Ep. 1703 - My Day at the White House with Four Cabinet Members

Yesterday, I visited the White House to conduct back-to-back interviews with four members of President Trump's cabinet, four of the most powerful people on Earth. I sat down with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
We discussed everything from interest rates and tariffs to whether or not vaccines cause autism.

Some of their answers are going to make Democrat heads explode.

Some of their answers are going to make some squish Republican heads explode.

So without further ado, let's get into them.

I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show. President Trump has finally addressed the hooty bombing boys chat.
You know, the one with Mike Waltz and JD and Pete Hegseth and all those guys. So we'll get to that in one moment.
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First off, I really want to thank the White House for the invitation yesterday. I flew down.
There were a handful of us in a room. The audio is a little rough because there were a few of us.
Jack Posobiec was there. A number of my friends were there.
Sarah Gonzalez was right next to me. So there were a lot of interviews going on.
I was thrilled that I was able to interview four of really the top people in President Trump's cabinet. When Trump came in, he said, and his communications team said, this was going to be a transparent White House.
They were going to transform their approach to media. I called at the time.
I said, forget about New York Times and Washington Post. You guys ought to focus on the new media.
They didn't need any cajoling. They understood that, I think, implicitly.
They understood how important podcasts and streaming were to the Trump victory. And so they're doing it.
Yet another promise made, promise kept. They invite the first ever podcaster's row to the White House.
And anyway, I was very honored to be part of it And so thrilled that I could sit down with these people in particular. So right before I walk in, the Health and Human Services Department announced that it had fired 20,000 bureaucrats.
This is as I'm coming into the room to set up the camera and the microphones. Then I sit down with RFK Jr.
We don't have time to get into the whole interview. You can see the whole interview over on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel and my X account.
And I think it's up on Daily Wire. But we touched on a number of issues up to and including the most controversial part of RFK's public career, that is vaccines.
And he raised a lot of eyebrows with this answer. For the people who are asking questions about whether or not they'll vaccinate their kids or whether they should vaccinate their kids, will anything change about vaccine policy? Yeah, everything's going to change because we're going to have good information.
And, you know, none of the vaccines that are given, you know, people said to me during the hearing, oh, well, this link between autism and vaccines has been disproven. None of the vaccines that are given during the first six months of life have ever been tested for the only one was the DTP vaccine.
in that one study that was done, according to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, found that there was a link. They threw out that study because it was based upon CDC surveillance system, VAERS, and they said that system is no good.
It begs the question is, why doesn't CDC have a functional surveillance system? Great point by kennedy here so that the headlines that are i think they're making like international news right now is as i asked the question okay regardless of your views on vaccines all the nonsense from the senate confirmation hearing is anything going to change about vaccines rubber meets the road now that you're the secretary and he said everything's going to change and that's going to be the headline and that's what's going to make the liberal heads explode but listen to what he follows it up he said, everything's going to change. And that's going to be the headline.
And that's what's going to make the liberal heads explode. But listen to what he follows it up with.
He says, everything's going to change because we're going to have good information. So what is his proposal here? Is Kennedy's proposal ban all vaccines? I didn't hear him say that.
Is Kennedy's proposal to mandate all vaccines as basically the policy in America now? So I certainly didn't hear him say that. He just said, we're going to have good information, because right now we don't have good information.
And what the libs will say is, well, what are you talking about? We have the vaccine injury reporting system, VAERS. And you say, oh, we do? Okay, well, let's incorporate that into our studies.
And then out of the other side of the map, the liberals will say, well, that system is totally unreliable because it's self-reported.

Say, okay.

So Kennedy's point is, how is it we're the most advanced, richest, most powerful country in the world?

And on this controversial issue that pertains to public health, an issue that touches on probably literally every baby born in America, we don't have reliable information.

Thank you. that touches on probably literally every baby born in America.
We don't have reliable information. Shouldn't we do that? So all Kennedy is calling for here is more information, following the science, more rigorous studies, better systems.
And the libs are going to lose their minds over that. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about their position.
So there's a lot more that we got to in the Kennedy interview. Just go check out the full interview.
It was quite interesting. I have to move on to Scott Besson now.
I sit down with the Treasury Secretary, one of the most important people on earth. And I brought up the tariffs, which is the most interesting aspect of President Trump's economic policy.
It's certainly the most controversial. And I wanted the Secretary to clear something up for me, which is that I'm not one of these free traders.
I just inject Milton Friedman into my veins. I don't have any questions about global free trade.
I am totally open to tariffs. I recognize that tariffs serve a great purpose.
I recognize that the Republican Party was in many ways founded on tariffs. Abraham Lincoln said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest country on earth.
So I'm all about it, baby. When President Trump started to refocus GOP economic policy, a ton of establishment Republicans pulled their hair out and wailed and gnashed their teeth.
I was not one of them. For Trump's first term, as he runs the second time, and his third term, he, I think, makes good arguments for tariffs, but some of those arguments contradict each other.
Not even the arguments Trump is making, but the members of his administration. So on the one hand, we're told that the purpose of tariffs is to make sure that we don't have unfair trade practices being pushed by other countries.
So if India has a 200% auto tariff and we're not tariffing the products coming in from India, that's unfair. So we use them as leverage to reduce barriers to trade.
And so then we're going to reduce our tariffs and then we'll get more trade. That's one argument for tariffs.
That's the tactical leverage negotiating argument. Another argument for tariffs is that we've emptied out America's industrial base and we need tariffs in order to protect certain industries so that companies invest in America, regrow American manufacturing jobs, defend American national security.
So in a period of global conflict or even a pandemic like in 2020, our supply chains don't get cut off and we're not caught up the creek without a paddle. That's a different argument for tariffs.
The third argument for tariffs is that it's a great way to raise revenue. So we don't need to only raise our revenue by taxing our citizens.
We can get the revenue from the other countries by importing goods, charging a tariff on it, and making those countries pay to fund our government. Three different arguments for tariffs.
And all of them are worthwhile goals. The issue is that they're in conflict with each other.
So for instance, if you are only threatening the tariffs in order to reduce trade barriers so that you can reduce your tariffs eventually, then you're probably not going to get the new jobs and you're certainly not going to get the revenue. Just necessarily, by definition, you wouldn't get the revenue because the whole point is to reduce the trade barriers.
If, on the other hand, you're focused just on reshoring American manufacturing and growing jobs in America, okay, well, that can be great. That's a worthwhile go.
But then you're definitely not going to get the revenue because the revenue is coming in by importing more goods. So my question to the secretary was, given these competing goals, how do you rank their order of importance? What are you really after with the tariffs? And I thought the secretary gave a really interesting answer.
There are these competing desires that the tariffs could serve. As Treasury secretary, how are you ranking those priorities? Well, I don't do the ranking.
President Trump does the ranking. And look,

President Trump, if we go back, Alexander Hamilton was the original tariff man. Why did he do it? He did it to raise revenues for the new country, and he did it to protect U.S.
industry. President Trump has added a third leg for negotiations, whether it's closing the border, the immigration, the fentanyl crisis, or as a way to prevent people from trading with Venezuela.
So I think it'll become clearer after April 2nd. I love this answer because Scott Besant is a very intelligent man.
He's a very successful investor. He was an economics professor.
He's the real deal. And how did he answer my question? By restating the question.
I said, here are these three competing goals. What are you after? How do you rank them? And he first says, well, I don't rank them.
I'm not the president. I'm the treasury secretary.
I work for the president. The president ranks them.
And then he goes on to restate my question. He says, here's one reason people use tariffs.
Here's another reason. Here's another reason.
Here's why we used it historically. Here's why they've been good for America.
But he doesn't rank them. And then you can see that little focus he puts on at the end.
And President Trump, in particular, is focusing on them for negotiation. I think this is a deeper answer, even than it seems on the surface.
Not just for negotiation for leverage with Japan or Europe or whatever. Negotiation, just broadly.
Negotiation, meaning he will not even reveal what his motive for the tariff is. and so when Scott Besson here says, I think we'll just wait until April 2nd, President Trump has said he'll announce reciprocal tariffs on April 2nd.
I think that Besson is perfectly embodying, not just not articulating, but embodying the Trump strategy, which is, I'm going to be unpredictable. In other words, in answer to my question, how do you rank the priorities of these tariffs? He says, yeah, wouldn't you like to know? Wouldn't you like to know, Michael? And wouldn't you like to know China? And wouldn't you like to know Russia? And wouldn't you like to know Europe? Because if the administration states the goal of the tariffs, that might help quell the markets a little bit, but it will also remove the negotiating leverage.
So it was one of the most beautifully articulated non-answers I've ever heard. There's so much more to say.
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Lee Zeldin is in the cabinet meetings. He enjoys the rank of a cabinet official, but the EPA is not an official cabinet department.
So that's why he's not Secretary Zeldin.

That's why he's the EPA administrator.

But it's still a very, very important role in the government. And it's a very, very bloated department.
And it's a department that has a huge economic and political drag on the country. So Lee Zeldin hits off the top telling us what he's doing.
But to me, what was even more eye-opening was him exposing the corruption in the EPA before he got there. So we just announced a couple weeks back what is the largest deregulatory action in the history of this country.
Trillions of dollars of deregulation. The cost of living is going to go down.
Jobs are going to go up. We are going to be able to accomplish so much of President Trump's agenda through our work at EPA.
Instead of giving $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance, which says that climate justice runs through a free Palestine, how about instead... That's a real example, by the way, that you're giving.
And that grant was canceled. I canceled that one, too.
$50 million EPA gave to Climate Justice Alliance. And that's what they say climate justice runs through.
It wasn't even a domestic slogan that caused outrage. $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance, which is focused not on the some monster or on the polar bears, on the ice caps, but on Palestine or whatever.
That seems like an abuse, doesn't it? It seems like the sort of thing that Elon uncovered with USAID, which is that USAID was spending your taxpayer money ostensibly for foreign aid to poor countries around the world so that kids wouldn't starve. But actually what they were doing was they were giving money to groups like the Tide Center, a left-wing organization that was then laundering that money and sending that money back to BLM so that BLM could go in and loot your local stores and burn down your neighborhood and pressure politicians to be more left-wing.
And then the politicians would take more of your money to give to USAID, and it would be a vicious cycle, a little laundry cycle. Well, the same thing was happening at EPA.
Lee Zeldin gives other examples that are just absolutely mind-boggling. He told me when he showed up for work the first day, something like 5% of EPA employees were actually coming into work, showing up to the office five days a week.
I think the number, I forget the exact number, you get 4%, 5%, maybe a little bit higher. This is the year of our Lord, 2025.
Even if COVID were an excuse, I don't think it's a very good excuse. How are you making that argument? So anyway, his stories about the corruption in the EPA.
I already had a pretty low view of the EPA. I mean, the EPA has been a villain for conservatives for a long time.
It's actually the villain in Ghostbusters. And this raised my eyebrows even.
Okay, before we move on past these interviews, one last one sat down with Linda McMahon, not only the education secretary, but the very last education secretary that we will ever have if President Trump's policy goes through. And I asked her a basic question, which is, you're hearing a ton of misinformation about what closing the education department will mean for America and how poor kids will suffer and no one will be smart and kids will go hungry and blah, blah, blah.

And I said, hold on, I just want to know, can you just tell me, what does the education department even do?

Let me think of office space.

When the consultants come in, they ask all the employees, what exactly is it that you do here?

Thank you. What does the education department even do? Let me think of office space.
When the consultants come in, they ask all the employees, what exactly is it that you do here? What exactly is it that the education department does? Well, first of all, let me tell you what the education department does not do. We do not educate a single student.
I mean, Michael, when you think about this for a second, from the time the Department of Education was set up in 1980 until now, we've spent over $1.3 trillion. No, over $3 trillion.
Over $3 trillion. Scores have consistently gone down.
We are not doing something right. Clearly, I then asked Secretary McMahon, I said, how is it seeing how the education department has failed on every metric, every metric that they set for themselves and that their supporters set for them? If it's failed, how could anyone possibly still support the education department? So if you want to check out her answer to that, if you want to hear Lee Zeldin's exposure of the corruption in the Biden EPA, if you want to hear more from the Treasury Secretary, whose words can move global

markets, whose actions can move global markets as we await the big tariff announcement. And of

course, if you want to hear more from Secretary Bobby Kennedy on a whole range of issues,

including firing tens of thousands of bureaucrats and ending the chronic disease epidemic and

vaccines and all the rest of it. Go,

Thank you. a whole range of issues, including firing tens of thousands of bureaucrats and ending the chronic disease epidemic and vaccines and all the rest of it.
Go check it out on the Michael Noles YouTube channel because we don't have time for it in this show because we got to move on to really important things like Ghibli. You know Ghibli? Ghibli is an Italian word actually, but it's used for Japanese animation.
And Ghibli has taken over all of social media because, well, actually, we'll get to why Ghibli is taking over all of social media. Why people are memeing this one particular form of Japanese animation all over the internet.
But I want to zoom in because we're talking about the White House on a particular instance of this. The White House yesterday posted a Ghibli meme.
So this was after the White House posts this picture of a woman, an actual just photograph of a woman. Virginia Bazzura Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon, convicted of fentanyl trafficking, was arrested by ICEGov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the U.S.
She wept when taken into custody. The White House then posts a Ghibli, a really cute little Japanese animation, of this woman crying in handcuffs while a tough-looking, kind of Tom Homan-looking guy, DHS agent in his uniform, is arresting her in front of an American flag.
And it was so funny because the woman, she's crying in this really cartoonish way, you know, tears just spouting out of her eyes. And it's so funny.
And it's so funny that the White House is posting this meme, shows you, I was hanging around the White House grounds for a fair bit yesterday. And the median age there is like 29 or something.
I mean, it's a young administration. They're intellectually very plugged in.
They have their finger on the pulse of the culture. They're very online, as most of us are very online these days.
Very online used to mean you're totally fringe and no one pays attention to you. But now, your grandmother is very online, possibly.
I mean, now, that's where the popular culture happens. That's where memes happen.
That is ideas replicating themselves and transforming. And so the White House posts this.
And I just want to get off the bat, because some squishes took big issue with that meme. There is nothing wrong with celebrating this woman's removal from the country.
She's an illegal alien. She was already convicted of other crimes, including fentanyl trafficking, poisoning Americans, one of the biggest mass poisonings ever, and maybe the single biggest mass poisoning ever in recorded history.
Certainly up there, certainly in the top five. This woman then comes back into the country.
She's deported again. There's nothing wrong with celebrating that, but some people said that the meme is bad because it makes her look kind of sympathetic.
She's not a sympathetic figure, but the meme, crying, all that kind of makes her look sympathetic. And I think there are three levels here.
One, the kind of tired view that the libs are spouting

is that the meme is bad because this drug dealing, illegal alien convict, already deportee,

deserves to stay in America. Okay, that's the tired view.
Then there's the wired view,

which is what you're hearing from the more moderate Republicans. They say, this meme is bad

because this woman doesn't deserve to stay in America, but it makes her seem sympathetic. Okay, I get it.
Then I think there's the inspired view. There's one level up, which is the meme is good because it creates controversy, because it sort of makes the woman seem sympathetic maybe, but then you look into it, and because it forces a conversation about who this woman is in particular and who really all the deportees are at this point.
That's the 5D chess level of viewing the meme. And memes operate, there's a reason that memes just spread as if of their own volition.
There is a power to memes, even greater maybe than the power of an idea, because memes are evocative and they have images and they, in some ways, bypass the conscious reason. And so the meme goes viral.
Everyone's talking about it. Now everyone's talking about this random woman.
No one would have heard about Virginia Vizora Gonzalez if not for that meme. Even if the White House posted the picture, no one would really have talked about her.
It's because of the meme. And then in as much as it becomes a debate, even the liberals then have to admit, yeah, she dealt fentanyl.
Yeah, she was already deported. Yeah.
So once again, it puts the liberals in a position of defending the indefensible. It's like when Trump signs an executive order about paper straws.
It seems kind of silly. It seems kind of a waste of time.

It's like when Trump signs an executive order about paper straws. It seems kind of silly.
It seems kind of a waste of time. It's trivial, right? Except no.
Now you've put liberals in a position where they're defending paper straws, which no one likes. Zero people like that.
Same thing goes for, well, certainly for the mass deportations, transing the kids. Oh no, don't talk about transing the kids.
It's a divisive social issue. Maybe.
I don't think so. I think it's an 80-20 issue, at least.
Maybe higher. So great, you take an 80-20 issue, you force the liberals into a position of defending the indefensible.
Fine by me. There's so much more to say first, though.
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Terms and conditions may apply. My favorite comment yesterday is from Eleg2134, who says, Thank you, Michael, for calling out parents who post public content of their children.
You're welcome. I really don't like it when parents post public content of their little kids.
Don't do it. Chase the likes some other way.
Post pictures of your lasagna or something. Okay, what is Ghibli? As I said, Ghibli is the style of Japanese animation, and the only reason we're talking about it now is because it's everywhere.
People are taking every photo, personal photos, but especially political and historic photos, and they're Ghiblifying them, because you can just do it in AI. So the immediate cause of this trend is that the new ChatGBT came out, and it's really good at the push of a button

at turning any image into the style of Japanese animation,

which is particularly funny,

because though I'm not a fan of, well, really, any animation,

because I'm a grown man,

but I know some people are huge fans of Japanese anime,

and apparently this style of anime is meticulously hand-drawn.

So it's kind of ironic that a computer can now just spit it out in three seconds. But that's the technological reason why this has taken off.
But that doesn't explain everything. We have plenty of technologies available to us that we don't use all the time, or that we don't use in any particular way.
In this case, what I've noticed about the Ghibli trend is people are using it to take images of the worst things they can think of, grotesque images, violent images, dangerous images, nasty, and gibbifying them. Because the Ghibli style paints pictures in a really serene way.
Often evokes nature. It's kind of soft, kind of cute.
So the one that I saw last night, I was just Googling this or searching it on X, and it's a picture of Hitler with the Grand Mufti, and they're talking, but it's in this like really nice, sweet, serene style. And as we've talked about on this show, you know, Hitler, for the secular liberal culture, Hitler just takes the place of the devil.
They mock the notion of the devil, but we need some idea of what evil is personified, so Hitler takes that place. Hitler, being a rather evil fellow himself, nevertheless takes on this kind of absolute wickedness because of that mythos.
Also because secular liberalism inverts reality such that in our culture traditionally, and in reality as it is, there's the incarnation of absolute good in the person of Christ. And then their evil is not the sort of thing that has a separate existence.
We don't live in a Manichean dualistic world. Evil is merely the privation of good, which is an observation of the Neoplatonist Plotinus, and then it comes to us way of St.
Augustine and the Christian tradition. And so, there's a really keen insight.
There's absolute good, and then there's evil, which is the privation of good. Modernity flips that and says, there's neither God nor the devil now, and there's certainly no incarnation of good, but there is the incarnation of evil, and that's the historical person of Adolf Hitler.
Anyway, that's a windy and pedantic way of explaining just one Ghibli meme, but there are many others. There's this video that it was like a mashup here.
Do we have the video? Yeah. So it's like Osama bin Laden, the Twin Towers, Jeffrey Epstein.
The porn lady who slept with a thousand guys in a day. The meme of a girl with the house burning down, the picture out of the Vietnam War of the guy about to have his head blown off, being executed, and all right, it's too fast for me to keep up with all of them.
Patrick Bateman, he's about to chop up Paul. You get the point.
Culturally, technologically, I understand why the Ghibli thing is happening now because chat gbt was updated but why this style of animation and why these images why is it disproportionately these evil horrific images there's the uh incongruity of this really serene cute kind of animation style with really evil, wicked things. That is funny in itself.
But that raises the question then also, why the Ghibli style? ChatGPT can make all sorts of animation styles. Why wasn't it Peanuts? Why wasn't it The Simpsons? Why wasn't it South Park? Why did Ghibli take off? I think the reason is because our politics is particularly nasty and violent and dangerous at the moment.
I think that's what makes it so funny. There are periods of our history, of any nation's history, when politics is kind of boring and normal.
When the Democrats and the Republicans, even if they secretly hate each other, they'll make a big show in public of, well, we know, we get along and we have a tip O'Neill and I fight during the day, but then we have a drink at six o'clock. We have great respect for each other.
My opponent's a good family, man. We both love our country.
We want to serve our country. We just have different ways of doing it by gully.
For much of my life, that's how politics worked. We're not in that time anymore.
Because of the left, I think the left actually is the one who really started this by seriously questioning presidential elections and calling their opponents Hitler all the time. And by, well, just having a greater deal of animus toward the right than the right has for the left, which is borne out in social science.
The right has responded and the right responded in the person of Donald Trump, who's not always so nice to the left anymore, and who makes fun of people's faces, and who just pummels them into the ground with his rhetoric. And because President Trump won, and the left couldn't accept that, and they burned cars in Washington, D.C., and they tried to stop him from winning in the first place by corrupting the DOJ and the FBI.
They tried to remove him from office with bogus investigations and impeachments. They justified his murder and nearly got away with it twice, one time really close within a hair's breadth.
Tried to remove him from the ballot. You know, all of the, I mean, really crazy stuff because there was a shift in politics.
That is why, that is the reason that Ghibli has taken off in this way on social media. From the humor in the culture, by way of contrast, you can see what our political order is like.
The thing that makes it funny is that Ghibli is really nice and serene and takes evil stuff and makes it look beautiful.

That's what people are seeing in the culture. They're seeing a lot of evil, violent stuff.
And it's not so nice out here. It's not so nice when you're not in the Japanese animation.
Okay. Speaking of dangerous things, violent things, nasty things, big story, stop the presses, man bites dog.
Andrew Tate has been accused of choking a woman two weeks after he returned to the United States. Andrew Tate, we've talked about him a few times on this show.
He's this social media influencer, but he made his bones prostituting women on the internet for pornography. And he faces these charges in Romania of running a criminal enterprise and rape and all sorts of bad stuff.
So the headline now is that one of his girlfriends is accusing him of choking her, hitting her, all the rest. And you can see the text messages and stuff like, you know, he's telling her, I really want to hit you.
And I really like hitting you, and I own you, and you're my slave, and all this kind of weird stuff. I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if the allegations are true. However, I guess I'm inclined to think they're true because this man has bragged about doing these things before.
That's kind of part of his brand, I guess. And I think it's even been filmed, you know filmed smacking women and all sorts of stuff like that.
Now, his defense of that, from what I've seen, again, I haven't delved deeply into Andrew Tate's oeuvre, but his defense of that is when a video came out of him hitting a woman and threatening a woman and saying all the things that have come out in these text messages, he says, oh, we're just playing around. That's our kink, basically.
And I kind of believe him on this. He clearly, it's one thing for a man to hit a woman.
That's horrific enough. But for a man to text about how excited he is to hit a

woman and wait for the response back, that's clearly a deeper kind of pathology. So that's

why I'm speaking about it because I don't think anyone, including Andrew Tate, would dispute the

Thank you. wait for the response back.
That's clearly a deeper kind of pathology. So that's why I'm speaking about it because I don't think anyone, including Andrew Tate, would dispute the basic allegations of this case or this claim that's just come out recently within the last couple of weeks.
The question is, is it good or bad? Was it all in good fun or was this abusive? And I guess my question is, what's the difference? I've made this point before when people are really ironic all the time. They're really ironic.
Millennials are guilty of an extreme degree of irony. And I think, well, if you're ironic all the time, then I think you're just kind of earnest earnest if you do something ironically all the time then that's just what you're doing and that's just who you are and and the story about Tate it it gets to a much deeper political and spiritual problem which is he appears to be a slave to his own passions if this stuff is true if things he's said in public are true, that he really gets off on hitting women and feeling that he owns them and branding them, putting his name and tattoos on their bodies, if all these things are true, they obviously appear to be true, then he's got a problem.
He's a slave to his own disordered appetites and passions, which means he's a slave. Being a slave is not just being chained up to a cabin in the antebellum South.
In fact, the deeper and more insidious form of slavery, ultimately the only form of slavery that can ever really take control of you, is this personal slavery where your reason and your will are slaves to your appetite and your instinct. And that's what seems to have happened here.
A buddy of mine who's a recovered alcoholic tells me about a line from AA, which is a warning. It says, wherever you go, there you are.
You think you can run away from your problems. You think you fly to another country or leave your family or whatever you're going to do.
You think, I'm going to put my problems behind me. But wherever you go, there you are.
So if you have, now moving beyond Tate, I guess he's an example of this. If you have some addiction, if you have some perversion that has been solidified over time, you're addicted to pornography, so you go into more extreme pornography, or you get addicted to drugs, and you go into more extreme kinds of drugs, or you get addicted to any bad habit, gluttony, pride, wrath, any of it.
That's just going to be with you. Okay, and there's no way to free yourself from that, ultimately, because you require God's grace.
You'll never actually free yourself from that. But having received God's grace, you can cooperate with God's grace.
And this is why the man who sins is a slave to sin. This is what Christ means in the gospel when he says, the man who sins is a slave to sin.
And sin is a very, very heavy yoke that will break you down to the ground. And the alternative to that is to accept God's grace and to cooperate with God's grace and to put our Lord's yoke upon you, which is a yoke.
It's a yoke meaning don't do that weird sex thing that Andrew Tate likes. Don't hit people.
Don't give in to wrath. Don't give in to pride.
Don't eat the fifth cupcake even. Don't do vice and sin.
Because there will be a real yoke upon you, but the yoke is easy and the burden is light. It's a much better yoke than the alternative.
That's where true freedom is anyway. And that's why the liberals don but the fight from truth is far from over.
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Finally, finally, I've arrived at my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you in the mailbag. Our mailbag is sponsored by Pure Talk.
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Take it away. Hi, Michael.
Huge fan of the show. My question is about surrogacy.
So let's say paid surrogacy was against the law, as I think it should be. But a sister or friend wanted to be a surrogate just to help out, I don't know, a sister or friend.
And it's a heterosexual couple. You know, the sperm in the egg is from that couple, just for whatever reason, the woman can't carry it herself.
What are your objections to that scenario? I do object to that scenario because the primary issue with IVF and surrogacy is not the exploitation of women whose eggs you buy and whose wombs you rent. That's part of it.
But the more basic issue is the commodification of children. That's the big issue with surrogacy.
And that is inseparable from surrogacy because to engage in surrogacy, you got to go to a doctor. The guy's got to commit a grave, gravely immoral disordered act almost all the time.
The woman has this procedure that is highly invasive to harvest her eggs. Then some, then they pay this unethical scientist and the scientist in a Petri dish mixes up some babies.
And then usually most of the babies are just killed or indefinitely frozen,

and then one or two of the babies are implanted in this other woman. This creates other problems for the baby because there was a study, I forget what year it came out, somewhat recent, that children who were born via surrogacy have greater emotional problems, antisocial behavior, your aggression, emotional disturbances by the age of seven than kids who were born the old-fashioned way.
And this might be because a baby is ripped away from the only mother he's ever known in his very first moments of life in the world breathing air. So who knows why it is, but that's also been demonstrated.
But even that is a little bit beside the point. IVF and surrogacy turns human beings from proper subjects with rights and moral obligations into commodities to be bought and sold on the open market

and to be cooked up in a laboratory by unethical scientists.

So that's the problem.

It doesn't matter if you take the renting of the womb out of it.

If instead you're just borrowing a womb from your friend, that essential problem is still there. Next question.
Hey, Michael. I was recently listening to the John Crist episode that you were on, and I thought you guys brought up a lot of really interesting points.
One in particular that you've brought up multiple times on your own show, which is about lying and whether or not it's ever okay to lie. You brought up several scenarios, one specifically involving Nazi Germany, and your solutions to the problem seems to me like they might actually still be breaking the commandment because the commandment itself does not say you shall not lie.
The commandment says you shall not bear false witness. And to me, that includes deception.
And so some of those scenarios that you came up with were deceiving either because they were leaving information out or because they were manipulating language or you know things like that and so I agree that you shouldn't just give the people up but I also think and I also agree that lying is wrong but I also think that some of the scenarios that you came up with were in fact breaking that commandment and so I'm curious what your understanding of what the commandment, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, actually means. Thank you.
Good question. What you're doing, which is interesting, is you're expanding out my understanding.
Meaning, I was answering the question of whether or not it's ever okay to lie. You said, well, is it, you're expanding that out to say, well, is it ever okay to even slightly mislead or even slightly, you know, deflect or prevaricate or whatever? But what's funny is when you read the commandment, the commandment is actually more restricted in the words than what we were talking about.
Because to bear false witnesses is actually a legal procedure in a court. And I'm saying you can think about it beyond a courtroom, but the commandment actually is speaking of a courtroom, isn't it? To bear false witness, under oath in a trial or some sort of civil dispute.
So no, I'm not too worried about that. In terms of the answer to the Nazis, for those who didn't listen to the John Crist episode, I was on his podcast.
Go check it out on YouTube. And we were asking, you know, the Nazis come to the door, you're hiding Jews in your basement or something.
They say, are you hiding any Jews? And you could think on your feet. Here's an easier example.
Have you seen any Jews recently? You say, no, I haven't. Because maybe you haven't seen them since yesterday.
You're kind of, it's a little mental reservation, but you're not quite giving him everything. You could even go further, maybe say, are you hiding any Jews? I could say, well, no, I'm not.
I'm not, they're hiding themselves in my basement. I'm not hiding them.
I don't, you know, you could, you could deflect or you could speak in a way that is not exactly telling a lie, but is certainly not giving him what he wants. And the argument for that is, and this is, you don't need to just take it from me or you asking the question.
You can also hear

it from St. Thomas Aquinas or many other doctors of the church.
The issue is no one, you do not

have an obligation to give people information that they do not have any right to have. You

understand? So the Nazi who comes to the door has no right to that information. So if you deflect, and this of course has been debated for centuries, and there is a variety of opinion on the subject, but the examples I gave I think are pretty safe.
I think you're allowed to use language in a crafty way. I don't think that violates the commandment.
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Next question. Puff King Knowles, I have a question for you about something you have referred to earlier as virtuous pagans.
Because on one hand yoga may supposedly summon demons but on the other and while i would never reference anyone real like our friend arun having a pagan conception of deity and afterlife seems better for such a person than being an atheist even with the supposedly demon summoningsummoning yoga. So, with pagan religions, when does the demon-summoning end and the virtue begin? And when and how does the godly virtue outweigh the supposed demons while practicing a form of paganism? Thank you so much for your thoughts and clarification, Puff King Knowles.
Really good question. I'll leave Arun out of this for now.
Though maybe I'll get to Hinduism. Arun is a Hindu.
But maybe I'll get to that in a moment because there are three kinds of paganism. There is paganism that's kind of monotheistic, meaning the paganism of Aristotle and Plato, for instance, Socrates, who clearly understand that there is one God, even though they lived in the time before Christ and they weren't Jews.
So they didn't have this monotheistic conception as a matter of revelation. It comes to them through natural philosophy, but they were, they would certainly count as virtuous pagans.
Then there is fabulous paganism, which is the kind of paganism where you start burning things to the god of the rain so that your crop will be harvested. Now you're getting into a little bit more trouble because it's superstitious, and superstition certainly opens you up to worshiping demons, and sometimes it becomes outright idol worship and sacrificing babies to Baal and things like that.
That's bad. There's a third kind of paganism, which is civic paganism.
It's a kind of civic religion. I mean, every polity has it.
I was just in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C.
on the National Mall has an obelisk in memory of George Washington and a Greco-Roman tomb in honor of Abraham Lincoln that makes Lincoln look like Zeus. Okay, there is obviously a civic religion aspect of this.
These are temples to democracy, as the liberals sometimes call them, call the buildings in Washington, D.C. So that's a kind of civic paganism, which is really just about the health of the polity.
And those are all different sorts of things. So what I would encourage you to do is be Christian, which is the fullness of truth.
But pagans can intuit aspects of true religion because the existence of God can be known with certainty from human reason in the created world. But it'll take you a lot of the way there, but it won't take you all the way there because

God also reveals himself to us. So once your reason takes you to God's existence, then you

got to keep going. And sometimes people can be sidetracked by superstition and demon worship,

which is bad. Okay.
Today's Fake Headline Friday. The rest of the show continues now.
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