The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 60 - Luther Revisited ft. Eric Metaxas

Episode Date: November 16, 2017

Sanctimonious Democrat Al Franken has been not only accused of groping a news anchor during a USO tour while she slept, he even posed for a photograph doing it! If we have to lose the Alabama Senate race, we can at least take that clown down with him. White nationalist Richard Spencer loses his verified status as Twitter infringes on his constitutional right to a blue check mark, and Charles Manson lies on his deathbed 46 years after he was sentenced to death for the murder of 11 people. Best of all, the great Eric Metaxas comes on the show to defend Martin Luther’s honor and discuss his new book, “Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.” Finally, all of your most pressing questions answered in the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sanctimonious Democrat Al Franken has been not only accused of groping a news anchor during a U.S.O. tour while she slept, he even posed for a photograph doing it. What a smart guy. If we have to lose the Alabama Senate race, we can at least take that clown down with us. White nationalist Richard Spencer loses his verified status as Twitter infringes on his constitutional right to a blue check mark. And Charles Manson lies on his deathbed 46 years after he was sentenced to death for the murder of 11 people. Fleeckis talks, Bradley Devlin, and Alicia Krause join the panel of deplorables to discuss. Best of all, the great Eric Metaxus comes on the show to defend Martin Luther's

honor against my popish insults and to discuss his new book, Martin Luther, the man who rediscovered God and changed the world. Finally, all of your most pressing questions are answered and your life has changed in the mailbag. I am Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Nolshah. There is so much news to get to today and so much delight that we can take at Al Franken getting caught up in this sexual harassment witch hunt. By the way, when I say it's a witch hunt, we're clearly in a witch hunt mindset, but there are witches. That's the other aspect of this, too. There are Weinsteens out there, so we're in a witch hunt, but there are witches here. We have a lot to get to, but listen, I caught a lot of flack for my Martin Luther episode. People thought

that I was a little harsh on the corpulent German heretic. They felt that I was overly popish, and a little leaning in toward Rome. So to rectify this, I brought on the great Eric Metaxus. He was kind enough to do an interview. We pre-recorded it so it could go a little bit longer. And providentially, it was on Martin Luther's birthday, actually, November 10th that we recorded it. He's going to talk about his new book

and defend Martin Luther against my Popish onslaught. Now I have the great pleasure of being joined by someone that I'm a big fan of, both for his radio show and for his writing, Eric Metaxus, host of the Eric Mataxis show. and author of the new book, Martin Luther, the man who rediscovered God and changed the world. Now, Eric, I do not share your admiration of the corpulent German, exactly, but I did really enjoy the book.

I thought the narrative is very compelling, very readable, and I learned so much about Martin Luther that I didn't know before, and more importantly, I unlearned so many things about Martin Luther that I did know. It's like what Ronald Reagan used to say. It's not that our liberal friends are ignorant. they just know so much that isn't so. That basically was my view of Luther, and your book corrected that a lot.

So, yeah, what made you write it? Most of what we know about him is a myth or a legend, or at least a half-truth, which is to say a lie. I didn't go into this book. I don't go into any of my books knowing what I want to write. I just go in with a healthy level of ignorance and curiosity and honesty, and I say I'm just going to write what I find. But what I found about Luther was that much of what is saying,

said about him over and over and over is just not true. The first thing is everybody says he was raised in a very poor family, that his father was a poor minor. He often said, kind of like politicians sort of furnished their street cred, you know, their humble, on a few days. He says that my father was a humble miner. That's true and it's not true. His father was a successful businessman in the mining business. He was socially, upwardly mobile, which is an extraordinary thing in the 1480s that there was enough of a free market that somebody could be not wealthy, but could get wealthy or could work hard, and that there was enough of opportunity, let's say. So the father borrowed, it seems, a lot of money from the mother's family and started this huge

business. And it had to work very hard to justify the loan to get it, you know, to work out. So these were hard workers. But the more we know about Luther, there's a bunch of things in the book that are brand new. I talk about a couple of archaeological things that were done, 2003, 2008, where they discovered that the actual house that Luther was born in is three times as large as they've been saying for 500 years. So it's kind of crazy. And then they found a lot of garbage, trash, and they could dig through it,

and they discovered real evidence that these were people of some means. He was not raised under difficult circumstances. they found nice toys. They found... They found nice toys. You read the book. Thank you. I really enjoyed the book. I read it over a cigar because the body is a temple and the temple needs incense. The claim that comes later on in the book that you point out, which is probably the essence of the Protestant Revolution, and it's what Hamlet talks about, is that Luther cracked the cover of objective truth, cracked the authority and the ownership of objective

truth, and we've seen a lot of varied consequences from that. On the one hand, we have political freedom and the nation states and liberal democracy. On the other hand, you and I both attended a former university called Yale, and there are people wreaking havoc over there because Is it still Yale, or have they changed the name because he was a slaveholder? He was a slave trader. They have to change it to, I don't know, Mr. Rogers University. I think Nathan Hale. Nathan Hale. Nathan Hale is a great. greatest man ever to graduate from Yale, at least in previous centuries. And I think that they should change the name. But yes, the world, the door that Luther opened, we all know,

led to tremendous things and to terrible things. That's part of the price of freedom, right? In other words, when you say to people, you are free, you are free to say and believe stupid things or to say and believe wonderful things. That's freedom. In America, we protect people who say things we disagree with. That's at the essence of freedom. You know and I know that it's a little more complicated than that. I wrote a whole book called If You Can Keep It, my book before this, where I go into,

if you don't have a virtuous populace, if faith is not at the heart of a culture, self-government doesn't work. People will destroy themselves, as has happened many times in the past. Free market will not give us everything we're looking for. These things need to have people running them in such a way that they're going to give us what we want, right?

So what Luther enabled, I think, led to great things, but it also lets them many terrible things. I'll be the first to say it. And I love the point about mass communication. I loved when you're writing about how Luther himself didn't intend for his 95 theses to spread as quickly as they did, as ubiquitously as they did, almost like a Facebook debate. You know, it gets out of hand and everybody sees it.

And he said he had some. some doubts about them. He might have written it differently. How instrumental were two things to the spread of those theses? The sale of indulgences, my only quibble with your book, by the way, is I felt you were a little harsh on Pope Sixtus IV. I felt that people are a little harsh on Sixtus. And the confusion over the sale of indulgences married to this printing press where people on the other side of the world end up reading Luther's thesis and say, oh, Martin, good job, pal. I didn't know you read it. The channels of communication effectively don't exist.

The cultural elites, which in those days were the church and the state, have complete control. And if you try to get a message to somebody else, you can't. There's just no ability to do that. Suddenly somebody invents the printing press, and you can write something. and whether you like it or not, someone else can copy it and print it and distribute it very cheaply. And then people who get it can reprint it and distribute it. And it goes on and on. It's no different than, you know, forwarding something, hitting reply all.

And it goes to everybody and you think, uh-oh, what just happened? That wasn't possible 10 years ago or 20 years ago. But suddenly everybody knows and there's no way to get the horse back in the barn. Luther's the feces, I mean, one of the hugest misconceptions in the story of Luther, which, you know, it's such a good story if people want to believe it. But they have this idea that in 1517, this young man

wanted to stick his finger in the Pope's eye and post this incendiary document in the most incendiary place imaginable, hey, how about the church door? And then you find out, no, no, no, no, no. That we're looking at it, you know, from a different perspective. What happened at the time

was a humble monk who loved his church and loved his pope wanted to bring attention to something that he thought was dragging the church's name through the mud. And he did this for the church, for the honor of the church. He said, this is not right that we have allowed the practice of indulgences to get out of hands so that people are coming to my confessional and thrown this piece of paper in front of me saying, hey, Padre, what can I get for this?

Get out a penance free card, right? That's what it is. So Luther saw as a brilliant theologian and as a very serious, priest and monk. He said, this is bad for the faithful. The souls of my flock are in danger. And so he says, we need to have an academic debate, a proper academic debate, but everybody was having academic. It's what you did when there was trouble. You said, let's discuss it. So he writes in Latin, 95 points, some of them slightly provocative because you wanted to provoke a good academic debate. And he posted on a local bulletin board, which is the church door. But it's as if

So you picture him with the hammer and nails, thundering against the papacy, you know, and that's completely wrong. Shattering the theology, right. You might as well picture him with a pushpin down by the laundry room, putting it on the bulletin board next to the thing with the missing cat and the guitar lessons. I mean, basically, that's what he did. But people thought it, and somehow it just spread and spread, and it got way out of him. He never intended it to cause trouble. That's a fact. And speaking of his deference to the Pope and not trying to, you know, poke a nail into his.

eye. There's the, the most heartbreaking moment of the story is that he writes the letter to the Pope. He writes a letter to Leo the 10th, I believe, and it never is sent. Well, see, this is the thing. You start, I mean, I hope people will read the book because it's startling and stunning when you see what actually happened. It's not, it's the way real life works. Dumb little things happens. Stupid people misunderstand things. Good people misunderstand things. Militz, who was this papal, get sent to kind of deal with Luther made some terrible mistakes. And a couple of other people involved made some terrible mistakes. He kind of kept thinking, if I could deal directly with the Pope, surely he has to see what I'm saying is correct. I'm not trying to upend Catholic doctrine.

I mean, so much of his point is that the Pope, the Christian doctrine, church doctrine on indulgences is that, you know, it remits penance and temporal punishment for sin. And while the Pope doesn't have jurisdiction over souls in purgatory, he can intercede on your behalf. He can ask really nicely for those souls to have less punishment. And then you get guys like Tetzel down at the ground who are hawking when the coin rings than a soul out of purgatory springs. So so much seems to be Luther wanting to reach the Pope, wanting to go directly to the vicar of Christ on earth, the Bark of Peter. I mean, look, it's no different than a president like Reagan not knowing what's happening with his guys with Iran-Contra. Right. I mean, you realize that it's very complicated.

So he's on the hook, ultimately, but there are people that he has trusted, and obviously, people like Tetzel were very fast and loose, and the corruption. One moment that struck me is when Luther had not talked to his father for a while, because his father wanted him to become a lawyer. So he's this genius, he's clearly a prodigy. Just as he's about to become a lawyer, he doesn't want to become a lawyer. He's struck down. There's this moment, this vision, this thunderbolt. And eventually they reconcile.

And Luther's father says, God grant that that was not an apparition of the devil that convinced you to go and enter into the monastery. What are the odds that it was an apparition of the devil 500 years later? The fact is it could have been. But it doesn't matter because we serve a God who is able to braid plans B, C, and D back into plan A. Luther, his heart was in the right place. And the Bible says God looks on the heart.

This was a man who wanted what God wanted. And so sometimes we struggle to figure out what is it that God wants. What is God like? When he did this initially, his whole view of God was wrong. He had a view of God as a nasty judge who was just slavering, ruling to throw people into hell. If you have that view of God, you're going to act accordingly. And Luther thought, the only thing I can do to cover my rear end is to go into the monastery. I'm not going to risk eternal hell for a good law career.

So he goes to the monastery, really, you know, to cover his rear end. And when he gets there, he tries as hard as anyone. to pray his way into the peace of God and to, in effect, earn his way. This is what happens is that he has this sense that I've got to do this and this and this this, I've got to jump through these hoops. And you feel like you're performing and you're failing and what kind of a God would put you through that hell. So you begin to resent God and hate God.

He's reading the Bible, reading the Bible. And of course, famously at some point, he discovers this idea that we are saved by faith, the righteousness of God is given to us. It's not something that God uses to beat us into hell. He gives it to us as a free gift. So it turns his world upside down. And right around the same time was when he decided to post the feces on indulgences. And so it all kind of exploded thereafter.

The portrait you paint, as you've just described, is of a guy who is an obsessive. He's neurotic. He is constantly worrying himself to death. He seems to have a great fear of. death. He's so gaunt and thin, not like that portrait that we imagine of him. And then later on, he becomes this garrulous, fat German fellow. And he's constantly troubled by intestinal pains, a priest friend of mine, because of the word in cloaca or ox cloaca, that it is a suggestion that he had his epiphany about Romans while sitting on the commode. And my priest's friend

wondered what torrent of commentary he could have unleashed on the world with a modern colonic irrigation. That isn't neither here nor there. Of course, I make fun of the Freudian. That's, you know, that's, that's what I want to ask about, are these Freudian Itherian. That, I mean, there was a guy named Eric Erickson who wrote a book about Luther called Young Man Luther, and if you want to talk about a mid-century horror of a cliche, Freudian nonsense, 350 pages of Freudian nonsense, really giving Luther no real credit for being a person. No rational credit.

Ass of urges and constipation and libido and, hey, that's what makes a world go around. Of course, that's not true. But in 1958, it was difficult to argue against it. So, yeah, people really misunderstand Luther in that way, too. They said, oh, his father was really cruel and he was rebelling against his father. there was this edible spasm against his father and the father God that made him do everything he did. It's completely ridiculous. And again, the least you can do in a biography, and I hope I do it in my book, is simply tell the facts.

And a story emerges from the facts, at least if you have enough facts. And at this point, we can say we do. You certainly achieve it in the book. It's really, really good. I highly recommend it, even as a very popish fellow and traditionalist conservative, I really, really enjoyed it. I recommend that everybody go out and read it. It's Martin Luther, the man who rediscovered God and changed the world.

We can quibble about maybe the subtitle or Sixthus the Fourth or what have you, but a really good book. Everyone should go out and read it. And of course, listen to the Eric Metax's show. It's a great show. And Eric, thanks for being here. And we definitely want to have you back as soon as possible. Michael, it was my joy. Thank you so much.

Did I defend Sixtus enough? I felt I didn't sufficiently defend my... It was too much. Well, we can all argue about that, I guess. Okay. That was really great. I really love Eric Mataxis. I like his show a lot and his writings.

So now I'm moving on to his Bonhofer book. And regardless of him not really convincing me to like Martin Luther, I still enjoyed the book and you should all go out and read it. So before we get to, we have an excellent panel today. We have Bradley Devlin. We have Fleckis Talks. We have Alicia Krauss. An excellent panel.

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We have Al Franken getting a little handsy with reporters and being sanctimonious as ever. We have Richard Spencer being unverified. And poor Charlie Manson is on his deathbed, apparently. So let's start with Al Franken. He is in hot water. He has been sanctimonious since the 90s, since he was Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live,

just liberal, insufferable. He wrote that book, Lies and the lying liars who tell them, wham, wah, wah, and so anyway, now that we have this sexual assault craze that is sweeping the nation coast to coast, he's being swept up in it, too. This is a guy who's demagogued on Donald Trump. He's constantly berating Republicans,

and now it turns out that in 2006, during a USO tour, he groped a reporter, a news anchor, named Leanne Tweedin in her sleep. He also said that they had to rehearse a bit for the U.S.O. show. He said, we have to practice the kiss. This is a line that actors use all the time.

They joke. They say, oh, we got to practice that kissing scene. You got to practice that kissing scene. Apparently, he took it pretty far, and he said, we got to practice that kissing scene. And he grabbed her and forced his tongue down her throat, and she said she had to go wash her mouth out to get the taste of Al Franken out of her mouth. I certainly can imagine why she would

do that. So she wrote this piece. It's, I've decided it's time. to tell my story. Franken is getting totally swept up in it. I love it. It's so much fun. But Alicia, to be fair, we always try to be fair, Roche Foucault said that hypocrisy is the tribute that Vice pays to virtue. So should we hold Democrats in particular to account on sexual debauchery and assault because they're always demagoguing the women's issue, the war on women? Or is that not fair? Should we hold them to the same standards we hold Republicans? I would personally, I would hold them to the same standards that I hold Republicans,

where this is a Republican senator, main reason I don't want Roy Moore to live. By the way, he just had a crazy press conference. It was insane. Did I miss it during my show? It's all the media's fault. It's all Mitch McConnell's fault because, you know. Well, that's true, but he also might have done all that stuff. So I'm going to hold Al Franken to the same standard that I hold Roy Moore. This isn't alleged groping, as Politico said in a title and a tweet earlier. There's photographic evidence of this. He posed for the photo. He posed for the photo. And we're now finding out that the U.S.O. volunteer photographer was indeed his brother. So apparently creep runs in the family. I've met Leanne before. She's a lovely woman. She's done multiple

U.S.O tours. She used to come for free to the Sean Hannity, all of her North Freedom concerts that raise money for KIA, MIA children to go to college. She's a wonderful human being, and I'm a fan of her as a person. And I'm sure that she, like many women that have been victims of this, had to consider, you know, what is this going to do to my career? What is this going to do to, you know, situation at large if I come out and share this story. And it looks as if there might be another woman that has said publicly, yes, Al Franken did do this to me too. And my story will be out soon. And of course, now reporters are hounding down if there's any women that he's treated this way since being a sitting senator on Capitol Hill. And I got to say, I'm shocked we didn't look for this

sooner. The guy has spent his whole career in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. He worked with Lorne Michaels, who went, who is, of course, the creator of S&L. And when he was asked about, well, how come you guys to do a cold S&L open making fun of Harvey Weinstein, he said, oh, well, you know, it's a New York thing. Well, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, also people that are all from New York, that Lauren Michaels has been totally okay with making fun of over the years. And it doesn't really surprise me that Al Franken came from that boys club of comedy in liberal New York. And this is exactly the point, because there have been plenty of sex scandals to go around, certainly, at Fox News or wherever. But for the really high-profile

ones, a people in office or running as candidates. They seem to have been Democrats of late. Obviously, Bill Clinton is the sexual creep par excellence, but there's Anthony Weiner. We're seeing this, we're seeing Al Franken now. The list goes on. Bradley, I'm curious about this as a campus question, because with the sexual hysteria on campus now, that bogus statistic that one in four women is raped or something like that, who are the people perpetrating this?

The hookup culture is pretty weird. You know, I'm not that old. I was on campus five years ago, and there was just a ton of sex happening all the time. It's pretty casual. But who are the guys who are really perpetrating the creepy stuff here? Is it the conservative kids buttoned up Brooks Brothers? Or is it the lefties who are at one corner of their mouth spouting all of this feminist hogwash? And then when no one's looking, they're the ones perpetrating these crimes.

Yeah, I completely agree with you that that statistic is fairly bogus. but it's because we see a movement towards sexual liberation on the left thinking that women are the same as men, that women want it just as badly as men. And there's been several studies where college-aged men admit that they haven't had consensual sex. So what they say is, oh, well, I was with her all night and I had sex with her, and that's just the way I operate, and that's the way she operates, because the left has been telling me that women are the same as men, and women want it just as bad. But that just simply isn't true.

So we can't deny women their own agency and their own volition by forcing upon them belief systems and values to fight the patriarchy. And I think that that is a major pitfall for the left and why you're seeing a movement back towards conservatism. Right now it's a very, very liberal environment, but I think you're going to start seeing social conservatives come out of the woodwork with all these net negatives

that are coming from this leftist agenda. a huge statistic is 300,000 abortions per year. Right. That's interesting because I was asking in particular because my theory is that feminist woke, woke bro nice guys are the creepiest dudes on the planet and I would never let my daughter or my fiancé or my female friends alone in a room with them, you know,

because they say they're really nice, oh man, I get your feelings, you know, and then they just get really creepy and weird. Oh, yeah, man, I love feminism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what you're saying is it's the philosophy itself. It's that philosophy that says women and men have entirely identical views of sex and relationships to sex and just unquenchable desires for sex. And so if a woman regrets an experience or a woman is in a bad place and gets very drunk and the man gets very drunk and there's some regret or something, then, hey, no harm, no foul, you know, we both made a mistake or something. When really that isn't a traditional view and that isn't the case because men and women are common.

complementary and they're not identical. Very good point. Fleckis, you're at in Hollywood. You know, for so long there has been this double standard. So Gloria Steinem, flax for Bill Clinton, right? Bill Clinton is accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault, on and on. And she says, well, he's good on abortion, so we're going to stand by our guy. The feminists follow her. Is that, we're seeing now left-wing guys falling because of this. Is that double standard cracking or once this witch hunt goes away, is it going to be right back in place? I think the double standard is cracking. And hello, Michael Knowles. Thank you for having me on again.

Good to see you, man. I loved your last video on Ben Shapiro at the outside of UCLA. Everyone, if you're not watching Fleckis's videos, go to Fleckis Talks on YouTube. Those guys, man, too, the difference between the protesters and the Shapiro audience people is just tremendous. It says a lot about our country. Yeah, a lot of Nazi go home chants. And I was like, wow. But yeah, the double standard is cracking.

I really think it is because I think right now we're dealing with a lot of echo chambers. So everyone's just seeing what they agree with. They're seeing their values reaffirmed. And it's tough to get stories that actually break through the echo chamber and are bipartisan people that can agree on in a bipartisan way. So when they do, and it's like these sexual misconduct cases, even though they said alleged, meanwhile, he's like looking at the camera. and it was completely premedicated. But when these cases do actually break the echo chambers, I think it raises the level of awareness.

So going forward, I think these cases of sexual misconduct are going to be way less popular and just way less in general and the whole industry is going to change. But I think the fact that we are seeing these cases come forward and it does tend to be Democrats and, you know, disgusting Hollywood, I think going forward it has to change. I think it will. Well, I hope it does.

I don't know. I'm a little less hopeful than you are probably, but... But the stats show that it is changing. I mean, Hillary Clinton lost millennial women because millennial women were children during the age of Bill Clinton, and then now in the age of the Internet, even if they didn't vote for Donald Trump,

his bringing the accusers to the debate, his bringing it up, his surrogates bringing it up, was enough for a lot of millennial women to go, yeah, we're not okay with this. We're not going to go out and go vote for a woman. that stayed married to a man that had these accusations in his past. And so I agree there. I think that politically, this is maybe potentially an opportunity for the Republicans to say,

hey, guys, we're supposed to be the party of the good guys. We call out our own creeps. The Democrats don't. They have a history of not doing it. So come on over to the right side. Absolutely. They wouldn't just vote for her because she was a woman. And one thing, when Trump decided to bring those women to the debate, all of Clinton's

accusers, people said this is awful. This is tawdry. No one cares. this is 20 years old, why are you rehashing this? He clearly sensed something about the moment. Sexual harassment, sexual assault is in the air right now. For many, obviously, the Axis Hollywood tape came out against him, talking to Billy Bush, and it's just in there.

And bringing the fight to them, which we have not done for 20, 30 years, bringing it to them on that is really a really strong response. And I'm glad we're seeing it crack, and I hope that that double standard goes away. Okay, we have much more to get to. to talk about verification, Richard Spencer, and Charlie Manson is dying. But, unfortunately, you can't see it. Plus the mailbag, by the way. I'm going to answer all of your questions in the mailbag, but unless you're a DailyWire subscriber, you can't see it.

So go over to DailyWire.com right now. What's the pitch? Well, you get me. You get the Andrew Claven show. You get the Benchapuro show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this, this, I can't tell you how many people envy my vessel, the leftist tears Tumblr. because they're so abundant right now.

The leftist tears are pouring out everywhere. Every new Trump tweet about CNN in the failing New York Times and those basketball players who then thanked him. Once they thanked him, they started gushing. I had to hold my breath. And the only way to get this

is to subscribe right now as an annual member. $10 a year, or $100 a year, and you will get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, the finest vessel for leftist tears on planet Earth in the entire multiverse. So go to DailyWire.com. We'll be right back. Richard Spencer has been unverified on Twitter.

They did this to Milo Yanopolis before they kicked him off. I think they kicked off Baked Alaska, who's a white nationalist guy, you know, all right figure. And Richard Spencer has lost it now. His constitutional right to a blue check mark is clearly being infringed on. Alicia, to play devil's advocate here, literally devil's advocate in this case, should we be worried to invert a fringe?

is often used against Nazis. First, Twitter came for the Nazis. How long before they start coming for regular run-of-the-mill conservatives who violate their regulations and start criminalizing thought? I'm even wondering if they're going to start

coming after conservatives that aren't violating the regulations, and they keep moving those regulations. We've seen other social media platforms do this as well to fit with the more politically correct narrative. Listen, I'm not a fan of Spencer. I'm not a fan of these other people that have lost or checkmarks and eventually their accounts,

but there is a level of hypocrisy here. And I'm kind of torn on it because I don't know that a blue check mark is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment, but it isn't to promote it. The blue checkmark from Twitter doesn't mean that Twitter agrees with every single tweet that Ben Shapiro, you or I send out. It just means, yes, this is Elisha Krause,

this is her verified account. So anything else that has like, you know, Alicia Krause's eyebrows or something isn't going to actually be myself. So it's a process of verifying that that's the real person to prevent fraud, not necessarily to silent speech or promote certain types of speech. And the reason I'm torn on this is because Twitter is a private company. And I think that Daily Wire should be able to do what they want. Michael Null should be able to do what he wants.

And part of me does believe that Twitter, as a private company, as a corporation, should be able to make the decisions that they want. Well, at least Michael Null should be able to do what he wants. I agree with that. Even if those decisions could potentially lead down the slippery slope of conservatives eventually being silenced. Sure, though there is some case, at least for Facebook and YouTube, that they do have a virtual monopoly over forms of information. That's why Prager right now is suing them. So I don't know. I go back and forth on this because I share many of your misgivings about telling companies what to do.

But that distinction between the checkmark initially was just to identify that this is the real person because there are a lot of fake accounts. You get these all the time. There's an really funny account, Ben Shapiro's Yamika. You know, or you get all of these. Ben Shapiro 2020. Ben Shapiro 2020. political pack. I'm sorry, folks. And, you know, you get like,

there are a thousand fake Trump accounts, but the one with the checkmark is how you know you're talking to the real guy. Now, though, it's considered like just a status symbol. It's a mark that I'm famous or I'm powerful or influential or whatever. There are people who have that checkmark who have like 100 followers, but they just,

they need the, to know that it's the real person because they've done something. It's not because they're a celebrity or a movie personality. They're not a celebrity at all. But, you know, Fleck is in. this celebrity culture, that's what it's come to be. It's a coveted status symbol, that blue check mark. Who cares about it? What is Richard Spencer care? He gets to say what he wants. People are still following him. If Twitter is going to act childish as I think they are, who cares? He

still gets to spread his ridiculous message anyway. Why the cult of celebrity? That's a great question. And I actually just made it through the Twitter purged myself. I did not lose my blue check mark. Not a Nazi. Not a Nazi. Yeah, I think with the situation with Richard Spencer, it's just Twitter trying to do everything they can to not associate with him in any way. So, I mean, we're seeing it as well with Taylor Swift. A lot of people are coming out now and saying, hey, Taylor Swift, why didn't you get political? Why are you staying apolitical? Why haven't you taken aside? So I think it's kind of like the leftist pressure on Twitter. They don't want Twitter to give them a blue check because you don't have to give them a blue check. And getting a blue check, means that Twitter went through your profile and thought that you were worthy. So they don't want Twitter to think Richard Spencer is worthy of anything, I think. And that's why the purge happened. And, you know, a lot of these people, yeah, they lose their blue check mark.

They don't really care. But I think it does affect them in a bigger way. And it goes back to what I was saying before. It just feeds the echo chamber. That Twitter echo chamber now is, you know, a little bit stronger. And they keep chipping away. And eventually it'll be just a complete, you know, a complete leftist mouthpiece. The one advantage, I will say, of the blue check is that,

As someone who got a blue check mark for literally doing nothing for publishing blank pages and selling a lot of books, the advantages that are businesses, when you complain about them, they give you stuff. So, you know, I had a flight that was delayed like a thousand hours and it was all messed up, and I complained about it, and they basically said, what can we do? We'll do anything for you. That's the only advantage. That could also have to do with the number of followers that you have. I mean, this is something that I think Gary Vee and other people in entertainment and marketing and stuff have talked about. Like, you know, is it really a company having good customer service if they're only answering to their popular people that tweet hate at them? Right, right.

Doesn't matter to me as long as I get the free stuff. But I just mean Richard gets to say whatever he wants. His followers have total access to whatever nonsense he wants to scribble. So, you know, what's the big deal? And Bradley, I do want to talk about this a little bit because, look, I think Richard Spencer is basically the devil. But I do like that he's honest. I think a lot of people who share his point of view, they're not honest. They try to combine various elements of conservative political philosophy with this sort of quasi-fascistic racialist political view. And I respect him in that he doesn't do that. He is very clear. He says the alt-right is about white identity. We want a white ethno-state. And so I at least give him some credit for that. He's had some luck recently with a campaign that the alt-right has. run, which is on college campuses, and it's a sign that says, it's okay to be white. Obviously,

a totally innocuous statement. And they were relying on the backlash for reasonable people to say, well, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. It's okay to be white. And obviously their metapolitical goal here is to have people start identifying essentially or primarily with their skin color, rather than with something like their ideas or their faith in God or some other ideological component. Do you find on campus that this is catching on, that people are falling for this trap, that the alt-right are setting for them, and that the left and the regressive left is basically rolling out the red carpet for people to do, or is it falling flat? Oh, yeah, I have several thoughts on the alt-right and its campus presence. But first, if there are any young conservatives watching,

watch Michael Knowles' video on Prager University about the All-Right. It'll give you everything you need to know about who they are and what they believe in. And if you're going to be a Nazi, you might as well tell me straight to my face that you're being a Nazi so I can punch you in the face. Not, not, I'm joking. You're going to get unverified for that. You're going to lose your checkmark. Well, actually, a little aside here, young conservative writers that I run in the same circles with are having a very, very difficult time getting verified. you're getting a blue checkmark because you're verified that you have a business.

I run a website called the University of Politics. I'm their editor-in-chief. I still am struggling to get verified. So there's definitely ideological censorship going on at Twitter. It doesn't mean that you have a right to have that blue checkmark. That's what the founders wanted. Personally, if you're running a company and you're barring half the population, you know, 47% of the population voted for Donald Trump,

and you're barring half of the population from sharing their viewpoints and being a verified individual, you're going to lose individuals on the website. True. Further than that, yes, it's okay to be white. Yeah. Poster.

Yeah, are they winning? Is they all right winning on campus? They're not. They're winning on the message boards on 4chan and Reddit because the echo chamber within hyper-liberal campuses have pushed these individuals, down into this scummy pepe meme society where they're radicalized and it bubbles out in

events like Charlottesville. So constitutional conservatives need to come out very strongly against the alt-right and tell individuals who don't necessarily like political correctness that just because the left labels you alt-right because you don't like political correctness doesn't mean you are alt-right. You can come join the conservative movement. You can come be for individual rights. You can come be for lower taxes and be for a strong national defense. I'll go further.

I'll go further. I want the memes. I love the memes. I think they're hilarious. I want Pepe. Pepe's great. I just don't want the ethno state. I don't want people to ground their identity essentially in race because I think that's very stupid

and it misses the point of our creation and of our lives. Okay. Speaking of people who miss the point of their life and speaking of great evil and principalities and powers of this world. Charles Manson is on his deathbed, only 46 years after he was sentenced to death, tells you something about criminal justice in the United States.

So my first question, Alicia, on the death penalty itself, is it cruel and unusual punishment to abolish the death penalty? He's only still alive because it was found unconstitutional in California, for some ridiculous reason, in the 70s.

Is it wrong to abolish the death penalty? penalty and lock people up for half a century? I think, well, I mean, he would be in hell a lot sooner, so I think that I'm okay with the death penalty. This is something that I know that, especially some Catholic friends of mine say, well, if you're going to be pro-life, then you have to be pro-life throughout the whole life. But my argument is that a baby in utero didn't murder people senselessly and create a cult and lead people to do disgusting and horrible things.

You know, Manson did do that as an adult and had a fully formed functioning ability. to decide between right and wrong. A child in the womb does not. And is that the whim of the mother and the doctor, you know, the abortionist. So, but I think Manson should have died a long time ago. It really pisses me off that my tax dollars have been paying to keep him alive

and to hospitalize him and to feed him. And, you know, to have his crazy wife that he married a couple years ago come and visit him and all that stuff. Or tried to marry. I think that the license went through. But, yeah, I guess it's harder to marry Charles Manson than you would think.

Yeah. I mean, that to me is a very large red flag of our criminal justice system. Understandably, there are some people that commit crimes that lose their right to vote, and people are like, oh, but felons should have the right to vote. And I'm like, no, no. Like, I think you should lose everything when you commit certain crimes. And in this case, I think Manson should have lost his life a long time ago. But for a little sympathy for Manson, by the way, I will say on the Catholic point,

Pope Pius the 9th, blessed Pope Pius the 9th, killed over 500 people. He executed them. So, you know, there's some disagreement among Catholics here. Certainly, I think so. But a little sympathy for Manson. The guy had a horrible life. His mother had him when she was 16. Not an excuse.

Well, I mean, there's lots of people out there that have had horrible lives that have not gone on the rampages that he has or been responsible for what he had done. But just a little, listen, I'm just trying to be so empathetic and bleeding heart here. He, you know, his mother didn't want him. He was, he didn't have a name when he was born. He was only given a name a couple weeks later. He was abandoned by his mother initially.

He had to live with an aunt or uncle or something. His parents went to prison. He never knew his actual father. And he said the only nice memory from his childhood is the one hug his mother gave him after she got out of jail. He was completely illiterate. He was sent to a boarding school because his mother tried to give him away to the state. The state refused him. He was sent to a boarding school.

He ran away to his mother. His mother rejected him. I mean, this guy was in prison. for half of his life before the Manson family. He just, I mean, it's, in some ways, he never had a shot from the beginning. I mean, he was really, really a horrible, tragic life that you imagine for a little baby and little kid.

Just because it was a horrible tragic life, you can't tell me that there wasn't one decent person that ever interacted with him and gave him the opportunity to choose between right and wrong. He had multiple moments throughout his life to do that. But that is the question. You know, Fleckis does, should we have any compassion for this guy

or should we be happy that he's about to be sent to hell? I think if he wasn't a white male, you'd have a case there, Michael. I'm sorry, I forgot it's 2017. Yeah, if he wasn't a white male, you'd be on to something. I don't agree with you. I don't think Charles Manson was a great guy like you do. Yeah, that's going to be the takeaway. Noel says Manson's a great guy.

I mean, we're going to be, have to hash this out later. I'm scared to touch this one, Michael. Noel says guy who murdered 11 people is really cool or something. That's what's going to be the headline. You're going to lose your check mark for this. Yeah, there it is. There it goes. Oh, it's gone.

And it's gone. But I think, yeah, he's a bad guy. I wish he had died sooner. But, you know, he also has a swastika tattooed to his face. So maybe if these protesters are not working at all ever, they should go to the hospital and, you know, rally for his death or whatever. Maybe that's something that they would have, you know, more fun doing than going to the Ben Shapiro thing. Point them in the direction of a true.

Nazi? Yeah. I would like to show just we have a little clip of all the crazy things Banson said, not all of them, but an abridged version. Let's just show that to get a picture of this guy. Well, God, I guess you're my best friend being I invented you. I don't need to kill anyone. I think it. When I stand on the mountain and I say, do it. It gets done. If it don't get done, then I'll move on it. And that's the last thing in the world you want me to do. I'm a boxcar and a jug of wine and a straight racer. If you get a done, you can get a lot. too close to me. Is Charlie Manson crazy? Whatever that means, sure, he's crazy, as mad as a hatter. What difference does it make?

A long time ago, being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy. Believe me, if I started murdering people, there'd be none of you left. My children are coming. I told you 20 years ago. The Charlie Manson that you created, that's not me. That's only an illusion in your minds. You know, if I wanted to kill somebody, I'd take this book and beat you to death with it, and I wouldn't feel a thing. It'd be just like walking to the drugstore. How much evil is there? So much as you see.

What do you say? All of it. I haven't dreamed. And worlds you haven't conquered. The mind is endless. Terrifying guy. Obviously demonic. I mean, really scary stuff.

It's stuff you read about in the Bible. If you see it coming through this guy. He's probably going to hell, but we can pray for his soul, and maybe he'll have a last-minute conversion, but I'm not terribly hopeful of that. Panel, thank you for being here. We are running a little bit of late, so I have to say goodbye to Bradley Devlin, Fleckis, and Alicia. See you guys soon. So I'm going to burn through these mailback questions. I'm going to change your life as quickly as I ever have.

First question from Stephen. Michael, what advice do you have for someone wishing to start their own business? I hope these get through the conversation. I'm watching on my cell phone. Thanks for watching. And great questions. So we're always talking about politics and government, political philosophy. Conservatives should be starting businesses and doing things in the real world. My main advice is register in Delaware. They have good state tax laws. So register in Delaware, get a registered agent over there, and you're going to fail. You're going to just fail and

fail and fail and try new things. But do it. That's the most important thing. Everybody has great ideas and a great business that they could start, but very few people raise the capital and go through the personal risk and then the hard work of doing it starting a I've started businesses businesses are very difficult to start you don't get paid a lot for a long time and then if it's successful hopefully you will so persevere make sure you have a good lawyer and an accountant so that you paperwork is very important and and persevere because it's a real test of your of your character and what your character has developed into to see if you can actually put the

pedal to the metal and leave the field of abstraction to exist in the real world. From Matthew, question, what is President Trump's greatest flaw in your opinion? You know, I had a lot of criticisms of Trump as a candidate. I've been very pleased by his presidency. He's been much better than I expected. He's been really good, I think. He gets good grades for me. But he's a flawed guy, just like anybody. He might be more flawed than some people. And I love, the thing that I think is his greatest flaw partakes of one of the great aspects of him, which is his spiritedness. He has ethos when he talks. when he gives a speech, when he commands a room, you see that.

And I think we're waiting for him to be Ronald Reagan. We really wish that he could give a time for choosing speech and articulate these timeless principles from the Bible up through Hayek and Burke and Kirk and whatever. And he doesn't demonstrate that. He hasn't been able to do that. Andrew Claven says he's a plumber. Sometimes you need a plumber to clear out your pipes, and sometimes you need an orator.

and he's been really good at connecting people and communicating. And I think if he were able to exhibit that high moral, truly inspiring on a moral level, rhetoric, I think he would be a force, unlike which we've seen certainly in my lifetime. But all in all, he's been doing pretty good. From Marie. Hey there, Michael. I've been trying to learn more about how this country was founded and the balance between natural rights and natural laws. It seems interesting to me that these rights would be deemed inalienable or unalienable

when some could be taken away or restricted by the same government. I can understand there are limits because of natural law, but why then call them inalienable or unalienable in the first place is they are clearly not in some situations? Are there any good books you could recommend on the topic? Thanks. So I think people misunderstand this. To say that a right is unalienable is not to say that your right cannot be. violated. It's to say that it's a right that's absolute. It's not a contingent right. It's not a

right that depends upon the caprices of political wins that depend on this party being in power of that party. The right to control the border of the United States might be dependent on which party is in power at the time and which party is running the government, but not my absolute right. Now, you have plenty of natural rights that are violated all of the time. You have a right to life, but the right to life is constantly violated, which comes out of the natural law, which comes out of God and Christianity. So it's absolute. It means that you can, a right that's contingent on a government, you can go to a government and say, look, my right was violated and go before that judge. A right that's absolute and not contingent on a government, but contingent

on your creator, you'll have to appeal to heaven. As this George Washington flag shows, you'll have to appeal to the ultimate judge in heaven. Next question from Jason. Little old knolls, yes, little old me. I was recently discussing spiritual presence with a friend. He was talking to me about when he visited Germany and had the opportunity to stand in one of the crematoriums at a concentration camp.

We questioned how men could stoop to such evil as to systematically kill people the way the Nazis did. My conclusion was that there are certain ideologies that are at their foundation evil, and people could only become so evil by ensconcing themselves in those ideologies. Would you agree? And what ideologies do you think deserve to be labeled as such?

I don't agree. I don't think people become evil simply because of ideology. Someone had to create the ideology, right? The ideology had to come from somewhere. I agree with what happens right after Noah gets off the ark, and he sacrifices to God, and God says, God knew at that moment that the imagination of man's heart was evil from the beginning, that were fallen creatures.

and evil and here's in that, not simply in ideas. But further, evil has a personality. Evil isn't just an ideology. It isn't just a set of ideas. It has a personality and it has a name, which is Satan. You see in First Peter, quote, Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil is a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

In Ephesians, put on your whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Then entered Satan into Judas Iscariot, being of the number of the 12. The book of Job has God speaking to the person of the devil. Jesus was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

It has a personality. It is creeping along in the world, as we see in Paradise Lost, as we see in the Bible, as we see in our own metaphysical vision of the world, and he's trying to get your soul. So I think when you view things that way, it's less clinical, it's less secularized, it's less rationalist, but it's much more accurate and it will serve you better to try to fight against evil from Fitzgerald. My girlfriend told me she's bisexual. What should I do?

I always liked straight women. You lucky duck? Man, that sounds great. No, I'm kidding. I don't know. It's very fashionable these days. for women to say that they're bisexual or men to say that their sexuality is on a spectrum and gender is on a spectrum. We see in all of the data show this that among polling people

are much less likely now to say that they're straight or cisgendered that they are the gender that they are. I think that's a fad. Now, obviously, there are people who are attracted to both sexes, and so your girlfriend might be in that category. I don't know. Do you love your girlfriend? If you do stick with her. If that's a breaking point, then you know, obviously you guys should break up, and I'm going to withhold all of the other jokes that I was thinking of when I saw your question. But I don't know, man, listen, these are not the worst problems in the world, you know.

Okay, next question from Cedric. Hey, Knowles, King of Trolls. Claven makes fun of you all the time, but why do you never make fun of him? Simple answer, he's the Supreme Lord of the Multiverse, who could strike me down whenever, by just closing his eyes and transporting me mystically into a Clavenless weekend. So I would never tempt that power at all. And if you're listening, Drew, I'm sorry I even read the question, okay?

And from Teresa. Hey, Michael, someone close to me straight from the church years ago and is now beginning to embrace the left. They think the stigma around socialism is unwarranted. They detest capitalism. They don't like organized religion. Sounds like a great person. It's almost impossible to debate them

because they either get so heated or they pull the moral relativism card. They just basically ignore the conversation you mean and say that there's no point to talking because nothing is true or false. but heaven makes it so, which is an argument against its own argument. I've been trying to get them to at least consider going back to church. They refuse.

Is there anything I could do to help them embrace a less destructive worldview? Yeah. So the term capitalism, we defend capitalism, we know what we mean by capitalism. The term is an invention of socialists and communists. It's not like this term has been around for thousands of years. It was coined in the 19th century by French socialist, politician Louis Blanc. He used it first, Marx and Engels used it soon thereafter in volume one of de Capital. The idea of capital comes from the 12th century of the idea, referring to funds and stock of

merchandise and money and money that carries interest and so forth. But it's freedom. Talk about it in terms of, don't use the isms that the communists and the other ideologues try to foist on us. Talk about it as a matter of freedom. Do you think people should be able to use the money how they want and hire who they want, and do you think the people should be able to work for whom they want to work and negotiate contracts and deal and free markets that are protected by laws. If you like that,

then that's pretty good. As far as going back to the church, if this person is using relativistic arguments, it's very simple to stop those arguments. They say, well, you know, that's your opinion, man, but don't forget, opinions are not preferences. They're statements of fact as you see them. So a preference is, I really like this cofefefefe. An opinion is, this is the greatest cofefefe in the world. One is a statement of fact. Another statement of fact would be, I think this is the greatest coffefe in the world or this is the greatest coffefe in the world, right?

So the way to stop the relativist so-called argument is to say, if they say, truth doesn't exist, then you say, well, that's impossible, because for you to state the truth doesn't exist requires there to be a truth. That is, truth doesn't exist, which doesn't. So if you can communicate the point,

the communication breaks down, because of relativistic nonsense, you might be able to crack her, this intellectual fad that she seems to be going through, which has no bearing to reality. Okay, I think we sprinted through that. That's our whole show. Heading into the Clavenless weekend, listen to Another Kingdom by Andrew Claven and performed by me. It's everywhere great podcasts are downloaded, stitch your Google Play and iTunes. And I will see you next week, folks. I'm Michael Knowles.

This is the Michael Knowles Show. Try to Survive the Weekend. Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson. Producer Jeremy Boring. Senior producer Jonathan Hay. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera, and our associate producer is Bailey Lynn. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production, copyright forward publishing 2017.