The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 16 - What Is Western Civilization?

Episode Date: August 24, 2017

Oxford classicist Spencer Klavan sits down in studio to discuss what the West is and is not. Then, Kassy Dillon and Fleccas Talks join the Panel of Deplorables to talk Fake News, Trump's thrashing Congress, and the health benefits of the death penalty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the left attempts to finish the Umayad Caliphate's job at the Battle of Tours by dismantling the Western civilization we hold so dear, while the old right tries to make it a matter of melanin, we ask classicist, scholar, and immortal heir to the multiverse Spencer Claven, a simple question, what is the West? Then lone conservative Cassie Dillon and Fleckis talks joined to discuss President Trump's congressional smackdown, Florida's finally killing white guys who kill black guys, and the Girl Scouts outrage that the boys. Boy Scouts are becoming the Girl Scouts. How transphobic are they? Plus, the mailbag. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Nulls show. Western civilization is all the rage these days. A hot topic of debate.

Here is Tucker Carlson and President Trump describing Western civilization. Tucker on his show and President Trump in his Warsaw address. President Trump's speech in Poland last week may have been the single best thing he has said out loud since entering politics. And for one reason, it was a rousing defense of Western Civilization. We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand new frontiers. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? That's a very good question. The left hopes the answer to that question,

is no. They have at least since the time of Jesse Jackson marching on college campuses said, hey, hey, ho, Western Siv has got to go. Here's why. That triggered the alarm bells for me. Am I wrong in making this parallel between Steve King, President Trump, and white nationalism? Trump seemed to embody and enshrine that belief that the West should steal itself for a clash of civilizations with other. cultures, other beliefs, which pretty much spelled out, you know, the Muslim world. So this is not a speech he could have given really anyplace else. And this is a white America, America first kind of speech. Well, as he talks on the left about white nationalists, let's ask a white nationalist himself.

Richard Spencer and the late Sam Francis also get in on the battle to define Western civilization. Quotation from Samuel Francis is from the mid-90s. And he actually said this at a speech at an American Renaissance conference. He said, the civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. Whether you're on the left or the right, many people seem to imagine that we could just find. a black African and dress him up in a Harris tweed vest or give him a pipe or some snuff and maybe a bowler cap and he'll become an Englishman or something like that. Or, you know, in another way, like the neocons, we describe Western civilization in this totally abstract term where it's, you know,

some vague ideas about individualism and political institutions like democracy and so on. Steve King is not doing that. Now, they all seem to get this wrong, all of those people. And that is why last week we talked to a Charlottesville, Unite the Right, Attendee, about the Alt-Right right and how they define Western civilization. And today, we're joined by an in-studio guest, Spencer Claven, a classicist, and obviously heir to the, to the multiverse. Now, I can't help but notice, Spencer Claven is here. I can't help but notice the coincidence of the name. Are you related to Richard Spencer? You know, not genetically, and as I understand it, that's basically the only kind of relationship that he acknowledged. So I would have to say no, unfortunately. I'm not really.

Not genetically, certainly not spiritually. Definitely. No. It doesn't exist. Spencer, a very simple question. What is the West? Boy, oh, boy. You know, it's funny.

One of my great regrets as a doctoral student is that I don't get to spend a lot of time firing up the old Tor browser. And, you know. Only when you're buying contract killing. and illegal drugs, I assume. I thought we weren't going to talk about that on this. That's all right. Marshall will cut it out, right? You'll cut out how Spencer Claven engages in contract. No, I'm going to turn up the audio on that part.

Okay, good, thanks. We wouldn't want that to get out. Is it too late for me to cover my picture? Look, I mean, I'm not up on the whole Keck and Pepe the Frog of it all, so I might be getting some of this. But it seems to me, whenever I listen to the All-Right on this stuff, I'm amazed at how exactly like the radical progressive left, they sound. I mean, you basically, Richard Spencer is basically at the point of accusing people of cultural appropriation, which I'm pretty sure was the province solely of the far left.

But on this particular point, I think that the radical progressive left and the alt-right are almost in exact, complete agreement. I mean, you have the alt-right chanting things like blood and soil, right? Right, which amounts to the assertion that basically what it is to be, Western is to be, born into a certain gene pool within. a certain set of geographic barriers. And that's basically what a lot of people on the left want to claim is true of Western civilization that all of our lofty ideals and principles are essentially just window dressing

for a kind of white supremacy, right? I mean, this is back in, I think there was a 19708. Edward Said basically makes this argument in Orientalism that it's all kind of a, Western identity is just a way of justifying to oneself, the superiority of whites. Of white people. single European.

Right, exactly. I take a slightly different view on the subject, by which I mean basically the exact opposite view. Just totally so. Slightly 180 degrees. That's right. If you just make a slight turn to everything that is not that, then you'll get what I think. I mean, look, one of the crowning achievements of actual Western civilization is to develop

slowly over time and space this idea of a nationhood whose citizenship doesn't depend on ethnic or geographic determiners. I mean, you really, I think this really kind of, you can see it beginning with the Stoics, who, you know, the ancient Greek, set of ancient Greek philosophers. And the Stoics have this idea, which exists before them, but which they developed in a really robust way,

of the Logos, right? The Logos being this universal, sort of rational principle or rationality that pervades the whole universe. And things like ideas about, you know, right and wrong, and logic, those all come under the head of this Logos, which exists everywhere. And that's kind of where you start to get this idea

or to justify this idea that there might be a universal civilization because you could have a society of people who no matter where they are or what race they were. They live by the Lagos. There's an eternal law, an eternal reason that isn't confined to your government.

Right, and you see this again, it plays out elsewhere. Like, Cicero, near the end of the Roman Republic, he writes that on the Republic, And he talks about a law that will not be different at a different time or a different place, different in Athens and in Rome, but it'll be the same for everyone. And that law is justice, this idea of right and wrong and good and bad that kind of pervades the whole universe. And so again, that you start to develop that idea of a society that transcends location and space.

until, you know, a minor event occurs in the Middle East around, oh, I don't know, the year zero. That's a coincidence around when time started. It's surprisingly, that's right, yeah. Jesus Christ is born, and one of the claims that Jesus Christ, I think, makes about himself, and that's certainly made about him, is that he is the Logos as a human being, right? That the word, the Logos was made flesh. And so now you have a person claiming to actually pronounce the universal moral law. law. And as Christ himself says, you know, allegiance to him is what defines membership in the

universal society, right? Whoever does the will of God, that is my brother or my mother or my sister. My kingdom is not of this world, meaning it's not in a specific time or place. And so out of that tradition, then, you get people like Augustine who start to kind of theologize and to Christianize the Ciceronian idea of a universal civilization. Christ even goes further. He says, If you don't hate your mother and your brother and your sister, then you can't follow them. If you don't renounce your parochial and superficial bonds, then you can never bond yourself with the logos, with the eternal law. Yeah, I mean, I really think there he's almost building on the call of Abraham way back in

Genesis, right? God says to Abraham, leave your home and your brothers and your father and everything that you've known and be defined by my call to you. defined by what God pronounces as truth. And you know, actually, Paul, too, confronted the Stoics and the Epicureans in acts. And you usually kind of read this as an adversarial confrontation between Christianity and Greek philosophy. But basically, I mean, Paul quotes Erratus at them who had strong Stoic roots.

So basically what he's saying is, look, you Greek philosophers, you already believe this. You already believe in this universal society. I'm telling you that the king of that society was huge. here on earth in a particular person. And so then that gets fed into the Christian tradition with Augustine and with Aquinas. So effectively, this massive major strain of Western thought is the opposite of blood and soil.

It's the only idea that really effectively contravenes what everyone else believes, which is that you are in a particular place in time and genetic material and that's what makes you who you are. I think you just made all the alt-right guys' heads explode. I think because for most of those guys, I think they read a summary one time excerpt of Thus Spake Zoroastra and the Belker. I think that's basically the canon of those great thinkers.

Well, we were talking before the show about, you know, analyzing the portion of Aristotle where he quotes the bell curve. That's right. Well, I remember, you know the Greek better than I do, but I do remember in Aristotle, he often expounds upon how we must secure the existence of our people in future for white children. Did I get the translation wrong? You know, that's actually, that's book 15 of the metaphysics. It's a lost book.

It didn't get transmitted over, but the alt-right has a secret code that allows them to read the minds. You know, I read on, I guess that's like Vox Popoli or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Which, incidentally, I think, you know, the, it seems like a seminal feature of all-right discourse is like purposefully misspelling important words and ideas, which goes really well with the willful misunderstanding of crucial concepts. But anyway, I read on Box Populi this assertion that, you know, if only the founders had kept the title of the rights of Englishmen instead of using the concept of natural law for propagandistic purposes. So it's like, oh, it's a living document. We know what was really there.

We know what they really meant. If they could write it today. So you're telling me that you trace the West to Jews and gay guys. And this, by the way, they are going to call us cucks. That is going to be in the comment section. Here's my question for you about that. If an alt-writer calls a gay guy a cuck, does that mean that there's an alt-writer out there somewhere sleeping with a guy? This is the Clavins theorem, Spencer Clavins' theorem.

This is going to become a major question for alt-right thinkers, a paradox of sorts. That is really good. So you think, I will push back a little bit. Is there no geographic component, were these ideas not carry? by people, specific people in specific times and places? No, you make a really good point. I mean, before sort of the stoic philosophy that I was talking about, you have people like Aristotle who expressly tie the whole ethical universe

to the polis, to this particular city in which you're living. And there is another important strand of Western thought that you have to kind of incorporate when you're talking about this, which is the sort of development of the idea of the nation state as kind of the goldilocks of political entities. political entities, right? Big enough to defend individual. Not too big, not too small, right, exactly. The right size to defend individual liberty in the real world. But the thing about that is, you know, that acknowledges a fact about the world, which is that we live in countries and are related

to people and have ties to this particular life. But the whole project of the West, I would argue maybe even a definitive project of the West, is the struggle over, you know, centuries to reconcile that fact with this beautiful notion of the universal society. And basically, I think what people come up with is this concept that your particular nation might somehow embody or be a model of the universal society. This comes up a lot in Aquinas,

but you know where it really comes up is in the idea for America. John Winthrop, the model of Christian chair. And I know talk about making the all rights head explode, the concept of a creedal nation is like, you know, anathema to them. But that, I mean, the founders read their Cicero, they read their Bible. This is a concept that was not alien to them. And essentially, the whole idea is to unify the idea of a nation state with the idea of the universal society and get a country to whom you can belong, in which you can be a citizen solely by in the ideal world, solely. by ascribing or professing fealty to a certain series of ideas, life, liberty, liberty, equality under the law, etc.

Pursuit of property, private property, sure. That's right, shooting people at will. Might be in there somewhere? Oh, no, sorry, that's not, right, yeah. That's in some addendum. Right now, nationalism has come to the fore as a response to Davos, basically, is a response to these globalized elites who want to get rid of many features of the nation state. And so we have a robust defense of nationalism.

We have a robust defense of Western civilization. And it seems that those defenses are often totally missing the point of the nation and of the Western civilization. How do we defend it? How do we pick up like our forefathers in Philadelphia did? How do we pick up Cicero and bring our civilization into its next phase, into the future, and to preserve our country. Well, you know, a good start would be to actually read Cicero. I don't want to do that.

It's very long. I forgot. You're the guy who wrote a book with no word in it, right? I have certainly read much more than I have written. That is. But all in all, I don't want to watch YouTube videos. I don't want to read these things. Right.

Sorry. Okay, so scrap that idea. Scratch the idea of actually reading the canon. Look, you know, this is a thing, as I'm sure we'll shortly discover around the panel. You know, my job is basically to sit in dusty attics, with books and read about people from 2,000 years ago. So I basically digest information at like a 2,000 year delay. So when you get down to sort of, I'm hoping that people like,

you can answer the question of how do we put these ideas into practice in the modern world. I will say this, it's not through nostalgia, this idea that, you know, we're going to basically resurrect the Ciceronian or the Aristotelian or any number of ancient ideals by living the life that Cicero or Aristotle lived, by throwing our iPhones away and living according to the, this is going to say, living according to the sexual morality of 300 years ago, right? That's just, that just doesn't happen.

That's not how the world works. What I think we have to do is, you know, another kind of Aristotelian idea is one of form and matter, right, that you have the particular form, the particular matter in which things are embodied, but then you have the concepts and the ideas, which, as we've been talking about, are universalizable. And I think what we really have to do is figure out how to embody

the ideals that we've been talking around in the 21st century, given all of the new facts that are available to us. And you bring up an interesting point on academics, on the elites. You, I think the guys who are Western chauvinists and who are basically white identitarians, they try to pride themselves on being intellectually superior. You know, they read the bell curve for a part of it and they think they have an high IQ and that they've read. But they don't really know anything about their civilization. You have read all the books. You have a high IQ.

What is the role of elites in conservatism and in America? They've gotten a bad rap over the last year and a half. There's been a revolt in many ways against the elites. How do we use them? What is the role of an elite? Yeah. No, this is really tricky. And I start to sweat under the collar.

It's like, you know, here I am. Tor and feather you. That's right. You're doing a doctorate in classics. It's like it doesn't get more kind of like airy-fairy than that. Was it you got rejected from gender studies. Is that why you had to choose classics?

You know, I gave them my best. But I wasn't quite queer enough. I think it was one degree further. No. I do think that some of the criticism that have been leveled at the elites are partially justified in the sense that in this country we have become, we being the Chardonnay sipping,

re cheese eating intellectual elites, we have become disconnected from the basic everyday concerns that animate 90% of the population. And I think that the election of Donald Trump is evidence of that. The fact of how shocked I was by the number of people who sympathies with a man that I find abhorrent it tells me that there's something going on that I'm not keyed into, or at least there was, and I'm trying now to. I have a metaphor about this, which will take me a second, but bear with me. So my mom has a plumber that she likes to call whenever our toilet breaks down,

which is approximately every five minutes. And the plumber is always boring her with these long descriptions of the technical process that he's going to undergo to fix her toilet, you know, widgets and gas. I'm not just saying words. Yeah, I have no idea about any of the words other than Plunger. I've heard of that one. Yeah, if I listened to our plumber, I would know. But anyway, my mom's joke is always, you know,

I pay you to know about these things. I'm really glad you do. So that I don't have to. Right, exactly. So that's fine. If the plumber then were to go off and come back and say, you know, in my deep study of plumbing theory, in my extensive analysis of widgets, gaskets, and what have you,

I have discovered that actually what a toilet is supposed to do is not flush human waste into the sewage, but actually regurgitated up into your face every time you flush it. That's what the true purpose of a toilet is. Then the authority to say, no, actually that's not what a toilet does, would rest with my mom because she uses the toilet every day and she knows what it's there for, it's there to serve for. Likewise, the general populace doesn't actually, you know, they're not required. to and nor are many of them interested to sort of delve into the high weeds of political and philosophical analysis.

Historical, yeah. Right. I mean, it's not incumbent upon every citizen to study to the degree that, you know, be required to get a PhD. And we do. We have elites for that so that they can, you know, study the theory behind these things and bring it back to us and potentially tell them just breathe dust for the rest of their lives and sit reading old books.

Exactly, a shoe human interaction for their entire adult lives. Anyway, no, I mean, so that they can come back and offer to us things that we maybe didn't know and guide us in ways that we might not have been able to do. But if what they bring back to us is at odds with what we know to be true in our own life and experience, then we do have, we being the sort of general population, we do have some authority to say, no, actually, that's not what the state is for. That's not what these, because we encounter. And we can tell. We can tell if it's working or if it isn't working. If GDP growth never rises above 3% or whatever it was,

no argument in the world is going to convince the hungry person that we have the right political philosophy in play in some abstract sense. So there has to be a kind of dialogue and interaction. And the fact that the elites have kind of absconded on that dialogue and declared their authority to be absolute is the problem. It's not that they are elites. at all. That is an excellent analogy. It rings so true because when I think of the so-called elites, the elites like in the media, like George Stephanopoulos, you know, the elites at most

of our universities, the image that comes to mind is a bad plumber spewing excrement in my face. That is a wonderful analogy. And on that, I think, we have to bring in our panel. We have a superb panel of deplorables today. We have Spencer's going to stick around. We have a Cassie Dillon and we have Fleckis talks. You guys want to come in? They're all in the studio today. I've summoned them all to this layer, the broom closet of the Ben Shapiro show, because we because we have to talk more about Western civilization. Fleckis, you've just gotten an image of university professors spewing excrement in your face. Does it ring true? You were in college pretty recently. Hey, Fleckis, why don't you go ahead and share a mic with Michael on the desk?

That way you guys are both picking the same thing up. Your mic just went out. All right. And it's only fair that you get to share. It's only fair that he gets to share it with you because today is Austin's birthday. Hey, happy birthday. Fleckis talks. What an honor to have him. All right.

Well, Fleckis, you bring up these Dartmouth professors. There was this guy Mark Bray, I think his name is, a Dartmouth professor who was on defending Antifa the other day and defending the violent left suppressing free thought. How did these guys get jobs there? I don't know. That's a good question. But I think if they weren't getting jobs, you know, the majority of the professors are on the same page. So it's probably easier for them to get jobs and keep their jobs and to bring on someone with more conservative views. And at least we're keeping them off the streets.

If this guy, Professor Bray weren't there, he just, it's a nice criminal employment program, isn't it? Oh, yeah. And I saw that piece you're talking about, you know, defending Antifa. And these Antifa people think they're out there fighting the Nazis. They think there really are not, there's a huge Nazi problem in the U.S., and we need them to, step up, take it to the streets, get violent, justified violence, and defeat the Nazis for America, as if there are heroes. There's a lot of projection going on, I think, on their part.

Cassie, we've been talking about the centrality of Logos, of Greek thought and Jerusalem, of Christianity that built the West. These days in the West, people don't think, and they don't practice any religion of any classical variety. Do you think, I know young people very often, are not raised in formal religious households anymore, though there is a little pushback to that. Do you think that there's a future for the right or for Western civilization if it remains atheistic or secular? Is there a way to translate those classical religious values into secularism,

or do we all need to get back to church and synagogue and get some old-time religion? I find that to be a very difficult question because if you look at Europe, it's becoming progressively less religious. But if you look at certain parts of America, it's actually becoming more religious. And I think that has to do with a lot of values changing in American society where people are confused and kind of scared of what's going on. So they're going back to the church, which gives them a foundation for beliefs that they have held true throughout the last couple hundred years.

So even in the West, I would say that secularism is becoming, or in the East, secularism is becoming more prominent too in certain areas, but you are seeing the rise of more fundamentalists around the world. So I think that you need to have the clear balance. If you aren't getting your values from religion, you have to figure out where are you getting them from? Al Gore, environmentalism. I get all of my everything from the internet. I guess we're fixing Fleckis's microphone.

Okay, I'm just making sure no one's man spreading. Are we good? Yeah, we'll take this moment to ensure. I just told this was a safe space for men spreading. It is the Michael Nulls show, we defend your right to spread your legs as far as you want, gentlemen. So we have to get to the news before we can. kick out all of the people who haven't subscribed, we have to talk about the most important story in the headlines today. The Boy Scouts are becoming the Girl Scouts, and the Girl Scouts

are very upset about this. The Girl Scout president just sent a letter to the Boy Scout president saying, quote, I formally request that your organization stay focused on serving the 90% of American boys not currently participating in Boy Scouts. Ouch, what a burn. It is unsettling that the Boy Scouts of America would seek to upend a paradigm that his served both boys and girls so well through the years. Cassie, as our resident female, why are the Boy Scouts recruiting girls? By the this isn't just transgender issues, they're recruiting girls, just actual girls. Okay, so I think I have a little bit of authority to speak on this. I go to an all-girls school, the first all-girls school in America, Mount Holyoke. So I think when you have women

in a space that's just women, whether it's just women in Mount Holyoke anymore, who knows, but I think you have women coming together and actually getting a voice because it is true that women don't speak as much in class I've seen it when I'm in not holy classes even the women don't talk it's like just me and the random man who's visiting in the class but I think when you have women together in a space it does give them some sense of becoming stronger women because I think the best way to get women to raise is have them to do it themselves don't don't knock down men why would people do that so I think that the Boy Scouts are trying to be inclusive and by doing this they're

actually targeting women and they're they're they're wrecking feminism, whatever they want to call it. But I think it's just, it's not okay. And I think you're going to see a rise in a tension between the two organizations. That brings up a really weird tension that we see throughout the modern left. Spencer, some say the world will end in feminism, some say in transgender movement, a fire or ice or something. Who is to blame here? And how will the left be able to resolve this tension between a feminism that says women should have their own organization and should be able to do whatever men want to do, and a transgender, gender bender movement in the popular culture that says men and women are essentially the same

and those categories are mutable and we can will our way from one to the other. I think this is one of those issues on which, you know, we need to find our way forward incorporating new information that has actually come to us since we sort of set up the paradigms that are reflected in, say, the Boy Sounds and the Girl Scouts. It is true, and I think you actually see this in leftist discourse, it is true that there is a tension between the idea that there is no difference between the genders. It's a purely physical situation and that someone could somehow, it could be spiritually one gender and physically another. Personally, I'm sympathetic to the latter claim, but not really to the former. And I think that that's probably the idea that has to go.

it seems just deeply, it's one of those ideas that is deeply contradictory to the evidence of our basic experience. We know there to be two genders. We know that they have a spiritual component as well as a physical component. Right. And that basically speaking, there are sort of discernible, what do they call them population level, right? Differences between men and women. I also actually believe that you encounter people who have a tension between those two aspects of their... Certainly.

Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. And so I think, you know, we need to find a compassionate and charitable way to incorporate that new fact into our idea that the genders are actually different. Right. That the left, one of those will win and we need to make sure that it's compassionate and not totally ignorant of physical realities, not ignorant of social realities either. I have one more question before we say goodbye to Facebook. I'm giving them a little something extra today.

We have fleck us. One of these reasons for the Boy Scouts to start recruiting women and young girls is that some girls want to do adventurous stuff. The Boy Scouts go camping and do adventurous stuff. The Girl Scouts sell delicious cookies that I buy every year. So what is the problem with having a tomboyish girl join the Boy Scouts if she doesn't want to just sit around and sell cookies? I don't think there is a problem with that necessarily, but I think maybe the Girl Scout should do a little bit of a rebrand. and, you know, get away from the cookies selling it. I'm going to cut you off right there.

How dare you suggest that the Girl Scouts stop selling those cookies? We will not stand for that on this show. Make sure the cookies keep coming. But maybe a little bit of a rebrand and get up with the Times a little bit and, you know, have more adventurous things and do more, you know, tomboy or stuff, whatever you want to call it, instead of, you know, combining the two because they already called the Boy Scouts. It's kind of a tough rebrand for the Boy Scouts to bring in the girls.

Fair enough. Now we will say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. If you are already a subscriber, thank you. Thank you for supporting this show, keeping the lights on, allowing me to purchase Girl Scout cookies. If you are not, go to DailyWire.com right now. It is $10 a month, $100 a year. You get my show. You get the Andrew Claven show.

You get the Ben Shapiro show. But who cares about any of that? You get the leftist tears tumbler. The most sought-after piece of material on earth. It keeps your leftist tears hot or cold, always salty. and delicious. And those tears are flowing these days. After that Phoenix speech, it seemed that they were falling out of the sky. So make sure you go over there. You get your leftist tears tumbler so you can catch them and imbibe them and dream and carouse on their intoxicating deliciousness.

Dailywire.com. Go over there right now. We'll be right back. All right. In today's tweet news, there's always some President Trump tweet news. President Trump is once again tweeting his displeasure with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. He tweeted out just today, quote, I requested that Mitch M. and Paul R tie the debt ceiling legislation into the popular VA bill, which just passed for easy approval. They didn't do it, so now we have a big deal with Dems holding them up, as usual, on debt ceiling approval. Could have been so easy, now a mess. And another quote came out. The only problem I have with Mitch McConnell is that after hearing repeal and replace for seven years, he failed.

That never should have happened. I'm inflecting my voice up to express the exclamation points. Fleck is is Trump right? I think, yeah, I'm cool with it. I think this is a great way to call someone out. Obviously, with Trump in the White House, it's not business as usual. It's not politics as it used to be. But he is a businessman.

He's got a business mind. And this is something I saw in football, too. I played football in college. And if you're not bringing it, if you're not performing, if you're not going 110%, the coach calls you out in front of the whole team. And he kind of did it with Jeff Sessions a few weeks back. in, I think since then, and things have gotten better. He's back in his good graces. So I think, yeah, it's not politics as usual, but the change is the change that people voted for. Because a lot of

people, especially in the media, are whining that President Trump isn't handling this in private conversations and whispering to them. And I guarantee you none of those people have ever picked up a football. You're saying there's a benefit to being called out in public, holding people accountable, making them sweat a little bit, and hopefully straightening out their job. Yeah, exactly. And where it's kind of, I keep saying rebrand today, but I think what it means to be president, it's changing. Like, you know, a few years back, we could have watched Obama and said, oh, Obama's great. He gave really passionate speeches. You could tell he cared.

You know, he's a really good orator. He's our guy. But then there's a lot of things behind the scenes that I don't think he did very well. Like everything. Yeah, everything was one of those things that he didn't do very well, yeah. So, you know, you have to kind of treat Trump, you know, for what he is. he's just a different guy. He's not a, you know, your standard politician. And with that, there are some benefits. And I think that's what the people voted for. Cassie, why has the

congressional leadership not been able to round up these votes? Is it because they don't have confidence in Trump? Or is the GOP just hopelessly fractured? Honestly, it's the never-trumper's you can blame. I love blaming the never-trumper's. Well, they aren't working with him at all. And instead of going with the Republican Party, they're going with the Democrats. And it's just really hard to get anything passed. And if you saw it in speech, he was throwing a lot. of shade at John McCain. It was very, very... I didn't hear him name anybody.

I think he said there was one senator, just one vote in Arizona. I won't say the name. Your senator. Yeah, so I think it's definitely telling, but I do think that Trump is going in the attack too soon. We have a long session left. And honestly, if he keeps doing this, are they going to work with him in the future? I think more things can be done behind closed doors, and I don't know if things have been

necessarily, but I think going in the offense this early on can be dangerous. Well, yeah. Some things can be done behind closed doors like a lot. done behind closed doors like funding Jeff Flake's primary opponents and the others. Not a bad idea. Spencer, does this help President Trump? Boy, oh boy. I just, you know, so often with Trump, it's like vaguely kind of the shape of something you might want him to be doing and then like substance, like that is utterly insane. So I mean, we've seen that he has trouble working with the legislature. We've seen that he has

trouble marshalling people behind his ideas to get bills passed. And I suppose that then you would probably want him to be able to develop a set of techniques for convincing or corraling, as they say, the legislature into his camp. But the idea that you're going to pass the debt ceiling by tying it to a VA bill is like you're going to sneak a nuclear bomb into the Pentagon by tying it to a kitten, right? There's just in what universe, it's not a bad idea, I gotta write that down. In what universe would you have,

would that have been an effective plan? So I don't know. As usual, I kind of throw up my hands. That is fair. Every time I'm asked to say, will this help Trump, will this hurt Trump? I'm always wrong. Inevitably, I don't know what answer I give,

but I'm always wrong because nobody can predict this guy. Nobody can ever tell what Trump is going to do, which is why I got $400 from my friend Mr. Shapiro. Okay. For the first time in Florida's modern history, a white man has received the death penalty for killing a black man. And this seems like progress to me. It seems like a wonderful move for social justice. Cassie, is it a win for social justice and racial equality?

Honestly, I think it's a big deal, but necessarily it's not really that big of a deal because he was convicted, what, the 80s? Right. And this isn't the first white man who's been killed for killing a black guy. But it's the first one in Florida. And the only reason why we're talking about it is because of Charlottesville. If Charlottesville didn't happen, we would not be talking about this. I don't think it's necessarily the biggest news topic that we can be talking about right now. The only reason why we're talking about it is because of Charlottesville.

And we also need to acknowledge that this is a bigger deal, not because of the skin color of the person, but because this is after they changed the laws regarding execution in Florida. Right. As the Supreme Court talks about it. Right. And a lot of opposition to it. You always hear opposition to the death penalty because of racial disparities, a lot more black guys who are getting the death penalty for committing murder than white people,

and there are a number of theories as to why that is. But deep down, it appears to me, this is all just about opposition to the death penalty per se. You've got people coming out today with this story saying, this doesn't change the hundreds of years without executing a white man for killing a black man, and we need to get rid of it all together. Spencer, hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully, yet nobody ever talks about these spiritual and political benefits of capital punishment. Is there a place for the death penalty in our society right now? Man, you know, it's funny, I've just been reading Boeotheists, who's basically, you know,

and he writes his entire, you know, his great contribution to philosophy has written sort of under pain of death. So I guess at the moment I'm more sympathetic than that. There's also a philosophic benefit to the death penalty. No, exactly. I mean, this is one of the issues, you know, if you needed a hot take on Aristotelian hylomorphism by... I've been waiting for one my whole... life. I realize, yeah. But I feel sure on this question that I'm likely to put my foot in my mouth no matter what I say.

I will say that, you know, the death penalty is, for me, at least, a deeply complex and conflicted issue morally because it's both a concept, an abstracted concept, right, should we put people to death for certain crimes that are so heinous, you know, that pragmatically we need to remove them. But it's also a historic policy enacted in time and space. And I think in that respect in America, it's... It's a deeply troubled. Because it's not always applied fairly.

These days, everybody gets it, but nobody is actually executed. People sit on death row forever and ever. It seems cruel and unusual in many ways. That's sort of what I mean. Those kinds of particulars of the death penalty as practiced here in America, you can't ignore when you have this conversation, but they certainly muddy the waters of the kind of more abstracted question of, is the death penalty ever okay?

And for certain crimes, it's very complex as to whether they would warrant the death penalty. And for some, like suggesting that we get rid of Girl Scout cookies, the answer is very clear. Birthday boy, very, very clear. Okay, I have got to say goodbye to my excellent panel of deplorables. We have Austin Fletcher, Fleckis Talks, lone conservative Cassie Dillon, and what's his name, Spencer Claven, classicist and heir to the multiverse. Thank you all for being here. now it is time for the mailbag.

So we have a lot of mailbag questions today. We're going to burn through them. From John, Mr. Drolls, I'm a student at Wofford College, and after reading your book several times, I'm hungering for more of your wisdom. Smart man. Would you be interested in coming to our campus to speak? I would love to come to your campus to speak.

Shoot me a tweet or something or send an email in, and we'll set it up. I love doing that. From Teresa, hey Michael. How do you respond to someone who says that there's a difference between socialism and democratic socialism? Well, in a sense there is. Socialism is a big umbrella, and there are lots of forms of socialism. There's democratic socialism like that which destroyed Europe.

There is national socialism like that which also destroyed Europe. And there's international socialism like that which destroyed Russia. So a lot of ways to ruin your society, a lot of varieties. I don't know, do you like chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry? Those are the differences all under that umbrella. From Chris, Michael, I just watched your interview with Mr. Alsup. I have never seen such a penetrating interview and I'm 62 years old. Thank you very much.

It's very kind. Did you have a model for your methodology? If so, who? If not, how do you do it? Thanks, Chris. I approached that interview. We did this interview last week with James Alsup, who's a YouTuber who went with the protesters at Charlottesville last week, the pro-Charlottesville protesters in Unite the Right. And he was scheduled to speak there.

In terms of interviewers, I love Bill Buckley. I like more substantive interviews that push people that are combative and constructive. They're not just yelling on television. But that interview I really stressed about a little bit because I in many ways empathize with this kid and with people like him. Because he's very young. He got famous very young. He understands a number of things correctly. And he's just gone down a dark path and has hung out with some bad ambrés to quote a great man.

the alt-right people and Richard Spencer. And it's very easy if we all know a little learning is a dangerous thing. And if you've only read a few texts, if you've read three lines of thus spake Zarathustra, it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of terrible ideas. And so with that interview, I was hoping to press on that in a way in which we wouldn't alienate these guys who have fallen into stupid ideas, but rather show them the flaws with their very, very poor ideologies and bring them back to understand truth. Truth and beauty. From Cameron, Michael, I stared at the solar eclipse without proper eye protection, and now I am a peripheral vision man. I can't see straightforward. I gained a useless superpower from the sun's

radiation. Does your book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, come in Braille? You are going to be so happy to know. Every single edition of reasons to vote for Democrats is also already in braille. Just go to your local store, pick it up, and you will catch every single word. Greg, Dear Knowles, when can we expect the Michael Knowles guest panel swimsuit calendar? A very good question. You know, I asked, before the show, I asked Cassie Dillon about this. I asked Roaming and Antonio Okafore. And unfortunately, they're all busy on the shoot day. But lucky for you, Fleckis is around. Fleeckis talks will be there. We're going to have Marshall is going to be there. Jacob Berry, Paul Boisso. Get ready. It's coming to the Daily Wire store. Just stay tuned for that.

It's going to be hot. It's going to be, really. It's going to be, it's going to be something. something from Wayne. Michael, I just heard your commentary on people from Liberty University giving back their degrees. I think it's presumptuous to assume it's because they're liberals and that's why they're upset. They could well be upset because Trump is a lifelong Democrat who isn't a conservative, can't be trusted to protect the Constitution. I do think he's doing better these days, but I can understand why some young conservatives would feel strongly about this and would want to see Cruz 2020. That's a lot. There's a lot in that mailbag question. That isn't my issue with it. I don't, my issue with it isn't the Trumpiness of it all. My

issue with it is that these students shouldn't be giving back degrees or diplomas because they don't like who the president of the university voted for. That's very stupid and very shallow and a very shallow view of education. And if these kids, perhaps they should give back their degrees because they clearly haven't been educated by this university, they should understand the value of a liberal education and that political disagreement with some administrator is not caused to tear up the symbol of your education. And on that point, my other issue with it is it's not possible. It is a completely empty gesture. If you receive an award from some institution or a government, you can reject that, and that is a protest of whatever that institution is doing. But the university

diploma is a symbol of your education. It's a symbol of four years of your reading books or more likely chasing women and drinking and gambling and staying up late. You can't give that back. You can turn in the piece of paper, but when you go to apply for a job or in the rest of your life, you will still have had that education. And so it's empty virtue signaling the worst of what millennials do and makes them look foolish. From Michael. Michael, that's a great name. What is something unusual or strange about your fantastic boss, Ben Shapiro? And I bet, I don't know if this was Michael or Ben who wrote this, that you would like to share with the world.

I would ask you, what is not unusual about Ben Shapiro? Ben was a syndicated national columnist at 17. He was playing violin publicly for, who was it, for Larry King when he was like two. He writes about 700,000 words per day. So everything, I would say. Maybe next question will answer what is usual about what is common about Ben Shapiro. From Teresa, hey, Mr. Best Selling Blank Book Knowles. Hey, Teresa.

If you were ever to hold office, how would you approach the issue of abortion? I would want less of it. I would try to make the law and the judicial interpretation such that there would be less abortion in general, but also there are two prongs to this. One, I think conservatives fight this issue on left-wing terms. So we're always arguing about cases of rape, ancestor, or life of the mother. Those constitute less than 1% of annual abortions. We always talk about three days after an egg has been fertilized, and the left loves to use the, their jargon of zygote and blastula and this, that, and the other thing to refer to these early embryos,

we should fight it on the other end. We should fight it where it's clear when people are getting sonograms, and they can see babies, full babies in the uterus. We should say that this is wrong, this is clearly wrong. This is a human life that has nobody defending it and that can't speak for itself, and we should do it there. As far as Rovi-Wa-Wa-Wat is concerned, Stauri Decisus would play a role in this. I once asked Antonin-Skalia about, this and whether it was possible at this point to overturn Roe v. Wade, there is a lot of time that has passed and the principle of story decisis is such that you give some credence to the time, even when a bad decision is made, but some decisions are so bad or so egregious that they could be overturned anyway, and I suppose that's what we'll have to hope for.

From Forrest, Hey Michael, as a fellow staunch Catholic, but also an ardent conservative, I'm troubled by some of the viewpoints more recently espoused by the Pope and other church leaders regarding immigration, climate change, capitalism, etc. Join the club. Do you think the Catholic Church is falling to the left? Thanks. This reminds me of O'Sullivan's first law, which is that all institutions that are not explicitly conservative or right wing will become left wing over time. So there's this natural tendency for organizations to move left. Luckily, as you believe and as I believe, the church is a unique institution instituted by Christ on earth. And one argument for the Catholicism, of the Catholic Church, of the universality of it, the realness of it, is that it's been around for

so long. It has so much weight and so much inertia that even bad popes can't change it. Even bad cardinals have a great difficulty pushing it in the other direction. So, you know, papal infallibility is misunderstood. The pope is fallible, except when he's infallible, it's only been invoked a handful of times. And I have great faith that the Catholic Church as a divine institution on earth will be able to withstand even bad popes. And I'm not explicitly calling out Francis, but we've had a lot of bad popes in the past. We have survived them. The Vatican exorcist actually, Gabrielle Amorth, who died recently, he said that Satan was in the Vatican and that there were dark forces operating. We see it all the time with obviously the sex scandal,

but probably even more so the scandal with the Vatican Bank. Anybody who ever tries to reform that institution gets thrown out the window, basically. And so I wouldn't be surprised if after two of the greatest popes in history, two of the greatest men of the century holding that office, that the devil would be a little hungry to make things go crazy. But I have faith nonetheless in the institution. And maybe the church militant is in a purgatorial phase at the moment, but we have hope that we'll come out of it.

On that very specific and serious note, we've got to say goodbye. I will say one thing. Pretty soon, Andrew Claven and I, he's the father of what's his name over there, are going to be releasing a little podcast that we've just done on our own. It's Drew's next book. It's his story, Another Kingdom, and I perform it. It's probably the only role I'm ever going to get again in Hollywood after my blank book came out. So look out for that. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Another Kingdom. It'll be all fiction and really, really cool. And enjoy the weekend. I hope you survive. And we will be back again on Monday. I'm Michael Knowles. Thanks for watching. This is The Michael Knowles Show.