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Zero Hour with James Poulos
Ep 79 | Is Michael Knowles a Santa Denier?! I Michael Knowles
00:59:02
James Poulos is joined by Michael Knowles, host of the Daily Wire’s “The Michael Knowles Show,” to talk everything from tobacco to Santa Claus.
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- [00:00]
James Polis
I'm told he's America's favorite conservative uncle. What lies deep beneath the surface. Michael Knowles joins us. I'm James Polis. Welcome to Zero Hour.
- [00:32]
Michael Knowles
La la la la la la.
- [00:38]
James Polis
Yes, Michael Knowles. He is the host of the Daily Wires, the Michael Knowles show, and he joins us today from his Advent cave. Michael. Tis the season.
- [00:51]
Michael Knowles
Tis the season. It's not the Christmas season. It's when my producers decked the halls of my studio without my permission or knowledge. I initially reacted very negatively, but it looked so good and cozy and lovely. I said, look, as long as it is an advent tree and an Advent wreath and an Advent little cozy little Michael Knowles figurine, here I am all for it. You know, it's a great season. Then we can move into Christmas decorations in about 20 days.
- [01:22]
James Polis
Well, you are thoroughly decked out. You know, I sort of think of you, and this is not an insult, as the Ryan Seacrest of the right, I hope the empire continues to expand for our long lives. You've got your cigars there. As a country, I think we can agree that we spent a lot of time in the psychological environment created by the wine ant archetype. And you seem to be offering the cigar uncle archetype, which really I think is working for you. And do you think it's going to be working for America?
- [01:55]
Michael Knowles
James, first of all, could I please hire you to write all my loglines and PR pitches? The Ryan Seacrest of the right is maybe the highest compliment I've ever been paid. And I am the cigar uncle. We launched Mayflower Cigars about a year ago and we had an ambitious plan for how many cigars we'd stock. And we sold out instantly, which is a great problem to have and everything, except that for a third of last year, I did not have any stock basically of any product to sell. So the stock is back in, the stockings can be stuffed. And whenever I opine on any other matter, I have to preface it, I say, look, I talk to people have very fancy degrees who are more intelligent than I. I am but a humble and simple cigar salesman. But I'll do my best.
- [02:43]
James Polis
Well, you know, you're being a little too modest. You're not all lifestyle. I know that you care about the real issues like what's happening to America under the rule of and some other stuff. But I do see, you know, I see this trend and it's, it's not just happening among the tech Bros. But it's, it's spreading to, to other areas at least, at least online. If What I'm hearing is true, that. That nicotine is back, that guys are really stepping up to the nicotine plate and saying, don't drink beer, don't smoke weed. What you want is you want to lock in. You want high performance stimulants, caffeine, nicotine. Do you embrace this? Do you think that this is a generational shift?
- [03:23]
Michael Knowles
It is a generational shift, and it's a political divide without question. Tucker put it very well when he pointed out that the libs want you smoking pot so that you're fat and lazy and stupid. But we on the right, we prefer to be focused. A friend of mine who got a little into those six milli lip pillies, pouches of Zinn, he said that they make him a better husband and father. But I have to urge some caution here because the great theologian Mike Foley had a good essay in First Things some years ago on the very uses of nicotine, specifically of tobacco, that the philosopher is more inclined to smoke the pipe. The pipe refers to the intellect, the logical part of the soul, and the little pouches and cigarettes. And that really appeals to the appetitive part of the soul. It can be addictive, it can be really habit forming. But cigars, which is my preferred form of tobacco, that appeals to the thumotic part of the soul, the spirited part of the soul. You think of Churchill, you know, it's more about what you puff out than what you take in. And so I am a supporter. You know, tobacco obviously helped to build our country. It was discovered from the standpoint of the west by Christopher Columbus when he met those lovely Taino Indians way back in 1492. So I'm all about it, but as with anything, it has to be done in moderation. But when done in moderation, never more than one cigar at a time. As Mark Twain said, when done in moderation, it can be really terrific. There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, but it won't stop me from telling it, of Saint Pius X. He's a saint. When he was pope, he was sitting there in his papal office and some wayward cardinal came in. Pope Pius X offered him a cigar. The cardinal said, no, no, Holy Father, I do not have that vice. And St. Pius X leaned into him and he said, cigar smoking is not a vice. You have enough vices already, so I wouldn't offer you one if it were.
- [05:19]
James Polis
As the late, great Christopher Hitchens liked to say, martinis are like breasts. One is not enough and three is too many.
- [05:27]
Michael Knowles
A great point. One of the few good points that Christopher Hitchens ever made.
- [05:30]
James Polis
Yes, one of his best. So, you know, another. It's interesting because we have this nicotine trend. We got the stimulant trend, but we've also got a trend. This also seems kind of generational. I'm curious what you think about it. You would know this trend of guys turning to sort of the more ancient churches in Christianity, whether it's Orthodox or Catholic, it's definitely happening. It's causing a bit of a stir in some quarters. Some of our more classically liberal friends are like, oh, what's happening? This isn't the right that I know. Are you seeing this in your own circles? And how big of an impact do you think it's going to make?
- [06:07]
Michael Knowles
I am. It's going to be great. It's inevitable. I am a traditional mackerel snapping papist. I prefer liturgy reverently in Latin, ideally. But I know some people are clutching their pearls and they don't know what to make of it. We are not the first people to make the observation that in the west, and specifically in America, people are gonna go back toward the Catholic Church maybe a little. You are seeing a little bit Eastern Orthodox. The first guy to really prominently make this observation in America was all the way back in the 19th century. And it was no less a figure than Alexei de Tocrov, who in the second volume of Democracy in America said, look, America is a Protestant country and there are all these different Protestant sects. But over time, he predicted that Americans would either become Catholic or they would give up Christianity altogether. And he viewed. He didn't go into great detail on why he saw this happening, but he thought it was just a function of the American government. The various Protestant sects were a little bit unstable. They actually thought it was a feature of democracy that people would return to the Catholic Church. But also, you're seeing this especially on the right, because, not casting any shade to my many Protestant friends, but Protestantism is an intrinsically liberal political movement. So I know there are a lot of hardline right wingers who would dispute that characterization. I'm not saying that they have aberrant views on immigration or taxes or whatever. I'm just saying that the project of Protestantism was one of individual emancipation and liberation. It's no coincidence that liberalism as a political ideology comes about shortly after the Protestant revolution. And so I think people are working through that right now. That, you know, what started out to some people sounding like a good idea of getting rid of the Pope has really just Led to an infinite number of popes. Every man, every becomes his own pope, that it leads to a kind of relativism. You saw this in the Treaty of Augsburg, in the Peace of Westphalia, the notion cuius regio, eius religio, the king gets to decide religion for everybody. And then you see this with the constant splitting up of various churches, go through divorces. And so you've got this kind of Southern Baptist and this kind of southeastern Baptist and you know, it just kind of seems to lead to the same radical individualism that the liberals have been foisting on us for centuries now. Even John Henry Newman, who was a rather anti Catholic Protestant and he became a Catholic cardinal, then he became a Catholic saint. He observed that the real distinction here is Catholics and Protestants have individual conscience. But for the Catholics, we also recognize the authority of the church, of the magisterium, ultimately even of the supreme Pontiff. Whereas for Protestants of various stripes, it kind of ends with the individual conscience. And so when you have a disagreement over scripture, over some matter of ecclesiology, even you're not gonna have any way to reconcile those conflicts. So now that we live in a kind of crazy upside down world where we don't even know what a woman is anymore, I am not at all surprised that people are becoming a little bit more trad. You got the ortho bros and even more pronounced, you have the Catholics. And as a papist, I'm all for it.
- [09:30]
James Polis
Well, as your friendly neighborhood ortho bro myself, I certainly think that, you know, Tocqueville's thesis is due an update right about now. Now that there's more than zero orthodox in America. Very interesting. But he is the place to look. And you know, I think there's, there's just so much, this is a rich vine and, and conservatives, and frankly, anyone ignores this stuff at their peril. Tocqueville's thesis, which I think has been borne out, you know, I'm not the only one to make these kinds of crazy claims that Tocqueville might have been right about what he saw in America. And he was, he said, I don't endeavor to see better than my colleagues, but to see further. And I think he certainly did that. His concern with, with Protestantism in America. I think you could boil it down to the idea that, you know, this is a very individualistic approach to the faith and that in, under democratic conditions where everyone is, is kind of more or less psychologically equal, they see each other as equals. If someone's way up ahead, they're like, well, why should that guy have all the money? He's just like me, you know, that kind of thing. Narcissism of small differences as Freud would sort of describe it later. And so what he saw in Americans was yes, they had this individualism, they had this restlessness, they were always on the move, they were always looking for an edge, always looking for a way to grab onto the good things of life before they slipped away. And always feeling like sort of the future was moving too fast for them to keep up with or to catch up to. And so what he saw is for people like that, they needed some kind of anchoring in their heart, a stable place when all around them was in flux. Turmoil, fortunes rising and falling, technology continuing to advance. You know, he found came upon a log cabin in the woods that was unfinished. And he sort of sighed and felt the pain of, you know, they didn't even finish building their log cabin in the woods and they moved on to the next place. For people like that, you know, if they don't have that kind of deep spiritual anchor in their heart, then they're going to feel like one false move or one hard knock in life and they're just going to hit rock bottom immediately. That's kind of what he was worried about. And you know, I mean, I think you look around and you see a lot of people in that predicament today looking for something that has a bit of a deeper root. And under digital conditions, you know, we're thrown back on these kind of questions about, well, you know, okay, why, why should I even be human? Why should I get out of bed in the morning, why should I have children, why should I date, why should I ever log off? And those questions are ultimate questions. And if you're looking for the ultimate answers, you're moving into theological territory. I know, for, you know. Sorry, go ahead.
- [12:02]
Michael Knowles
No, I love your point on the digital conditions. I think that's a huge part of this because we live in an age where you can ignore your body most of the time. I mean, some people still have to do jobs that involve them actually doing things, but for a lot of people, they're just logged onto their computer most of the time. And in people's leisure time, supposed leisure, I don't think any of us really has leisure anymore. But in our leisure time we're all just doom scrolling. We're existing through avatars that are digital divorced from the body. An extreme of this is of course the ideology of transgenderism that says the body has nothing to do with My true identity, that I can really just be a spirit floating through the ether, or at least through the tubes and the wires that connect the Internet together. But we recognize, well, hold on. I still am this body. I still exist in time and space. And so I'm gonna have to do something with my body. And I think especially when you get into some of the iconoclasm that attends to various Protestant denominations, you know, there's this fiction that we can do without images. We can do without statues, we can do without sacraments, we can do without kneeling and postures and putting our voice into it, that the faith can just be something in our own heads that doesn't need any actual expression in the world. But that's not really possible, because even if you go into the beautiful cathedral, you go into a nice Eastern Orthodox Church and, you know, you've got all this lovely Byzantine art, or if you go into a traditionalist Catholic church with all the statues, you tear all of it down, you whitewash all the buildings. We're back in congregationalist New England with no images to look at. Well, even when you close your eyes and pray to God, there is going to be some image there because we're human beings and our thoughts and our desires are mediated through images, inevitably through signs and symbols like the words that we're using right now. And so that is inescapable. The only question is not going to be, do I do anything with my body or not? It's gonna be, what do I do with my body? It's not, will we have images or not? It's what kind of images are we going to have? And this gets then to the real observation that people, I think, are coming to, at least implicitly today, which is lex arandi, lex credendi. The way that I worship is going to inform the way that I believe. It's not necessarily the other way around. It's what I do if I receive our Lord in the Holy Eucharist, kneeling on the tongue at an altar rail in a position of reverence, that is going to affect the way that I think about it. But American Catholics, now, a third of them, don't even believe in transubstantiation. They don't believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Why? Well, might it have something to do with. With the deformations that followed the Second Vatican Council that tell us to take the Eucharist in the hand, ignoring crumbs, particles that, you know, ostensibly are our Lord, body, soul, blood and divinity, Might it have something to do with the casual way that we treat religion. Well, all right. If that's led us to a deformation of our belief and a deformation of our lives, then maybe we gotta put our bodies back into it, baby. And maybe actually by behaving in a certain way, that will fix the intellectual problems that we seem to be suffering from.
- [15:13]
James Polis
Well, there's no doubt that we are incarnate beings as far as Vatican II is concerned. I will say I'm sorry that happened to you, but, you know, so much of what's going on in this debate, to me, it just seems obvious that, you know, the west has created technology that's so powerful that it's really kind of broken, like the modern Western sense of identity of what the west even is. And, you know, in some ways that's. That's fruitful, and in some ways it's probably inevitable where, you know, this is kind of a construct that's emerged over time. And obviously it involves the eternal truths and trying to figure out what to do about them and how to reconcile the. The. The prerogatives of faith with the obligations of politics. And, you know, there's obviously lots of stuff there, and all of our smart guys can talk about it and argue about it, but what people are looking for right now, it just seems to me to be so clear, is they're looking for spir. Authorities they can trust because the technology has become so powerful that you can't really just turn to, you know, your rationalist friend and say, like, tell me, smart expert friend of mine, how do I hold on to my identity as a human being in an age when computers and machines can almost simulate the soul? You know, they don't really have those answers. And. And you're not really going to find them in sort of like, you know, free market economic theory. You got to look somewhere else. And I know for some of our guys, they're like, oh, spiritual authority, you know, that's red flag. You know, what are you telling me that I have to, you know, listen to the Pope for my political idea, what John F. Kennedy went through? Or, you know, the orthodox version of that? Oh, are you telling me that Rasputin was a good guy? It's like, okay, hold on. Look at what's happening to our country. Look at the way that so many people are, you know, searching, sort of stumbling around, looking for someone they can trust about the fundamental matters of human existence, our relationship to the divine, our status as created beings, how we can keep ourselves in kind of orderly formation as we go into this World where, like you said, you know, some people, they soberly looked at the information, at the situation that we're in, and they said, okay, I figured it out rationally. The most important thing that we can do to keep a grip on our humanity is to start severing the genitals from our children. Right? We've seen kind of what that approach takes. And, you know, I gotta say, there are opposite numbers on the left. Some of those guys, they looked at it and they said, hey, you know, we gotta leave the Marxism. We gotta leave the materialism behind. We need to create a new religion for ourselves, because if we don't have a religion, a faith, then we're just not gonna be able to make it in this world.
- [17:45]
Michael Knowles
Of course, you think about the authority, the crisis of authority in technology. Anna Navarro, this fake Republican who just spends all her time attacking Republicans, she got in trouble because she was defending the Hunter Biden pardon. And she said, well, look, this has happened before. Woodrow Wilson pardoned Hunter debutts way back in the early 20th century. And people did a little fact check, and they realized not only did Woodrow Wilson not issue a pardon similar to Biden's of Hunter, but there was no such person as Hunter debuts in or around the Woodrow Wilson administration. Hunter debuts is just a kind of a punchline, you know, like Seymour Butz or something like that when you prank phone call somebody. So Ana Navarro looked really silly, and she said, well, hold on. I asked chatgpt. Chatgpt told me that Hunter debuts was pardoned by Wilson. Well, no, lady, you are giving far more credence to the authority of chatgpt than perhaps any Catholic has ever given to the pope. You're just misplacing where you identify that authority. And so the authority is a big question about this, because so many people in our liberal age even hate that word. You know, it's the A word. We want all the control for ourselves. We prefer autonomy to it, authority. But it's an inevitable problem that you have to get to. You think about it just within your own church, two people in the church disagree over what scripture means. How are you going to figure out who's right? What's the hermeneutic? You know, who's got the control? Well, probably you take it to your pastor. Maybe your pastor has some idea, but Pastor Joe disagrees with Pastor Keith. Well, what happens when the pastors disagree? Well, we used to have this idea that you could go to someone who was a little bit higher up the chain than them. I don't know. Let's call that person a bishop, let's say. And then the bishop would come to some conclusions. But then the bishops disagree. Well, sometimes there used to be this idea that we would call big meetings of the bishops. We call them councils. But what happens if all the bishops are disagreeing on the unresolvable question? There has to be someone who makes the final judgment, just like you and your wife are debating, do you get Chinese food or McDonald's for dinner? If you're right in impasse, someone just has to decide. And so the question for us then is, well, who has that authority? Who or what has that authority? And I think you're right, James. I think now we in our rationalist age, without any of the good rationalism of the scholastics, just the modern rationalism where these people are totally unmoored, we want to give it to some guy in a lab coat. And even better, we want to take the humanity out of it entirely. We just want to ask a robot. But guess what? If you trust the robots, sometimes, they're going to lead you all the way to Seymour, Seymour Debuts. And you're gonna be all the worse off for it.
- [20:29]
James Polis
Well, you know, I was under the impression that Hunter Debuts was the pseudonym of Hunter Biden when he was a sex tourist in Ukraine. But I appreciate you clearing up the matter for me. You know, I am tempted to engage you in a proper theological debate about the supremacy of the Ecumenical Councils, but maybe something that people would be slightly more interested for the purposes of this interview. You know, I think. I think you and I probably both want to be very clear that the goal here is not theocracy. And there is now, I guess, a thriving but small segment of folks somewhere on the right who are saying, like, hey, look, this is where things need to go, is if you accept the idea that people need spiritual authority that they can trust, if you accept the idea that there's a better form of government versus a worse form of government, then America has failed the experiment. We tried it. It didn't work. We got to go straight back to theocracy. This is the sort of eternal form of government that's the best. Christ was king, so we need a king, and that needs to be a Christian king. And that's the form of government that America should have. I think that's a mistake. You look at America, you look at the American people, it's 300 million people. You can't just flip a switch and say, my philosophy tells me that this is the best thing to do. So now I'm going to impose it on you. I think that's a terrible mistake. And I would also go so far as to say, speaking as someone who knows a thing or two about orthodox theology at this point, what the orthodox say about this question is you don't want to fuse a super strong regime government with a super strong church. You want a healthy church, you want a healthy government and you want Symphonia. You want a harmony between them, which is much different than a theocratic form of government, which you know, that is what the Wokies were offering. They were offering woke theocracy.
- [22:17]
Michael Knowles
Yes. And this is like all of these questions, it turns out we're not the first people to ever think of them. Believe it or not, they've been debated for a long time. Believe it or not. I think one of the great writers on this subject actually is my favorite poet, Dante, who in one of his minor works, Monarchia, took on this issue because in his day, one of his least favorite prelates, Pope Boniface viii, whom he puts in hell, Boniface VIII claimed in a papal bull, unum sanctum, that the church had to possess two swords, that the church had to have both the total temporal authority and spiritual authority. And Dante has a really great syllogistic argument in this book, Monarchia, on how this is not backed up by Scripture. This is not really even backed up in the history of the Church. And you don't want that. You want something that's closer to what you're describing as a harmony. And this is also in part because man has two ends. And this gets back to what we were talking about earlier about man being a body but also being a soul, that we have a natural happiness that we're looking for. And natural happiness includes being able to have a family and being able to feed your family and being able to put clothes on your family and succeeding in your career and all the sort of normal, natural things we like. But man being not only body but also soul, also has supernatural ends. And so we have two authorities to look after these two ends of man, both appointed by God is the traditional Christian understanding the civil authority and the spiritual authority. But this does not mean that we need a firm separation of church and state that I don't think has ever existed anywhere in the world and certainly has not existed in America, despite the claims of the left. But there is a distinction between the Church and the state. And just as you can't really make sense of man's temporal ends without paying some attention to his eternal ends, so too the Temporal authority being distinct can be illuminated by the light of the spiritual authority, but they do really have different, albeit somewhat overlapping, ends and realms. And also, given the look, being the Pope is a big job, okay? I don't think we need to have him like, paving the roads as well. There are people who can handle these things, but working together in a unity is the ideal way to do it.
- [24:39]
James Polis
Well, I'm a big fan of the first Amendment, second Amendment, fourth Amendment, tenth Amendment, all the amendments. We love all our beautiful amendments. But I gotta say, there is a weakness there in that First Amendment where the founders and pretty much every American at that time, and probably most people in the world at that time, had the thought of either a thing is a religion or it isn't. And so if you're ensuring that there isn't going to be an established religion in your country, they weren't even thinking of, you know, where. Where we were just a few years ago or arguably, you know, still are in some respects, where a lot of folks on the left who, who did kind of make that turn of saying, we're going to create a new religion, but we're not going to call it a religion, we're going to call it best practices and DEI and ESG and this laundry blm, you know, this constellation of catchphrases and jargon and verbiage, and it's going to be a religion in everything but name. It's all too easy to establish that. And I don't know exactly if you can or should kind of tweak the First Amendment a little bit to cover that, because it just seems like a huge loophole that they just sailed straight through.
- [25:53]
Michael Knowles
I think it's in part because we're much dumber than we were at the time of the founding and the ratification of the Constitution. So at the time of the ratification, first of all, as your audience well knows, but many people do not know, one of the arguments for not establishing a church at the national level is that there were established churches at the state level, which would have created a massive political problem. And some of those churches endured for decades after ratification. So it's not that you can't have any church anywhere in any way affiliated with the government, but they were resolving a real problem there. The other one, though, is people understood at that time that in order to make laws, you have to appeal to practical morality. And to appeal to practical morality, you have to have a sense of the moral order, transcendent morality. And if you were to make sense of justice and rights and Obligations and the moral law. You ultimately have to have some reference to a moral law giver. Ultimately, this rests on some basic religious principles, which is why John Adams says in a private letter that Christianity, the principles on which independence was won, were the principles of Christianity in which all the sects agree. John Adams was not exactly the most orthodox lowercase O Christian going, but he recognized, as did basically all of our framers, that you need to have recourse to some basic sense of religion. And you know, we won't quibble about the details, but you know, come on man, you can't make a law without moral reasoning. And today the ignorant perverts who run our country, they just seem to think that you can. And because you can't, they just smuggle in, as you say, all of their moral priors which are wrong, I guess we should call them immoral priors. They just smuggle them in. And so ironically enough, they essentially establish a church at the national level. It's just an anti church. It's the ur church of, well, the prince of this world maybe.
- [27:54]
James Polis
Well, you know, speaking of basic moral reasoning, my exhaustive show notes here say that you actually supported the pardon of Hunter Biden. What's going on there?
- [28:07]
Michael Knowles
It's not that I supported it, it's that I was not surprised by it at all. I don't see any world in which it didn't happen. And I do think there's something kind of delightful about it, given that it was always going to happen. The only people who thought it wasn't going to happen were the people who thought that Joe Biden was gonna tell the truth. Joe Biden, one of the most prolific and infamous liars in American history for half a century. He was all of a sudden now going to catch a whiff of honesty. Of course he was gonna pardon his kid. And there is something understandable, if not admirable about a guy looking out for his kid, not wanting to leave him out to dry for the next administration. There's also some self interest because Hunter Biden's crimes implicate Joe Biden and I think he didn't want him to flip on him. But furthermore, Democrats are gonna pay a political cost for this. The Democrats ran on Trump as a threat to democracy and putting himself above the law. Democrats have lost the democracy argument now in part because they tried to kick Trump off the ballot and imprison him and justify his assassination. And then he won the popular vote. So there goes the democracy argument and then putting him above the law as Joe Biden tweeted out, he said, no one's above the law. Then he pardons his son for any crime he may or may not have committed for a decade. You know, that really makes the Democrats look like hypocrites. It really makes them look corrupt. And Joe Biden hates his own party at this point. You know, his party threw him out in an unceremonious way. They called him demented. They replaced him with a woman that no one really likes at all, and she lost. And so I think this was one final little shiv that Biden gave to the party that overthrew him. People have short attention spans, so I don't think this is gonna kill them for decades, but I do think that the 2026 midterms are gonna be a little. Because of Joe Biden's flagrant corruption on the way out, when he says, okay, Dems, you wanna screw me over? Well, good luck next time.
- [29:59]
James Polis
Yeah, very much of a piece with him saying, okay, you like Kamala so much, I'm gonna endorse her right now. And that just threw a huge monkey wrench into their plans. Really delightful. You love to see it. You know, I have to admit, I've written some fiction over the years. I'm a sort of empathy path, I guess, in that way. And when I look at Hunter Biden, I mean, it just seems to me like this is a guy who sees some really dark stuff. Like he didn't ask to be Joe Biden's son, and he was really just kind of dispatched as this weird sort of, you know, in insider kind of bag man guy, and didn't seem like he had a huge amount of choice in. In what it was that he got up to. And when I, you know, when I see the. The crack pipe and I see the, you know, the. The. The cheap whores and everything and. And the poop art. And I think, you know, this. This doesn't just naturally issue forth from the ordinary American soul. You know, this is the result of someone who was really put through the ringer, probably saw a lot of dark stuff that. That ordinary people don't want to have to think about, much less encounter in their real lives. And I wouldn't be surprised, you know, especially given the pardon, if he. If he busted out the. The tell all memoir at some point. I'm pretty sure. I don't know if this is a rumor or what, but. But I did see something about how perhaps he did even and tell his father that he might just go ahead and write that memoir unless he was pardoned.
- [31:21]
Michael Knowles
I wouldn't be surprised. The Biden family has a lot of problems. You can tell a lot, if not everything about a man by how everyone around him treats him. And Biden I don't think has lived really in a dignified way. There's an irony though to the Hunter Biden pardon, which is that now that he is totally pardoned for any crime he might might have committed, the fifth Amendment would no longer apply. You know, he can't incriminate himself because he can't be held liable for any federal crimes he commits. So in a way, if the Republicans want to pursue this, it might be easier for them to make him testify than it otherwise would have been. Because now he can't keep mum, he can't just cite the fifth Amendment. However, I don't think there's appetite for the Republicans to pursue this. In some ways I wish that they would. I think that people need to be held to account because if the Democrats think that they can get away with it this time, they're just gonna keep getting away with it. So just as a matter of justice and prudence, I think you gotta hold people accountable just so that they start to behave a little bit better. But I don't see any political appetite for that whatsoever. And if Hunter does write the tell all memoir, he might just do it cuz he's furious and he's sick of burning his life away, giving 10 to 50% to the big guy and he's so mired in vice and degeneracy that it just pours out of him naturally. But I don't think the Republicans are going to pull it out. I think they're going to move on. They're going to say let's let bygones be bygones. And is that going to bite them next time like Lucy with the football? Yes, it will. But we've never accused Republicans of learning anything.
- [32:50]
James Polis
No, I think you're right about the Republican appetite there. But I also think that you're right that we should hold people accountable. And that's why I've harvested a few more controversial things that you've said recently. They're important and we need to know exactly, exactly what's going on. You are, you're pushing to make Advent solemn again. Now I'm a little worried that this means that you're gonna take my spiked eggnog and my Mariah Carey away from me. So let's hear.
- [33:19]
Michael Knowles
Only one of those things is true.
- [33:21]
James Polis
How do you know when you've gone too far? In making the Christmas spirit solemn.
- [33:27]
Michael Knowles
Mariah Carey goes to the gulags until December 25th. That's a non negotiable as far as I'm concerned. Now, can you keep your eggnog? I think you can. I don't think that solemnity, I mean, we were discussing, you know, I'm a Catholic. We typically do not banish the booze. You guys are drunk for almost any occasion, you know. Yeah. Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there's good cheer and good red wine. I forget the rest of the Belloc.
- [33:51]
James Polis
Quote, but yeah, two cigars in one hand, your eggnog is safe. Sniffer of booze in the other.
- [33:56]
Michael Knowles
Right. But we do you actually do have to make Advent a thing again? Well, it is a thing, but you have to recognize it as a thing because otherwise Christmas is sort of a letdown. People take their trees down on Christmas. Christmas. You know, there's a song about this. It's 12 days long. Okay, there's a play about that too, you know, but now these people, they just rush it. And it's that line, I forget who said it. It was one of the quotables who also knocking some of our more Protestant friends, but said, you know, maybe it was Chesterton. With the Catholics, you have first the fast and then the feast. But with some of the more modern approaches, you have first the feast and then the hangover. So you don't want to rush these things. It's important. You know, we're preparing for the coming of our Lord and a sign of the second coming of our Lord. And so, you know, you want to think about that. The final four things that traditionally one thinks about during adventures are death, judgment, heaven, and hell. And that seems a little depressing, I guess. But the irony is it's not the people who think about death, judgment, heaven, and hell. I think about it every day. The people who think about it, in my experience, tend to be happier and more joyful. The people in modernity who never want to talk about death, they certainly don't want to talk about judgment or hell. And their version of heaven is something out of a Hallmark card. Those are the people who are neurotic, who are anxious, who are taking all the depression pills, who are constantly suffering from angst. And the reason is you can't really ignore it. We all know we're gonna die. And as you get a little older, it can either drive you crazy or it can allow you to prepare for those final things. So, you know, I think it's the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. When we lived in a religious age, people were relatively well balanced. You know, they might have died a bit younger and they might have had weaker dental care or something. But society still worked. People still had kids. You know, people weren't all lying on psychiatrists couches, you know, taking pills to numb the pain all the time. Now you have one in five American women is on depression pills. 2020 to 2022, you saw 130% spike in teenage girls taking depression pills. You see a huge spike in overdoses and deaths of despair among men. Why is that? It's because our culture of ignoring the final things is just driving us all completely up a wall. So celebrate. Get your Christmas ham ready. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But consider what it actually means. Otherwise you are not going to be merry this season, no matter how much you try.
- [36:30]
James Polis
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that deep down we all understand that heaven is not endless reruns of Love, actually. Yeah.
- [36:38]
Michael Knowles
I mean, look, I like the Joni Mitchell song, okay? I've looked at love from both sides now. You know, it's nice stuff. But guys, come on. There's a little bit more to it than a Hugh Grant move.
- [36:47]
James Polis
Be well. Do you think that there is, you know, a sort of American hangover when it comes to commercialism? There are still some guys out there who are like, you know, black Friday nationalism. Buy it. The bigger the better. But, you know, again, maybe this is one of those generational things, you know, people who have grown up really, you know, enjoying Call of Duty more than enjoying getting lost in Toys R Us. It's just a different feel to it.
- [37:13]
Michael Knowles
Yes, it is. And as always, you know, virtue is the mean between two extremes. So I'm not saying you gotta deprive your kids of presents or, you know, you don't take them to see Santa Claus at the mall or whatever, it's okay. But maybe the kid doesn't need 100 presents. Maybe you get him a few things that he can really enjoy. I mean, otherwise you just get so trapped and you become possessed by your possessions. And the thing is, you realize that it's all gonna break and it's all gonna become outdated these days, you know, a new cell phone which costs $1,000 a piece, you get a new cell phone every, like, three weeks or something. So you're just rapidly trying to keep up with this pace of technological innovation, and it's all ultimately unsatisfying At a certain point, once you've finished watching your show and once you Finish watching my show every day of the week on your iPhone then. And you download it and you get those ratings in there. Then maybe put the phone away and, like, sit outside.
- [38:07]
James Polis
Just throw some cigar.
- [38:08]
Michael Knowles
Throw a cigar. Maybe a mayflower.
- [38:09]
James Polis
It's served as a purpose.
- [38:11]
Michael Knowles
That's right.
- [38:12]
James Polis
Are you a Santa denier?
- [38:15]
Michael Knowles
I am not. I am a big Santa respecter. I am, in fact, a Santa maximalist. And I think we need to pay more attention to Santa. We just recently celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas, and there is a story, I'm pretty sure apocryphal, but it won't stop me from believing it, of Santa showing up to the Council of Nicaea to hear the ravings of the heresiarch Arius, who denied the divinity of Christ and Santa Claus. Saint Nicholas was out of care, out of charity, was so concerned for this heresiarch's lunacy that he gave him a corrective slap, which over the mists of time, the story has become Santa Claus punching a heretic in the face. Cause he couldn't stand hearing his nonsense anymore. And that's important. You know, first of all, we need a little bit more of a robust discourse. We need people to have more of the courage of their convictions. We need clarity on matters. It's not just all you do. You don't. Yuck my. We need clarity. Clarity is charity, baby. And the legends of Santa Claus are based on real things, you know, St. Nicholas of Bari and maybe giving kids little toys. And it's where we get the meme that Santa Claus came here to give presents to kids and to punch heretics in the face. And by golly, he's all out of presents.
- [39:32]
James Polis
Anyone with even a drop of Mediterranean blood understands that sometimes a little slap is, you know, it's cause I love you.
- [39:41]
Michael Knowles
Old Saint Nick was restrained. As far as I'm concerned, there was only one corrective slap. That's actually. That requires a great deal of virtuous restraint.
- [39:50]
James Polis
That is not an endorsement of domestic violence. That is not an endorsement of domestic violence.
- [39:55]
Michael Knowles
One more controversy is an endorsement of punching heretics. No, it's not.
- [39:58]
James Polis
Yeah, one more controversy for you, ivf. This one has really been tearing it up lately. It's not hard to understand where people are coming from, from on both sides of it. And that's probably one reason why it's so controversial, is because it is so messy. It does kind of drag you kicking and screaming into this kind of weird ethical zone. What do you think is gonna happen on the right and across America on this issue, given the force of all this tech going forward.
- [40:30]
Michael Knowles
Well, what should happen is that we shouldn't do IVF anymore. It's totally morally unacceptable. However, I get why people want it. I understand. My wife and I dealt with infertility for two years. The fertility doctors are always trying to sell you ivf, and I was tempted to do it. Even I have a pretty well grounded opposition to it. I was tempted to. I totally get it, but it is totally morally unacceptable. I think part of the reason why people buy into it now is also because it's a relatively novel technology and people just haven't thought through the implications of it. So for a long time in the West, I actually don't really know the orthodox stance on it, but the Catholics were totally opposed to it from the beginning, and they were basically alone. Recently, the Southern Baptists have just come out and said, look, this is morally unacceptable, but it's gonna take people a while to figure out why. And I agree with them. I think they're right about that. The arguments for ivf, as far as I can tell, amount to, without ivf, I wouldn't have my kid. So screw you, shut your mouth. And more babies is always a good thing. What's the matter with you? I thought you were pro life. Those are the two arguments for it, and they're not really arguments. Those are emotional pleas, albeit totally understandable ones. But we don't really believe that anything that produces a child is morally acceptable. You can produce a child through adultery. You can produce a child through rape. Is that a justification of cheating on your wife or committing a rape? God forbid? Certainly not. So no one really believes that the ends justify the means in any way to produce a child. But how about on, you know, I wouldn't have my kid without. Yes, you can be grateful for the good of your child. It is good to have a child. You can be grateful for the good that you have received without trying to bend yourself over backwards to justify something that is intrinsically immoral. The clearest reason for people, which I think is the weakest argument for the immorality of ivf, but the clearest reason that resonates for people is that in practice, IVF creates a lot of little babies. And for every one baby that actually survives and is gestated and is born, you could have 5, 10, 20 embryos that are created human beings and then placed in a freezer indefinitely, or more likely, destroyed in the long run. So if one is pro life, if one really believes life begins at conception, as it obviously does, Then one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support ivf. IVF will explode the rate of abortion, not only by multiples, maybe by orders of magnitude, but again, that's still kind of a consequentialist argument, or it's an incidental argument to it. The real reason that IVF is immoral, morally unacceptable, is that it inverts the order of rights in reproduction, and it creates the notion that people somehow have a right to a child. But you can't have a right to a child. You can't have a right to a person, because people are not objects or commodities to be traded. People are proper subjects with rights themselves. So now people go to the baby store, and they go in the extreme of it. They'll go purchase the eggs of some woman, then rent the womb of another poor woman, then have the child gestate, then rip the child away from the only mother that he's ever known and intentionally deny the child the ability to know his natural mother so that two homosexuals or something can pretend to be a family, which is. I understand the desire. It's a natural desire to have kids, but that is totally unacceptable. It is abusive to the child, and it establishes the domination of science and technology over the origin and destiny of human life. So now you see court cases where, you know, doctors will implant the wrong embryo. There's a major court case going on right now. Doctors will implant the wrong embryo. So, you know, a white couple gives birth to an Asian baby. They say, wait a second. I don't know that this is my baby, or vice versa. And then they raise these children for months and months. They have to figure out what to do. Do you now rip the child away from the only mother he's ever known or one of the only two mothers he's ever known? Or do you. What do you. Do? You just tell the mother, well, give it up. We're gonna go trade them someday in the back of a parking lot. I mean, it's so nasty. It's so degrading to the human person. And it also creates the notion. It actually creates a market for children to be purchased to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just don't see. I've never heard any even remotely compelling argument for it beyond the emotional appeal, which is in itself compelling.
- [44:55]
James Polis
Well, you know, I think this is a very American predicament. And we talked a little bit about Tocqueville and about technology and about the character of American social and cultural life. And it does seem like this is one of those situations where People feel like we don't have a theocracy, we don't have an established church, there's no official spiritual authority that we all share. And therefore ain't nobody going to tell me how I can or can't use technology. And if we go down that road, people think, well, pretty soon we're just going to have, you know, some person who doesn't have any higher moral standing than you or me just passing laws forcing us to, you know, to you to. We have to use electric car or we have to reduce our carbon footprint or, you know, there's nothing to. I have to have a robot assigned to my child to take the place of a parent. Americans seem to me to be really afraid that if it's not a free for all on technology, then someone is gonna rule their lives through technology.
- [46:06]
Michael Knowles
Right? Although I do think there is a popular sentiment that people want some controls over technology, even if they say that they don't. And I think about this, in the 90s, when the Internet was really becoming pop, there was a law passed, actually, the Communications Decency act, which now we talk about that because of section 230 that might regulate social media companies or might let them off the hook. But the Communications Decency act was about decency in communications. It was chiefly about regulating porn on the Internet. And unfortunately, judges struck down the strong provisions that had support among Democrats and Republicans. A Republican House signed into law by a Democrat president. There was another law, the Child Online Protection act, same story, was to regulate porn on the Internet. And liberal activist judges struck down the really important aspects of that law and allowed the Internet to be a free for all. But in principle, we already do regulate technology tremendously. We obviously regulate your automobiles, we obviously regulate every part of your home, and we do regulate the Internet. You know, at least the one regulation we have on pornography now that's still enforced is that you can't trade child pornography. You can be arrested. You'll go to jail for that. I don't think all but the most hardened perverts would say that that's a bad thing. You can't trade drugs on the Internet. You can't contract an assassin on the Internet. The guy who ran the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, went to jail for that. So we do have limitations on how you can use technology. Because getting back to what we were talking at the top of it, technology is still real life. When you're in the digital sphere, you are still morally culpable for how you treat people, how you speak, how you behave the kind of content that you consume, that's gonna really shape your character in the real world. There's no escaping the real world. There's no going into some alternative universe on social media or on other technologies. So no, we have to regulate it as we would in anything. So the people who say, well, hey man, get your big government hands off of my technology say, okay. The logical conclusion of that impulse, that gesture of the intellect is just anarchism, I guess, to say we're not a theocracy, so therefore we really can't have laws against murder or against theft or against, I don't know, against anything, I guess. But in as much as we grant that the civil authority has rights to pass laws based on practical morality, it would seem to me that we can also have laws against abortion or what will soon become the leading cause of abortion, in vitro fertilization, which needs to be regulated or banned for many other reasons as well.
- [48:47]
James Polis
Well, you've heard me go off on this, I'm sure, once or twice. You know, if we go down this path, and I think we've already started to go down this path, what ends up happening is that technology itself and the logic of technology becomes the spiritual authority and becomes the established religion. So you know, I've been out here for, for years now saying, like, look, you know, in America it's important that Americans have a hands on approach to their technology, that they don't feel alienated and distant and sort of servants of their technology. And in order to accomplish that, we got to make sure that the first Amendment, the second amendment, the fourth Amendment, that these things extend to online life, that Americans can, can mine Bitcoin and use it and have high power GPUs and not have the government tell them, this computer is too powerful for you, it only belongs to us. You know, that's all really important in order for Americans to maintain that confident, competent relationship. Ordinary people with extraordinary technologies, even if they, that yes, some of them will be ripe for abuse in the same way that a gun is ripe for abuse, you know, yes, you know, there's a certain amount of risk there, but if the people cannot develop that habit of bearing that risk responsibly, then it's going to lead us to, to a very dark place. But you know, I've got friends in tech who, you know, they're cheering along, yes, you know, come and take it, and they've got their flag with their GPU on it. And that's why we need to make sure that Americans have a constitutional right to become cyborgs. And it's sort of like record scratch, you know, how do you, how do you walk that line where, you know, you got guys like you and me, you know, we, we understand that America does, does need to maintain a commercial culture of competence and a free access to the most important kinds of technologies so they don't just become part of the glittering tower that the elite post humanists live in without opening up the floodgates where you say like, oh, yeah, you want to have cat girls, you want to have three heads, you want to have an enormous machine growing out of your body, Go for it, baby. It's your life. You do you.
- [50:50]
Michael Knowles
We need to have standards and norms. I mean, it gets back to the gun argument. And I'm a strong supporter of the second Amendment, about as strong a supporter as there can be, but it is simply a fact. People have to be able to use their guns responsibly. They need to exercise their rights. They need to know how to use their gun. They need to pass this knowledge onto their children. They have to really do it. If they do not, their guns will be taken away from them. They'll end up ceding their rights away. They'll end up ceding that technology away. I don't care what the second amendment says. That will happen because order will be maintained. There will be order. I promise you that. I think that is a first principle of political philosophy. So the same goes here for technology. If people can responsibly use their technology, they will keep their rights. They will have a great deal of strength. They could be really edified by that. And if people abuse technology, in the words of the men who built our country, if they abuse liberty to license, then they'll kill themselves. I mean, they will turn themselves into weird little cyborgs, decadent little creatures that can be controlled and manipulated quite easily by technology or by the government or by a technical government that is being run by ChatGPT. That's just going to happen. And so we need to have a far greater exercise of standards and norms. And what that's going to feel like to a lot of people is the restriction of individual liberty. I don't think it really is the restriction of individual liberty. I think it's an expansion of individual liberty. Because the only way to make sense of our individual liberty, individual liberty is as social creatures, what Burke would call the spirit of an exalted liberty. Even as you tamp down your basest appetites and passions, which we lie to ourselves and say will free us. But Actually enslave us. That's what's going to happen. You have to tell people no, because as C.S. lewis wrote when he was predicting the rise of transhumanism and the cyborgs, he said, every time we seem to take a step forward in this path, we also take a step back. Everything that we say is going to augment our humanity is actually diminishing part of our humanity to the point that we make it all the way to Yuval Harari's prediction that Homo sapiens will cease to exist because we will create the new Homo deus. We'll make man as a God. Well, okay, what has the conclusion of that been then? The conclusion is the abolition of man. Something that I do not wish to see.
- [53:31]
James Polis
Yeah, you know, I mean, there's just so much to freak out about. And you and I have talked about this before, just kind of the parade of horribles, whether it comes out of Harari or some of these other guys, you know, people who are trying to build their clones or merge with their machines, it's easy for, you know, Christians of any stripe really to look at that stuff and immediately start. Start panicking about. About the Antichrist and about the end times and about kind of the horrors that. That people would be subjected to until, you know, the. The very end of days. At the same time, though, you know, you. You were. You were Padre Pio posting a little while ago, right? Pray and don't worry. And, you know, there's a. There's a long list of orthodox saints that. That would probably take up the remainder of our time to enumerate them, say, saying, you know, do not lose your inner peace. If your heart is not prepared for Christ to take up residence there, then you can just say goodbye to all the other stuff. It doesn't matter if you memorize all the rituals. It's about what's in here, which is where the possibility of salvation and of peace really begins. How do you live that out? Do you encounter folks in your circles who really seem to be kind of as frantic and desperate and worried about the future? And how do you convince them that you can relax without being irresponsible about it?
- [54:58]
Michael Knowles
Well, I was Padre Pio posting and often Aristotle posting as well. And one way to do it is to find the mean between two bad extremes. One extreme is this constant frantic worrying about the sky is going to fall and we need to save the world, which you're not gonna do, by the way. And we need to just get through. If we just get through this one election, everything's gonna be all better, and we're gonna cast the devil out of the world. And you know that's not gonna happen. And if you think that's gonna happen, then you're gonna be even more depressed and more anxious. The flip side of that, the other awful extreme is a political quietism that says, well, I should have absolutely nothing to do with public life, and it all doesn't matter at all. I'll just retreat into asceticism. For most people, you probably shouldn't be a monk. You actually do have an obligation to participate in public life. And, you know, you were born in a time for a reason, and you have obligations to that. So you need to find a mean that is between these two things. And you say, look, I'm going to do my part. I'm going to fight evil as I can. I'm going to advance virtue as I can. But I'm also going to recognize that I really won't save the world. I can cooperate with God's grace, and God will save the world. And it would be sinful, actually, for me not to cooperate with God's grace, but I'm just going to play my part. And I'm not really the author of this story. So following Padre Pio, we pray, we hope. Hope is a theological virtue grounded in fact, by the way, not just a happy feeling. But if you believe in the Incarnation, if you believe in the crucifixion and the Resurrection, then that's a fact. You know, the Gospels are journalism, not just poetry. And so you believe in that, and then you don't worry about it because it's really a little bit above your pay grade. And when you're worried and you're frantic, not only are you unlikely to help anybody, you're also going to perhaps lose yourself, and you could fall into despair, which is a major sin. You know, you've gotta just. A friend of mine uses this phrase all the time, and I think it's a really important guiding light for politics, which is, be normal. Just be normal, I implore you. I'm reaching out through the screen and shaking you by your shoulders. Please be normal. Your audience probably does that better than most, but it's good, because norms has two meanings. There's normal, like what everybody does, what's common behavior. And then there's also norms, you know, up in the sky, this ideal that we reach for. And ideally, what we would like to do is bring those two things a little bit closer together and just, you know, look, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. So that's going to remain the case. Don't lose yourself because you think that you're the most important figure in history.
- [57:40]
James Polis
You're not Michael Knowles. Normie Nationalist. That's about all the time we got. Good to see you. Hope to see you again soon and have a very solemn yet cheerful time out there.
- [57:51]
Michael Knowles
Yes, and I'll be sure to drink eggnog in your stead.
- [57:56]
James Polis
Cheerio. That's all the time we got. Until next time around, I am James Pulis. This. This is Zero hour and God of mercy.