The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 131 - The New New Testament ft. David Bentley Hart

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

Happy Easter! To celebrate, Michael sits down with American Orthodox theologian and scholar David Bentley Hart to discuss his new translation of the New Testament. Then, after all that Good News, a bunch of politically bad news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Easter to celebrate. We will talk to American Orthodox theologian and scholar David Bentley Hart to discuss his new translation of the New Testament. The New New Testament. Then after all that good news, a bunch of politically bad news. I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show. We have a very Eastery show today. I was going to, you know, obviously we missed April Fool's Day, which we could have done just a blank show. I could have just sat here and stared at the camera.

That might have been fun. We did, Prager University did release a blank video yesterday that I'm in. So if you haven't seen that, I urge you to go over. It's very educational. I highly recommend it. But we've got a wonderful show today. And the timing, you might say, is providential just after Easter. David Bentley Hart is an Orthodox Christian theologian and philosopher.

His major works include the beauty of the infinite, atheist delusions, the story of Christianity, many others. He's written articles everywhere. you've probably read him at first things or the Wall Street Journal, lots of other places. Now he has this new translation of the New Testament. I have wanted to get David on this show to talk about it since the project came out. It is a wonderful translation. It is being called fresh everywhere. I don't want to be glib about it, but it is fresh.

It does give a new life to a lot of verses that are probably familiar to a lot of people. And that's an ambitious project as far as things go, doing a translation of the New Testament. So we have David. David, thank you very much for being here. Thanks for inviting me. Before we get into these specific words and verses and theories, why do we need a new translation of the New Testament? What did you find lacking in other translations that prompted you to render your own? Oh, the typeface never satisfied me in the earlier one. No, well, first of all, let me say it's not my Easter yet, so I wish you a happy Easter

But I'm still in Lent, so forgive me if I'm a bit melancholy. Still penitential and absolutely, of course, absolutely. And a bit lightheaded from the fasting, which the Orthodox always take to an extreme. Well, I don't know if we need a new one, but I certainly think that it serves a certain purpose. for years when I was still teaching introductory courses, which you do when you're early on in your career, students would come with whatever the standard translation was that had been assigned, usually the revised standard. And like any other teacher who's dealt with the text, I spent a great deal of time saying, well, no, what the original Greek actually says. and in other times, well, the way in which the Greek actually says it is.

So it didn't seem to me to be an outlandish idea that maybe a translation could be produced that tries to say what the Greek says and to do it as well as possible, at least, in the voices of the various authors. I think that there's a kind of paternalist approach to a lot of translation. The assumption being that most Christians aren't particularly bright and don't really need to be confronted with any ambiguities or unfinished passages or moments of broken syntax

and that therefore it's the translator's job to tidy up all of that and in the course of so doing decide what the text means in those places where it's not always clear what the text means. It just seems to me that for Christians especially who don't have Greek, they may as well have some sense of what the Greek reads like. You've called the translation pitilessly literal. And I would like to focus on those moments where you say there were strange grammatical structures and the tenses change.

and it just reads as a little abrupt in ways that a lot of other translations don't bring to readers in the target language. You know, I think you've said elsewhere that one aspect of your translation is you do the police in different voices, and this does strike you. There are different voices throughout. Just to use Mark as an example, the word immediately appears frequently throughout the first chapter of Mark, not just in your translation, but, in other translations as well. Your translation, however, gives that immediacy a whole new life with these bizarre grammatical constructions at times. For example, in Mark chapter 1 verse 30, your translation reads, and Simon's mother-in-law was laid out stricken with fever. And immediately they tell him about her. And it sounds almost like how New Yorkers talk.

So I says to him this, and then he tells me this. And that... Well, I'm honest, everyone talks that way when they're telling stories from the past. You know, there's a, for generations, New Testament scholars have been taught that this thing called the historic past was a normal stylistic device that to the people of the time sounded like past tense or didn't seem out of place. This is nonsense. That was based on the misapplication of philological work that was true five or six centuries earlier in Greek. It has no systematic application to what's going on in the first century chemis. of the New Testament. What's really going on there is much more interesting. In the ancient world, of course, you didn't sit down and write a book. You dictated a book to an amanuensis.

There were only very few persons who have been able to practice handwriting and the materials and the skills. You composed by speaking. So Luke, who's a very educated person, writes in a syngrammatic style, to use a term I've invented, just to scare the philologists. which is he's writing like a treatise, and they're the tense as irregular and uniform, and very much as we would use them today if you were to sit down and write an historical narrative. But the other three are living voices captured by an amanuensis who's transcribing, sort of like the fidelity of a dictaphone. And if you suppress this tense changes, I think you do great damage to the text,

because they were not systematic. They don't, this, this, they are exactly as you say. It's the way we tell a story when we're, uh, and say,

among our friends. You know, I went to see my girlfriend. I went up and knocked on her door and she comes to the door there with a knife in her hand, you know, and I step back, you know,

the shift. You're relating stories of my recent past, but that's fine. That might just be providential. I, I think that, uh, I can imagine,

you know, looking at you. I, that might be. But it is, it's something we do intuitively, spontaneously, unsystematically, but for that very reason, it's expressive. And as opposed to the syndromatic style of Luke, it's what you might call a frastic style, just an expressive style.

And it captures the voice of someone who was not a scholar, not a writer, not a particularly educated man, probably. And in the case of Mark, I tried to capture the terseness and the abysherstness and the abruptness and the brokenness of the prose by trying to keep the English as terse as the Greek, which is kind of hard to do, but I think it's placed as I succeeded. What does it tell us? Obviously, I understand the purpose to it. I see its use in English as well as what I assume to be its use in Coyne Greek. What does it tell us about the experience of the text, how people would have experienced this text in the first and second centuries, and how Christians today

genial, regular old American Christians, what it does to our experience of that scripture and maybe our experience of faith to get it in this urgency and to get it in this immediate language. Well, I think the immediacy of the voice is instructive in two ways. One, it reminds us of how the early Christians heard these stories. They would have been read out, just as you didn't sit down to write, you didn't sit down to read for the most part. These were heard. And so little devices that many translators remove in Matthew, and all of them, but Matthew especially, says, Edel, look, in the old King James, that's behold, which even at the time was a somewhat hieratically ornamental term, not quite appropriate, but the look actually goes along with the style

of hearing, the manner in which the text was heard, it was almost like reading to a room full of children. Look, here comes a bunny. Only in this case, the bunny is a Magian from a Parthian priest, where it gets king. But at the same time also, the immediacy seems to me, and I find this even more in Paul than in the gospel writers, there is an urgency there. There is a vitality there as if somebody who's not really a gifted writer, not an educated man, is attempting to communicate something that has gripped him with absolute and undeniable power. And I think even in translating, even though I've been reading the Greek since I was a boy, because I just had the luxury of the classical education,

in translating, it struck me again just how extraordinarily passionate, urgent, what a sense I got from the text of men who would not necessarily have written anything at all if they didn't feel they had something very vital to communicate that they had experienced at a very deep level. I'd like to talk about Paul. You write, quote, the relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history. Theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous

consequences for the development of theology. It would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate's inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 512, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin. Now, in the ESV, that verse reads, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned. The KJV renders it just about the same. So death passed upon all men for all that have sinned. The instead of the ESV or the, the KJB, the DBA translation, your translation, reads,

therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man and death through sin, so all death pervaded, all humanity, whereupon, at which point, as if to say, all sinned. You've also criticized the American Protestant understanding of Paul to use your words, how does the genial Presbyterian get Paul so wrong? Well, you know, you've just asked about 12 different. You can answer them in any order you prefer. I mean, I want to point out that the ESV and the KGV translations also don't quite capture what happened in the Volgate, which is what had the theological consequences. In the Volgate, that last phrase becomes in quo Omnese Pekeweiland, in whom all sinned.

And because the pronoun quo had retained the masculine form of the Greek pronoun, F.O. Pontes, but the prior noun in the Latin went from being male, thanatos to female, feminine, masculine to feminine, more. What in the Greek looks like a reference to death becomes a reference to Adam. and with a different preposition, it seems to be saying that we in Adam said. Now, from the time of Augustine right up through the Council of Trent, when these issues were defined in Roman theology, that is the only verse that is routinely cited as evidence of an inheritance of original guilt. And it's simply, it's one of the large differences between Eastern and Western Christianity that in the east, the idea of original sin has no notion of an inherited culpability.

And I would argue that's an illogical notion in any event. It's like a square circle, the notion that you can inherit guilt. So there isn't the same rather grim Augustinian picture of humanity born as a Massa Damanda, already damnably guilty in the eyes of God. If you wanted a nice chilling picture of the direction in which that kind of a language can go, I can cite you some passages both from Augustine and Calvin that would keep you up at night. As for the other thing, I would say that the Protestant, it's not just the Protestant. I mean, Paul has been, Paul is a difficult figure to deal with.

But the more removed that Christian thought became from the age in which he lived, lived and the special concerns that tormented him and the intertestimental literature that he read, the further we move from appreciating what's most important in his theology. And a new emphasis arose. I mean, most Protestants being inheritors of the late Augustinian tradition think that Paul's principal concern is how we're justified, that is. By justified, they don't mean really made just or even proved just, but extrinsically pronounced just through the unmerited grace of Christ's sacrifice, which supposedly pleases

the Father because there he pours out his wrath on sin. Now all of that's, none of that's actually in Paul. Some of the language there is based on distortions of Paul. Paul's actual teaching is very different. I mean, the word de chaos is or its verbal cognates doesn't mean justified in that sense. It means literally either vindicated or corrected, made new. And it's actual, that aspect of Paul's thought shows up in Galatians and in Romans 9 through 11, because in the first case, he's arguing with new Christians in Galatia from the Gentile

world, trying to explain to them that they don't need to obey the law of Moses to be unfolded within the covenant, because the covenant goes back to Abraham, not just to Sinai. And in Romans 9 through 11, one of the most notoriously misread passages in Christian history, Paul's concern is principally how church and Israel are related. Basically, did God forsake his covenant with Israel in embracing the Gentiles? And in the end, he comes to the conclusion, no. He raises the possibility that God created vessels of wrath to show the power of his dereliction

when he showed mercy to some and not to others. But then he concludes in Chapter 11 that this too is not what's going on. That's a dreadful possibility for Paul. What he concludes is, in fact, as he says quite explicitly, God bound everyone in disobedience so that he could show mercy to everyone. But that's not actually the thing that gets me most of not reading Paul, because all of that is actually, those are actually not central concerns for Paul. If you actually go through all the Pauline literature, the definitely authentic epistles, and those that are definitely in his own. school, even if they aren't directly from his mouth. He's very much a man, he's a Hellenistic Jew of the first century.

He believes that he lives in an age that is passing away. Another age is coming, and that this age is under the dominion of ancient angelic powers, that in Christ these powers on high, and Paulson, Thrones, Dominion's, principalities, powers and we don't always appreciate that these are angelic beings who occupy the planetary and stellar spheres in the cosmology of the time and below the earth have been conquered that this whole cosmos and there's a reason why I retain the word cosmos there too has that was enslaved to death and to these mutinous or incompetent or apostate powers have been conquered Christ took them captive, he ascended on high, and in 1 Corinthians 15, you get the great synthesis.

Ultimately, the whole cosmos having been restored, a new age will dawn in which Christ hands over the cosmos to be directly governed by God, no longer through the intermediate agency of these incompetent or fallen angels, and God will be all in all, and the whole cosmos will be transfigured. This is the burning heart of falsiology. It runs through all of his writings, but we tend not to notice it because we don't recognize what the language is. For one thing, even the words principality's powers, we tend to think he's talking in terms of human political arrangements. And for some reason, even though this is ubiquitous in his writings, we tend to look past us, and especially in the West, I would say. I mean, that's also part of the Western inheritance.

The notion of salvation is cosmic conquest, is a little bit better preserved in the east. Sorry, I won't have some time there, but you did, as I say, ask a dozen questions. And you gave me the answers. I want to get on to the cosmos. It's an excellent place to launch from because you do maintain some words in your translation that we would not usually see, one of which is cosmos. For instance, instead of a blessed or the poor in spirit,

you write how blissful the destitute, abject in spirit. Instead of in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God in John chapter one, you maintain logos. You say in the origin there was the logos and then finally cosmos. Instead of for God so loved the world as we can all recite, you write for God so loved the cosmos. What do blissful logos and cosmos offer us that blessed word, and world do not. Yeah, well, what they don't offer you, obviously, is a great deal of literary felicity. I mean, obviously, it leads to somewhat awkward English. But then again, I'd point out that in none of those cases, am I translating good Greek? So the ultimate effect is sort of an even draw. But to me, it's very important. For instance, well, Cosmo, let me start there, because that connects to what I was saying about Paul.

We use the word world today to mean two things generally. One, the planet we're walking around all the other, the human world. And by that we mean just the way people are, the moral order, the political arrangements by which they live, the social order. And if we use the word world in our translation, we lose, I think, a vital aspect of the way first century Jews and Christians and pagan saw reality. When the Gospel of John, for instance, talks about Christ is coming from above into the cosmos, he means just that, passing down through all the spheres. Cosmos is an incomparably, it doesn't, it not only does it not merely mean the human world, it doesn't even mean merely the physical world.

It includes the world of spirits, of angels, it includes the whole of the heavens, the fixed stars. the planetary spheres, the ethereal realm, the aerial realm, the subterranean realm. It means the whole of everything. And there is, especially in John and Paul, but also elsewhere, very much a clear narrative structure to their language of salvation. It is about this enclosed reality of an entire cosmos from the heights to the depths, enslaved to death. being invaded by a divine conqueror, transfigured and redeemed. I think all of that is all. We lose that cosmology, and a lot of the language, especially, say, again, of John, becomes needlessly obscure.

Although when you restore it, it becomes rather frighteningly unfamiliar, too. When you really look at what the gospel is saying, the way it's imagining the reality in which the story of salvation unfolds, It's an alien picture of reality. So then, of course, we have to adjust. I was trying to say, how does the gospel survive the shift in world fears? I'm sorry, please go ahead. No, just whatever the case, that's the translation decision about which I get the most complaints, not translating cosmos as world.

And that's the one which I'm absolutely most adamant. It is an absolute folly to translate that as world, because it just, just gives all the wrong impressions by the usage of the word today. The way that you translate Satan struck me to all of this language, it being fresh, it being different, it being unfamiliar, is striking and it makes you approach the gospel in an unfamiliar way. You refer to Satan variously, but by what his name means, the accuser, the slanderer, Satan means the adversary. But you don't do this with all names, So you don't refer to Peter only as the rock or something, which as a matter of translation

might conjure up images of Dwayne Johnson weeping bitterly as the cock crows. I imagine Peter was a lot like to. Of course. Yeah. Pretty burly guy, you know. Why do you translate the name Satan? What is it about the character of Satan, but not other names? It's not a name for one thing.

And there are two words. And Satan has always translated as accuser. When you see slanderer, the Greek there is all the aviolis or diabolos, or diabolos, sorry, in proper Greek you would say, the avalos. And these are titles, they're ancient titles. They're not proper names. When it comes to proper names, all proper names have some meaning if you go far back and And there's no need to say, Peter, where it's important in Matthew, I note the play on words on this rock.

But in the case of certain titles that have become for us just titles, whose actual meaning, which would have been audible to the first century Christians, has been lost. I restore the meaning, or I translate the meaning rather than retain it as an opaque signify. higher, so to speak. So I don't use the word Christ either. I use the term the anointed or the anointed one. The Satan, Os Satanus, is obviously a figure in Hebrew scripture, but also change his character somewhat in the Intertestamental period. But it is basically just that. It means that a prosecuting attorney, basically. Lawyer. Satan is a lawyer. But we knew that, didn't we? So, and the Avalos, well, we have the word devil, which may come from the Avalos.

I tend to think it comes from an earlier Indo-European route, like the Toifle or the devil in English come from the same Indo-European roots as the words for Deva in the Indo-European language. And that's not important. But what is important is the Avalos, the Greek word, just, it really means a slant. or one who divides with false speech. What was the other one you asked about? Macari. Ah, blissful.

Now that's interesting. Where the text says, Eveliimonos, you know, eveliominoe, I leave the term blessed. But Macarius is an interesting word because it doesn't just mean blessed in the sense that, oh, he's fortunate.

At least it doesn't have just that connotation. or he's comfortable or he's well off. It has, it has an, both etymologically, and when you see how it's used in texts outside of scripture, it has a special intensity. It means bliss and originally meant a bliss akin to that of the gods. And so, you know, it appealed to me to write blissful. Again, now that's an example of a translation. Some people love it, some people hate it.

No one seems to be neutral. I do love it. I love it. The images that it evokes are really, it strikes me really beautifully. Well, Timothy Johnson said it evoked images of stoners, which is fine with me. I mean, I was born in the 60s. I was stoned while I was reading it. Maybe there's some relation there. My final question is not about the age, the age to come or the age that you were writing about that you're translating from the first century of the second century. My question is about this age. You've written extensively about the new atheists, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins. You've rhetorically just smacked them around for years, very powerfully so. It seems to me that they are on the decline. They're in mortal decline, and there is a hunger on campus for some meaning. I think it's why Jordan Peterson's book is selling so well. I think it's why everyone

is so sick of the shrieking girl at Yale and all of this. Is your example, surely? Well, he's a very popular example. That's why I bring him up. I think even that, this is, you know, there's an age of, I think there's a sense that the only moral thought these days, the only moral framework is if it feels good, do it, and there's no meaning to anything. And so even the suggestion that one ought to make one's bed and clean one's room is

earth-shattering to a lot of people. Do you share my hope for this culture right now? for the very near coming age, or do you think we're just going a hell in a handbasket? Well, okay, let me unpack that. I think you're right, the period of the new... I mean, writing about the new atheist was convenient because it meant not having to construct straw men, they more or less built themselves out of straw. And that was a silly group.

And that was a publishing fad. I don't know if it was ever quite a... The movement they imagined it was, but it answered a certain... for a niche market in publishing. I don't know if there's a new hunger for meaning. I think there's a perennial hunger that expresses itself differently from time to time, from age, stage, from period to period. I hope it's not a hunger that Jordan Peterson would be able to fulfill because I think he's a

hack, but a mediocrity who's made a lot of money by doing from a market. a sort of, from a different angle, much what a new age writer would do. This may be your angle to convert Jordan. I had him on the show, and I tried to get him to announce that he was getting baptized or something. But this is like the good cop, bad cop, maybe. This angle, perhaps yours will work. My disagree. I have much profound.

I just think that it's a pastiche of reasonably bad scholarship by a second-rate mind. I don't care what is aims. are one way or the other. I just think it's silly. But it's profitable. But maybe you're right. Maybe what it answers to, but I don't know how popular he is. I haven't seen his work popular with anyone that I wouldn't have expected it to be popular with. That is, people who already like to hear that they should make their beds. So I think that's not where you look. You look rather whether there's a fatigue in general with complacent disbelief. And I have seen that. And the hunger can take many different forms.

It can express itself. I mean, it doesn't fit into a single obvious political pattern or social. But what it does, what I have seen is more and more students and students and faculty, too, who feel much more comfortable talking about the sense that they're not, you know, that they find the materialist view of reality. not only unfulfilling but implausible, that they want more. I have encountered that more in the past five years than I had in the previous 15. So I think you may be right about that.

Where it will lead, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if we're going to hell in a handbasket. I always tend to think we're already there. See, I don't actually tend to idealize the past. I remember, you know, I'm just old enough to remember a Christian America in which people could go to church on Sunday and then go cast a vote for George Wallace a couple days later. So I don't have a warm, rosy picture of the Christian America of the past. What I do believe is that the desire for God is a natural eros in the soul that can't

be repressed and sooner or later it's going to break out in individual. and in whole generations in new ways. And I think you're right, I can only say in a vague way. I'm not sure where it's going. But they're at least, they're no longer intimidated by the new atheists. They don't believe that they enjoy the rational high ground. And I think part of that is there have been very effective answers, not just for me, but for a lot of you pointed out just how irrational and fideistic

and intolerant and rather stupid. this movement was. You know, I was asked a question at Ithaca College about the new atheists, basically. And I do hope that there is this response now, and I think we're seeing it happen, which is not sentimental, it isn't shallow, it involves serious words and new fresh translations and serious scholarship, and which basically punches the intellectual bullying and the absurd intellectual bullying of the new atheists write back and says, no, they don't occupy the rational high ground. They don't occupy any particularly intellectual or sophisticated ground at all, and all shallows are clear. Yeah, there's not a single genuinely distinguished philosopher among them.

The only trained philosopher is Daniel Dennett, but that's different from saying distinguished. I think a more honest atheist aware of the relative plausible. of atheism or theism or something as yet to be defined would be someone like Thomas Nagel who is unable to believe, doesn't want to believe, has a real revulsion at the idea of belief, as frankly all of us do it at times, you know, but nonetheless recognizes how deep the problems are just at a logical level with the project of a metaphysical naturalism or physicalism. And I think the veil of illusion

has been somewhat pulled back. I think more and more sophisticated answers to the very unsophisticated books that the new atheists produced have made more and more people realize that these are not rationalists. They're just fundamentalists of a particularly dreary and intolerant kind.

Well, that's a good reason to hope. That's a good place to leave it on an Easter episode or an Easter adjacent episode, post-Easter for us, and still in the fasting and penitential period for you. Well, happy heretic Easter to you. Listen, I not only get called a heretic for my religion, I get called a heretic for many, many other reasons. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I didn't talk politics.

I did. I will, I will tell the only, I promised, David, we would not talk politics. And another reason I don't want to talk politics with David is he's much smarter than I am. So I don't want to even open up that. Thank you. The only thing I will suggest, and we won't talk politics online, but because I've so enjoyed your wonderful translation and so much of your writing for years, I could send you my literary magnum opus, which I published last year.

But I will send that in the mail. It's much lighter reading. It would be the blank pages. And if perhaps there could be translations, there's, there are ample opportunities, but I will say I probably took a fair bit more out of your translation of the New Testament. Well, maybe we should talk politics sometime. The problem is that I've not, since I dislike both political parties in this country, the major political parties, ferociously. That I only, you know, I abstained so long from voting for the major party that I don't

know if I have a right now to complain at the state of affairs that it bothered me. But anyway, all right. I think there are, I think there are probably a lot of people watching and listening who would agree with that take as well. David, thank you so much for being here. David Bentley Hart, you can read him all over the place. I've been reading him for years, and I really hope the fear with things like a new translation of the New Testament or the writing of a distinguished philosopher and theologian is that

it reaches a smaller audience or a more distinguished audience, and I hope many more people will engage with it because the reading can be blissful. David, thank you for being here. Well, thank you. Take care. Now we've got to talk about politics. now that I promise David we wouldn't talk about politics, but now we have to talk about politics,

and I've got to sign off. If you are not on DailyWire.com, I'm sorry. You cannot get the right. And there is, we've gone through all this good news. Now you've got to get the bad news, because there's some political bad news, but there's a glimmer of hope in there too. Go to DailyWire.com.

Why? You get me, you get the Andrew Claven show. You get the Ben Shapiro show. You can subscribe for $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership. That's okay. You get the shows. You get to ask questions in the mail bag. Blah, blah, blah.

Who cares? No one wants that. This is the real key. This is the real key, folks. The Leftist Tears Tumblr. Now, look, I was without this for a week. I was in New York. I was in one of the lefty capitals of the entire world.

And I almost drowned. I made it through by the skin of my teeth. I had straws up, you know, trying to breathe in like people in, you know, war-ravaged countries. Make sure you have the Leftist Tears Tumblr. It's the only FDA-approved device to handle all those salty de-leftist-lecious, la-la-la-la-la. Salty, delicious leftist tears. We'll be right back with all of the bad political news.

All right, here's the news roundup. Here are the things you haven't heard about. Maybe you have heard, but you haven't heard the whole story. Facebook is now fact-checking photos. They're fact-checking your photos. We knew this was going to happen. This is being reported as though this is something new. This is nothing new.

I actually had the experience of this on Election Day in 2016, and it wasn't really written about it wasn't reported. I posted a photo making fun of Hillary Clinton and Democrat voters, you know, just a little joke meme or something. My account was shut down for 24 hours. My account was suspended on Facebook. They've been doing this for a long time. Now it's being reported that they're going to fact check images. How are they going to do that? I don't know. They have all of our information. Fact checking is not a good thing. Fact checking is one of these new euphemisms that we use, fact checkers or fact checking. It's a euphemism used by the left to mean left-wing opinion that we will present as fact. That's what fact checking is.

It's why sites like Politifact lean so far to the left. They're much harder on Republicans than they are on Democrats. It's why now when you look for right-wing sites on the internet, on Google,

they will serve you left-wing fact-checkers in there. It's just another euphemism and they're trying to say, we have facts and all you have are your feelings or whatever, and that's why we have to have people who say that facts don't care about your feelings.

It's really disingenuous. It's really dishonest. This also is funny, being juxtaposed with what former Facebook Vice President, Andrew Bosworth wrote in 2016 in a memo where he wrote, quote, maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack, coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is good. Okay, he's been criticized for this.

He's now disavowed that. He said, I didn't believe it at the time. No, no, I don't really believe it. But I actually agree with him. I don't know that it's that it is connecting people, but it's the freedom. It's the freedom. This is the argument against freedom or for freedom, which is that freedom involves risk and freedom involves the possibility of death.

When you have freedom, maybe someone's going to abuse that freedom and hurt someone else and attack someone or bully someone or whatever. That is an actual negative cost of freedom, but that is the price. That's why freedom isn't free. That's the expression, freedom isn't free, means there is a cost to your freedom. Ronald Reagan talked about this in a time for choosing. He said, the only way that you can be guaranteed to have peace is surrender. When did life become so dear and peace so sweet that they would be purchased at the hands of chains and slavery?

You can have this totalitarian malaise where attacks aren't quite likely to happen, except by the government on you, except by the people with the power against you. Or you can have freedom. and freedom involves a lot of risk. Unfortunately, Facebook clearly wants to have its cake and eat it too. It changes its tune depending on the news cycle. They're very upset that Republicans are using their tools and succeeding. When Democrats use their tools, no one cared. Everyone was happy.

It was wonderful. It was a great strategy. Now that Republicans are doing it, they're very upset. They're going to keep fighting it. This is going to really further hurt the conservative media industry. It's already put some people out of business. it's already put others, non-political people out of business. You're seeing a lot of thought pieces, think pieces coming out today, saying, oh, it doesn't

really matter. Conservatives are whining. They're exaggerating. This is targeted. This is to put us out of business. And hopefully something else will come up. But don't believe a word of it when they say this isn't trying to attack conservatives. That's explicitly the point.

In other news, students at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have been given extra credit for attending a white privilege conference. Some of the classes at this conference are breaking the chains of capitalism and white supremacy, the whiteness of law, and how whiteness kills. And the last part, that is true. Whiteness can lead to skin cancer. That is true. So it can kill.

It's very sad when that happens. That's why I try to remain a little swarthy. Keep my tan all year long. They're getting extra credit for this. And I spoke to students last week. I was on the campuses last week. Some students said that there were professors who won't call on white men. They'll call on every aggrieved intersectional group in that hierarchy of victimhood.

They'll call on all of them first before they will call on white men. We're talking about religion a lot for this Easter episode and the New Testament episode. White privilege is original sin for atheists. That's all it is. It's just a religious construct for people who pretend that they don't have religion. Everybody's got to serve somebody, and that's what they do. Atheists have a lot of religious concepts. They have the carbon tax.

That's their version of buying indulgences. That's what white privilege is. And it's the reason why when you disagree with it, they attack you like you are attacking somebody's religion. Because they don't hold it like a rational view or like a view that is scientific or something like that. They view it as a religious tenet. And so when we debate this with them, we have to understand we're debating religion. We're not debating some sociological observation. This is all very not good news for the culture, but this is good news for politics.

And I'll close on this point. 50% of likely voters now approve of President Trump's job in office. This is according to the daily presidential approval poll, 50% of likely voters approved of President Trump's job in office, 49% disapprove. This outpaces Barack Obama in the approval ratings. At this time, on this date in Barack Obama's presidency, he only had a 46% approval rating. Donald Trump has a 50% one. Now, you might be shocked to hear that because you watch CNN or something,

and you think he had a 3% approval rating. 50%. We did a whole show on the silent majority. We did a whole show on Roseanne representing the silent majority. Look, Roseanne's ratings blew every other sitcom out of the water for a long time. Why? Because it represented that silent majority. This is what we're seeing. Now, we shouldn't forget Barack Obama had a pretty good approval rating, and he got killed in the 2010 midterm elections.

He got blown out of the water. That said, models only work in normal times. President Trump is not a normal character. With Barack Obama, people really liked him personally, but they just despised his policies. We don't really see that with Donald Trump. If anything, people don't like him personally, but they do like what he's doing in office. So this could be not just pretty good news for Republicans. This could be excellent news for Republicans. CNBC is reporting if the midterm elections were held today, five Senate Democrats would lose to Republicans. That's according to surveys by Axios and Survey Monkeys.

In six of ten states with seats up for grabs, President Trump, approval rating is higher than his national rating. This is all good news. We shouldn't get complacent, but there are two things happening here. What you're observing is this awful culture and all of the culture makers, the universities and Hollywood and the technology companies like Facebook that pretend to be tech companies, but really they're media companies, the largest publishing company in the history of the world. You're seeing all the culture makers destroying the culture, doing their best to destroy this culture and knock it down. And then what you're seeing is the people who have to live in that culture fighting back and they're reacting and they don't like it. It's why Hollywood has

spit out how much garbage in the last however many years, including reboots, including nostalgia, reboots, Will & Grace. The one that people like is Roseanne. The one that's different. The one that talks to reality. The one talks to the silent majority. You're seeing this at the polls, these people reacting and saying, huh, you know, first of all, clearly the silent majority isn't totally silent because they're answering these polls with some of their, um, some of their voice. They are saying, oh, 50%, okay, we approve of what he's doing. But you're seeing them pushing back and pushing back against that culture. Keep fighting back because they have all of the cultural power. So what we can do is go to the ballot box and be prepared because if they beat us,

if they even sort of plausibly beat us, even though all of history is for the Democrats to win these midterm elections, they are going to clobber us with it. They are going to clobber us as hard as they can. They're already trying to shut down our venues that we have in new media and our few strongholds in the traditional media industry. Don't let them do it. You have to be vigilant. We have to work twice as hard. But there is a glimmer of hope there.

A little hope, a little good news for this Easter. There's a lot of other good news too. I am Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. We've got a lot more to talk about, but we'll just have to do it tomorrow. See you then. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

Executive producer Jeremy Boring. Senior producer Jonathan Hay. Supervising producer Mathis Glover. Our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua O'Vera. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.