Ep. 1853 - Are Dems Finally Ending The Longest Shutdown In History?
Democrats cave to reopen the government, the Supreme Court may overturn "gay marriage," and Pope Leo takes on Internet vices.
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Ep.1853
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After 41 days, the government is on the brink of reopening.
There has not been any deal.
There has not been any concession.
It's just that eight Democrat senators finally flipped to side with Republicans.
We'll get into all the details.
They're great.
But the long and short of it is that when all is said and done, the Democrats instigated the longest government shutdown in the history of the United States for no reason other than to help them win an election in Virginia.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
The Supreme Court might overrule gay marriage.
They might.
You remember how, you know, all the nomination hearings, they say, like, they grill the conservative judges.
They say, will you uphold Roe v. Wade?
This is before Dobbs, obviously, and the conservative judges.
They always say, they're really coy.
They don't lie, but they say, Roe v. Wade is settled law.
Then they kind of wink a little bit.
No, it's settled.
At the time, it's settled law, but they're going to overrule it.
Well, the same thing's been happening.
When they overruled Roe v. Wade, they said, well, does this mean you're going to overrule gay marriage or Bergefell?
And all of the judges said, no, this is different.
This is different.
Other than Clarence Thomas, who's like, yeah, totally.
I definitely want to overrule that.
And anyway, they might overrule it.
We'll get to that in a second.
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The government shutdown is not officially over, but it might as well be.
They had to get to 60 votes in the Senate.
Republicans were threatening to nuke the filibuster.
Plenty of generally restrained, moderate voices, myself included, by the way.
I include myself in that in the Aristotelian sense of moderation.
They came out and said, nuke the filibuster.
All sorts of voices that you would not have expected came out and said, whatever, it's been many decades, but we're going to nuke the filibuster because the Democrats are going to do it.
We'll get a tactical advantage if we do it first.
So we're going to end the shutdown by nuking the filibuster.
All of a sudden, eight Democrats come out of the woodwork.
They say, okay, fine.
Okay.
Here's how it happened.
You know, they say that this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The same thing with the government shutdown.
Here's how the government shutdown effectively ended.
For those of you just listening, Senator Rosen.
Aye.
That's it.
Just people moving around the Senate floor, senators talking.
That's it.
That's all clip.
Senator Rosen.
Aye.
Who's Senator Rosen?
It's Jackie Rosen, followed by Dick Durbin, Maggie Hassan, Tim Kaine, Angus King, who's not a Democrat, but he might as well be.
He's an independent in Maine, Cortez Masto, Gene Shaheen, and John Fetterman.
Those are the eight.
Fetterman, who is now taking up the mantle as the last blue dog Democrat in the country.
They voted with 52 Republicans, brings it to 60, gets past the filibuster.
Now it goes to the House, but the House is controlled by the Republicans, albeit with a slim majority.
It doesn't matter.
The Republicans will vote in lockstep to reopen the government.
What was this all about?
This went on for 41 days.
It might still go on for a day or two.
What did the Democrats get?
Why did they shut it down?
The Democrats said they shut the government down because Republicans wouldn't negotiate on health care and they were going to strip health care from Americans and blah, blah, blah.
Republicans came back to them and said, hold on, what are you talking about?
You mean, you're right, we won't fund like illegal alien health care, which you apparently want to do.
We won't.
What do you want?
What is this about?
What are you doing?
And the Democrats said, we need to fix health care.
And the Republicans came back and said, guys, we gave you a clean CR, a clean continuing resolution, which means that to continue funding the government, you just had to vote for the budget that you already voted for under Joe Biden.
It's not like the Republicans said, Democrats, we're going to force you to give us a bunch of our priorities and slash spending here and put in a bunch of social conservatism here.
And no, it had nothing to do with that.
They just said, hey, guys, do you want to keep the government open under the same budget you already voted for under Biden?
And Democrats said, no.
So they owned the shutdown.
And then they came up with all these ex post facto arguments.
They said, you need to fix health care.
By the way, we're currently under a healthcare framework that the Democrats gave us called Obamacare.
We'll get to that momentarily.
But they never really had anything.
So the agreement that the Senate came to is to fund the government through January 30th.
So not just to get us through the end of November, which, you know, we're pretty close to, to get us through January 30th.
That will include a full year funding for SNAP.
We used to call it food stamps.
Snap.
We found out a huge number of Americans are on food stamps, many of whom apparently don't seem to need it.
It will also, well, that's it.
That's pretty much it.
It'll reopen the government.
It'll fund the welfare programs that Democrats like.
And later on, they will vote on those Obamacare subsidies that the Democrats want.
How are the Dems reacting to this?
Not very well.
Chuck Schumer was opposed.
The Democrat leader in the Senate was opposed to the eight Dems siding with the Republicans.
Elizabeth Warren, Liawatha, Focahontas.
She said, I think it's a terrible mistake.
The American people want us to stand and fight for health care.
So they're still making it about health care.
Democrat Representative Greg Kaysar of Texas says that the Democrats caving on this constitutes a betrayal and a capitulation because it doesn't reduce health care costs.
They're still making it all about health care.
That's not a deal, says Democrat rep Richie Torres.
It's an unconditional surrender that abandons the 24 million Americans whose healthcare premiums are about to double.
So they're trying to make it about healthcare.
Now, why?
I explained this right when the government shutdown happened.
I said, what this is about is Democrats throwing a Hail Mary is the Democrats are on the wrong side of virtually every 80-20 issue in the country, with the exception of women's rights, which just means abortion, environmentalism, and healthcare.
But no one cares about abortion.
That's not a top priority.
No one cares about the sun monster.
That's not a top priority.
The only one that approaches a relatively high priority is healthcare.
And so the Democrats said, shoot, we're losing on everything.
We've lost the whole government.
Republicans have a unified government.
So, okay, we're going to shut the government down, make a big spectacle to try to turn the conversation away from immigration, to try to turn the conversation away from some of the economic wins under Trump, to try to turn the conversation away from the geopolitical wins under Trump.
Peace in the Middle East, some movement on the Ukraine war, Trump winning on the terror fight when everyone said that he would be losing on the terror fights.
We're going to turn the conversation away from that to healthcare.
The big problem, though, is we are currently under the Democrat healthcare regime.
Democrats told us under Barack Obama, if you vote for this bill, we're going to fix healthcare.
We're going to fix this problem once and for all.
Joe Biden, vice president at the time, says, this is a big effing deal, man.
So the Democrats, even as they get their best issue right before the election, they're admitting that the last time they told you they were going to fix healthcare, it made everything worse.
Now, in fairness, tactically, the shutdown did achieve one thing for Democrats.
The shutdown took 300,000 federal workers and had them sitting on their hands, not getting paid with nothing to do but stew, just as there were consequential elections in Virginia.
And it worked.
They got their Democrat governor, Spanberger.
They got their Democrat Attorney General, Jay Jones, even as he was calling to murder Republicans.
Seemed like his support among Democrats went up when it was revealed that he wanted to murder Republicans and our kids.
They did well in the House of Delegates.
So they did well in that election.
They got it, but that's it.
And now the story of this shutdown is going to be not what the Democrats wanted, which is that Republicans are shutting down the government, not what the Democrats wanted, which was that Democrats are making a heroic stand for health care or whatever.
The story of the shutdown, when all is said and done, is going to be that the Democrats shut down the government to win an election in Virginia, which they did.
Good for you.
And it wreaked havoc in the country.
It cost a lot of money.
It didn't achieve anything.
Don't take my word for it.
Here's MSNBC reacting to the beginning of the end of the shutdown.
I have a lot more questions than answers.
I don't know why Senate Democrats are going to lie so hard for a date promised in the future.
And they're looks like they're settling for something that is six weeks down the line.
I don't get it.
I would say it doesn't feel like a gentleman's agreement.
It feels like Lucy and the football.
Yeah, that's it.
It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we promised this vote.
Whoops.
You know, the vote's gone.
They could even, in good faith, do a vote in the Senate.
Nothing's going to happen in the House.
Mike Jones does not.
So I'm like, even if John Thune is being above board and say, I'm going to do this.
But look at the base.
I mean, I'm already seeing a thing on social media and getting emails from listeners to my radio show, by the way, of a radio show.
We already said that.
We gave you ready for that, Dean.
Come on.
Come on, Ready.
No, but they're saying for 40 days you shut the government down and now you're going to open the government up and what did you get in return?
Nothing?
Nothing?
After the pain you inflicted.
There it is.
Don't take my word for it.
You shut the government down for 40 days.
What did you get?
Nothing after the pain you inflicted, you Democrats.
Because I think the biggest shock to the Democrats was they always manage to blame government shutdowns on Republicans for my whole life.
Sometimes it's Republicans' fault.
Sometimes it's Democrats' fault, but Republicans always get blamed until this one.
Until this one.
So, okay, they got a little victory.
More than a little victory.
They got a major victory in Virginia.
Mamdani was always going to win New York.
They got a major victory in Virginia, and then they got nothing else.
The Democrats are going to try to hang their hats.
Tim Kaine is already trying to do this, nearly one heartbeat away from becoming the second woman president.
Tim Kaine, still a senator, he said, well, we got the Republicans to give us a vote on our stupid health care plan after we reopen the government, which is ridiculous.
That's nothing.
The Democrats were using all their leverage to get this vote on healthcare.
And Republicans, Trump very rightly said, we can't give it to them because then they're going to run us over in every other negotiation.
We have to hold firm here, guys.
And then the Democrats say, okay, fine.
Uncle.
We say uncle.
And it looks ridiculous.
The MSNBC lady is trying to spin it and make the Democrats look like victims here.
Oh, this is Lucy with the football.
They're being tricked by Republicans.
No, they're not.
Everybody knows what's happening.
Everybody knows this was a surrender.
But it's not Lucy with the football.
It's the Democrats realizing they have no cards to play.
They have no leverage.
They went into this thing so overconfident, so bullish that their usual nonsense would work.
And it didn't work with the American people.
And so you even had, I think it was Tim Kaine came out and said, look, our constituents are going to make us vote for this.
We lost.
We just lost.
And still, they're going to try to hammer healthcare because it's the only issue that is even sort of working for them.
We'll get to how little that is working in one second.
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Let's get back to the table.
In this episode of Michaeland, I'm really excited about this one.
Michael and the Good Doctor, I sit down with psychiatrist Joseph Witt Dering to unpack one of the most controversial topics in modern medicine, and that is the link between psych drugs and violent behavior.
From SSRIs and Adderall to the rise in mass shootings, we dive deep into how these medications affect the brain and whether Big Pharma is hiding the full story.
Watch this quick teaser.
We've done spinal taps.
We've done functional MRI scans, which are real-time scans of the human brain kind of firing.
Are there any differences between a depressed person and a non-depressed person?
No.
What about the relation of these kinds of drugs to violent acts and to aberrant ideologies?
I've noticed a major uptick in violence from the left, notably associated with transgenderism and in the lion's share of these cases.
They're on SSRIs.
Is it safe for 15 to 20% of our population to be on these drugs?
The FDA is sitting on this because they are trying to cover up one of the biggest scandals in modern medical history.
That's horrifying.
Watch a full episode now on the Mike Knoll's YouTube channel for the uncensored ad-free version.
Subscribe to DailyWire Plus.
Bernie Sanders makes one last valiant stand over the shutdown.
And that the way the process has been developed, it is impossible to delay the votes that are going to take place.
And if that were not the case, that is certainly what I would do, because I think it is important that the American people fully understand what is being voted on today.
Everybody in America knows that our current health care system is broken.
It is dysfunctional.
It is cruel.
It is by far the most expensive health care system in the world and the only health care system of any major country that does not guarantee health care to all people as a human right, covering every man, woman, and child.
We are unique in that respect.
And yet tonight, what this Senate is about to do is make a horrific situation even worse.
so let's be clear what this vote is about if this vote succeeds over 20 million americans are going to see at least a doubling in their premiums in the affordable care act in my state around it throughout the okay Bernie is very old, so I can forgive him for this.
But that speech could have been given in 2007.
That's a Democrat speech from 2007.
The healthcare system is dysfunctional.
This is the most expensive health care in the world.
This is not working.
Our system is fundamentally broken.
The reason that that doesn't play as well in 2025 as it did in 2007 is that the Democrats, by hook and by crook, gave us their health care program.
In 2007, we were operating on the pre-Obama healthcare system.
Today, it's all Dems.
It's all Obama.
Barack Obama ran.
He said, if you give me my health care plan, premiums are going to come down.
If you like your doctor, you're going to get to keep your doctor.
We're going to fix this health care once and for all.
And he gets it through, and it was very unpopular, and it's why the Democrats lost the midterms in 2010.
And it was what led to the Tea Party, and that's what led to Trump.
Trump nearly repealed Obamacare.
He got very close, but John McCain was vindictive against Trump, and he cast the vote that said, no, we're going to keep Obamacare.
So I actually think not only was this a feckless shutdown, other than giving the Dems some extra seats in Virginia, not only was it feckless, not only did it not work, not only did they have to surrender in the end.
I think ultimately this will have been bad for their long-term prospects.
Not only did it not shift the conversation back to an issue on which they think they're winning, healthcare, but in as much as it did shift the conversation, I think it's going to highlight that their healthcare plan didn't work.
So to get us back to the Lucy in the football analogy, I think this reveals Democrats to be Lucy because we all remember, many of us remember, the last time they said, let us pass some crazy spending bill and it's going to make healthcare better.
It's going to reduce costs.
It's going to give Americans more choice.
They told us that.
And then they took away the football.
So much so that Barack Obama had to come out.
They said, hold on.
You said premiums would go down.
Premiums went up.
And he said, well, you didn't think you were going to get all that good stuff for free, did you?
You didn't, what, you believe me?
Why'd you believe me when I said that?
What I said didn't make any sense.
You didn't think you were going to get all that stuff for free, huh?
It was so egregious that PolitiFact rated, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor to be the biggest lie of the year.
And now Bernie is unwittingly, I think, acknowledging defeat on the issue, not just tactical defeat on the shutdown, like the eight senators did, admitting defeat on the issue.
Our plan didn't work.
So why would the American people give the Democrats more of their health care plan?
It completely failed to fulfill its promises the first time.
Why would they do it again the second time?
All in all, a big win.
It was a very painful election day.
They got their scalp for that.
All in all, Trump held firm.
There were plenty of Republicans wanting to go weak in the knee.
Maybe we need to negotiate with the Democrats here.
He said, don't go weak in the knee.
You have to hold firm on this.
Republicans won.
They won big.
Now, speaking of major potential Republican victories, huge one coming to the Supreme Court.
Maybe.
Here it is, New York Times headline.
A decade later, Supreme Court is asked to revisit same-sex marriage decision.
Kim Davis, a Kentucky County clerk, once jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, has asked the court to reconsider its landmark 2015 opinion.
So the Supreme Court considered this on Friday.
They will announce their decision of whether or not to even take up the case to take up the issue today.
By the time you're listening to this show, if you're listening later in the day, it might have already, the court might have already issued their opinion.
It sort of doesn't matter because at some point, the court is going to have to overturn same-sex marriage.
At some point, I'll be more broad about it.
At some point, gay marriage, so-called, is going to go away.
And it's going to go away because it's contrary to nature.
It's going to go away because it doesn't make any sense.
Matrimony, matrimony comes from the word mater in Latin, okay?
Like mother.
You can't have matrimony between two dudes.
It doesn't make any sense.
The defining feature of marriage is that it involves sexual difference because marriage is a lifelong union between a man and a woman for the begetting of children and for the educating of children and for the mutual support of the spouses.
But primarily, it's about making kids and raising kids.
And you cannot remove the essential feature of marriage and still have marriage continue.
It doesn't work.
So you have Clarence Thomas in the Dobbs decision acknowledging that the reasoning behind overruling Roe v. Wade and Dobbs would naturally lead to overruling all sorts of other dumb cases.
And we can get into the legal minutiae of why that is some other time.
But he admitted that.
He admits that Obergefell's got to go.
The other judges are being a little more coy about this.
Probably they don't want to take this up and they don't want to take it up because right now, same-sex marriage still has majority support in the country.
However, that support is waning and the court does follow opinion polls, does follow election returns.
And in many ways, it should because the court is not some ethereal body protected from the fall of man with infallible judgment that comes down out of heaven to maintain our political order.
The court is a political institution.
It's one of the three co-equal branches of government.
And as support for same-sex marriage continues to decline, which it must, I've been calling this one for years.
You know, I hate to say I told you so.
It must because the logic that gave us same-sex marriage was the logic of feminism, which says that men and women are the same.
That led to the gay rights movement.
That led to redefining marriage.
That led to the transgender movement.
That led to transing the kids.
Necessarily as a consequence of those ideas, as the public turned away, they were so repulsed by transing kids, that finally aroused the wisdom of repugnance, that aroused their indignation.
As the idea then moves back in the other direction, it's going to start to unwind all of those things.
So look, I hope the court overrules Obergefell now.
It's a ridiculous decision on like every front.
On textualist grounds, it's ridiculous.
On originalist grounds, it's ridiculous.
On substantive grounds, it's ridiculous.
On natural law grounds, it's just crazy.
It doesn't make any sense.
So I hope they do it now.
But even if they don't, it took 50 years to overrule Roe v. Wade.
It might take 50 years to overrule a Bergefell.
It will be overruled.
It's just a matter of time.
You cannot maintain a political order that is contrary to reality.
You can't do it for very long.
Eventually, the Soviet Union is going to collapse under its own incoherence.
Eventually, you know, we have a lot of power, we human beings, to enforce the tyranny of our wills on society.
But eventually, reality is going to win out in the end.
Now, speaking of the courts, really shocking numbers about how the courts are being weaponized about Trump, against Trump.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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We had Chad Meisel on the show.
What was it?
Two weeks ago, something like that.
He was the recent chief of staff over at the Department of Justice.
Really, really sharp guy.
He has a shocking number, set of numbers, about how the courts are being weaponized against Trump.
Bush had six injunctions against him.
Half of those were issued by Democrat-appointed judges.
Obama had 12 nationwide injunctions issued against his administration.
60% of those were issued by Republican-appointed judges.
In the first Trump term, he had 64 injunctions.
That compares with Biden's 14.
And then before the CASA decision, we have a rough count of about 40 issued in the first six months of the Trump administration.
So over 100 injunctions issued by against the Trump administration.
Over 90% of those were issued by Democrat-appointed judges.
That means that since 1963, over three quarters of the nationwide injunctions have been issued against President Trump, with over 90% of those coming from Democrat-appointed judges.
Well, some might argue that's just because Trump is more lawless.
Well, again, let's look at the facts.
24 emergency petitions were filed at the Supreme Court by the Trump administration this year.
They won 22 of them.
That's a 92% win rate at the United States Supreme Court.
Since 1963, 75% of all nationwide injunctions have been against Trump.
And as Chad points out, you might be tempted at this point to say, well, look, maybe it's just because Trump is more lawless than any president before him.
Give me a break.
But that's what the Democrats are going to say.
Yeah, three quarters of the injunctions over the last 60 years have been against Trump because he's the most lawless guy.
Except when they then appeal these decisions, the Trump administration has a 92% win rate at the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court rules over the lower courts.
So it's just ridiculous.
At a certain point, the lower courts should probably take note and stop issuing these injunctions.
And the injunctions are crazy.
It's against everything Trump wants to do.
Trump wakes up.
They say, sir, what would you like for breakfast?
Would you like an omelet or would you like pancakes?
I think I'll have pancakes.
Oh, sorry.
A federal district court judge rules you have to have an omelet today.
I think I'll wear a purple tie today.
Oh, sorry.
A federal district court judge issues an injunction.
You have to wear a green tie.
On everything the guy tries to do.
They're trying to undo the 2024 election from these lower level federal courts.
One random judge out of 700 can stop the executive branch from executing its responsibilities after Trump won the election, after Republicans won the House and the Senate.
Are you serious?
How does that work?
This brings us to have to reconsider what the courts even are.
What do the courts do?
Because we're supposed to have three co-equal branches of government.
In practice, though, today, the Democrats have elevated the court into a kind of super government that is supposed to rule over all the others.
Now, they weren't doing that five minutes ago, were they?
Five minutes ago, they were talking about how the Supreme Court was lawless and unconstitutional.
We need to pack the court.
We need to abolish the way the court works because the court did things they don't like.
But now that the court is their last chance, it's that Hail Mary, it's that last-ditch effort.
Now they say, no, no, no, one federal district judge, he can rule the whole government.
The Supreme Court's not allowed to, but some random district judge that we like, he can rule the whole government.
And it's even the way we talk about the judges that I think should cause some introspection.
We talk about the judges as if they're some disembodied intelligence.
It's kind of the same way we talk about AI.
Oh, well, Grok said such and such.
So debate over, boom, owned, roasted.
Well, a federal judge.
They never even use their names.
No one even knows their names.
It's just a federal judge has declared.
The Oracle at Delphi has declared that Trump can't do what the people elected him to do.
So be it, Nihil Obstad.
And this reminds me of a line, providentially, that my pastor read during his homily yesterday.
He was quoting George Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, a socialist, an atheist, a radical leftist.
Pretty good playwright, friends with Chesterton, but leftist.
And he has this really great line.
He says, quote, the famous dogma of papal infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence.
Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else, his decision shall be taken as final.
This is the way to understand it.
And you're getting it.
You know, I point you to MSNBC to show you it's not just some right-winger inveighing against Democrats.
No, there's actually all reasonable people can see this.
Well, I point you to the socialist George Bernard Shaw here, who wrote this, what, 100 years ago?
I'd say from his play St. Joan, I forget exactly when it was written.
And he could be describing 2025.
Plenty of people have a problem with papal infallibility.
You know, the notion that when ruling through a definitive act on matters of faith and morals, ex cathedra, the pope is infallible.
People say that, oh, that's ridiculous.
That's crazy.
And yet, look how we treat these other institutions.
Look how we treat the medical councils.
We think the Fauci is infallible.
We were told he was infallible for like five years.
How about our democracy, our sacred democracy?
When Democrats were winning elections, we were told democracy is infallible.
Vox popoli vox dei.
Even some right-wingers say that.
And now the federal judges.
That's the one thing Shaw could have added.
The infallible federal judges.
It's like papal infallibility is really quite modest.
It's really quite restrained compared to the supposed infallibility of some random bureaucrat in DC.
It's ridiculous.
The federal judges are not infallible.
They should not be treated as a priestly caste.
And I think people are coming to that realization.
They're going to have to, because the Supreme Court keeps striking down the supposedly infallible lower-level judges.
Now, speaking of the Pope, the Pope has something very, very interesting to say about internet porn.
And people don't seem to be understanding what the Pope is saying.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Mr. Rifley, who says, quote, when I have an issue I care about, people will hear.
That's worth borrowing.
I know.
Sidney Sweeney.
If she's not going to be JD Vance's running mate in 2028, which I'm still holding out for, she at least needs to train all Republicans on messaging, on interviews, on how to handle the media.
Papa Leone, Pope Leo XIV, has just weighed in on internet porn.
In recent times, addictions like drugs, alcohol, which continue to be the prevalent ones are joined by the use of the internet, computers and smartphones.
It doesn't only have clear benefits, but with overuse, it results in dependencies with bad outcomes for your health that have to do with gambling with porn and the almost constant presence on platforms of the digital world.
These addictions become an obsession.
Changing behavior in daily life is phenomena more often than not are the symptoms of mental problems and the inner malaise of the individual and a decay of social values.
He goes on.
The whole statement is worth listening to.
First of all, it's very interesting.
It's not just about porn.
He also points out that there's a big problem now with compulsive gambling on the internet.
And I agree.
I know plenty of people, plenty of my friends, enjoy sports gambling, sports gambling on the internet, which has recently been legalized and normalized.
I'm a little more cautious about that.
I don't think that's necessarily a good thing.
Having little bets here and there can be a lot of fun, but if you're regularly compulsively engaging in gambling, that can be really, really damaging.
And then, of course, the clearest addiction problem that's come out of the internet is porn, pornography addiction.
And the Pope is taking this on.
He's doing this, I think, quite intentionally.
I think he knew he was going to do this when he picked his name, Leo XIV, because he took inspiration from his predecessor, Leo XIII, who dealt with the problems of the modern world, specifically with industrialization, and wrote really important encyclicals, Re Rum Navarum, notably, about industrial society and how it was changing our moral outlook and behavior and how the Catholics need to react to it, how Christians broadly should react to it.
And it was highly political, and this is pretty political as well.
But it also calls to mind, whether you're Catholic or not Catholic, whether you like the Pope, whether you hate the Pope, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, something the Pope is calling our attention to is how much we underestimate the effect of technology on political problems.
I think we, the kind of people who follow political news, read the paper, watch the shows, follow every happening in the Senate and the House, we tend to get abstract and we think it's all about ideology.
And it's just those crazy radical leftists and their ideas almost abstracted from the tangible world.
I'm guilty of it sometimes too.
We all do that.
We think it's all ideology.
But the ideology doesn't just occur and grow in a vacuum.
It is intimately intertwined with technology, with the real tangible physical aspects of the world.
You know, this does lead to, I think of the School of Athens, famous painting by Raphael, of Aristotle and Socrates walking in the School of Athens and, or sorry, Aristotle and Plato.
Plato's pointing up, Aristotle's pointing down.
Because for Plato, his philosophy is all about the forms that are kind of floating in outer space.
And for Aristotle, it's all incarnate.
Philosophy is all embodied.
It all has a connection to the physical world.
And Aristotle's right.
So think about the way that technology has shaped our ideological fights.
Going all the way back.
The printing press, the invention of the printing press, caused the crackup of Europe, of what we used to call Christendom.
Now we call it the West because we killed Christendom because of the printing press.
And the Protestant narrative on this is that the printing press allowed the Bible to be translated and sent out and then people discovered the true gospel, which had been hidden for 1,500 years and they discovered it now.
And that's what led to a revolt against the Catholic Church.
That's like the Reformation kind of narrative about it.
I obviously don't quite agree with that.
There were plenty of translations of the Bible elsewhere.
The reason the Bible was not widely circulated was because it was extremely expensive.
The reason that it was sometimes locked up in churches or on a chain is because these things were worth the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars and they could be robbed.
And anyway, I think that's historically, the whole narrative is quite dubious.
But the thing we should all agree on is what the printing press allowed was the publication, not just of the Bible, but of political tracts, invectives, polemics, Luther's 95 Theses to be printed widely circulated.
And that led to a political crackup of Europe, first in Germany and then everywhere else.
There is no crackup of Europe.
There is no major religious war.
There is no piece of Augsburg or piece of Westphalia without the printing press.
It did it.
The automobile, fast forward a little bit, the automobile caused teen culture, rebellious teen culture, you know, going out, having a separate teen culture from the broader social culture and teenagers going out and hooking up and whatever, going doing drugs and stuff.
That was facilitated by the automobile.
If you don't have an automobile, then teenagers can't go sneak out a lot of the time and, you know, form their own habits and views and lead to that kind of rebellious spirit that really came about in the 1950s and 60s and 70s.
That was caused by the car.
Even going back to the Enlightenment, I'm hopping around time zones here, but the mechanical clock, the invention and development of the mechanical clock, impelled Enlightenment deism, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and specifically deism, this idea that, okay, maybe God exists, but he's like a clock maker.
You know, he just builds the clock, winds it up, and then it runs on his own without his interference.
These are ideas that were prominent, even with the founding fathers of the United States.
Those ideas would not have gained currency without the technological innovation of the clock.
That was the idea, or rather, that was the fact that made these ideas seem to make sense to people.
There would be no Freud without the steam engine.
Freudian psychology is just an articulation of the technology of the steam engine.
We even use that phrase.
We say, people just got to blow off a little steam.
They don't want to repress everything.
They got to let it out a little bit.
That's where that comes from.
Bring it back to Congress.
Part of the reason that Congress is so dysfunctional today is because of C-SPAN.
C-SPAN, which goes into the House of Representatives in 1979, goes into the Senate in 1983 or 84, I think it was, starts televising all of the deals, all of the arguments, all of the, that made Congress much less functional because all of a sudden the senators are not just trying to persuade each other and they're not just playing to the print media that would write about what happened.
They're playing to the cameras.
I did it myself the other day.
I was testifying before the Senate two weeks ago and I knew the cameras are on me.
So I wanted to humiliate Corey Booker because he was endorsing Jay Jones, Jay Jones, who called for the murder of Republicans.
And I played that for the camera.
And you know what?
It worked and it went super viral and it did shame Corey Booker and he ran out of the room and there was a Corey Booker shaped hole in the wall.
My argument would have been different had that technology not been in the room.
And it's not just me, that's one tiny example of how all of the legislators operate.
Technology is a huge part of it.
And the people on the left and the right, they get so abstracted.
They get so in their own heads about their ideology.
We have to grapple with, we still haven't grappled with the internet.
We tried to in the 90s.
Both Democrats and Republicans tried to pass laws.
They passed two laws, actually, trying to regulate porn, specifically on the internet, the Communications Decency Act, which was gutted by judges, and the Child Online Protection Act, which also was gutted by judges.
So we weren't able to do it.
Now, with the development of AI, it's only going to get worse.
So many of these problems, the transgender ideology, notably, are a result of technology.
Because if we didn't live all of our lives on these screens in the compulsive way that the Pope is talking about here, if we didn't live our lives in those way, in that way, then we wouldn't have this crazy idea that our identity has nothing to do with our bodies.
The reason that that ideology was able to set in is because it was largely true.
A lot of our identity is just mediated through a screen and the body has nothing to do with it.
Now, ultimately, that's contrary to reality.
And so it leads to that big crackup that you saw in the transgender fight a couple of years ago that you're still seeing play out today, including with revisiting O'Bergefeld.
But it doesn't come from nowhere.
One last point I have to make before we get to Music Monday.
Jennifer Welch, this left-wing podcast gal who's gone viral recently because she was saying all sorts of nasty things about Charlie Kirk and Republicans.
But she sat down with Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat leader in the House.
She sat down with members of Congress.
She's a thing.
She had this to say about addictions, not to online gambling, not to porn, not to drugs, not to alcohol, addictions to religion.
I think a lot of the people that are involved in this movement are either psychopaths, sociopaths, they like it.
I'm talking about like Stephen Miller, right?
And then you've got people that are religious addicts.
And you guys, that is a real thing.
Like somebody can be an alcoholic, somebody can be a drug addict.
A lot of people are religious addicts.
And you can Google it and read about it.
And these religious addicts, like all addiction, like all addicts, sabotage things.
Their default setting is to break things and create collateral damage.
And I think even on the Supreme Court, we have some religious addicts.
And I think in the administration, we have a ton of religious addicts, Mike Johnson, et cetera, Marco Rubio.
And they think, okay, I'm doing a lot of bad shit in my private life.
I guarantee you, Sam Alito's Google search history is full of a lot of has to be.
Okay, so ton of projection here, obviously.
It's these people.
You really see this with porn.
These people who are obviously involved with and at the very least approving of lots of weird deviant sex stuff, they insist that their opponents must be too.
It's impossible for them to imagine that other people are not caught up in the same addictions that they are.
So they say, oh, Sam Alito, he's probably a total gooner.
Is it gooner?
Is that the term?
I think that's the Zoomer language.
He's a total porn addict.
It was ridiculous.
I would be willing to bet a lot of money that that is not true.
And I would be vindicated on that.
Or Mike Johnson or whatever.
They project all of this kind of psycho babble on it.
But she has a little bit of a point here in the sense that religion does bear some similarity to an addiction because all human behavior bears some similarity to an addiction.
What is religion?
Religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.
Listen to that.
a habit that inclines the will.
That is kind of like an addiction.
A methamphetamine addiction is a habit.
You begin this habit of doing drugs, and then that habit inclines your will, even outside of your conscious control, to keep doing math.
Gambling is a habit.
Maybe you start out just playing the penny slots, but if you let that get out of control, it inclines your will to do more and more, get a bigger hit.
And pretty soon you're gambling the family farm on poker games or whatever.
Well, so too with religion.
Religion is not just something in your mind.
It's not totally abstract.
It's stuff you do.
You go to church.
You read your Bible.
You avail yourself of the sacraments.
You pray to God every day.
You have to put it, you get down on your knees.
And the more you do that, the more it inclines your will toward righteousness, towards sanctity, toward living in accord with God.
That's true.
You want that, though.
Because all virtues and vices are just habits.
And the more you do of them, the easier they are to do and the harder it is to do the opposite.
The more virtuous you become, the harder it is to sin.
You can sin.
If you're not in a state of grace, you will commit mortal sins eventually.
If you are in a state of grace, you'll still commit venial sins eventually.
But it's harder to do it.
And the more you're addicted to gambling and porn and drugs and booze and whatever, the harder it is to go the other way.
That's true.
And the big error she's making here is this error of liberalism, which is to pretend it's all the same.
It's like, oh yeah, some, you know, Uncle Johnny, he's addicted to gambling.
And Aunt Sue, she's addicted to religion.
You know, addictions.
Am I right?
Yeah.
So Uncle Johnny, he destroyed his whole family and his wife left him and he bankrupted the kids and he is going to be taken out by the mafia because he owes him money.
Yeah, that's bad.
And Aunt Sue, she prays a lot.
She bakes pies for orphans.
She, you know, addictions.
Am I right?
She can't help herself.
She's just, oh, you know, it's like Uncle Johnny, he can't, he just can't walk by a blackjack table without blowing his paycheck.
And Aunt Sue, she can't help but do corporal and spiritual acts of mercy, you know, addictions, right?
That is obviously ridiculous equivalence.
We should recognize, yes, human behavior is habit forming and is in that way akin to addiction.
And that is why we need to encourage religion.
This is not like the Pope of Rome declaring on high, you know what I'm saying?
This is like what all the founding fathers said, what all the men who built our country said, what every sane, smart person has said throughout the entire history of politics and political philosophy.
Yes.
Accidentally, they've admitted something.
I guess that's the theme today.
Accidentally, the libs admit stuff.
They admit their healthcare program is terrible and no one should ever trust them on it again.
They admit that we need much more religion in this country.
They admit that the federal judges are not infallible.
They admit, they admit, they admit.
And I guess we should believe them and take the win.
