The Michael Knowles Show - The Pro-Life Spiderman | Maison DesChamps

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Maison DesChamps is a free climber who climbs buildings around the USA for various causes including protesting mask mandates and raising awareness for pro-life causes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With great power comes great responsibility, and we all have different powers, some natural and some cultivated over time. Some of us can play the violin. Some of us can run very, very fast. Some of us can climb up thousand foot tall buildings without any ropes or anything at all, like complete and utter maniacs. And you could either just do that for fun or because you have a death wish, or you could do that for a good cause, as Mason Deschamps has done, raising money for all sorts of pro-life causes and crisis pregnancy centers around the country, making the case for life by constantly risking his own. Mason, thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, thank you, Michael. You know, I just have to say this is kind of a dream come true. I've been listening to your

episode, to your show since episode five. And so you are not only one, but if not the sole, reason I became a conservative, so I just have to thank you a lot. You've got to be kidding me. Wow, man, I'm so honored to hear that. That is genuinely and clearly, listen, I knew that you were a courageous person already just from reading all the stuff you've been doing. But I didn't realize how absolutely gentlemanly and scholarly you were until I saw you with the scotch and the cigar. Very, very great stuff. And I'm really, really honored that I played some role in helping the way that you think. But now I feel as though I might bear some responsibility because you maniac, you just go up there and risk your life constantly. I see here, you have climbed the 1,070-foot

Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the 770-foot New York Times building. Too bad you couldn't have just smushed that building when you got to the top there. The 560-foot Renaissance Center, 400 tower in Detroit, and the 840-foot Devon Tower in Oklahoma City. How and why? Yeah, you know, so I was actually, I'd wanted to join the pro-life movement for a while and get involved somehow, but nothing had quite convicted me until one morning I was listening to your show, and I heard about the Justice for the Five incident. And, you know, of course, like everybody, I went online, and I see these photos of these babies.

Well, then I read an article about Cesare Sanangelo and how the police not only didn't arrest the doctor who had brutally murdered these babies, but arrested the activist Warren Handy instead. And so I not only felt like it was something I should do, it felt like a duty, like something I had to do. I felt convicted. And so I'm sitting at home. I'm a poor college rock climber, still am.

But I'm thinking to myself, you know, if politics are downstream of culture and I want to change the culture, then the best way to change the culture is to somehow become a part of it. And there was this guy, his name's Alon Robert. And in the 90s, he had climbed all of these buildings around the world. And a movie came out during quarantine about him. It's called My Next Challenge. And I watched it, and I thought, you know, I think I can do that. I'm a good enough climber. And so, you know, I started planning this. And it was really hard at first because I knew if I was going to do it, I was going to have to do it right. I was going to have to raise the money to get professional photographers so that I can really put it out there.

And I determined that the cost was going to be around $8,000. So I'd emailed every pro-life organization, every conservative organization, and, you know, I was either ignored or denied. And I really, I felt like a Nigerian prince, you know. I was like, I'm going to climb skyscrapers and raise all this money. But I finally, I had asked my boss, and at the time I was working construction for a company called Ninth Island woodcrafters in Las Vegas, and we build cabinets and stuff like that and custom woodwork. But I was his apprentice, and so he's like a father figure to me. And he said,

you know, Mason, I believe in you. And if this is what you believe in, then I'll fund it. And so that's what got it off the ground. And so I bought all these plane tickets to go to San Francisco, then Detroit, or New York, then Detroit, rather. And I bought him a month in advance, right? And I bought him a month in advance, right? And the morning I wake up to fly to San Francisco, I get a notification on my phone that the Roe v. Wade draft was leaked, and I didn't plan it. It was just this divine timing that occurred. I can't explain it, but that really blew up the story. Wow. That does happen. You know, these things sort of come together. It's almost as though Providence exists, you know, and the world is just rich in symbols.

That's an amazing story. And it's a really beautiful thing in that you seem to have learned the lesson from Trump and the kind of Trump era, which is that when you want to get things done in politics, you have to shake up the system a little bit. If you just go along, if you are losing, if your side is losing, and you just keep playing by all the rules that all the other people on your team are, playing by. You are pretty much guaranteed to lose you. You've got to shake it up. And I would never have thought, okay, the way to reinvigorate the pro-life movement and to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers is to climb a bunch of buildings. But that's exactly the sort of thing that you've got to do. You've got to kind of, I don't know, throw a wrench into the machinations of the system such that people look at you as they have looked at you and say, oh, wow, wait,

what's going on? This kid is climbing a thousand feet up high in the air to raise money for what is over crisis pregnancy centers. Okay, you know, I'll give some money to that. If he's willing to put his life on the line, I'm willing to raise a little bit of money. So then I've got to ask you, you get to the top of these buildings. How do you handle it? I know I sound like I'm so naive, I sound like I'm probably a chicken, but I get up 50 feet in the air and I start feeling a little weird. Okay, I get, if I'm up walking, going for a hike and I see a big drop, I get, just this visceral reaction. Are you just missing that gene? No, I don't think so.

You know, the climbing on buildings is a lot easier than on rock. Like on rock, I'm gripping holes the size of credit cards, where on the buildings, I'm able to stick my hands all the way around it. So I never feel like I'm going to fall at all. But if I were to describe what climbing skyscrapers feels like, taking the technical aspect of climbing out of it, You know, you have police cars everywhere. You have helicopters circling around.

I think I counted one time I had five news helicopters filming me. And I like to say it feels like playing the game Grand Theft Auto, but in real life, it's so strange. And honestly, like, I get so nervous before I go climb these buildings, but it's not from the climbing. It's from the security and all of the other things that go with it. But, you know, when I get to the top of these buildings, It's so funny. The police, they're never mad at me. They're always really impressed. And so, you know, I've never really treated like a criminal. They'll throw me in the police car all angrily for the news cameras. But we get back to the police station and, you know, they're coming down to

take selfies with me and I'm assigning autographs with my hands behind my back. And I say it's pretty hard at first, but you do enough of them, you get pretty good at it. And the funniest moment was one time, you know, I was like, I kind of want some coffee right now. That'd be really nice. And they came and they brought me some coffee. And so I'm never treated like a criminal. But, you know, I get criticized a lot because when I do this, I am arrested. It's not actually illegal.

Like in Detroit, it's so funny, there's a law that says you cannot lease your pet alligator to a fire hydrant. But there's no law that says you can't climb the Renaissance Center. And the way trespassing laws work, they're able to arrest me, and then eventually it all just gets dropped because there's no way to really prosecute it. They just want to make an example so that no one goes and repeats it, which I think is fair. You know, you're reminding me of just the perils of big government, taking away all of those simple joys in life, like a man trying to leash his alligator to a fire hydrant. Here come the liberals yet again to quash that sort of joy. It's funny you mention this, though, because I would imagine it would at least require in me some concentration to climb up a thousand foot skyscraper. Maybe you, it's a little bit more second nature.

But you would think if these cops and everybody want to make sure that you're safe and don't fall, they wouldn't just start grazing you with helicopters and sirens everywhere. Seems like that might be a little distracting. Yeah, it's a little bit distracting, but it's a part of it. One of the things I learned when I started doing activism is, you know, you really have to focus your activism on gaining this sort of media attention and learn how the media works. Because if you only reach the people that are there, it's not as effective and you don't reach the people of the world. Of course, of course. That's so true. I mean, this is true in any political system, but especially in one that is notionally self-governing. It's all about the media. This is why the libs have taken such efforts to control the media. specifically to control the narrative on pro-life activism.

So then I got to ask two questions going way back. And, you know, this was not a setup. I had no idea that you listened to my show. I'm very honored that I could have played some role in this. But how did you become pro-life? Was it just the Chesiree Santangelo story? Or were there inklings of pro-life activism before that? And then how did you get into climbing at all?

Yeah, you know, I grew up Catholic. So I was just around other pro-life people. I hadn't, you know, cemented those ideas in my head. But listening to people like you, Ben Shapiro, Stephen Crowder, you know, you just hear the arguments on the side of life. And they're really hard to debate against. They are just so concrete. I mean, a baby in the womb is a life that is separate from the mother.

It has its own DNA from conception. If you go and dig up bodies at a mass grave site, you, you're just, you're just, you, you're You can tell the difference between these bodies based off of their DNA. It's the most, like, I guess, basic separation between people. Of course. It's funny because digging up gravesites also pokes a hole in the transgender argument. You'll see forensic investigators. They'll say, okay, we found the body of a woman.

And the reaction to that would, of course, be, oh, yeah, how do you know? she's a woman. How do you know? Did you ask her? No. How did you know? All that. So I can know that a cadaver was a woman, but I can't know that a lady walking around is a woman. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And obviously, this is all the more true for the pro-life cause, obviously. And if you talk to an abortion advocate who's willing to be candid and honest with you, they will admit. They will say, yes, the baby is living, has all the characteristics of life. Yes, the baby is an individual. It's not not a fingernail, not just a kind of cancerous tumor on the mother. Yes, that's true. And they'll usually give the argument if you catch them in a candid way and they're not afraid of admitting

things on camera. They'll give the argument that Naomi Wolf gave in the 90s, which is the baby is a baby, the baby is alive. And for women to have equal feminist political rights, the mother needs to be able to murder her child in all of his humanity, which is ghastly. But at least that's what they're saying, right? And that's why they can't say that public. very often is because people would recoil from it. The reality of it is so obvious for anyone who's willing to look at it. Yeah, you know, and that's why, you know, I do what I do. I think with the reality of abortion, we should do everything in our peaceful means to stop this and sort of regardless of the consequences. Like, I get criticized a lot like Romans 13, Romans 13, but, you know,

you look at where Romans was written and not only who wrote it, Romans, was written, I believe, in a jail cell by Paul, who was later beheaded for crimes against the state. And so I think, again, like, we should do everything within our peaceful means to stop this evil that's going on. And, you know, I like to tell jail stories. They're kind of fun. Please, I hope you're not beheaded for them, but please. Oh, no. How's it been? No, it's so funny. Like, jail was really scary at first. And when I got arrested in Detroit, they were taking me back.

into the holding cell. And this is a dirty jail. It's, I mean, Detroit, it's so already impacted, let alone defunded after Black Lives Matter. And so this jail is just, you know, a scary place. And they walk me back in the cell and you've got the crips on one side and the bloods on the other. So it's like crips, bloods, pro-life Spider-Man, you know, and it's Mother's Day. So I climbed the Renaissance Center on Mother's Day. So if you're in jail on Mother's Day, you are a real criminal. These guys, they have tear drops and ice cream cones tattoo on their face. They've been there before. And I'm walking in there and I'm thinking like, what did these guys do to get in here?

And it's so funny because they were thinking like, what did this white kid do to get in here? You know, this is actually the plot of Alice's restaurant. I don't know if you know the old Arlo Guthrie song, but it's this guy who gets arrested for littering and then he ends up at the draft board. And the whole thing is, you know, I was sitting there on the bench with all these criminals. We got mother rapers and father stabbers and father rapers. And there was me. They said, kid, what are you in for? I said littering.

And that's basically what you're doing. What are you doing for? Oh, I climbed a building. Uh, what? Yeah, and that's the funny thing is, like, they're all wondering what I did. And as soon as I tell them, you know, all the gang beef just goes right out the window. And they're laughing and they're asking me questions. And so I like to tell people that I'm.

I'm one of the few men to ever bring the crips in the blood together, even if it was just for a moment in jail. But my favorite jail story was from Oklahoma City. I was in Oklahoma County Jail. And whenever I go, I like to evangelize. Again, looking at people like Paul in the Bible, they get arrested and put in prison and they say, I'm going to grow my ministry. And so that's what I try to do in jail. And I tell them, you know, why I'm in there and why I'm doing it.

One of the guys, he actually told me, he said his girlfriend was pregnant. And what he didn't tell me was that they were planning to have an abortion. And about a week went by, and Nathan Burning, the CEO of Let Them Live, the charity I raised money for, calls me on the phone. And he says, hey, man, I just got a phone call from a woman who said that their boyfriend meant you in Oklahoma County Jail. and they want to choose life. And so, you know, it was, again, like this divine timing. Like, what I do is such a farce, you know, like climbing buildings. It's just so silly.

Pretty cool. It's this mechanism that I've used to be able to make a difference in this movement. And I just feel blessed, honestly, that, you know, I'm able to be the vessel for the Lord's work with something so silly as climbing buildings. That's amazing. because, wow, you think for most people in their lives, if that's all they ever did, if that's all you ever did in your whole life was you sat in jail with this guy and convinced him not to kill his kid, that would be a life well lived. You would have done it. You would have accomplished more in your life than pretty much anybody. And how many of those stories are there? And it's inspirational in the sense that we can do that too. I can't climb a building. I can barely climb to the top of my ladder to change a light bulb on the second floor of my house. But what can we do? It's not just big stunts that do these sorts of things. In your quotidian experience, when you're just sort of having lunch with somebody, if you can just plant, that kind of seed. Obviously, you could never have planned it to say, I'm going to get arrested

to go to the Detroit jail on this day so that I can talk to this guy so he can tell his girlfriend not to have an abortion. But it happened. And now, you know, God willing, pregnancy goes well and everything, there's going to be a human being who can come up and say, hey, thanks, man, thanks for convincing my dad not to kill me. Yeah, you know, that was part of, I guess, the messaging when I started this project, it was, you know, you guys can't all climb skyscrapers, but you can go out and do something. And I tell people, on every interview I do, I say, I get called a radical. But the most radical thing you can do in the pro-life movement is do nothing. So I hope that people can look at what I do and be inspired and go out and do something,

because abortion is, you know, the evil that all evil is standing on. Of course. I mean, you think of radicals, you know, at the time of, say, chattel slavery or something like that. And at the time, the people who say, hey, maybe we should, you know, kind of unwind this institution here, you know, kind of get rid of this whole thing. You know, they would have been called radicals. But now with hindsight, you look and you say, no, it's the people denying humanity to a large number of people. They would seem to be much more radical. And so a question then becomes, what are people going to say about us?

There is no neutrality. There's no middle ground here between do we kill 850,000 babies a year or do we not kill? I guess the middle ground is we kill 400,000 babies a year. But that's not much of a middle ground. You know, King Solomon talked about this too. So, you know, which side are you going to be on? If you throw your hands up in the air, you've made a decision. If you just sort of allow this sort of thing to happen without any pushback at all, you have absolutely made a decision. decision. Can I ask, well, I want to ask two things before I let you go. One, and I asked you this a little bit earlier, but we got off track, how did you learn to climb? I mean, how did you start you know, you're pretty young man right now. When did this start? Yeah, this started in high school. I grew up in Michigan hunting and fishing and, you know, I was outside every day. And then my dad, he was a carpenter and it just got hard on his body doing construction. So we moved to LA and California the hunting is just so much different than Michigan so I need something else outdoorsy to do so my dad he he bought me a rope some quick draws

and a harness and I learned how to rock climb off of YouTube and we would go out on the weekends and maybe once a month and go rock climbing but when I graduated high school I actually skipped my graduation and I moved to Yosemite and that was where you know Yosemite Valley is just the gauntlet it's It is the mecca of rock climbing. So that's where I really got my feet wet. And, you know, it's so crazy. I never thought I'd be climbing skyscrapers.

Or, like the other day, someone approached me and they want to make a comic book out of me. And I'm like, never in my life did I ever think I would have my own comic book. But here I am, and I'm so grateful that everyone is supporting me and, you know, donating money to Let Them Live.org. I think it's just absolutely fabulous,

a total inspiration. Everybody should go check out Let Themlive.org. Everybody should keep up with Mason's work, obviously. And I want the comic book. When can I go buy this comic book? You know, it's a work in progress.

It's a hard thing to make a comic book about abortion. So we're trying to work out a way to do it. We're maybe going for a Johnny the Walrus kind of angle, you know? Like make it about abortion, but not. Yeah, with a lighter. touch. But I agree that it is tough. It is tough to make a cartoon or a comic book about it. But listen,

you've done harder things. Okay, you've climbed a thousand foot building. So I have no doubt that it will happen. Mason, incredible work. Really keep it up. Just so inspirational. And everybody go keep up with Mason Descham, the pro-life Spider-Man. Thank you, Michael.