Ep. 1719 - BREAKING: Pope Francis Dead at 88

I take one morning off work in however many years, and the Pope dies.

News of which I received as I was walking back from the White House,

six o'clock in the morning, I was picking up my tickets to the White House Easter egg roll,

which was a lot of fun. We will get into all of it.

Pope Francis's legacy, what happens now, and the marvelous return of bunny rabbits

instead of shirtless transvestites to the

South Lawn of the White House. I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.

Welcome back to the show. Lots of important news in the world.
Obviously, everyone is talking about the Pope. There's a little bit going on domestically.
There's also a very, very important issue that I want everyone, even remotely connected to the Trump campaign or the Trump administration, to listen to. I know I'm very happy to say there are a lot of people who listen to this show who are in that world.
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Code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S at checkout. Six o'clock in the morning, I've got to go pick up my tickets.
It was kind of a last minute thing that I was going to go out with my whole family. I was down visiting my 93-year-young grandmother for Easter.
I got the kids with me. I got sweet little Elisa with me.
We fly up from Florida. And I say, okay, this is the one time in however long that I actually just can't do the show Monday morning because of the Easter holiday.
I said, what could happen? No news ever breaks over Easter. I'm walking back from getting my tickets at the Eisenhower Executive Office building, and I see this news that Pope Francis has died.
And so I kind of felt like Trump in that moment when he heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, you remember, and this tiny dancer playing in the background. He goes, this is the first I'm hearing of it.
She was a wonderful lady. And he gave that impromptu speech.
I said, what do I think? It's not as though this was unexpected. The Pope was on the brink of death a couple months ago.
He's an 88-year-old man. We all knew that he was not long for this world.
So what does a conservative, much less a conservative Catholic, think about the death of this Pope who was somewhat politically controversial, who was viewed as a liberal, who many people called a leftist on a lot of issues, though really his legacy is much more complicated. First thought is, pray for the Pope.
That's the traditional Catholic answer. We pray for people who have died.
That's where we get RIP from. Even if you think you don't pray for the dead, you do pray for the dead every time you say RIP, because RIP is Latin.
It's, well, we say it in English now, rest in peace, but the Latin maps as well, and it's requiescat in pace, and it's this traditional prayer for the dead. Requiem eternam dona e domine, lux perpetua a lot of people don't notice in our culture, which is we used to have funeral masses for people.
We still do in some quarters, but a funeral mass is not like a modern funeral. Now we don't even call it a funeral.
We call it a celebration of life. The traditional Mass is not a celebration of life.
The traditional Mass is not a big celebration of what a guy did where we give eulogies. Eulogies are a pagan tradition where you just sing these songs of praise to the dead.
The traditional Catholic view is the opposite. We don't have a celebration where we talk about how good a person is because we know that we're not all that good.
And we know that only God is good. So whatever you think about Pope Francis, and we'll get into his legacy, and we'll get into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
We'll get into what this means for the church and for all of these conversions that have been happening over the past few days. We'll get into who the next Pope might be.
But whatever you think about Pope Francis, I would just say maybe in humility, say a prayer for the guy. Say RIP.
Because my big political takeaway from the death of Pope Francis is that our modern left-right paradigm

does not map all that neatly onto ancient institutions, pre-modern institutions.

The church, she's very, very old.

St. Augustine said the church is ever-ancient, ever-new, that the faith is ever-ancient, ever-new.

There is one institution in Western civilization that has survived from antiquity, and that is the Catholic Church. And what that means is our modern notions of politics, they don't really fit onto the church.
Because on the one hand, you could say Francis was a total lib. He was a big leftist.
He supported mass migration and effectively supported open borders or sounded like he supported open borders. Sure, that's true.
That's very leftist. He also said gay marriage is a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.
Yes, it's true. Pope Francis reportedly said really nice things about Joe Biden.
And he said that Joe Biden should continue to receive communion. And he was a little harsher on President Trump and J.D.
Vance. Sure.
On the other hand, Pope Francis said that an abortionist is like a hitman. And when you procure an abortion, it's like you're calling in an assassination of a baby.
Okay. He mocked the notion of transgenderism.
And so where do we put him? Is he on the left? Is he on the right? You can't characterize the church, and you can't really characterize a pope that way. So I don't want to paper over it.
Pope Francis's pontificate has been very challenging for a lot of people, and there has been a fair bit of confusion, so much so that some more conservative cardinals issued dubia, you know, questions to the Pope that were really not sufficiently answered. From my own position, I love the traditional Latin Mass.
Pope Francis did restrict the traditional Latin Mass, and yet when I consider Pope Francis's legacy, I have to have a great deal of gratitude to Pope Francis because my reversion to the faith, I was an atheist for 10 years, my reversion mostly took place during Pope Francis's pontificate. And that's not just me.
That's true of a lot of Catholics. You know, on Sunday, we'll hopefully get to it a little later in the show, record number of baptisms in France.
France. You know, the country where the terms left and right in politics actually come from.

France. France, you know, the country where the terms left and right in politics actually come from.
France, the country that beheaded its monarch, Catholic monarch, beheaded its other Catholic, you know, the queen, took over the great cathedrals, turned them into temples to reason, you know, instituted this secular, atheist, hideous kind of

revolutionary government, hotbed of liberalism. But France was once the first daughter of the

church. And now in France, with all the secularism, you're seeing mass conversions.
In the UK, you're

seeing a huge resurgence of Catholicism. I think in part it's because Christianity is the religion

of the catacombs. Christianity is

anti-fragile, to use a phrase from Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The more you persecute Christianity, the stronger it becomes.
And I think this is true even in its, I'm being persecuted right now by the trains that are going by my home studio. That's okay though, we endure just like the faith does.
because when you look at Pope Francis' pontificate, he might have had perfectly good reasons to restrict the Latin mass. I don't know what they are, but he might have.
It's above my pay grade. But all I know is people have become more Christian under his pontificate.
There has been a resurgence of tradition. Call that paradoxical.
Call that providence. There has been a resurgence of interest in orthodoxy.
And so what do we do? We pray for the Pope. What did I do? I went to the Easter egg roll at the White House.
It was really great. I'm a little souvenir wooden Easter egg here.
It was wonderful. The kids got to see the bunny and take pictures with him and go on egg hunts.
And it was beautiful. I was there first thing in the morning.
It was going on all day. The president came out and said hello to people.
Members of the cabinet were there. And it was just so normal.
This was, this was the most delightful part of the Easter egg roll this year. You remember Joe Biden decided that he was celebrating Easter, going also celebrate the Trans Day of Visibility because apparently that ancient festival coincided with Easter one year.
So he celebrated. You remember he hung those flags, not just the regular rainbow pride flag, but the terrorist pride flag, the one where it has like the BLM colors and the trans stuff.
And it was all, it was just crazy culminating in that one transvestite taking his shirt off and showing his fake breasts on camera on the South Lawn of the White House. It was revolting.
It was for anyone, even if you're okay with the weird rainbow stuff, you just thought this is so below the dignity of the White House. And what happened at the Trump Easter egg roll? Nothing in particular.
It was just wholesome and nice. And families were there.
Families with lots of kids. It was good.
It was a return to normal. And I think that's what a lot of the Trump administration, especially the second Trump administration, is represented.
That's what people voted for. They wanted a return to normal.
And I do see a connection here with the church because a lot of people are going to be asking, well, who is the next pope going to be? There's so much more to say. First though, go to preborn.com slash Knowles.
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What happens now? The Cardinal Camerlengo announces the death of Pope Francis. So now the seat of Peter is vacant, sede vacante, and the church enters into a period of mourning that will go on for 15 days to no more than 20 days.
At that point, there's going to be a conclave. At the conclave, the College of Cardinals is going to assemble in the Sistine Chapel.
And the College of Cardinals is all the cardinals, but only some of the cardinals are electors, only the cardinals who are under 80 years old. And, you know, I told you the Catholic Church is old.
A lot of them skew a little bit on the long and the tooth side. But nevertheless, there are a lot of cardinal electors and they're going to vote.
And certain cardinals are more popabile than others. You know, they're more popable.
So the names that have been floated, you have some people who are considered liberals. Cardinal Matteo Zupi, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Perolin.
But there are others who are considered centrist, center-right. I have a long video on this on YouTube that you can go check out too.
What happens next? How do you become the pope? And so there's Peter Erdo, cardinal in Hungary. He is considered center-right.
Not a rad trad, not totally extreme, but he's definitely considered a more conservative figure. He has spoken out about the need and the traditional Catholic understanding of borders and the notion that nations have certain political rights to determine who gets to come in and out, who gets to stay there.
You've got Cardinal Pizzaballa. He is the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem.
That would be a really interesting choice. He seems favorable to more traditional kinds of liturgy.
Also, he's right there in Jerusalem. So you've got this flashpoint geopolitical conflict, which has really dominated the discourse because of the Israel-Gaza war.
I notice even, you know, I still do my campus speaking tours. I keep my finger on the pulse, see what the youths are talking about.
And for the past, I don't know, five, six years, it's been all gender, all the crazy rainbow stuff, which is tedious. I don't even want to talk about it anymore.
I noticed this past year, the big flashpoint on campus, Israel-Palestine. How interesting, how timely would it be to have the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem to be the next Pope? Others who have been floated, Cardinal Bisungu out of Africa, a much more conservative figure.
An irony too, because some people say, well, Pope Francis consecrated all of these cardinals, so they're all going to follow in his footsteps exactly, and you're going to get Francis 2.0. There's really no evidence of that because a lot of the new cardinals are in Africa.
They're in Latin America. These are people who are socially quite conservative.
Some names that I think a lot of conservatives are hoping for, people like Cardinal Seurat in Africa. It would be kind of funny for the libs who don't know anything about Christianity and the church to celebrate that we've elected the first ever black pope and then he's more right wing than any pope we've had since like Pius IX or something.
That would be really funny. Another one would be the American Cardinal Raymond Burke.
That would be wonderful. You know, both Cardinal Burke and Cardinal Seurat are a little bit, a little more aged.
I think the odds of them becoming pope are a little low. But in any case, people have known that this is coming for a long time.
I suspect we will have a new Pope within probably three weeks. So we just have to wait and see.
Pope Francis's legacy will be clearer in the long run. But don't forget, when everyone is agonizing over every stupid news headline that comes out, the church measures time not in days or weeks or even years, but in centuries and millennia.
And we trust providence. Our Lord has not abandoned the church yet.
It's okay. Saint Padre Pio said, pray, hope, and don't worry.
That's what we do. Even in politics, things tend to shake out in the long run.
And the church has a special protection. So before we get to all of the other Easter news, beyond the White House, over in France, over in England, or what it means for the faith, what we're looking at now.
I also have to, I can't, you know, it was amazing. The one morning I take off, I have to point out, you remember Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen? I was talking about him last week.
Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen, he's this lunatic from Maryland who thought it would be a good idea to fly down to El Salvador and have a sweet little meeting with this criminal, this MS-13 guy, alleged MS-13 guy, who was brought into court for a protective order, allegedly for beating his wife. You know, doesn't seem like the very best.
Senator Van Hollen, instead of being with his constituents, giving care to his constituents who have been the victims of illegal aliens, no, he takes the side of the illegal aliens. So anyway, I joked last week.
So I made this AI-generated image of Senator Van Hollen and a face-tattooed Mexican gangster staring lovingly in each other's eyes over a picnic with glasses of red wine, you know, kind of just just melting in the vision of the other one. And no sooner do I do it than one day later, Chris Van Hollen brings my meme to life.
He does my meme? Do we have. There it is.
And some people are saying, well, Michael, this prediction wasn't perfect because you see in yours, the two were staring lovingly in each other's eyes, drinking red wine. And in the real photograph, they're staring lovingly at each other's eyes, leaned over, almost touching hands, but they have glasses of clear liquid.
So, okay, the one part I got wrong was maybe it's tequila instead of red wine. I don't know what it is.
But this shook even me. This is the most on-the-nose, Nolstradamus prediction I have ever made in my entire career.
I don't know what to do with this power that I apparently have. But what I do know is this is the dumbest political stunt, the single dumbest political stunt I have ever seen in my life.
And in some ways, I'm half joking that my meme came to life. In some ways, maybe my meme did spur this.
This is something Trump does. Trump makes his enemies destroy themselves.
And I think this would be another example of that. This guy, Trump deports a criminal.
And then because Trump did it, the libs have to take the other side. So they have to take the side of the criminal.
Trump says enough of the paper straws in an executive order. You get to have plastic straws again.
What do the Dems do? The Dems defend paper straws, which nobody likes. Trump says, hey, no husky fellas going into the girls' locker room.
What do Dems have to do? They have to defend the husky fellas in the girls' locker room, even though no one likes that. And so here we say, hey, man, it's kind of weird that a Democrat senator would go down to defend this illegal alien over his own constituents.
Wow, has he got a thing for the guy or something? And sure enough, he doesn't. This guy, when all is said and done, this guy is not going to be able to get elected dog catcher.

But the left has to do it. Now, we will get back to why the left has to do it in a second.
First, though, I want to turn back to the White House, back to the Easter message that Trump put out. Because this, too, was so refreshing.
This is Sunday we celebrate his glorious resurrection and proclaim as Christians have done for nearly 2,000 years he is risen. Through the pain and sacrifice of Jesus on the cross we saw God's boundless love and devotion to all humanity and in that moment of his resurrection history was forever changed with the promise of everlasting life.
As we approach this joyous Easter Sunday, I want to wish Christians everywhere a happy and beautiful and blessed holiday. America is a nation of believers.
We need God. We want God.
And with his help, we will make our nation stronger, safer, greater, and more prosperous, and much more united than ever before.

Thank you to everyone, and have a really happy Easter.

Beautiful. So, so beautiful.
I want you to compare President Trump's Easter message about the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the hope that that means for

the world with the statement put out by King Charles over in the UK. King Charles writes, the love he showed, this is Christ, the love he showed when he walked the earth reflected the Jewish ethic of caring for the stranger and those in need, a deep human instinct echoed in Islam and other religious traditions

and in the hearts of all who seek the good of others.

This is an Easter message or this is a Ramadan message? This is an Easter message or this is a

Yom Kippur message? Why do I need to hear about Judaism and Islam in the Easter message?

No knock on our Jewish friends, no knock even on our Muslim friends. But what? The Jewish ethic of caring for the stranger.
Well, what's funny here is one of the clearest stories in the New Testament is the story of the good Samaritan. A Jewish man is totally neglected by his neighbors and actually a Samaritan who's supposed to be the bad guy.
He comes up and helps the man. I'm not saying it's reflective of all the Jews.
I'm just saying, where is this in the Easter message? Islam? Where do you find Islam in the Easter message? Islam wasn't invented for over six centuries after the crucifixion and the resurrection. I don we, why, I really, I'm not, I don't even mean to knock Judaism and Islam in particular here.
I'm just saying, why, why are we talking about that? You wouldn't talk about Christmas in your Ramadan proclamation. You wouldn't talk about Easter in your Rosh Hashanah proclamation, would you? So why do we have to talk about other religions in the Easter proclamation? Easter, the most important holiday in the Christian year, in a statement put out by the King of England, who views himself as the head of the Church of England, the defender of the faith.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. Trump understands.
We're a

Christian nation. And the message of Easter is not some nebulous, wishy-washy, generic message

about God and spirituality, man. Easter is about an historical event, which is the resurrection

of Jesus Christ. And America cares a lot about Easter because America is a Christian country.
It was founded by Christians, many of whom sailed on the Mayflower, which is a great cigar brand. And it was developed by Christians.
And John Adams said that the principles of Christianity are the principles on which independence was won. And it's just, we're just, it's Christian, okay? And until the last 50, 60 years, America was almost entirely Christian.
We were nice to Jews. There weren't that many Muslims, but we were in principle nice to Muslims.
But it's a Christian country. And the particularity is what's key here.
And so many in the West want to deny that. They want to deny the particularities of our culture, even down to the particularities of our God.
They want to deny the things that make us what we're there. They want to deny our whole civilization.
England can be for anyone, say the multiculturalists. America, oh, it's just America's anything.
America's just an idea, but it's not any idea in particular, and it's just anything you want it to be, except what the conservatives want it to be. It's definitely not that.
No. Trump says, no, no, no.
We're going to be America, and we're going to celebrate this particular holiday for this particular religion, for this particular historical event that shaped our particular culture, and that's that. And that's very refreshing.
You know, the existence of God can be known through reason from the natural world. You don't need revelation to know that God exists.
But God also reveals himself. And we believe as Christians that the only way to the Father is through the Son.
And some people don't believe that. I'm not leading any charges to go, you know, throw them into the outer darkness.
But that's what we believe. And Trump is saying it's okay to believe what we believe.
It's okay. It's all right.
It's all right to have our country the way it always was, and the way we flourished, and the way we want it to be. It's all right to have our own country.
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Pure Talk Wireless by Americans for Americans. I mentioned earlier in the show record number of baptisms over the weekend in France.
384 adults in France scheduled to be baptized between Saturday evening and Easter Sunday, according to the Conference of Bishops in France. That comes on top of 7,400 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18, expected to be baptized that week.
Doesn't seem like a huge number until you realize just how secular our culture has become. That's a record.
That's moving the trend line in a different direction. Who were the converts? It was driven mostly by young people, people under the age of 25.
45% increase among adults compared to last year, 33% rise among adolescents. So you're seeing a big, a big drive here from young people.
Now, part of this might be because fewer adults were baptized when they were babies by their parents. Two generations ago, everyone would be baptized, even if you didn't believe in it.
Today, a lot of parents, Gen X parents, millennial parents, even boomer parents, just didn't baptize their kids because they don't believe in it. What's the point? Church is just like every other day of the week.
It's all kind of fake. It's all just, it's all happy clappy kind of, it's for me, it's to entertain me, but it's not that entertaining.
So whatever, Why would I give any credence or participation to it? And then those kids grew up and they decided they want to be baptized. They received grace, I think.
And in any case, they become baptized. In other words, Nietzsche said that God is dead.
God said that Nietzsche is dead. One of them was right.
It turns out the old eternal questions, they remain. It turns out the old human longings, they remain.
We deny them and we ignore them and we indulge our concupiscence and we do everything we can to distract ourselves from them and we doom scroll and we have flashy lights and we're busy all the time. We're always doing busyness, and we're just always distracted.
And yet, those nagging questions remain. There was this thought from the radicals and the liberals that, hey, if we stop baptizing people, if we change the liturgy, if we tell everyone that all the smart people are atheists, if we mock the religion, if we do all these things, then human nature is so malleable, we can just morph people into these new kind of atheistic, rationalist creatures.
We can change human nature. This is what Marx says in the Six Thesis on Feuerbach, where he says that, you know, heretofore, philosophy is sought to understand the world.
I want to change the world. I want to change human nature.
Okay. How'd that work out? Didn't work out very well.
And in fact, after those decades of true oppression, spiritual oppression, God wins. God wins and the libs lose.
I love it. Absolutely love it.
Now, unfortunately, some libs are winning a little bit right now, at least at the courts. The Supreme Court has ruled that President Trump cannot deport illegal aliens under the Alien Enemies Act.
And the court did this in a truly bizarre decision. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had not had a chance to act on this matter.
So, you know, you got lower courts, you got the district court, then you got the appellate court, then it goes to the Supreme Court. Here's what the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said about Trump deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act.
The court said, the Court of Appeals sits as a court of review, not of first view. That principle dictates our ruling today.
Just yesterday, the district court entered an order indicating that the government states that authorities will not remove the petitioners during this litigation, and it will alert the court if that changes. If petitioners are concerned that respondents' position has changed, they should have litigated these concerns before the district court in the first instance.
It goes on, the district court's order today indicates the petitioners gave the court only 42 minutes to act, did not give the respondents an opportunity to respond. The appeal is dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
Okay, so the appeals court says, well, this hasn't risen to our level yet, so we're not going to act on it. Trump can still, well, Trump has said they're not going to do this anymore, and it's got to be litigated at the district level anyway.
The Supreme Court then comes in anyway, 7-2 decision. You and Alito dissent, you know you got a bad ruling.
It's just a general rule. Those are the two solid judges.
Then you got a few squishy supposed conservatives. Then you got the libs.
Really, really bizarre. You got the court coming in.
This is legally really dubious. This is certainly out of precedent and tradition and all the sorts of guardrails that we're told the court has to defend to stop Trump from acting lawlessly, to stop this huge accumulation of power in the executive branch.
But hey, if you care about separation of powers and checks and balances and all the rest of it, then why are you cheering on the domination of the government by the judiciary in an unprecedented, downright lawless way? It's not just the executive that can take a lot of power. In this case, Trump is not acting with any particularly aggressive move to consolidate power.
He's invoking a law from 1798. It's been on the books for a pretty long time.

And what is he actually doing? Beyond all the legal jargon, what is he actually doing?

He's removing illegal aliens who have no right to be here. And he's not even removing Abuela,

you know, making a nice paella minding your own business. He's removing face tattooed,

raping, murdering gangsters who are part of a foreign terrorist organization.

And that's too much for the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court is going to upend legal precedent, is going to jump the gun on the lower courts to stop Trump.
This is especially true when you look at who President Trump is deporting. Here we are.
It's kind of a grainy picture because my printer's almost out of ink, but you can see it. Sure, it's up on the screen.
Trump is holding up this picture of the knuckles of this guy, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the boyfriend of Senator Van Hollen. And in the picture, you see on the knuckles, there are these little symbols, and then above it, MS-13.
And the libs are trying to argue, this is astounding, they're trying to argue that the picture is photoshopped. But it's not really photoshopped.
They're arguing that it's photoshopped because the symbols have been labeled MS-13. The symbols are marijuana, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull.
And what the government is arguing is that these symbols stand for marijuana, M, smiley, S. The cross looks like a one.
It's got a little cross on it though. And the skull looks kind of like a three.
And what the government is arguing is these symbols on these finger tattoos stand for MS-13. Now you might say, well, I don't think they stand for MS-13.
First of all, neither you nor I are experts in MS-13 symbology. Okay.
This satanic gang, Mara Salvatrucha, neither of us is an expert in it. However, the government's case seems plausible to me.
And even if the government's case, even if the government's just making it up, a guy who has these kinds of weird, obviously symbolic, pretty dubious knuckle tattoos, Even if all it is is just a marijuana leaf, drugs, some weird smiley face, a bizarre looking cross and a skull. I don't know.
This doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's going to, you know, perfect AI or something. You know, I don't think he's going to take us to Mars.
Pardon me for being prejudicial. It doesn't seem like a Rhodes Scholar exactly.
What benefit does he add to the country? A guy who just have almost certainly gang signs tattooed on his fingers, but even if it's just drugs and skulls and stuff, I don't know. Why do we want him here? I think generally, if you got face tattoos or even these kind of weird, simple tattoos, that's a mark against you.
If you have court orders for protection because you beat your wife allegedly, that's a mark against you. If you've got confidential informants saying that you're an MS-13, that's a mark against you.
If you've got multiple judges agreeing that it's likely or at least trustworthy that the guy's in a satanic gang, that's a mark against you. How many strikes until you're out? To me, it's three strikes and you're out.
In this case, maybe just one of them. But I don't know.
We got four, five. Every time Trump throws something out there and then the libs argue against it.
And the argument that the libs make seems to fortify the argument that Trump himself is making. I think he's MS-13, but even if he's not, get him out of the country.
So now the libs have to move the goalposts. Now the libs have to say, no, no, no, it doesn't even matter if he's an MS-13.
We'll get to that in one moment. First, though.
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Many such cases. Wonderful news.
Welcome. Welcome home.
So the liberal media are moving the goalposts, I think because they suspect that Kilmar Obrego Garcia is in MS-13 and they realize just how terrible the Van Hollen thing looks. So CNN moves to goalposts.
CNN's Caitlin Collins interviewing Garcia's attorney. They then argue that the case is not about whether or not he's in this gang.
I want to show you something that the president posted tonight. It's a photo of what he says is your client's left hand.
You can see his knuckles there and the president is showing these tattoos that the White House alleges, reveals that he's a member of MS-13. I should note, the photo has been doctored because those, the actual MS-13 that you see the top, that's not actually a tattoo tattoo that's what they're saying the tattoos portray what is your reaction to this photo yeah my reaction is this is just a continuation of the distraction this case is not about whether mr obrego garcia is good or bad whether he is or isn't in ms13 whether he should be able to remain for the rest of his life in the U.S.
or not. This case is about the simple fact that he was removed without due process.
And if it can happen to him and the government pushes back at every turn, despite three different courts ordering them to return him, then who's next? Actually, I think it is about whether or not he's MS-13. That's what it's about for me, at least, in the first place.
No, listen, guys, it's not about, come on, we're getting distracted by his allegations of beating his wife and the multiple judges who think he's in this vicious terrorist organization. It's not really about that, you see.
No, it is about that. And I guess at a deep level, you could say it's not about that.
But at the really deep level, what it's about is this guy has no right to be in the country. So what Trump is saying is, I'm just trying to deport hundreds of thousands, maybe a million or two really violent, vile, dangerous, terrorist people here who are foreigners.
But if it's not about that, if it's then just about illegal aliens having no right to be here, then we should be deporting 11 to 16 million now. I get why Garcia's attorney and the libs who have put a lot of chips on this case are trying to distract and say, it's not about whether or not he's an MS-13, because he obviously is, allegedly.
But, okay, fine, maybe you'll win that little battle, you're going to lose the war, because if this just becomes about whether or not you have a right to be in America, then we need to deport them all. Van Hollen himself is backtracking.
After he brought my meme to life, after he really made me into the greatest Nolstradamus I've ever felt like, he decided to backtrack. Are you concerned about standing so forcefully with somebody that has at least a questionable record? I am not defending the man, I'm defending the rights of this man to due process.
And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law.
Because if we take it away from him, we do jeopardize it for everybody else. If we want to defend the rule of law, then we need to make sure that illegal aliens don't enter our country.
but Van Hollen and all the Democrats up to and including Joe Biden and Kamala and many Democrats over the decades have welcomed them in. But Joe Biden in particular welcomed them in.
Kamala was the boarders are welcomed them in. The Democrat senators welcomed them in.
Now you're talking to me about the rule of law? No, no, no. I don't stand with this guy.
You went on a lunch date with him. Also, wasn't this guy supposed to be being tortured in some horrible prison in El Salvador, basically a concentration camp? Van Hollen doesn't even know where he is.
Naib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, pointed out, obviously the senator knows where he is. He took him out on a lunch date.
Yeah, no, it is a bad. You are defending this guy, and you realize it's a horrible look, and you realize your your constituents hate you for it and you're trying to salvage what remains of your political career.
Good luck. Good luck, buddy.
And good luck to any of the Democrats who want to defend this stuff too. Please run on this in 26, run on this in 28.
That would be wonderful. Here's what Tom Homan, the border or the deportations are rather, had to say.
Not even a U.S. senator could get any information about his whereabouts or the condition of his incarceration without actually going down and making the trip to El Salvador himself.
We obviously knew his whereabouts because he went there to see him. But what bothers me more than that is a US senator traveled El Salvador on a taxpayer dime to meet with an MS-13 gang member, public safety threat, terrorist.
Terrorist. That sums it up.
Well said by Tom Homan. Keep it up, Democrats.
Scott Jennings on CNN, who does a great job. He's the conservative on CNN.
He said that he cannot understand why Democrats in this case, and more broadly, always fall in love with the worst people. I see these pictures tonight and I think, boy, the party of women is really covering itself in glory tonight.
I mean, I don't understand why the American left falls in love with the worst people. You've got a gang banging, human trafficking, wife beating, illegal alien, and a United States Senator in a ludicrous display of energy is in El Salvador having Mai Tais and Yahtzee, I do not get it.
I do not understand why the left takes on the heroes. I don't get it.
I do get it. I actually get why the American love falls in love almost uniformly with the worst people.
The reason is that their loves are disordered. All of their loves.
They have a root problem. Fundamentally, not only what they believe, but what they desire is wrong.
And when your loves are disordered and misplaced, you're not just going to fall in love with one bad guy. You're going to fall in love only with bad guys.
This is the same reason that your rebellious sister always dates punks and losers and criminals. It's the same thing.
All of liberalism comes down to screw you, dad. And so it's the same reason.
Your sister has, I don't know, maybe your sister's perfectly nice. I hate to slander her.

But your sister, the archetypal rebellious sister, she always brings home the bad boy. And she's always in these bad relationships.
Yeah, of course she is. You rarely find someone who has just one bad relationship.
It's usually kind of all or nothing. And that's the American left.
whether they're simping for terrorists in the Middle East or at home, Antifa or Hamas or whatever. They're defending career criminals.
They're always attacking cops. They're always attacking good guys.
We're protecting people like Daniel Penny on the subway. It's always the same thing.
Now they're defending this kid who stabbed Austin Metcalf in the heart. It's always the same because their loves are off.
You got to fix that. And that requires not merely a political fix and not merely a cultural fix.
It requires a religious reorientation. There's no way around it.
As Cardinal Manning tells us, and I tell you frequently from him, all politics ultimately is theological. And so that's what it's got to come down to.
Now, there is so much more I have to get to. So much more, but I'm running out of time because I decided to take one morning off and the world changed.
What are the things that have happened? Kanye West has just declared on social media that he had an incestuous gay relationship with his cousin when he was a child until he was 14. And it all centered around pornography that he found in his house.
I don't even have time to get to that today. There's a major issue that I have to tell you about.
And I specifically need to tell you about if you are anywhere around the Trump organization or the White House. I guess they're the same thing now because it's a really easy political win for the conservatives and I feel that we're kind of blowing it right now.
I don't have time to get to that. Has anything else happened in the last few days? There's been a lot.
I can't, and I can't even get to member block today because I have to fly out to Los Angeles to film a bunch of episodes of the book club but I will be back tomorrow and we will be talking about all of these things probably even the Kanye thing I'll try to do it in a respectful way because this is a wholesome show and I know kids watch so we'll try to be but there are political implications to this. We just need more time.

We will have that time tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.

This is The Michael Knowles Show.

See you then.