The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 216 - The Virtue Of Nationalism

Episode Date: September 12, 2018

The humorless Left is now so trigger-happy theyre now attacking things that havent even happened yet. Hysteria rips America apart, but Yoram Hazony helps us put it back together. A new poll shows Americans don’t care about candidates’ religion, while the Pope blames the Devil for exposing the corruption of bishops. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The humorless left is now so trigger-happy, they are attacking things that have not even happened yet. We will analyze the hysteria that is ripping America apart. Yoram Hazani will then explain how to bring our nation back together in his book, The Virtue of nationalism. Then a new poll shows Americans no longer care if political candidates are religious while Pope Francis blames the devil for exposing the corruption of bishops. I wonder if one has to do with the other one. All that and much more. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles show. The left is going after Norm McDonald's show even airs. We will talk about that and explain why.

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Really good products. So they're going after Norm MacDonald. You know, I've referred to Norm on this show before. He's my favorite living comedian. I know he's the favorite comedian of a lot of people out there too. And, you know, you can go down a YouTube wormhole of all the Norm clips. And the reason we're talking about Norm now is he's getting a show on Netflix in, I think, two or three days.

I think it's airing either this week or next week. And so the left is already. already trying to get him. Now, Norm, it's not like he's some Brooks Brothers wearing conservative. It's not like, you know, he's this right-wing apologist or something. He's just not politically correct. And he's a comedian who cares about actually making people laugh. Unlike Nanette, unlike Kathy Griffin, unlike people who they go for claps and not laughs. Norm actually goes for laughs. And so they're so angry at him because he isn't politically correct because he isn't making jokes about Trump, because jokes about Trump are super duper lame.

He did this interview yesterday or two days ago with the Hollywood reporter where he was asked, what do you think about Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K., both of whom are friends of his going back decades, I believe. And he said, well, you know, they were really broken up about the whole thing and they're really sorry and I'm glad to see them back on their feet. Something to that effect. And they are pillorying him for this.

He made a comment. He said that the Me Too movement got a little bit crazy. And so he's glad that there's some balance, you know, that because of their, look, there were false accusations. some of the people who were accusers are now being accused of sexual harassment themselves. Some of the people who were accusers, details have come out where they were in consensual relationships, not non-consensual relationships. So he's just pointing out that it maybe got a little out of hand and he's glad that it's not

as crazy as it was before. He is being raked over the coals. They're already trying to cancel his show. There were actually people tweeting who said, I hate his show. It's boring and terrible. The show hasn't premiered yet. And all I, look, I like Norm, so I want to. want to defend his show, and I look forward to watching the show, but what this is really about

is all of the hysteria that is gripping all of America. We're all so trigger-happy. For those of you who are not familiar with Norm, just to give you a little context, here is a joke he did on David Letterman's last show. I think you'll understand why he's such a favorite on this program here. There is one country that worries me, though, not Iraq, not Iran, not North Korea. The only country that really worries me is the country. of Germany. I don't know if you guys are history buffs or not, but in the early part of the previous century, Germany decided to go to war. And who did they go to war with? The world.

It had never been tried before. And so you figure that would take about five seconds for the world to win, but no, it was actually close. then about 30 years passed and Germany decides again to go to war and again it chooses as its enemy the world and this time they have that guy skrankly clankly that guy I'm not even going to dignify him by saying his name

but I think you know I'm done but you think at that point the world will go listen Germany here's the deal you don't get to be a country no more on account of you keep attacking the world. So you get the sense. We've talked about similar things before on this show

with due respect to our German viewers and listeners. So anyway, the left is very upset because he's not being mean to Trump or he's not telling this joke or that joke. He's actually telling jokes that are funny, you know, and that you're not allowed to do that anymore. We're in the Ninnett comedy world now. So Norm actually was booted from the Jimmy Kimmel show

because of this non-traversy. This is the stupidest non-traversy since the Mark Duplass thing. You remember the whole Mark Duplass? He said, oh, I kind of like Ben Shapiro. Now his whole career is ruined. This is the stupidest non-traversy since then. Jimmy Kimmel goes up to Norman McDonald and says, you can't come on the show because you said that you're still sort of like Roseanne Barr

and you still sort of like Louis C.K. My producers are crying because of your comments. My producers are crying. Millennials in the workforce, folks. Safe spaces at the Tonight Show. By the way, I will actually give it to those. millennial producers, certainly, they've undoubtedly millennial producers because they were able to negotiate in warm milk and pacifiers into their nightly contracts. So great, good work. I mean,

that's the art of the deal right there. Oh, Jimmy Fallon. I'm sorry, it was Jimmy Fallon, not Jimmy Kimmel. It's really sad because those two guys used to be different people. One was the crazy lefty. One was just, you know, sort of having fun. And now, unfortunately, it looks like Jimmy Fallon is falling into that left-wing clap trap too. Easily confused, though, sorry to say that. It's all of this trigger-happy hysteria. Producers shouldn't be crying because of a common sense observation. People in show business is a horrible industry, and we know that this town is rife with emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and they're crying because a guy made a normal

observation. This, we're so, the left is being hysterical. That's what this is. That's the only way to describe it. It is hysteria. Get a hold of yourself, people. Get a hold of yourself, that people should calm down. This is, you know, I think this is all Trump's fault. This obviously is all Trump's fault because when Trump was elected, everyone was told the world was going to go to hell in a handbasket. And then he was president for two years now and everything is going fine. Now, common sense, your gut instinct would tell you this would make people change their mind. Everyone would calm down because of this. That's not how people work in real life. What actually happens when they're all, they're totally hysterical, they're expecting the worst,

something good happens, they ignore the reality and double down on their prejudice. They double down, so they say, well, but Trump is president, so things can't be going well. So it's really awful. And that's why they're getting crazier and crazier. As the economy improves, as the jobless numbers go down, as the world is at peace, relative peace, they're not getting happier. They're getting, this is how conspiracy theories work. A guy has a conspiracy theory, and then you point out the holes in his conspiracy theory,

He doesn't stop believing a conspiracy. He just thinks you're part of the conspiracy. He gets even wilder. So you saw this morning Joe humiliated himself yesterday. It was a despicable column on 9-11. He said that Donald Trump is worse than 9-11. He said, quote, For those of us still believing that Islamic extremists hate America

because of the freedoms we guarantee to all people, the gravest threat Trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to America's image. As the New York Times, as Roger Cohen wrote the month after Trump's election, America is an idea. Strip away freedom, human rights, democracy, the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world, and America itself is gutted.

America is gutted under Donald Trump, according to Morning Joe and some dumb dumb over at the New York Times. First of all, America is not just an idea. America is a country founded in part on ideas and on a tradition, in a land at a particular time with particular people. So it's not just an idea. It doesn't float in this rationalist ethereal cloud. It's a real place.

It's a country. It's a nation, which we're going to be talking. talking about in a little bit. But also, does anybody believe that Donald Trump has stripped America of freedom, human rights, democracy? No, the left wanted to strip America of democracy. They wanted to overturn, they still want to overturn a presidential election. But Donald Trump has only increased the freedom experienced by Americans. Deregulated the government, let Americans keep more of their money. Is America gutted? Of course not. But they can't admit this because they were so wrong in their predictions. They can't admit it. So they have to get

crazier. Morning Joe called Trump, a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America than any foreign adversary ever could. Donald Trump, worse than Pearl Harbor, I guess, worse than blowing up the harbor, killing all those Americans, worse than killing 3,000 Americans? Do you really believe that?

Maybe he does, but what a morally idiotic fool, if that's what he really believes. Jeff Bennett at NBC, the White House correspondent, tweeted out, he said, quote, Trump in Shanksville talks to U.S. troops fighting the menace of radical Islamic terrorism, a controversial campaign catchphrase that he didn't

use last year. A controversial catchphrase. Radical Islamic terrorism is a controversial catch. Controversial to whom? It's just reality. It just describes it. But NBC can't admit the reality. Because for years and years, Barack Obama wouldn't use the term. The Democrats wouldn't use the term. But it turns out the enemy that we're fighting are radical Islamic terrorists. They're not moderate. So they're not moderate. They're radical. They're not Methodist.

They're Islamic. And they're not legal participants in war. They're terrorists. They're radical Islamic terrorists. That's not a controversial catchphrase. That's just a basic description of who they are. But as we've seen this time and time again, 65 terrorist attacks in Europe in just the last four years.

As we've seen it time and time again, a stabbing seems to be happening every month or so in Europe. We've had seven, I think it was seven, might have been nine terrorist attacks since 2000. in the United States, we can't, the more that we see the evidence, the more that we see who this is,

the more the left is going to double down and pretend that it isn't happening. This is very important because this hysteria seems to be ripping the country apart. People have always been a little hysterical. They referred to Ronald Reagan as a Nazi, as the election of Hitler as all.

Everything they said about Trump, they said about Ronald Reagan. But now because of social media, this is sort of the downside of social media, it seems like it's so much louder that it's happening. in a different way. It does appear to be tearing the country apart. Morning Joe talking about America being gutted. Fortunately, we have an expert, Yoram Hazani, who wrote this great book,

The Virtue of Nationalism. But first, I need to invite you into my boudoir. Come on in. It's okay. Come on. Let me, I'll give you a little tour around what I'm sleeping on. Purple mattress, baby. The purple mattress is saving my marriage. I can certainly say that. Because I had a dinky little queen-sized mattress before. Now, I've got that California. King, thanks to purple. And purple is the trick. I don't sleep very well. I've always had mattresses that don't feel great or a little crook in the neck or whatever. Purple mattress feels terrific. It was designed by rocket scientists. I've told you, I have very simple tastes. I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm easily satisfied by the best, and that is purple mattress. It is this brand new

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Dr. Hazani, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I have told you already extensively how much I love this book. It is so good. It is an argument that you don't see people make. It is totally politically incorrect. It is a vigorous defense of nationalism. We've heard in the conservative movement for years and years, even on the right, that nationalism is a bad word.

Bill Buckley would always say, I love patriotism, but I hate nationalism, as though there were some distinction between the two, which I can't figure out. What is the, you know, in five words or less, you know, in 2017. seconds here. What is the argument for nationalism? The simplest argument is, is the world better off if it's governed by a diversity of independent nations, each one with its own different customs and traditions in constitutional and religious issues, each one an experiment in what it is for human societies to live? Is that better? Or should we go for some kind of, kind of centralized rules-based order that somebody's going to decide about and then impose on the rest of the world. The argument is that the first is far superior. It's not utopia,

but it's better. Well, what is amazing in the book is it's a simple premise, which is that there are two orders of the world. You can have an imperial order, the order of empire, or you can have a national order. You trace that national order all the way back to the Bible, and you trace the imperial order all the way up to institutions that we don't even think of necessarily as imperial, the European Union, the United Nations, all of these supranational organizations. Why is it that the progressives seem to be advocating for empire? And how is the EU no different than the empires of antiquity? Well, as far as the progressives, don't forget that Marx was a clearly imperial universalist ideology that sought to conquer the whole world and get everybody to live according to a single theory.

So the fact that progressives continue to believe in something like that isn't terribly surprising. It's maybe a little bit more surprising to find people who are liberals or classical liberals who are for a very long time allied with conservatism, even today. also advocating some kind of let's tear down all the borders and impose a single regime. I think for me that's personally more surprising. Well, it's interesting too from your vantage in Israel because Israel comes out, is born out of the Second World War, a nation for the Jewish people. And now, not shortly after the end of the Second World War, we saw that nationalism was being blamed for the Nazi.

It was about nationalist expansion and nationalist hatred and nationalist fervor. And that's why we all decided we have to totally get rid of nationalism and become one big kumbaya community of people across the earth. You say that this argument and this common knowledge that we have is totally ridiculous. How so? Well, it's not totally ridiculous. It's just mostly wrong. I mean, Look, if you read about the policies of somebody like Dwight Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, his foreign policy was based on fighting imperialism and supporting nationalism because he believed in the self-determination of peoples. And you can name lots of others on the left and on the right.

Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt in his later years, DeGal, Fatcher, Gandhi, Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion. I mean, so many people who are revered heroic figures politically and intellectually subscribed to one version or another of a nationalist world order, that it really takes just an extraordinary degree of ignorance to just blame all of that, say all of that is like, Nazism. And I just wanted to say that the people saying this obviously have, I mean, I don't recommend that people actually read mine comp, but if you're going to talk about this, it's not fun to read, but if you're going to talk about the subject, it's worth actually looking at what the Nazis believed. The Nazis were from the first moment, an imperialist movement, whose goal was,

as Hitler wrote to make Germany the mistress of the globe and the Lord of the Earth. His goal was to overthrow the order of national states which he viewed as corrupt and contemptuous. Well, I wonder when we look at these historical examples, even in our present time, why is it that the international community, the empire builders, the advocates of the European Union and the advocates of the United Nations or whatever, they seem to support nationalism for certain countries, but not other countries. They seem to support nationalism in other areas of the world, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, but then they want to break down borders in Europe, in the United States, and in Israel. Why is that? Why do these different countries, seem to be treated differently. You're absolutely right. And the answer is because this internationalist worldview in both its progressive and its liberal forms

is descended from an Enlightenment theory of history, which goes, an excellent example is Kant, which says that first a society is tribal and barbaric everybody's killing one another. Then tribes gathered to unite under a law as a nation, as a national state, and then they only kill the other nations. And then finally, you reach moral maturity. That's what Pat calls it. Moral maturity, when you realize that you need to take down all the borders and unite in one international state to cover everything. And what's happening is that the progressives and liberals who support this kind of movement,

they look at the third world or Islamic countries or Southeast Asia, the countries that you're naming. And they say, ah, those are just, you know, they're primitives, they're barbarians. They haven't reached the level of moral maturity that we've reached. But if anyone steps out of line among the descendants of, of European peoples, you know, that could be the UK with Brexit, or it could be Israel or the Trump movement in America or Poland or Italy. The moment you step out of line, if you're descended from, you know, some kind of European background, then you're attacked as a traitor, as a traitor to the moral maturity that Europeans are supposed to have reached. That's right. And one of the

ironies that you explain in the book is truly one of the enduring historical lessons, which is that the Jews can't catch a break. And so within 50 years of the foundation of the Jewish state of Israel, you've got the people who helped found it say, okay, pish pash, let's drop those borders now. Let's be, oh, let's be nice. Let's have a nice international community or whatever. How did that change so quickly? You know, in the, as you write about, in the Bible, the Jews are called out to be a nation, not to be an empire, but to be a nation. And they get this nation state in the aftermath of the Second World War. But now all of a sudden, Israel is under attack on every college campus in America all over the world. People are boycotting Israel. But what is that

about? Well, there was a, there was a mistake that the Americans in the British after World War II, I think originally wanted to see a European Union. because they were trying to build up a strong continental resistance to Soviet expansionism. But I think that that was just a terrible mistake. And what happened is that at an hour and the other founders of the European community just unleashed this vision of claiming that independence of nations is, is the cause of warfare and therefore the root of all evil. And that argument, I guess, had tremendous emotional traction

after World War II among liberals and Marxists. And since, as you know, the universities and the media are very, very sympathetic to these kinds of arguments, And so they've, I mean, they've been educating an entire, it's now two or three, two or three generations first of Europeans and now Americans to the idea that national independence is actually the source of evil. And that concentration of power in the hands of international bodies is the solution to it.

I want to know, in, we're talking about concentrations of power. And you make it pretty clear in the, book, there seems to be a spectrum here between anarchy, chaos, you know, the kind of fever dream of libertarians maybe in the American right, and empire, the imperial order. And then the nation, nationalism, is somewhere in the middle of that. How do you arrive at that? We hear nationalism bandied about by everybody from good conservative Americans to wacko white supremacists. what is the nation and what makes nationalism work? Why is that the best order for nations? Well, the nation, when I use the term nation, I'm using it in a traditional way according to the Anglo-American political tradition, which is rooted, as you say, in scripture, especially in the Hebrew Bible.

So if you take, let's say, the King James Bible and you look up the way the word nation is used in the King James Bible, then you'll get a really good idea of what it is that shaped the English, Scottish, Dutch, American conception of a nation. It's based on the diversity and unification of the ancient Israelite tribes in the Bible. But at the same time, it's not based on race in any way. And we know that because when the Israelites leave Egypt, we're told that Egyptians joined them and stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments and joined the Jewish people. Or that Ruth the Moabite, even though she's a Moabite,

she comes over to Israel and she embraces, she says, your people will be my people and your God will be my God. And when she adopts that mutual loyalty with the faith of the Jewish people and belief in its God, then she becomes a part of the Jewish people. Right. So the biblical concept of a nation is not based on race at all. It's a unification of a number of tribes that are diverse internally, but at the same time share some kind of of basic cultural inheritance around which they can unite, which is usually a language, a religion, a legal system, and so on. That is such a wonderful clarification because I'm reading it and I'm thinking this is the best defense of nationalism I've heard.

This is a very compelling argument. And yet I wondered where these, you know, they call themselves white nationalists fit into it because I've always found their arguments to be weak to say to put it charitably to not be very compelling at all and it's it's just a misunderstanding it seems by these various 20

racists who exist in America a misunderstanding of what the nation is what the nation has meant throughout history throughout all of history well white racism is an oxymoron I mean you can't have a white nation I mean there is no white nation there's historically never been

such a thing as a group of people who are the whites and they are a nation. So the whole argument that the biblical and Anglo-American argument is based on the assumption that nations are not some kind of fantasy that somebody came up. You can't come up with you can't just say, oh, people with blue eyes, they're a nation. There's an actual historical thing that is a nation, the French are a nation, the Dutch are a nation, the English or a nation, and so on. And you can argue on the margins about whether some group or another qualifies, but the fact that there are nations and that they're distinct from one another and that they're internally cohesive, and that's an empirical fact. Now, the question,

the question that you asked before about why is this a good way to organize the political order? So the argument that I make in the book is that a national political, a national form of political organization where nations are independence, that it sits roughly halfway between conditions of anarchy where, you know, like every family or every clan is independent, and they're all at war with one another. and at the other extreme, a universal vision where the goal is for the whole world as much as possible to be brought under a single legal and political regime. And what the idea of independent nations, what it does is it tries to strike a balance between the two, which is obviously difficult to maintain, but it tries at the same time both to to embrace the value of particularity, of particularism, of diversity. The different nations are different from one another, and the competition among nations is, in fact, what advances us towards innovation and advancement, you know, in politics and religion, science, the arts.

So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, the national state does resemble. international empire in that what it does is it unifies a very large group of people and drives warfare to the periphery of life. So it creates an internal sphere of peace and prosperity. The difference between empire and national independence is that the nationalist, when he's behaving himself at least, is looking to take care of his own nation. and actually sees it as a tremendous waste of resources to fight an unending war at the other side of the world

to conquer all sorts of other peoples which you then don't know how to govern. Right. This is something I've always loved about your writing even beyond the book. I'll let you go because I know you're very busy in doing the book tour right now. But something I love about it is you make conservative arguments.

You don't make liberal arguments as a conservative. you don't say, I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal. You make conservative arguments, and it's not just pie in the sky. We're talking about real facts and things that are demonstrable in history and therefore demonstrable in the way that we should order our nations and order our world. And one of those facts is the nation. It's a terribly compelling argument. You have to go read it.

I encourage everybody to go read it. The virtue of nationalism by Dr. Yoram Hazani. Dr. Hazzani, thank you so much for being here. Sure. Thanks for having you. So much more to get. to today. I'm sorry though if you're on Facebook and YouTube. How'd you do it?

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This is what matters. The Kathy Griffin Tears Tumblr. Is that where are we starting that new? vintage. I'm in a Twitter fight right now with Kathy Griffin because she always gets really angry with me and she said like F you Michael Knowles, all you

daily wire idiots don't know that comedy is subjective, which is very funny because then she's angry with us because we subjectively think she isn't funny. Maybe objectively think it. Either way it's led to an overflow of Kathy Griffin tears. Make sure you get your tumbler or you're going to drown. The only reason that this

studio isn't underwater right now is because we have the tumbler. It's the FDA approved vessel. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back. All right. We have some bad election news today. Not for the midterm elections. That I'm not convinced about. They're saying that the midterm generic ballot is terrible for Republicans, but they always tell us this. They always say, oh, Republicans, don't even go out to vote. There's no reason for you even to go vote because you're going to do so bad. And then we win. So I don't really believe that. Also, because there's no such thing as a generic congressional candidate. There's no. And when you talk about these national polls,

giant blue states like California end up giving the Democrats a disproportionate representation in these polls. So I'm not that concerned about that. What I am concerned about is a poll that came out today from the Associated Press, which is that only 25% of Americans think it is very important for their political candidates to have religious faith. And this is a major low, only 25%. Some more people think it's moderately important, but this is a big low. And it tells us a lot about the miseducation of millennials, and it tells us a lot about the cracking up of institutions like mainstream, mainline Protestantism,

and I'm sorry to say, Catholicism in America. So you've got to look at these numbers because when you dig into this poll from the AP, you learn about the political views and the views of candidates. But there's another poll from Pew that came out a little while ago that shows that the lion's share of millennials are religiously unaffiliated. They're not Protestant. They're not evangelical. They're not Catholic.

They're not Buddhist. They're not whatever. They're religiously unaffiliated. affiliated. This number is double. That's that number for their parents' generation, and it's triple that of their grandparents' generation. Really scary number. Now, why is it scary? Well, John Adams said that the American Constitution was built for a moral and religious people, and that it's unfit for the governance of anyone else. That's because it's a government that allows you to be free. But the only way that you're allowed to be free, the only way that you can govern yourself,

is if you have virtue, if you have discipline, if you have a religious foundation that inculcates those virtues and that moral law into you and gives you a view of what the purpose of your freedom is. If you don't have that, you're just going to descend into liberty nonsense and not be able to control yourself. We look around and we've got a burning man culture, basically. It's descended into chaos and it'll only get worse. If you can't control yourself, if you can't discipline yourself, the government is going to discipline you because you're not capable of your own freedom. You're not capable of governing yourself. I don't totally blame millennials for this, though, because they've just been miseducated. I don't think that the lion's share of millennials have tried Christianity

and found it to be wanting. I think they haven't learned anything about Christianity at all. I think they haven't been raised with very much religion at all. And this can be a great opportunity. I mean, look, I was an atheist for 10 years. And then it struck me. The intellectual side of it struck me. Later, the spiritual side of it struck me. The historical, the cultural, Everything finally hit me and nobody is more enthusiastic than a revert or a convert. So this is a good opportunity, but it requires that we show millennials what they've been missing the whole time. This also shows the breakdown of institutions of mainline Protestantism and of Catholicism. Because when you dig into that AP poll, you'll see that among white evangelical Protestants,

the majority of them still believe it is extremely or very important that a candidate has strong religious belief. So it's still the majority of white evangelical Protestants, and it's not a racial thing, because even among non-white evangelical Protestants, almost 50%, 47% believe the same thing, that it's extremely or very important that candidates for public office have deeply held religious views. When you get down to Catholics, that number drops in half to 25%. When you get down to mainline Protestants, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, whatever, it drops even lower to 18%. Why is that?

It's because those institutions have been hollowed out. from within in the United States, even the Catholic Church. We're seeing the crack up of the Catholic Church now in the U.S. where bishops have been credibly accused of covering up abuse, not just abuse of kids, but abuse of seminarians, abuse of priests, whole sexual networks within the clergy, and credible allegations from a major archbishop, Archbishop Vigano, the former nuncio to the U.S.,

accusing Pope Francis of being complicit in some of these cover-ups of priests and seminarian abuse. this is a major issue, but that isn't the whole issue. A lot of the issue is that a lot of churches in America, Catholic churches too, teach weak sauce, weak religion. There was a theologian in the 20th century, I forget his name, who said, I forget which one it was, who said that most of the sermons that he heard on Sundays amounted to, I might suggest that you try to be good. That's the homily. That's the sermon. And the same thing is, obviously, it's much worse among the mainline Protestant churches, which have totally, they fly PC, transgender flags outside.

They've adopted the religion of political correctness and the religion of modern leftism. But it's really bad because what you're going to end up with is what Richard Niebuhr, the Christian ethicist, described as a God without wrath leading a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. And that is not true religion,

and that's not compelling religion. And the pews are going to empty if they try to teach that religion. The line is that if you marry yourself to the spirit of the age, you're going to find yourself a widow in the next age. And that's what we're seeing. People thought in the Catholic Church,

after Vatican 2, after the traditional liturgy was nixed, and they started inviting in all of the acoustic guitars and all of the liturgical craziness. They thought that that would modernize the church, that now we're going to have a huge awakening. What happened? The pews emptied.

And what I see from my own vantage as a Catholic is that the traditional liturgies, the Tridentine Mass, the Latin services, those are the ones that are filled up. And when you see it with families, you know how the Catholics feel about babies, you see like father, mother, kid, kid, kid, kid, kid, kid, kid, they're single-handedly filling up the pews. That is what you need. Either the church is going to be the church or there won't be a church. But it's not going to become something else. It's not going to become the leftist hippie-dippy happy hour. That isn't going to compel people for very long. That is a fad. And this is true if the Catholic Church does it.

It's true if the Methodists do it. It's true if anybody does it. And I've really got to give credit where credit is due to evangelical Protestants in America who are still in many cases practicing what they preach. There was a survey out of American Catholics, I think also from Pew, that showed that roughly half of American Catholics support abortion. The church is clear about its teaching on abortion. People should be clear about the teaching on abortion.

Abortion ends a human life. Christ is very clear. He says, whatever you do to whoever causes the littlest one to sin, it would be better for that man if he had a millstone tied around his neck and were cast into the bottom of the sea. Whoever harms the least of me, things aren't going to turn out very well for that person. And yet half of American Catholics support abortion.

This is insanity. Clearly, they don't believe what they say that they believe. And either those churches are going to be the church and authentically preach the gospel, or they're going to fall apart and fall away, and you're going to get another generation of religiously unaffiliated, and then another and another, until, to quote, I think it was Pope Benedict,

the flames of Christianity are extinguished throughout the West. That's the direction that we're headed in, and we need some of that old-time religion. I don't think the rock-star churches are going to do that. I think you need to authentically preach the gospel, and then you'll get people who are taking their religion, seriously. John Adams was not a crazy person. He was not

just a product of his time. He was not a guy who thought in a shallow way. He knows that this country which exalts freedom, which protects freedom, is only built for a moral and religious people. Even if you don't consider yourself religious,

give it a second thought. I remember when I was an atheist in college, Anne Coulter, or I would have called myself an atheist. I actually don't believe atheists really even exist. You know, if I don't believe in unicorns, I don't spend all of my life talking about unicorns. So I don't really even believe they exist. But I would have called myself that. And Anne Coulter made this great argument. She said, if all you care about is low taxes and you've got one guy who's pro-life and one guy who's pro-choice, one guy who's religious, one guy who's

irreligious, vote for the guy who's religious, who's pro-life, who has those cultural aspects to his conservatism. He will lower your taxes more because there is a coherence to his thought. okay if you consider yourself atheist and you want to low taxes, that's better than being a leftist. But there is a coherence to that thought that you've got to understand. And we get a lot of this out of the framers and the founders of the country. Now, to attack the Catholic Church even more, not really to attack the church, but to attack people who are abusing the church and to attack corruption in the church. We have heard from Pope Francis, Pope Francis who said, I will not say one word about this scandal. I will not say one word about the accusations credibly made against me. I will not

say one word about this. Now he's saying some words. He's saying multiple words. He is now blaming the exposure of this corruption in the bishops and in the clergy. Not on the bishops, but on Satan. He's blaming the exposure of that corruption. He's not even blaming the corruption. He's blaming the fact that we now can see it, that light has been shed on this. He's blaming that on He said, quote, in these times it seems like the great accuser has been unchained and is attacking the bishops. True, we're all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins so they are visible in order to scandalize the people. The great accuser, as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the book of Job, roams the earth looking for someone to accuse. A bishop's strength against the great accuser is prayer, that of Jesus and his own, and the humility of being chosen and remaining close to the people of God without seeking an aristocratic life that removes this unction.

Let us pray today for our bishops, for me, for those who are here, and for all the bishops throughout the world. Every response has been so totally tone deaf, has so totally missed the point. Yes, Satan is the accuser. Satan does accuse people. The trouble with the church right now is that there's, is not that there's too much shame, that there are too many accusations. The trouble with the church is that there are rotten, corrupt bishops who are covering up for sex abuse

for decades, and they're lying through their teeth, and they need to be. to be rooted out because they're a scandal. Christ talks about it. He talks about the millstones. He'd remember the millstones, people. This is a really, really tone-deaf response. And we've heard this before when the last time that Pope Francis responded after he said he wasn't going to respond, he said that people who are talking about these things should be silent and pray. Yes, people should pray, but he told them to shut up. This is not the right response. and you're going to see those numbers, those religiously unaffiliated go up and up and up as long as this sort of corruption is being tolerated by the Vatican or by bishops in the United States.

Really, really upsetting to see that. But we're running late again. We're always running late. Okay, well, we've got a lot more to talk about. An attorney general candidate in New York has really, really stepped in it. She's violated the only rule that matters to the left, which if they didn't have double standards, would have no standards at all. We'll just have to get to it tomorrow. I want to leave you on this note, however. There was a video that came out yesterday on the anniversary of 9-11. It is

perhaps the most American thing I've ever seen. I'll just play it for you right now. Hey guys, we're out here live on the Highway 10 bridge. I want to show you what's going on here on the bridge. Look what landed on top of the aerial on 9-11. Isn't that unbelievable? This eagle just landed on the aerial. While we're doing the 9-11 Memorial, phenomenal. Really incredible. It does make you think about the role of providence in America from the founding of the country, from the Mayflower,

all the way to the present. There does seem to be a providential hand, even as the religiously unaffiliated increase and increase and increase. Maybe that should all give us some thought. We've got a lot more to talk about tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll see you then. Get your mailbag questions in. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

I'll see you soon. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Sennia Villa Reel. Executive producer Jeremy Boring. Senior producer Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover. And our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Jim Nickel. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina.

Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production. Copyright Forward. Publishing 2018.