Ep. 1935 - BREAKING: The Government Launches "Aliens.gov"
Michael Knowles critiques the "Aliens.gov" launch as a potential government deception rather than proof of extraterrestrials, refutes claims that Thomas Paine was an undocumented immigrant, and condemns AI-generated Val Kilmer scenes as necromancy. He mocks Democrats James Tallarico and Pete Buttigieg for relying on fading progressive trends like vegetarianism, contrasting their failures with Trump's consistent messaging. Knowles further argues that modern liberalism's obsession with cosmetic augmentation ignores the soul-body unity, while promoting a new book on Nero and St. Paul to challenge contemporary cultural absurdities. [Automatically generated summary]
The federal government has reportedly just registered the domain name aliens.gov.
Now, I am holding out hope that the website will simply feature the faces of the various Venezuelans that we've shipped to Bukele's Salvadoran torture resort.
But it would appear that the federal government is on the brink of releasing information about UFOs and little green men.
I have spoken with some high-level people in the government about this.
I know some of the things that they are likely to disclose.
These disclosures could upend everything that people think.
The way we view the cosmos, the way we view ourselves.
We will get into how to think about that even before these disclosures come out.
But most important and worst of all, if the government proclaims that aliens are real, Matt Walsh is going to be insufferable.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Val Kilmer is going to star in a movie from Beyond the Grave, apparently.
We'll get to that.
This is now we got aliens.
We got necromancy.
We got a lot of bad stuff.
What did I tell you?
During Lent, the devil runs amok, and that's what we're looking at.
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Aliens, China, and Earth00:08:16
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has registered aliens.gov and alien.gov.
So one of them could be for the illegals south of the border.
The other one could be for the men from Mars.
And you could do alien versus predator.
And both of those could be the MS-13 gang members or both of them could be the little green men.
I think this is about little green men.
It'd be a very funny troll if the Trump administration did this, leaked it, got everyone talking about it, and then just put a picture of some big fat face-tatted Latin American criminal.
That'd be hilarious.
But President Trump announced, what was it, a month ago that he was going to start disclosing information about UFOs.
I've spoken to people in the government who have been following this issue very closely, and they tell me they're seeing really crazy stuff.
I've been speaking to people in the government who were skeptical of aliens going in, or skeptical of the UFOs, I should say, because aliens are a different issue.
But they were skeptical of the UFOs going in, and now they say something is really happening.
The stories involve aircraft moving in ways that we just don't understand in ways that we could not possibly recreate, strange visual phenomena, but they're not just hallucinations because they're physical evidence of these kinds of craft.
The stories are pretty similar over time.
I was hoping with all these stories of UFOs that it was just us, that it was just our government or our defense industry building stuff.
And we were pretending not to know about it to fake out our enemies.
Or maybe some people really weren't in the know and it was highly classified and it was us.
I am now convinced, given what the government has said privately and publicly, I'm now convinced we actually don't really know what these things are.
So my next guess was that it was China.
First guess was that it was us.
I don't think that's true anymore.
Second guess that it was China.
It might be China.
I think there's some evidence that it could just be China.
That's pretty bad because my third guess is that it's demons.
At no point on my guessing do I think that there are actually little green men from the planet Zebulon 5 who have weird little green-gray flesh that come and visit Earth and stick things into people's orifices.
I don't think that's real.
I know some people disagree.
When I mentioned this story to Mr. Davies, I said, have you heard about this?
You know, the UFOs, he said, oh man, that's so scary.
I wonder if they're going to visit.
You know, I wonder if they're going to like probe me or something.
I said, wait, what?
What did you say?
And he said, I don't know.
I'm just, I wonder if they're going to visit.
I said, no, after that, what did you?
And he said, no, I just, man, I just really hope they don't probe me.
You know, I hope they don't know that I, you know, live in this part of town and I sleep with my window open from 9 p.m. to 3.
I don't know.
He was like going on and on about it.
And I know a lot of people are really interested in it being aliens, but it's not aliens.
Aliens are not real.
Look at me.
Look at me.
This is going to be the most controversial thing.
I should have renamed this show Unpopular Takes with Michael Knowles.
Unpopular takes that are going to get everybody to hate you, but which are indisputably correct with Michael Knowles.
That's going to be the new name of my show.
Because look at me, Matt and the rest of you.
Aliens are not real.
It's either skunk works, China, or demons.
Those are your three options.
But it's not aliens.
You know why it's not aliens?
It's not aliens.
We can say it's not aliens because we can say this with confidence, because we have no evidence that there is life anywhere else in the universe.
Up, hold up.
I know, I know what some of you are saying.
I know what the contingent from Reddit.com is saying right now.
And you're going to say, the universe is really big.
So statistically, there must be alien life forms out there.
That is a non-sequitur.
In order to ascertain the probability of something, we have to know something about how that thing comes to be in the first place.
When it comes to the existence of life, we do not have any idea how life could arise through natural processes.
I do know how life can arise.
I know that God can form man out of the clay and breathe into his nostrils.
I know that, but that is a supernatural process.
From a natural process, like, you know, amino acids just banging together in a primordial soup with a certain concoction of carbon and methane and, I don't know, nitrogen in the atmosphere, that whole thing, we have no idea how you could possibly go from inorganic to organic matter.
There have been many hypotheses over the years.
They have all flopped, every single one of them.
So the universe being really, really big means nothing.
So then people will say, well, look, we're just this one, this creature on this rock, in this galaxy, in the solar system, in this galaxy, in the middle of nowhere.
What, you think we're so special?
What makes you think we're so special?
Yes, I do think we're special.
I do.
And you have no evidence to the contrary.
I think that we are so special that God is a man.
That's what Christians believe.
I think man is so special.
I think of Psalm 8.
What is man?
I'm paraphrasing.
Oh, actually, you know what?
I have my, because I was forced to use my iPad today, I can actually look it up.
Psalm 8, RSVCE.
This is what I think about the alien.
I'm just going to do the whole show on aliens today.
I'm so fired up about it.
When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established, what is man that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man that thou dost care for him?
Yet thou hast made him little less than God and dost crown him with glory and honor, and so on.
Yeah.
They say, well, why?
Why would God have made all these planets and all these galaxies if the only place that was going to have life on it was going to be Earth?
To that, I would answer, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Well, surely you know.
Where were you?
The reason that I'm, I think the alien, the reason I think aliens are not real as a physical being is there's absolutely no evidence for them whatsoever.
That's the main reason.
But then furthermore, the reason why I think that if the aliens are not the U.S. government and if the aliens are not China, the reason that I'm fairly convinced they're demons is because of what it makes us think.
If aliens are real, what we are going to think is that man is not all that special.
What we are going to think is that our religion is false.
Our religious systems are false.
What we are going to think is that, I don't know, maybe we need some kind of one world government to unite against them.
What we are going to think is all sorts of stuff that if I were the devil, I would want people to think.
I know that people are going to tune out right now and they're going to say, Michael, you sound crazy.
I sound crazy.
The government just registered aliens.gov.
Okay.
We're past the realm of crazy.
And what I'm saying is not crazy.
I'm reminded of that great saying from systems, which is that the purpose of a system is what it does.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
What does the alien thing do?
It gets us to deny our religion.
It gets us to follow new woo-woo bizarre supernatural trends.
It gets us to be submissive.
It gets us to have servile fear.
And sometimes it probes us in ways that probably constitute a mortal sin.
So, yeah, I guess you'd have to consent to it for it.
In any case.
Okay, they're going to release.
If they're going to release stuff on aliens and it's not about the Venezuelans or the Hondurans, all I'm saying, this is a little Lenten advice from a mere layman, be on guard.
Thomas Paine and Immigrants00:15:14
This is not just neutral.
It's not just, I mean this, I know we have fun with the alien thing.
I mean, this is not just neutral.
It's not just fun.
It's not real, also.
This is not good.
If you're seeing aliens and they're beaming you up to their spaceship and they're sticking stuff in you, that's not good for physical reasons and for metaphysical reasons too.
Speaking of aliens, Jamie Raskin, Democrat member of Congress, was just pontificating in the House of Representatives on illegal immigration.
You remember that issue?
I know, before we were talking about Iran, before we were talking about all sorts of tangential issues that aren't going to help Republicans win any elections, aren't going to help conservatives move the ball down the field.
We're back to talking about immigration.
And Jamie Raskin, a big Democrat, is running on the claim that Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, one of the fathers of the American Revolution, that he was an undocumented immigrant.
Invoking Tom Paine, who was an undocumented immigrant who came to this land in 1774, two years before the revolution, and wrote Common Sense.
Remember said, I think his opening sentence was he said, Thomas Paine was an illegal immigrant.
My understanding was Mr. Paine was born in the UK, came to America, then a British colony in 1774.
So I was just struggling to figure out how he was.
Oh, I didn't say he was an illegal immigrant.
I said he was an undocumented immigrant.
Just like Thomas Jefferson's family was.
Most of our ancestors did not arrive here with documents.
Okay, well.
What?
Okay, hold on.
So you see, he's so clever, Jamie Raskin.
He's so clever.
Oh, I never said he was an illegal immigrant.
Oh, no, because he obviously wasn't.
He was a British subject who went to a British territory.
That's not, that's, you're not an illegal immigrant.
Oh, I never said that.
I just used the euphemism that we made up to replace the more appropriate term illegal immigrant, which actually itself is a euphemism to replace the more clinical term, which is illegal alien.
I just used that to refer to the observation that the man had Neri a notebook when he arrived.
What?
What are you talking about?
He's an undocumented immigrant.
He didn't bring any vellum with him on which to write his diaries.
Oh, you mean he like literally didn't have paper?
He's a British subject.
He went to a British territory.
The phrase undocumented immigrant is stupid, but in as much as it has any meaning at all, it refers to the fact that these people have a different legal status than citizens or residents.
But now you're taking illegal alien has a pretty clear meaning.
A foreign person who is here against the law.
Then it becomes illegal immigrant.
Now, they're not really immigrants.
To be an immigrant, we got to take you in.
They could be an immigrant, I guess.
They're leaving their country, but they're not really immigrants.
Okay, fine.
And then it became undocumented alien and undocumented immigrant, whatever.
And now it literally, it just, you're referring to the, this is so dumb, so ridiculous.
If this is how Democrats are going to run on immigration, we are going to win the entire House of Representatives.
Also, though, there's one additional point we should make here, which I haven't seen anyone make on this ridiculous exchange that went viral.
Namely, we should have deported Thomas Paine.
Thomas Paine is not good.
He wrote a very popular pamphlet, Common Sense.
And so people in American history sometimes exalt him.
He's very bad.
He's a huge lib.
He was one of the most liberal figures around the American Revolution.
The American Revolution would have proceeded just fine without Thomas Paine, maybe even in a better way.
We had very good conservative leaders in the American Revolution.
We never needed Thomas Paine.
He was a crazy lib.
He believed crazy things.
So even if Thomas Paine is your, yes, deport the MS-13 guy, send him to Bukele's torture camp, and maybe do maybe do the same to Thomas Paine.
I'm sufficiently conservative that I wouldn't object to that.
Okay, speaking of clashes on Capitol Hill, big fight within the GOP between Mark Wayne Mullen, who's the senator who's now up for DHS secretary, and Rand Paul, ostensibly a Republican senator, though much more libertarian, frequently opposes Trump.
These two went at it.
They had personal beef.
This is like the podcast wars brought to this is the senator wars.
We got the intra-party senator wars on Capitol Hill.
What does it mean for the future of MAGA?
What does it mean for the future of the Trump administration?
Will he get his DHS secretary?
And how does it reflect the voters?
Because you see the mess on Capitol Hill, and then CNN tells us that MAGA voters support President Trump at a rate of 100%.
We'll get to the discrepancy.
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Mark Wayne Mullen should be flying through the confirmation process to be the new DHS secretary until he hit the roadblock, not from the Democrats, the roadblock of Republican Senator Rand Paul.
If I have something to say, I'll say it directly to your face.
I work around this room to try to fix problems.
I've worked with many people in this room.
Seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us.
I did address those remarks.
I did explain your gimmicks by the amendment you put forth.
And as far as me saying that I invoke violence, I don't.
I don't think anybody should be hit by surprise.
I don't like that.
But if I do have something to say, everybody in this room knows I'll come straight to you.
I'll say it publicly and I'll say it privately, but I'll never say it behind your back.
So for you to say, I'm a liar, sir, that's not accurate.
And I got proof to say that because you have spent millions of dollars in my campaigns against me.
Okay, so we didn't even get, I mean, this, we could be here with the soap opera all day, but we didn't even get Senator Paul's side of it, which is he said, you're a liar.
And they're really going at it.
These guys do not like each other.
And part of it is because I guess Mark Wayne Mullen at some point made a joke about Rand Paul being very seriously assaulted by his neighbor.
Do you remember that?
His neighbor came over to Rand Paul's house and like broke his rib or something.
I guess Mark Wayne Mullen made a joke or some reference to that.
And Rand Paul didn't like that very much.
And it's really bad idea to irritate senators when you rely on them to be confirmed.
In any case, regardless of party loyalty, Rand Paul has come out afterward.
He said he will not vote for Trump's pick for DHS.
Depending on voting for this nomination, I think there are anger issues.
I think there's a lack of contrition, both about the violence that's perpetrated on me, really the violent episode he was involved in and set a committee where he's told the media, frankly, that he doesn't regret it.
He's also told the media there, as he said it again today, that there's a historical precedent for violence, that caning and dueling happened all the time.
And I pointed out, well, it was illegal 170, 200 years ago.
They would actually flee and they would do it in areas they could find where the law didn't reach.
Sometimes they would actually go to Canada.
Sometimes they'd go from one state to the other.
But the mass of civilized response, even in the 1850s or 1830s, was against dueling.
That's why dueling was made illegal.
The fact that he can't bring himself to say that, you know, really we shouldn't settle political questions with violence, I think that would be a terrible example for ICE and for our border patrol agents.
We're in the midst, I think, of a crisis where there needs to be more direction from the top.
And a guy who brawls, a guy who can't even say he's sorry about, you know, wishing violence on me and really applauding the attack that happened on me, can't come to say that.
I don't know how he could, from my point of view, be a leader of ICE or a board of people.
Senator, do you know what you said?
Senator, do you know what you said?
There you have it.
He's a no, not because of ICE policy, not because of a disagreement over deportations, because of personal beef.
I get it.
If I were Rand Paul, I'd be pretty irritated too.
Now, maybe Mark Wayne Mullins didn't mean all that much by it, and maybe I don't know.
I don't want to wade into this personal feud.
However, I will tell you, as a Republican and a conservative, I wish that that kind of thing were settled behind closed doors.
I don't need to see that on TV.
I'm not saying Republicans shouldn't fight.
And I'm not even saying they shouldn't fight each other sometimes.
They should.
We're Republicans.
One of our strengths, we conservatives, one of our strengths, sometimes our strength, is that we all disagree.
You get 100 conservatives into a room, they will find the one thing they all disagree on.
The libs march in line more frequently than the conservatives do.
So fight over substantive matters, fight over war and peace, fight over immigration, fight over whatever.
Fine.
Yeah, duke it out.
I love interesting ideas, avant-garde policies.
Duke it all out.
When it comes to this kind of personal stuff, though, whether we're talking about the media, whether we're talking about the elected politicians, I would prefer if people who are ostensibly on the same side would work it out behind the scenes.
Is this going to sink Trump's DHS secretary?
I hope not.
Now, probably he'll get through because of Fetterman.
Probably John Fetterman will cross the aisle and vote for this guy, I think.
So I think Mark Wayne Mullen gets through.
But you don't like to see division where it's gratuitous, where it's needless.
You want to save the division.
You want to save the fighting for the places where it really, really matters.
The voters seem to get that.
Really shocking headline came out of CNN's pollster, who's going to be one of the biggest celebrities in politics after this because he keeps showing all these really shocking poll numbers.
We showed yesterday where the Trump base sits on the Iran war.
If you listen to the podcast, you'd think they're all against the Iran war, but you look at the numbers, almost all of them are for.
It was 89%, I think.
Well, now just look at the MAGA base on approval of what President Trump is doing.
The numbers get even crazier.
Yeah, you know, sometimes you look at the polling data and there are numbers that just jump off the screen at you.
And this is one of those.
Because just take a look here.
MAGA GOP view of Trump.
Approve 100%, 100%.
If you are a member of MAGA and the GOP, you approve of Donald John Trump.
0% say that they disapprove.
You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know you can't go higher than 100%.
He is the 1972 Miami Dolphins.
Now, there are some Republicans who disapprove of Donald John Trump, but they are not members of the Make America Great Again movement.
The bottom line is this.
If you are a member of MAGA, you approve of Donald Trump.
It's interesting though, because there have been a couple prominent people who have sort of come out online and they're very mad about this war with Iran because he promised no new wars.
Is there any sign that people might be leaving MAGA relative to 2024?
Yeah, okay.
So, you know, I've said it before, and, you know, the theme of this segment is Tucker Carlson be darned.
And when we look at the numbers, I mean, I've heard some people say, oh, you know, but when you look at those MAGA numbers, it doesn't account for those who might have left MAGA.
But take a look here.
Americans who identify as MAGA in November of 2024, it was 28% of Americans.
Now it's basically the same.
If anything, it's slightly higher.
Okay, look, I'm glad the number is good.
That number matters more.
28% of Americans identified as MAGA during the election in 2024.
Now that number is 30%, which is good.
It means that Trump has been pretty successful in office.
The heat of the campaign has worn off.
The people, even the ones who didn't totally like Trump, have come around to accept him.
Okay.
But that first number is ridiculous.
The first number really shows you there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The first number claims that 100% of MAGA supports Donald Trump.
Yes, that is a truism.
That's like saying, that's like saying, what percentage of people who support Donald Trump support Donald Trump?
Oh my goodness, it's 100%.
Yeah, right.
Because the conclusion was, your premise was the conclusion.
Of course, that is the case.
Did you know that 100% of people who live in the White House named Donald John Trump support Donald Trump?
Did you know that?
Shocking number.
I would be shocked if that numbers were any different.
Of course, that is the case.
The issue is that MAGA is not just MAGA.
It's just using these words in really slippery ways.
And this kind of stuff is going to have Republicans whistling past the graveyard in the midterms or in 2028.
When we say MAGA, what does that mean?
To me, MAGA is the people who elected Trump.
Well, you know who elected Trump?
More than 50% of the country.
Or actually, that's technically not true, but the popular vote.
More than voted for Kamala, roughly half the country.
That was MAGA, as far as I'm concerned.
But MAGA can also mean the really hardcore people, the most hardcore people who voted for Trump three times, who have hashtag MAGA in their Twitter bios, who wear the hats every day.
Okay, let's say that that number is 30% of the country.
If you keep your support at 100% with 30% of the country, but your support crashes with the other 70% of the country, you're never going to win another election again.
That's the problem.
I'm not saying that that's what's happening, but there is a far greater fear that that is happening.
America First Coalition00:03:11
So that segment, the guy just led on right there, that segment was really about Tucker and other people who previously were allies of Trump, who are now at odds with Trump.
That's really what it's about.
And they're trying to ascertain how big a deal is this.
Well, it's not a big deal with the MAGA base, because this is Trump's movement.
I had a funny debate.
I was on Piers Morgan's show with Dave Smith.
And the premise was that the real America firsters felt betrayed by President Trump.
You know, Trump wasn't really America First.
And the point I made, I got along great with Dave.
I thought we were having an amiable exchange.
But the point I made was, look, Dave, you're a popular podcaster, but you don't get to define America first.
You don't get to define MAGA.
There's one guy who gets to define it.
And it's the guy who built that coalition to the point that he won the presidency on it.
That is his coalition, by definition.
You can say, well, I used to be in his coalition and now I'm not in his coalition.
I used to like him, but now I hate him.
You can say whatever you want.
But the one thing you can't say is that MAGA is defined by some random podcaster or some random influencer or whatever.
America first really belongs to some live streamer.
It doesn't.
It's Trump.
Plenty of those people are impressive.
None of them got themselves elected president at least two times.
At least two times.
Okay, so yeah, of course.
MAGA supports Trump, of course.
But the MAGA coalition, the thing that actually gets you results, that gets you into office, that includes independents.
That includes the rest of the GOP.
That includes disaffected liberals.
Okay, and I don't want Republicans whistling past the graveyard here.
We're going to be happy, clappy, dancing for joy that 100% of MAGA supports Trump, and we're going to get blown out in the midterms, and we're going to get destroyed in 2028 if we don't pay attention to those other aspects of the electorate that are part of Big MAGA.
Do we need two terms now?
Little MAGA and Big MAGA.
MAGA the lesser, MAGA the greater.
Whatever it is, that's the issue.
And the very fact that these polls are not really focusing on that group, I think tells you they're trying to set the Republicans up.
They're trying to set Trump up.
Set him up, not with bad news, set them up with apparently good news.
So what's going on in Iran?
We got an update from President Trump.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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Missiles and Regime Change00:05:13
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What's going on in Iran?
President Trump just gave a tactical update this very week.
Frankly, as somebody said very, they could leave today and it would take 10 years to rebuild the damage that's been done.
But I think we have to make it a little bit more permanent because no other president has to go through this and we shouldn't have any other president having to go through this kind of a thing.
And if they didn't want to do it, if for some reason they didn't want to do it, we'd have the same problem.
We don't ever want to have that problem again, not with lunatics.
We can't have lunatics controlling nuclear weaponry.
So I just want to thank everybody.
So he says, look, right now, my goal is to weaken Iran.
It's a broad goal.
It's not to completely destroy their nuclear facilities necessarily because we already did that six months ago and then they just started building them up again.
It's not to convince them never to build another missile.
It's not necessarily regime change.
It's just to weaken them.
And maybe if you weaken them enough, maybe you can change out the regime.
I mean, we just keep killing all the top guys.
So there is a world in which that happens.
But if you kill too many people without good contingency plans, the whole country could plunge into civil war.
You might end up with a tyrant who's even worse than the guy before him.
So right now, he says, we've already set Iran back 10 years.
When am I going to be done?
I don't know.
Maybe I've got to make the damage a little more permanent first.
So he basically just says, look, I'm just breaking things.
I tried to play nice.
I tried to play nice.
For the whole first term, I tried to play nice.
And then you wouldn't play nice.
I killed your top general.
And I tried to play nice.
I tried to play nice.
You were messing around with me.
You wouldn't play nice.
So I dropped the bunker busters, flew the B2s over.
I tried to play nice.
You just wouldn't give in.
And you were making fun of us to Steve Witkoff and my negotiators.
So I had to go in and I had to kill your leader and I had to kill all the leaders around him.
And I had to kill the next leader.
And then I had to wound the homosexual son.
And I don't know.
I'm not done yet.
That's what he's saying.
I'm a skeptic of intervention in Iran.
Okay.
I would have made the argument against it, as I've told you ad nauseum.
I think that things really could spiral out of control.
I think that oil really could go up to $200 a barrel if this gets out of hand.
I trust Trump.
Those five weeks that he asked us to trust him, I trust him.
He's got great credibility on foreign policy.
But I am eminently aware of all the things that could go wrong.
I know Trump is too.
So he was asked if he's afraid of all the ways that this could fail.
Because the Iranian regime has told Sky News, if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it will be another Vietnam.
Are you afraid of that?
No, I'm not afraid of, I'm really not afraid of anything.
It sounds like he's bragging.
It sounds like he's being boastful.
I think he's right about that.
I don't think that guy is afraid of anything.
We should have holy fear.
He might have a little bit of that, especially after he was almost killed during the campaign.
But servile fear, we really shouldn't have.
You should not be afraid of anything in a servile way.
The way he's messaging right now, though, is he is not, he's going to go the full five weeks.
Unless Iran really says, uncle, he's going to keep going.
And the Israelis are going nuts over there.
I mean, they just killed one of the real hardliners, the Kantian leader, two days ago.
He was the guy who was effectively running Iran while the Ayatollah's son was having his legs or whatever other body parts mended up as arguably in a coma.
So they're just going to keep going.
Trump says, I'm not afraid of anything because his mind was made up here.
But when the people say that Israel pressured us to go to war in Iran, that's obviously true.
And I know people are going to say, you're not allowed to say that.
It's obviously true.
We've heard that from the Secretary of State.
Duh, of course, Israel's been trying to get us to go to war in Iran forever.
When they tell you, they probably won't even tell you, that Saudi Arabia was in favor of a strike on Iran, you say, yeah, that makes sense.
Saudi Arabia really hates Iran.
And they called the Ayatollah Hitler.
They really don't like Iran.
That's true.
But Trump has wanted to do this for a very long time.
And Trump feels very confident in his ability to do this.
And Trump has been talking about this since the 1980s.
And so I'm not going to worry.
I'm not freaking out yet.
Okay.
AI Avatars and Necromancy00:05:09
Speaking of death, Val Kilmer is about to star in a movie.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
Let me look up.
I kind of like having an iPad on the show.
I usually don't do it because I hate having screens, but it's very convenient.
I see why my colleagues do it.
Yeah, Val Kilmer died on April Fool's Day last year.
Less than one year ago, Val Kilmer died.
He's going to star in a movie.
Not because he had completed filming of the movie.
I don't think he'd even started filming of the movie.
He died of throat cancer, so he wasn't even really able to speak at the end.
Val Kilmer is going to be in this movie because they're going to try to bring him back to life with AI.
So this just came out from Variety, the trade magazine in Hollywood.
And it's this movie that Val Kilmer apparently really wanted to do.
The AI Val Kilmer has his daughter's blessing, apparently.
Said, oh, my dad really wanted to do this, and he wasn't able to do it.
So this is really great.
I'm sure this is what he would have wanted.
They already did this in that Star Wars movie, what was it, five, seven years ago now, where they brought Princess Leia to the screen again, where they brought Peter Cushing to the screen again.
That guy had been dead forever.
So they'd already, they've been trying this out for a while.
Now they're going to take a dead guy and make an AI avatar of him and have him star in a movie, not just a little cameo.
To which I have to say, this is really like a get back to basics episode of the show.
We're talking about UFOs and we're talking about all sorts of really weird stuff.
Now we're talking about necromancy.
This is necromancy.
Taking dead actors and making AI versions of them and putting words in their mouths and movements in their apparent bodies and having them star in movies is indistinguishable from necromancy.
And I know the objection.
You say, no, it's not.
It's just technology, Michael.
You know, necromancy is where you literally bring someone back from the dead.
But this is just creating an image that looks and sounds like them.
No, no, no.
Necromancy is not really literally bringing someone back from the dead.
When you go to some psychic and you pay the psychic money and you say, conjure me a ghost of my dad or whatever.
Well, you're probably just going to get scammed out of money and you're probably going to attract a bunch of demons to you in the meantime.
But if it even seems like it's going to work, you know what's going to happen?
You're going to hear a voice.
You'll say, oh, Johnny, I'm your dad.
Give this lady more monies.
It's probably what you're going to end up hearing in the psychic's place.
But you're going to hear a voice.
You're going to see something move in the room.
You're going to see a little shade of an image of a whisper of a cloud.
But you're not going to see a flesh and blood person.
That's not what necromancy is.
You're going to see exactly what they're doing to Val Kilmer, exactly what they did to Peter Cushing and Princess Leia.
And the Bible tells us not to do that.
We should not do that.
It's bad.
Even if it's just a shade.
Necromancy is always just a shade.
I mean, this is actually in Dante, in the very first canto of Dante's Inferno.
Dante meets Virgil, his favorite poet, and he says, tell me who you are, whether true man or shade.
And the Virgil character says, I am not a man.
I once was a man.
Non omo omo jafui.
I am not a man.
I once was a man.
And there's this character the whole time, but he's a shade.
He's a ghost.
He's just a kind of a spirit moving around.
Because to be a man involves body and soul.
A body without a soul is a corpse.
A soul without a body is a ghost, a shade, a spirit.
But a man is both.
A man has both of those things.
This is really bad.
Why is necromancy bad?
Necromancy is, why is it bad to go to the psychic and conjure your dad?
Why is it bad to go see this Val Kilmer movie?
Necromancy is bad because it assumes something, presumes something unto yourself that really properly belongs to God.
It tries to take control over things that are properly outside of our control.
It tries to deny death.
It tries to deny time and history.
It tries to conjure and control destiny.
You don't have the right to do that.
It's false.
People are going to look at that and they're going to think that's Val Kilmer.
The AI is good enough, and maybe it will be.
They're going to think that's Val Kilmer, but it's not Val Kilmer.
Val Kilmer lived, and then he died.
And when you see Val Kilmer in movies for the next 200 years, that is going to change the way you view death.
It's going to lead you to deny your own mortality.
So much of liberal modernity is about denying our mortality, is about trying to gather to ourselves powers that are properly due to God.
It's about teaching us to turn away from God and to trust merely in ourselves.
Plastic Surgery and Mortality00:07:37
It's about maximizing individual autonomy above all else.
That's the project of liberal modernity.
And it is a project that is much closer to pagan antiquity than it is to Christendom, the society, the civilization that we've known as Christendom.
Not good stuff.
Go see living actors.
There are plenty of living actors.
Go to them.
Don't talk to your dead father.
Pray for your dead father.
That's one thing.
But don't try to talk to him like he's still alive.
There are people who are still alive.
That's who you have to talk to.
You know, be among the living.
Okay.
Speaking of artificial appearances, very important guidance on plastic surgery causing a big to-do coming out of the church.
Right now, you got to go subscribe to the Daily Wire.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Banana Man CoolGuy7670.
I didn't pick this.
I left it to the producers to pick this.
I want to see, did they pick a good comment or a bad one?
Come in and says, to the just stop oil crowd, you got Cuba.
Take the W.
Yeah, okay, that's fine.
Yeah, you got Cuba for now.
But you know, the thing is, the thing of the thing about it is that we're going to get Cuba, and then we'll give them oil again, and we'll take their tobacco, and they'll blend it into new blends of Mayflower cigars.
Speaking of artificial appearances, the Vatican has just issued warnings about plastic surgery, and the Libs are using this to attack what they call mar-a-lago face.
They're using, it's this very cheap thing.
It's so ridiculous.
First of all, it's ridiculous.
The idea that conservatives get more plastic surgery than libs.
Libs get a lot of plastic surgery, okay?
And I'm not even just talking about the crazy trannies, you know, the libs telling us that it's the sacred, somber thing that we have to go in and chop off people's genitals and rip off the flesh from their arms and make new simulacra of phalluses and what a, yeah, yeah, that, oh, that's very serious and somber, and that's great, but we're going to make fun of some lady, some wealthy Palm Beach lady, for eating a facelift, is preposterous on its face.
But the plastic surgery is a problem that has affected both sides of the aisle.
And I'm not going to read the whole document, but it's very important.
Vatican writes this: thinking about Christian anthropology in light of certain future scenarios for humanity, advances in cosmetic surgery offer tools that significantly change the relationship with one's corporeality, with our bodies, with our having bodies.
A widespread cult of the body follows, tending toward a frantic search for a perfect figure, always fit, young, and beautiful.
A curious situation arises.
The ideal body is exalted, while the real body is not truly loved, since it is a source of limits, fatigue, and aging.
Cosmetic procedures create a relationship where the person, quote, is no longer his or her body, but owns a body from which arises the search for a borrowed identity.
This is really brilliant stuff, and I encourage you to read it from the Vatican.
Even if you're not Catholic, or even if you are Catholic, but you don't like the Pope, or I don't know, whatever your hobby horse is, you should read this.
This is very important because that last bit there is the key.
There's this relationship now where a person in his own mind is no longer his or her own body, but owns a body from which arises the search for a borrowed identity.
This is it.
There's this very new age-y idea that we're not really our bodies.
Our bodies have nothing to do.
We have bodies.
It's like a husk for our true selves, but we're not really our bodies.
And you would think that this would lead to a kind of ascetic mentality that would cause us to disregard our bodies, but that's not true.
Actually, especially in modernity, liberal modernity, which emphasizes self-ownership, which emphasizes autonomy, we come to obsess over the body even more.
When we cease to view the body as what we are, we begin to view the body as something we own.
View the body the same way Professor Jacob views his Camaro.
Something that he's always going to work on, something he's going to replace the parts on, something he's going to try to, he's going to take a hammer to.
You know, he takes a hammer to the Camaro and Clavicular takes a hammer to his face.
You see it a little bit.
I think you would probably say my former guest, Mr. Clavicular, is on the right, even though he endorsed Gavin Newsome.
He endorsed Gavin Newsome because he thinks Gavin Newsom's good looking.
And he said that to be good looking is the most important thing in the world.
So that notwithstanding, he seems, I guess he's more on the right if he were political, but whatever.
You get him and you get the transgenders.
But it's this obsession with the body when one ceases to view oneself as the body, when one views the body as a kind of commodity, you know, just something, just an accessory, just something that we have.
It's a big problem.
It's the culmination of liberalism.
It was always there.
I mean, that kind of idea has been around for 300 years.
It's been cooking and percolating, but now it's come to this absurd extreme.
And when something is visibly absurd, hitting yourself in the head with a hammer or chopping off your genitals or whatever it may, or even just getting the ugly plastic surgery.
I've never seen plastic surgery look good.
Can I tell you that?
I'm not saying corrective stuff like a soldier gets blown up in a war and he gets some corrective surgery to try to make it look like he was before.
I'm not saying things that correct a defect or an injury or an impairment.
I'm talking about people who are otherwise perfectly normal, perfectly as they should be, who want to augment something.
I've never seen it work out.
You remember for a while, the millennial girls, even some Zumer girls, were getting those horrible lip thing.
They're still kind of doing it.
We're girls who have perfectly beautiful lips, perfectly nice-looking lips.
They get the thing where it looks like that.
And it's never looked good.
It always looks bad.
Or they get the crazy facelifts.
Or they get, and I don't mean to shame anybody.
I know there are plenty of people who've gotten procedures out there.
I'm not, probably you shouldn't do any more of it, but I'm not knocking anybody.
We all make mistakes.
But what they'll tell you, what they'll tell you is, no, Michael, you only don't like the bad plastic surgery.
When it's really good, you don't even notice it.
We notice it.
And we're polite, but we notice it, and it doesn't look good.
I'm not saying everyone's a 10 out of 10 supermodel.
I'm just saying you look better the way you are than when you try to augment yourself and you turn yourself into some high school art project.
That's not a good way to think of yourself.
A canvas on which we can do whatever we want because we have total freedom of expression, art for art's sake.
Art is not for art's sake.
That's a modern nonsense.
You do things for some purpose, for some good that we can know with our reason.
That's what you should be doing.
If you want to stop obsessing about your body, there's so much body dysmorphia, then what you need to do is recognize that we are a body.
We are our bodies and we are souls.
And you have to tend to both of those things at once.
Okay.
Speaking of flesh, one last bit before we go.
James Tallarico.
We haven't done a good Tallarico clip in a few days.
Body Dysmorphia and Climate00:03:36
James Tallarico, Democrat Senate candidate in Texas, has just, another clip has come up from 2022 in which he's campaigning in Texas on vegetarianism.
We have, I think, heard more and more issues of animal welfare.
I think not just because it's the right thing to do and the moral thing to do, but also it's, as all of you know, necessary to fight climate change.
It is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption and that we try to respect animals in all aspects of society.
And so I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign.
So we have, we are, we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.
Some of you may know big nonas.
They were little nonas and then they opened up brick and mortar, some other big nonas.
But we just got our pizza from there today.
And so the point is that I think all of us, not just policymakers, but everyone has to take personal responsibility in this effort.
Mask on campaigning on not eating meat in Texas.
He's cooked.
He's a great candidate.
This is what they all said about it.
They said this about Budige.
They said this about Beto.
You remember, oh, he's a real, he's going to give us a run for our money.
You think, I look at this guy, I think he's a total joker.
Why would I?
And now he's got the mask on campaigning on tofu in Texas.
Give me a break.
But why is it not working?
Why is it not working for him?
Pete Buttigieg, there was this reboot.
It's like the 10th reboot of Pete Buttigieg.
They did the same thing to Beto.
It was in some magazine a week or two ago.
So here's Pete sitting at a diner, just a man's man.
He wore a beard and he's wearing flannel and isn't he just a regular guy?
Previously, he was the really wide-eyed white Obama, gay, progressive.
I checked every box four years ago.
He's just trying to...
This is the problem with these guys.
They're trying to be whatever seems fashionable at the moment.
And so they flop.
Occasionally they get lucky and they get in.
AOC was like that.
She got in at this moment when there was crazy wokeness, crazy environmentalism.
She snuck in and now she's in.
But for the guys who flop, it's very hard to reset when they tie their whole personality to a particular moment that falls out of fashion.
Now that wokeness is out of fashion, being gay is bad for Budigej.
Previously, being gay was good for Budigej because the whole country was super duper gay and his party was as gay as all get out.
So it gave him a benefit actually to be a little light in the loafers.
Now, not so much, actually.
The support, even just national support for gay marriage, quote unquote, has declined precipitously.
And this thing with Tallarico, he's saying you can't eat meat because of the environment.
Climate change is over.
Bill Gates declared climate change over the other day.
Greta Thunberg is now protesting that people are not burning oil.
That's the new Greta Thunberg protest.
So that's over.
And you got all these clips.
It's very hard to reinvent yourself.
This is one reason why, you know, there are temptations in politics and political media to just go along with whatever the popular thing is.
Whether the popular thing, I don't know, is what, free speech, Maha, COVID, nationalism, whatever mob fury is of the day.
There's a temptation to go along with it.
I try to resist it.
Outdated Priorities and Trump00:01:30
One, that doesn't really appeal to me as much.
And two, you're going to burn out.
Well, on the left, it's all the more so because their fads are totally preposterous.
So this guy, he burned out.
They went all in on outdated priorities.
Then look at someone like Trump.
Trump has looked the same, talked the same, and dressed the same for 50 years, maybe longer.
President Trump, love him or hate him, he sounds the same to every crowd he talks to.
He sounds the same today as he sounded in the last presidential election, as he sounded in the presidential election before that.
President Trump is talking about Iran today in the year of our Lord 2026 in precisely the same way he was talking about Iran in 1987.
And people make fun of him and they say he doesn't get it and he doesn't fit the bill and he's not made for this Republican Party and he's not as serious as this in the United States.
But that guy, that guy, as far as politicians go, he's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, as far as mere mortals go.
Pretty impressive.
And I think it gives him a lot more runway.
Okay, very exciting.
Taking things from the mortal plane to the immortal plane.
I'm very, very excited to talk about a new book that's out on Nero and St. Paul with my friend Kathy Lee Gifford, as well as her co-author, Dr. Brian Litfin.
The rest of the show continues.
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