Ep. 1748 - Karine Jean-Pierre Leaves The Democrat Party
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre leaves the Democrat Party, Elon ramps up his attacks against the "Big Beautiful Bill," and Chinese nationals try to smuggle a toxic fungus into a U.S. university.
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Ep.1748
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Former White House Press Secretary Corrine Jean-Pierre is leaving the Democrat Party.
Do you remember Corrine Jean-Pierre, KJP?
I think you do, but just to jog your memory.
Here is how Corrine Jean-Pierre answered when asked about why Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
We read the president's statement where he said that it's in the country's best interest for him to step aside.
Why is it in the country's best interest for him to step aside?
Does it have to do with his health?
It does not have to do, they have nothing to do with his health?
Nothing, absolutely nothing to do with his health.
Joe Biden had both dementia and cancer when she said that.
KJP, not exactly the most prolific truth-teller in the country.
Now, much like her fellow Democrat Jake Tapper, she wants to come clean in a tell-all book with, I'm sure, a very hefty advance that comes along with it.
She wants to tell the truth long after any of it would have mattered.
Now, I'm not a sailor, but I have been told when a ship is capsizing, The rats all scurry to the deck to try to escape.
First Tapper, now KJP.
I predict a lot more scurrying as that Democrat ocean liner continues to go down.
I'm Michael Knowles.
the Michael Knowles Show.
A Chinese national was caught trying to smuggle a toxic fungus that could have obliterated our food supply onto an American university campus.
Actually, to his girlfriend who was already working at the university and seems like the CCP is up to its usual shenanigans.
I have much more food for thought.
I even have ideas for thought.
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What is this book?
Am I going to read it?
Am I going to read the KJP book?
No, I won't.
But I'll read about it at least because I want to see if she's going to give us any tea.
She probably won't.
These books always overpromise and underdeliver.
But what kind of exit is it for KJP?
I guess that's the politically interesting question.
On what grounds is she leaving the Democrat Party?
Is she leaving the Democrat Party because she was so disgusted with what she saw and really what she participated in in the Biden White House?
Is that why?
Or is she disgusted with the Democrat Party because of something going on today?
Well, she tells us in the book's press release.
Until January 20th, I was responsible for speaking on behalf of the President of the United States.
At noon on that day, I became a private citizen who, like all Americans and many of our allies around the world, had to contend with what comes next for our country.
I determined that the danger we face as a country requires freeing ourselves of boxes.
We need to be willing to exercise the ability to think creatively and plan strategically.
We don't need these labels, man.
What does that mean?
Is it because she's adopted right-wing positions?
It drives me crazy.
People say, you've got to stop identifying with a political party.
Why?
Political parties clarify our political order.
And there is a kind of coherence to the beliefs and policies advocated by each party.
If you're a big lib, That's going to signify something for you on abortion, on immigration, on the economy, on environmental policy, on war, on all of these things.
They seem disconnected, but there is a kind of coherence to it.
There's a kind of coherence on the right side, too.
So is it because KJP's had a big change of heart?
She's no longer a big lib?
No.
Is it because she was disgusted by the lies and deceit of the Biden White House?
She's just upset that her boss didn't get to run again and she didn't get to keep her job.
She says, this is in the book's press release, Prince Jean-Pierre takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden's abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.
Betrayal.
Betrayal by the Democratic Party.
The guy couldn't speak.
The guy was drooling.
The guy had dementia, obviously, and now we know, almost certainly had cancer at the time.
And the Democrats, I can't believe I'm defending the Democrats, the Democrats were kind of nudging him, hey Joe, you can't speak anymore, you can barely stand up, how about you let someone else have a shot?
And he said no.
So it's not that KJP's beliefs have changed, it's not even that her loyalties have changed, she's just irritated that she lost her job.
And, politically what's crucial is, she realizes that the Democrat brand is toxic.
This is the same sort of thing that you see from Republicans if they're in really Democrat areas and they want to fit in and they want to be cool and they want to get invited to parties and go on dates and stuff.
They say, oh, me, I'm kind of independent.
You know, on Tinder, I've never been on Tinder, but I'm told from many of my friends who've been on Tinder, if someone lists his or her political views as independent, it means Republican.
But it's just when you're dating, Democrats are so vindictive they might swipe left on you if they see that you're a Republican.
Same thing here.
Oh yeah, no me, I don't really, I eschew labels.
I don't really, I don't want to limit myself to, yeah, are we allowed to admit, yeah, I'm a Republican.
And that's what KJP's doing here for the Democrats.
That's what's so interesting.
For basically my whole life, it has been socially acceptable and encouraged to be a Democrat.
It has been, sometimes more than others, socially unacceptable, taboo to be a Republican.
That's now flipping.
If you want to have a mainstream career, if you want to seem like a normal person, if you want to appeal to people and sell books, today, you can't admit that you're a Democrat.
Even if your views obviously haven't changed.
The Democrats today are in the position Republicans have been in for most of my life.
You've got to hide the ball a little bit.
Me?
No, I'm not a Democrat.
I mean, I still believe all those Democrat things.
But no, me?
No, I'm an independent.
Was that good?
Will that get me invited to the parties?
Now, speaking of infighting, Elon continues his full frontal assault on President Trump's big, beautiful bill.
There's a lot of a Twitter storm going on from Elon.
Now, one tweet that he responded to said, we have the White House, Senate, And House.
It's actually from John Lefebvre, who I like.
We have the White House, the Senate, and the House.
It's not rocket science.
All we are asking for is legislation that aligns with what we voted for.
Elon says yes!
And to that I say, look, I sympathize with not liking the big spending bill.
I totally get where John and Elon are coming from.
I get it.
I sympathize.
Where I disagree, though, is that the big beautiful bill is not what we voted for.
The big, beautiful bill is exactly what the people voted for.
It's exactly what the people voted for.
The people voted for tax cuts.
They don't want a massive tax hike when the 2017 tax cuts expire.
So they definitely voted for that.
They voted for cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the entitlement programs.
They got that.
They voted for more border funding.
They got that.
They voted for more military funding.
They got that.
The more ideologically sophisticated among them voted for a family policy.
They got that in the child tax credit.
They got the beginnings of that at least.
They got exactly what they wanted.
They voted for no tax on tips.
They got it.
They voted for maybe raising the SALT deductions a little bit, maybe to bring over some of the moderate Republicans in the blue states.
They got exactly what they wanted.
And it's this line that I've mentioned.
A little more frequently in recent weeks, from H.L. Mencken, that democracy is the theory that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it good and hard.
If you just go through, take the prices aside for a second, you just go through every policy, every funding priority that's in the big beautiful bill, the Trump voting coalition, which is to say the popular vote, would say, yeah, I want all of that.
But then you show them the numbers, they say, wait, wait, I don't want that.
I don't want to exacerbate the national debt.
I don't want to maintain a major deficit.
I don't want, I don't want, I don't want.
You don't want to pay the cost of the things that you want.
So again, I don't mean to just flack for the Trump administration here, but what do you want the guy to do?
He and the Republicans in the House and the Senate are giving the people what they wanted.
And it turns out that what the people want involves a ton of spending.
And if...
There is something of a disconnect between the elites that run our country and the people, but it's not as great as many people think.
One of the challenges to our country as we fall into decadence and decay and overspending and mortgaging our future is kind of what the people want.
Politicians generally are kind of cowardly, and they will.
Pretty much just give the people what they want.
Okay, well, this is what you want.
Are you happy?
Are you not entertained?
Is this not why you have come?
I can't tell if Elon is just, weirdly enough, a little naive here.
He's a genius.
He's extremely knowledgeable.
He's got lots of important businesses.
But this is his first time in government in a really direct way.
And I wonder if he's a little bit shocked by how the sausage is made, you know?
I wonder.
I wonder.
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Speaking of wasting money, I love this one.
The Democrats.
The capsizing Titanic of the Democrat Party has decided to spend $20 million to figure out how to appeal to male voters.
Not even to appeal to male voters.
To study How to appeal to male voters.
They've partnered up with the Speaking with American Men Project.
Speaking with American Men Project has a two-year $20 million budget to study young men and how the Democrats can better appeal to them.
Here is just one example of some of the insight that Democrats are gleaming from their $20 million investment.
This is from one of the guys involved in Speaking with American Men.
Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong.
How much money do you think he got paid for that insight?
I'll do it for 15 million.
Democrats, you want to give me that contract?
This proves one thing, at least.
If the Democrats are good at only one thing in the entire world, it is spending money inefficiently, and that's what they're getting here.
I'll tell you why the Democrats don't appeal to men.
Because they don't appeal to men.
They don't say, hey men, we want your vote.
We like you, we support you, we'd like to help you, and we would like you to vote for us.
They don't say that.
That's how you get people's votes.
And they won't do it.
Instead, they'll say, hey men, you're disgusting pigs, and you're toxic, and you're all crypto rapists.
You're all at the very least potential rapists and probably murderers too.
You're certainly racist and bigoted.
We hate you.
You're disgusting.
You repulse us.
The country would be much better off without you.
Why?
Why?
Does anyone know why these men aren't voting for us?
Hey, give me $20 million.
I want to figure out why these men aren't voting for us.
The left has a misandrist problem.
Misandry, like misogyny, misandry.
Do you know that word?
That's a good word to tuck away.
You don't hear it very much because the libs don't like men and they don't care about any injustice against men.
But they have this problem.
They don't like men.
And it's not just an accident.
And it's not just from, you know, wokeness or political correctness or something.
It goes all the way down to the liberal understanding of men and women.
Conservatives, we like men, and we like women.
The Libs like to accuse us of not liking women, but the women don't even buy that.
Women largely vote for Republicans, and even 40% of women under the age of 30 in this last election voted for Republicans.
So why is it that the Republicans don't have this problem of hating men or hating women?
Because we view men and women as complementary.
So at a fundamental human nature level, we think that men need women and women need men.
We think that babies need mommy and daddy.
Democrats don't think that.
They certainly don't think babies need mommy and daddy, and the Democrats don't think that men and women are complementary.
The Democrats believe, the liberals believe, that men and women are identical for all intents and purposes, indiscernible, and therefore in competition with each other.
If a woman's going to get ahead, she's got to dislodge a man from his position of privilege.
That's how the libs view the sexes.
That's not how we view it.
I'm not in competition with my wife.
We do different things.
So there's really...
It's not that easy because their view of human nature requires them to I don't think they're going to become misogynists, so they're going to be misandrists, and they're going to continue to repel young men, which is happy enough for me.
We in the Republican Party are happy to take you.
Now, speaking of what the young men want, there's a Democrat activist, Olivia Juliana, very prominent on social media, young whippersnapper, trying to gather all the young votes for Dems.
I've got to give a hat tip to Libs of TikTok here.
She found this clip of this prominent young Democrat activist explaining how to appeal to men in rhetorical terms.
I spend a lot of time on college campuses.
You love young men.
I love young men.
I love frat guys.
And in that, I've realized, like, even the ones that identify as conservative are almost always pro-choice.
They're almost always pro-gay marriage.
You'd be surprised at the number of them who support a Black Lives Matter.
And so I feel like people just kind of lump them into this box when the truth is, again, a lot of them are with us on the issues.
They're just not part of our coalition because they feel like they're not welcomed in it.
the views she's expressing are laughable.
Even, let's say, That might be true.
She says even the conservative ones.
I'm skeptical, even the conservative ones.
But plenty of young college guys are open to abortion, either because they want to be able to have promiscuous sex and not be accountable for it, or because they want to flatter young women, some of whom are rabidly pro-abortion, and they're willing to sacrifice their integrity in order to sleep with them.
So, maybe.
Let's put that one as a maybe.
Most of the frat guys are pro-LGBT.
No, they're not.
They're not.
Even when I was a young man in college, at a very gay university, at the height of all the super gay stuff, I think that peaked somewhere in the early to mid-20-teens.
Even then, like, nah.
The frat guys were not.
They're not pro-LGBT.
Okay, and then the cherry on top.
Pro-BLM?
Pro-BLM?
You think the way that you're going to win over fraternity brothers for the Democrat Party is to go over there and start talking about St. George Floyd and the supposed lynching of, what was his name, Michael Brown, the criminal who charged the cop and grabbed his gun and then the Democrats lied about it for two years?
You think that's how you're going to get young frat guys?
Talk about black power and solidarity and America's evil and take a knee at the football games?
I don't think so, honey.
That's not going to work.
So why even listen to this woman?
Because, one, makes me feel more comfortable for the midterms and the 2028 election.
But two, it shows you, she's so wrong on her substantive view of things, but it shows you even the young Democrats, even the radical Democrats, No.
The Democrats have this existential problem with men.
Even the most diehard, true blue believers, young, inflexible, sticking to their guns, even they realize the Democrat ship is capsizing right now.
And they need to fix something.
And they just have no idea how to do it.
This woman sincerely believes.
That the way to attract young, normal, conservative men back to the Democrat Party is to brag about killing babies, be super gay, and exalt George Floyd.
Cool.
Cool.
Good luck.
Let's see how it plays out.
Now, speaking of how to win over the liberals, speaking of the makeup of the Democrat Party, Nate Silver.
has an interesting survey out.
Nate Silver, you know, the pollster from FiveThirtyEight, one of the most prominent political observers and pollsters and statisticians of our time.
Nate Silver says that actually there's a fundamental psychological difference between the libs and the conservatives, namely that the libs are crazy.
This is Nate Silver, who's kind of a lib himself.
He observes that liberals are more than twice as likely To say they have poor mental health, conservatives are more than twice as likely than the liberals to say their mental well-being is excellent.
This comes from data that was collected in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study.
This is from Tufts, reported by Nate Silver.
Among voters who said that they had poor mental health, 45% identified as liberal, 19% as conservatives.
Among those who say they had excellent mental health, the majority of them, 51% identified as conservative, only 20% were liberal.
This is not exactly man bites dog.
I'm not even just joking and saying, oh, those libs, they're crazy, aren't they?
I mean, this is backed up in survey after survey, that people who are more anxious, more depressed, more neurotic, more likely to have these psychological conditions are much more likely to be liberal.
So this is not exactly a man bites dog story, but… Why are the Libs so crazy?
I think this, too, comes down to the essence of the political ideology.
Because liberalism comes about in the Enlightenment, really solidifies in the French Revolution, develops in all its various ways into classical liberalism, libertarianism, progressive liberalism, socialism and communism are kind of cousins to liberalism or even offshoots of it.
Something they all share is that all of these ideologies seek to change the world in a fundamental way.
Classical liberalism less so.
Classical liberalism at least says that it wants to understand the world and work in accord with nature, though in practice a lot of classical liberalism involved eradicating old institutions, eradicating tradition and old ways of life.
But at least classical liberalism recognizes that That fundamentally transforming the world is unlikely to work, even though liberalism does endeavor to do that.
The other forms, libertarianism, progressive liberalism, socialism, communism, they all pretty explicitly seek fundamentally to change the world.
And you can't.
This was the subject of my Ave Maria University commencement speech this year.
You can't change the world.
You shouldn't change the world.
That's the classic advice in liberal self-help therapeutic culture, but it's a bad idea because the world is not going to change.
The world is as it is.
And what you should do is seek to understand the world and live in accord with nature and to cooperate with supernatural grace so that you can be transformed.
So that the love that created the world can transform you.
That's really what you're after.
Bringing it back to Earth a little bit.
If your political ideology comes down to, as George Bernard Shaw says, some people see things that are and say why, I dream things that never were and say why not, you're going to get frustrated.
Because the liberal worldview is just a little disconnected from reality.
Why does marriage have to be what it always has been?
Why does this baby have to grow inside?
Why can't I just get rid of the baby?
Why do people behave the way they behave?
Why, why, why?
You get very frustrated and anxious.
Whereas if you live in a resigned acceptance of reality, as it is, and you endeavor to do your best within the confines of reality, you're much more likely to be happy.
Now, speaking of health, we turn from mental health to, well, all of our health.
In public health, Chinese nationals are trying to poison our food through our universities.
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Yunqingzhan, 33 years old, and Zunyong Lu, 34 years old.
Have been charged with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud because Yongqing Zhang was working at a university, and her boyfriend, Sun Yong Liu, was smuggling in toxic fungus that could poison the U.S. food supply.
And apparently what they were going to do was...
This is the University of Michigan.
And they might have already been working on it.
At least Lou.
No.
Jan is the girl.
And Lou is the guy.
I'll try to remember that.
They both sound like men's names, John and Lou.
But in any case, John was the girl.
She might have already been working on it.
Lou, when he tried to come into the country, was turned around at the Detroit airport.
He was just sent back.
And they abandoned his poor girlfriend.
His poor girlfriend, I guess, has been arrested.
Why?
Why are the Chinese sending students to bring toxic fungus to American university campuses?
First of all, most things on university campuses are toxic today.
So had the fungus made it, it would have fit in just fine.
But the reason that the CCP is trying to bring fungus to the campuses is to work on it, to investigate it.
A lot of scientific instruments available to them to work on this, and presumably in case they need to use it.
These guys have ties to the Chinese Communist Party, as do many students of Chinese origin who are at American universities, which is why Marco Rubio is going to revoke a lot of their visas.
Why is the CCP targeting campuses?
Because the CCP understands something.
American liberals have understood for many decades at this point, and that conservatives need to figure out, which is that the campuses matter.
The campuses really matter.
They're power centers.
They produce elites who will go on to run the country.
They conduct scientific research.
They are a nexus for powerful people.
They matter.
And the conservative view...
Let the left have them.
Oh, who cares?
You know, don't go to college.
Oh, no, it's all dumb.
It's all a waste of time.
You're just sitting around reading Derrida or whatever.
You need to go out and get a job.
Let the left have the campuses.
They're all stupid anyway.
That's not the CCP's opinion.
That's not the American left's opinion.
The American left worked doggedly to take over the university campuses.
Because they realize it's powerful.
And so, if conservatives want to do anything, we need to exert a little power in those areas.
We need to exert a little control.
We need to make sure, as President Trump is demonstrating beautifully in the case of Harvard, and other schools, but especially Harvard, we need to make sure that the mission of the university is ideally in line with our national and political mission, but at the very least, not totally contrary to it.
The toxic fungus is not the first time the Chinese have tried to take over American universities.
They had the Confucius Institutes.
They continue to fund the universities through the tuition of their elite children and through all sorts of other grants.
And they buy them off because they know they're very powerful places.
And conservatives should play that game too.
Now, speaking of young people, a marvelous, marvelous essay by my friend Madeline Kearns, who's been on this show a number of times.
Matt Kearns writes in the Free Press how Catholicism got cool.
Young Americans and people around the world are flocking to the Catholic Church.
The Free Press spoke to them to find out why.
This is not surprising.
A lot of you have noticed this.
There is a return to faith broadly.
The declining Christianity of the past several decades has leveled out.
But there is a turn toward Catholicism in particular.
Why?
Because young people, Many, if not most of whom have been raised without religion or without conscious religion, want something solid.
And I don't care if you're the most anti-Catholic person out there, and you disagree with the veneration of saints, and you don't believe in transubstantiation, and you hate the Pope.
Even the most anti-Catholic person has to admit, the Catholic Church is pretty solid.
It's the only institution in the West, That has persisted from classical antiquity, from roughly the year 33 AD, all the way up to the present.
There are no other institutions in the West that have done that.
It's solid.
Also, the church makes authoritative claims.
Other institutions, including religious institutions, they seem to change their mind left and right.
Okay, now this week we're going to have women priests.
This week we're going to redefine marriage.
This week we're going to accept abortion or contraception.
The Catholic Church, again, I don't care if you're the most anti-Catholic person in the world.
The Catholic Church doesn't really change its opinions, does it?
Does she?
No.
No women priests.
No gay marriage.
No contraception.
No, none of that.
And in part, this is because the church, with the weight of the magisterium, can't just start changing stuff, can't just start inventing new doctrines.
We just had a relatively very liberal pope, and even that pope, Pope Francis, was constrained.
Even if he had wanted to be a radical innovator, he was really constrained.
And some of the things that he wanted to do, some of the things, he was a little unclear about what, And it just was reported in the news that Pope Leo XIV has come out and kind of clarified, no, no, no, in case you misunderstood, that's not how it works.
So I think the solidity is part of the reason why people are converting, especially young people.
But the other thing is, we've just come out of the trans nonsense, and I think that's over.
I think transgenderism is well on its way to being eradicated from public life entirely.
People don't believe it.
It's a punchline, again.
After the trans nonsense, people want incarnational and sacramental religion.
Christianity is, by definition, incarnational, and I think sacramental as well.
But the trans idea said your identity has nothing to do with your body.
And Christianity says, no, the body matters.
We're not Gnostics.
We're not Albigensians.
We're not Manichaeans.
We're not any of these ancient heresies that kind of minimize the role of the body.
We are body and soul, and the body matters.
And the body has something to do with my identity, and if I want to worship in a real way, I'm not just going to go sit in my little room and close my eyes and not engage with my body at all, because, for goodness, the body matters so much that our Lord becomes flesh and dwells among us, is born.
To a woman in Bethlehem.
It matters.
And he tells us, you've got to eat my flesh and drink my blood, or you won't have life in you.
And he actually tells his apostles that on multiple occasions.
That, I think, is the draw.
Because a lot of modern religion, just like modern political ideology, minimizes the role of the body, minimizes the role of flesh, pretends that we're all just atoms floating in outer space.
Without beginning, without end, never going to die.
And reality ain't that.
Very good stuff.
I like it.
I encourage you all to go read Maddie's column, talking to the young people, giving their...
But listen to the young people in their own words.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Samantha Ross in 4216 who says, Now that I know Michael comes from a Navy family, his intro makes a lot more sense.
Uh-huh.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I was waiting for that one when the producers were sending over the comments today here are your selection of 10 comments you can pick from Professor Jacob actually sent that one over separately said Michael you can read the other ones if you want but this one I think this one really gets it Speaking of religion, Britain effectively has blasphemy laws again.
The UK has and is enforcing blasphemy laws.
Not to protect Christianity, of course.
No, no.
You might guess which religious group is being protected by the anti-blasphemy laws.
It would be the group that has conquered the entire United Kingdom.
It would be our friends, the Muslims.
Hamid Koskun is a 50-year-old, get this, Turkish-born Armenian Kurdish atheist.
I do not encourage atheism for anyone.
Atheism is wrong.
It's spiritually very dark for you, and it's just...
It's just not true.
But I kind of get, if you're born in Turkey and you're Armenian and Kurdish, I get how you might be a little religiously confused.
He migrated to Britain and he was just convicted of a, quote, religiously aggravated public order offense over a February protest that he took part in, in which he burned a Koran outside of the Turkish consulate in London.
So a guy born in Turkey.
He's also Kurdish, knows a thing or two about Islam.
Now he's an atheist.
He burns a Quran.
And he wasn't convicted of blasphemy, exactly.
It was a religiously aggravated public order offense.
But it's effectively a blasphemy law.
Now, of course, if someone burned a Bible, In the UK, of course, that person would never be prosecuted.
This is a special carve-out for Islam, and therein lies the problem.
For a country like the UK, for a country like the United States, therein lies the problem.
The libs are going to tell you that the problem with this law is that it's effectively a blasphemy law.
That's not the problem.
The problem is not that it's protecting religious taboos and the sacred things.
The problem is it's protecting the wrong religious taboos.
And it's mistaking the sacred.
That's the problem.
I've seen a lot of people post about this from the United States.
They say, this is crazy.
Thank goodness we're not like the UK and we don't have blasphemy laws.
Blasphemy laws are anti-freedom.
They're counter to our constitution.
It's un-American.
That is not true.
It's not true.
That's not a conservative opinion.
It's a very liberal opinion.
And like many liberal opinions, it's not true.
We have had blasphemy laws in America for most of our nation's history.
Even just since the founding in the late 18th century.
If you include America going back to the early 17th century, that is Jamestown and Plymouth and all of the early settlements, then we've had blasphemy laws in America for the vast majority of American history.
But even still, even if you just go back to the late 18th century, we've had blasphemy laws in America for most of our history.
That all ended.
Well, it actually didn't even all end.
It started to end in 1952.
Not 1852.
Not 1902.
1952.
In Burstyn v.
Wilson.
Burstyn v.
Wilson held that the New York State Blasphemy Law was an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of speech.
But that didn't settle the matter.
25 years later, 1977, Pennsylvania passed another blasphemy law.
And that other blasphemy law was on the books for 33 years, which is the holy life, actually.
Kind of interesting.
That blasphemy law was on the books until 2010, when it was ruled by some district court judge to be unconstitutional.
The issue is not blasphemy laws per se.
The issue is what is understood to constitute blasphemy.
As you know, it's a little hobby horse of mine.
I've pointed out there are all sorts of speech that have never been considered to be protected by the First Amendment.
Obscenity, fraud, direct threats, all that kind of stuff.
Blasphemy, until 1952, was understood to be the kind of thing that you can discourage as a matter of law.
And the response to that is, the liberal response is always going to be, well, who's blasphemy?
Who's going to define what the blasphemy is?
You know, is it going to be the Muslims who define it?
Or the Jews?
Or the Zoroastrians?
Or the Christians?
The Christians.
That's who.
Because we're a Christian country.
So we have religious toleration.
We have a long history of religious toleration with the Jews.
We have a more recent history of religious toleration with the Muslims.
I don't know if we have any Zoroastrians in the country since Freddie Mercury died.
But sure, we have religious toleration.
But we're a Christian country.
So it would be the Christians who would decide that.
But you don't even need to get all too sectarian about it.
We all kind of know what blasphemy is.
Mocking God.
You know, we don't like that.
We don't want to do that.
I think that's a bad idea.
And then you know the liberal response.
You say, you authoritarian, you fascist, you anti-American.
Oh, you can't call me anti-American.
I just proved to you that for most of American history we had blasphemy laws.
So on my side of the argument is every American until 1952.
On your side of the argument is all of the people since the middle of the 20th century when our country went to pot.
So don't tell me you're the strong conservative here.
All the conservatives are on my side.
And even the liberals in America were on my side until the middle of the 20th century.
But the liberal response then is going to be, okay, all right, I won't call you anti-American.
I won't call you fascist or this or that.
But, Michael, you're just, you're being too capricious with the law.
You're being too arbitrary because how can anyone really even know what blasphemy is, you know?
How are we supposed to know?
Who God is and therefore what it would mean to attack God.
And I say, you know, well, okay.
Because we have a conscience and we know the difference between good and bad.
And some of them are going to say, well, do we?
Maybe your good is my bad.
Maybe my bad is your good.
Okay, well, if you think that, if you believe that, then we can't have a government.
Because government exists to distinguish between good and bad and to promote good.
And to discourage bad.
That is the basic charge of government.
And it is the first precept of the natural law that good is to be done and evil avoided.
So, I know there are going to be many people on the right who say, Michael, this is too far, defending blasphemy laws.
Well, no.
I guess you got to ask yourself this question.
Why did everyone just about think blasphemy laws were totally fine until the middle of the Why did Pennsylvanians in 1977 think that blasphemy laws were fine?
Why did that law only get overturned in 2010, 15 years ago?
Maybe it's not that all those people are totally crazy.
Maybe we're the ones who've gone a little bit crazy in pretending that we can't distinguish between good and bad.
Maybe that's a little crazy for a country that fancies itself a self-government.
Speaking of modern religious standards, there's a story.
I really want to get to it.
I really want to get to it.
But we're running out of time.
I'll give you a little teaser.
You know I'm a tease.
The libs and the LGBT people are very, very upset because LGBT characters in TV shows have declined by 36% this year.
Over a third down.
On the LGBT LMNOP characters, this is according to GLADS, that's a pro-LGBT group, their annual report.
Even Hollywood is turning on the LGBT pride stuff.
We'll get to what that means tomorrow, because today is Theology Thursday.
