Hold on.
Oh, because you don't have a strong Christian foundation.
Because, as you say, he just wants to go to Mass on Christmas Eve for some reason.
Why?
Why?
But you're Christian.
So now you've got big problems in this engagement.
You don't seem to view the world the same way.
You're not on the same page.
But you're about to become one flesh.
And you say you don't want to get divorced, but you're already preparing yourself to get divorced.
You want to buy a house for the two of you.
No, you both want to buy a house together.
You're in a tight position.
So I would figure that out first.
I would figure out, what's your view on religion going to be?
You have an obligation to go to church every Sunday.
Are you going to do that?
But he's not going to do that?
What about when you have kids?
Are you just going to take the kids?
Your husband's not going to go?
Then the kids are going to see daddy doesn't have to go to church.
They're going to fall away from the faith.
I promise you that.
Then, what about money?
What happens when he wants to spend all your money and you don't want to spend money?
He's the head of your household.
No, you're going to have separate bank accounts?
You're going to have separate bank accounts, you're going to have separate properties.
Why are you getting married in the first place?
Your family already doesn't like the wedding.
You have, this is a little tough love, but you need to hear it and you're asking me to tell it to you.
You have set yourself up for a divorce.
I'm not saying you and he can't get married.
You have to get on the same page on very basic questions.
Finances are why people get divorced.
A deeper issue is religion, but finances are the proximate reason why people get divorced.
And you're going into this thing on totally different pages when it comes to finances.
You need to be on the same page when it comes to finances such that you trust him to lead the household, such that you trust him to be in possession of your money and never split it up because you're never going to get divorced.
If you can't get on the same page, dump him and don't get married.
To him.
Go find another guy.
Next one.
Hi, Michael.
Brandy here.
First, thank you so much for your contribution to truth and the dissemination of conservative information.
Recently, my father and I have had many conversations about the future of the family unit.
My children are all in their 20s and 30s, and they're part of a generation who are considering whether or not to have children.
My father is a hardcore atheist, and until 10 years ago, I was too.
Praise God, I am now saved.
Worth noting is that my father disowned me for seven years after accepting Christ as my Savior.
My Heavenly Father was a boundary I stuck to, and we have now reconciled agreeing to disagree.
Being saved has contributed to a significant amount of hope and resilience in every facet of my life.
His focus on science, innovation, AI, and liberal doom and gloom leaves him hopeless for a future generation.
He is a major influence in the lives of my children, and I fear they are falling into the same hopelessness and will buy into not wanting to bring children into the world.
Do you have any advice as to how I can positively interact with my father and children, which may encourage all to look at the value of the family in a more positive light?
Thanks much, and have a great day.
Sorry to hear you going through that.
Your father sounds like an uncle.
I barely even know what that means because I barely speak French.
I'm glad you've reconciled with your father.
You owe your father some respect.
You have to honor your father.
It's a commandment.
But you don't owe him your kids.
You don't owe him your life.
You're grateful to him for helping to bring you your life, but you owe him honor and respect.
If your father, you need to pray for your father, you need to try to bring him to Christ.
If your father is going to lead your kids down a bad path, You need to seriously circumscribe his relationship with them.
I'm not saying cut him off or anything necessarily, but you've got to tell him, hey, Dad, enough with the atheist stuff to the kids.
We're raising the kids Christian, and I'm not saying you have to go to church, though you should.
I'm not saying you have to go to confession, though you should.
But you're not going to spread the atheist stuff to my kids.
I have to protect my kids.
It's better for someone who would cause the little ones to stumble to have a millstone tied around his neck, okay?
It's my responsibility.
It's my responsibility as a daughter to give you honor and respect, but it's my responsibility to protect my kids from scandal that you're causing them.
So, cut it out, or we're going to have to rethink things.
That's what you've got to say to them.
And it's out of love.
It's love for your father, it's love for your kids, and out of the responsibility that you have in your position as a daughter and a mother.
Next one.
Hey Michael, when you were discussing organ donation and brain death, you mentioned that the organ recovery process is what essentially kills the patient, taking the organs.
But I want to make you think a little bit deeper because if you are a full organ donor, you donate your heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, all of it.
Those organs, and let's say all the recipients don't go into rejection, and all of those organs are functioning sometimes for many decades in another human body.
Are you really dead?
Are you alive until all of your organs are truly dead?
Where is your soul in that instance?
Are you stuck in some type of limbo?
Love to hear your thoughts.
When you ask, where is your soul?
This is a basic question that has confused people in modernity, though it did not confuse the ancients and the scholastics.
Because it's just a category error of what the soul is.
The soul is not just some part of my body.
It's not just in my brain or something.
The soul is the substantial form of your body.
Human beings are composite substances.
We're not just body and we're not just soul.
We're not just body like, you know, the...
But we're not just soul.
We're not just pure intellect, say, like an angel.
Actually, I'm explaining this in a crude and imprecise way.
Because animals have a soul in a certain sense.
A soul that is proper to them.
The soul which is what gives them unity as a being.
Which is why pigs are not just a random assemblage of bacon, but they're an actual creature that has integrity and that can distinguish itself one pig from another.
The soul is what gives you shape as a human.
You're not merely the sum of your organs.
So when you cease to exist as an individual, then you're going to have organs all over the place and bones and muck and guck and stuff, but that's not you.
Your soul is the substantial form of your body, of you.
It's not reducible just to one part of you.
There's an interesting discussion to be had on even what the intellect is, which is why I was talking about the intellect, which is a different but related matter, because a lot of people think that the intellect is reducible also to the body, and it's not.
And St. Thomas Aquinas drawing on Aristotle has lots of good arguments as to why that is the case, but it's not.
The intellect is not just a functioning of the brain.
The intellect uses the brain, but the intellect is not corporeal.
For all sorts of reasons that we don't have time to get to now, but maybe we'll get to it in a future episode, because now it is time for the Membrum Segmentum.
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