The Only Republican To Defend Kristi Noem? with Michael Knowles

Hey, everybody. Michael Knowles joins the program. We talk, is it okay to put down an unruly dog?

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You send a message. We play to win. Register now at tpaction.com slash peoples. Michael Knowles from the Daily Wire joins us. Michael, welcome to the program. Michael, you have made news recently for defending Governor Noem in South Dakota for killing Cricket.

Cricket was her dog who was, you know, a little bit uppity and decided to get into the other animals. And Kristi Noem put a bolt in him. Your defense, Michael Knowles. I think I might be the only Republican in America defending Kristi Noem. I'm not doing it merely to be a contrarian. I'm not doing it because I care all that much about Kristi Noem's political career. I'm not even doing it because I think it was a smart political move for Kristi Noem to brag about shooting her dad in the back, her dog in the back of the ad like old yeller.

I don't think it was a good move, but frankly, people are treating this as though she did shoot her dad or as though she did shoot a baby or as though she did shoot a human being. We have way too much of a confused dog, puppy, pet culture in America. We treat dogs like humans and we treat humans worse than dogs.

My only argument here, for which I have been pilloried for weeks, is that there is nothing in principle wrong with putting down a farm animal in a humane way. Could Kristi Noem have given the dog up for adoption? I guess she could have. Could she have tried to train the dog harder?

I guess she could have. But it's a dog, guys. It's a farm dog, okay? And many of the politicians who are attacking Kristi Noem for this are people who gleefully celebrate abortion up until the fourth trimester as though it's some sort of human right. And I just think it is evidence that we have our priorities so backwards as a society.

Well, and Dennis Prager has been warning about this for a couple of decades. Dennis Prager has his famous test where he asked the question, if your dog was drowning or a stranger, a human being was drowning, who would you save? And a majority of Americans say they would save their dog.

And that goes to show that they cannot answer the most fundamental question. What is a human being? What is the distinction between a human being and a dog? Now, there's many layers to this, and I hope people understand. In the Dakotas, dogs are tools on farms, meaning that they're there to help you accomplish your task, your goal. And if they get in the way, you are responsible for that dog.

There really aren't shelters to drop them off at. And the question, though, Michael, I have the morality aside, we'll talk about that. Why did she put this in her book? The reason she put this in her book is because she was making a political calculation that as a woman, as a member of the weaker sex, she's got to prove that she's tough. And women politicians have had to do this for many years. Margaret Thatcher famously did it. She was called the Iron Lady because of that.

They have to overcompensate and prove they're tough as nails. And so Kristi Noem's political instincts, I think, are clearly a little off here if she thought that this tale of shooting poor little cricket in the back of the head because he massacred some chickens was going to win her any extra votes. But that was it. It was a clear political calculation. When she writes in the book that if she had better political instincts, she wouldn't be telling this tale, she's being falsely modest.

She obviously included that as a calculation. It just didn't pay off. And it didn't pay off because a friend of ours is fond of saying facts don't care about your feelings, which is true enough. But the problem with politics is politics almost exclusively cares about your feelings. So we can go through all day all of the moral and bioethical arguments about how dogs do not have rational souls and how the reason that humans need to make sure that we treat animals well is to preserve our own souls. And because to be cruel to animals is to deaden our humanity, as C.S. Lewis says, and because, as you say, Charlie, dogs on farms are tools. And sometimes you've got to put down old yeller and yada, yada, yada.

We can talk about that till we're blue in the face. But it is a fact that people love their dogs. And if you want to be the running mate to President Donald Trump, you probably shouldn't brag about killing one in a book. Well, and the way that she put it in the book, she's like, I hated that dog. And it's just she said that in the book. And again, I like Kristi Noem. She's terrific.

She speaks at our events. I'm just looking at this from a purely political calculus. I want to just say two thoughts on this. Number one, nonpolitical, what I call normies in my life, they're horrified. I was just like walking the street the other day and a couple of come up and they said, Charlie, we need to talk about how that Republican from the Midwest killed her dog.

I was like, OK, let's just, you know, kind of go through the the points here. But what this is a very important issue, though. This is if you are more worried about Kristi Noem putting down an unruly dog and not worried about a million abortions every single year, you've got a serious moral compass problem. And people say you're conflating two different things. But no, that that that is important. The outrage.

Let me just play this out. If Kristi Noem would have said that she got an abortion when she was 16 years old, how would the media have treated her? Michael Knowles should be a hero. Well, she she'd be a hero if she were speaking positively about her. No, of course. If she said she came to regret it.

Yes. Let's just let's just say a person running for office says I got an abortion and it helped me have a nice career. And that's why we need plant planning out parenthood. How would that be? How would the headlines be different than killing cricket? She would be a symbol of liberation, of women's empowerment, of of choice and freedom, as opposed to you put down this dog that had already massacred a bunch of chickens and was threatening people. And, you know, we we have a responsibility as stewards of our environment and of animals to make sure that they don't do that sort of thing. They're painting her as Patrick Bateman, you know, hip to be square about to axe his friend in an apartment as a total psycho. But of course, it's it's on the other side.

The reason they do this is because, as Philip Ryans explained, former spokesman to Hillary Clinton, he went on TV. He said, I like animals more than I like people. I love my two cats and I prefer animals to people. And that's true. You see this even beyond abortion, even beyond poor little cricket out there in South Dakota, the way that they talk about global warming and the environment. We are told that we need to eat less, drive less, reproduce less. We need to have fewer children. We need to kill our elderly through euthanasia. We need to stop people from reproducing in Africa and India and the third world. We have to stop Indians from spreading electricity and industry throughout their country to raise their standard of living to feed their families. We need to have a lot more human suffering in order to what?

Save the polar bears, save the Delta smelt because of a sardine in California. Human beings need to die or not even be born. That is their explicit argument. And when they tell you what they believe, we ought to believe them. And they cannot define the very simple question. What is a human being? You know, they always scream about human rights. But can they tell you what a human being is?

Michael Knowles. Right, right. I have an answer to it.

And I was sort of mocked by the glib libs for saying this. I said the reason that it's okay to kill an unruly farm animal is because these unruly farm animals don't have a rational soul. We have rational souls. We're animals. We got flesh and blood. We have lower appetites and instincts. But we also have reason. So we can think about justice. We can know about morality. We can think about abstract mathematics.

We can have this conversation right now on podcast and on the radio. Animals can't do that. Not even our beloved pooch, not a gorilla, not an elephant, not a Delta smelt.

And we all know this. This is not just some kind of old dusty religious dogma or something. The reason we know this is true is we don't put dogs on trial for biting people. We don't put the Delta smelt on trial because he assaulted the horseshoe crab at the bottom of the ocean.

These animals don't have reason. We do. And in that way, we're the meeting between the physical and the metaphysical. We're the greatest of the creatures and therefore we have a certain responsibility to be stewards of our environment. But that's what a human being is. To put it really in a blunt way, we are made in the image and likeness of God.

The liberals don't want to admit that. And animals are not. Animals are explicitly not made in the image of God. In fact, it says in Genesis 126, 127, let us make man in our image. And we are image bearers and having a rational soul, which is a wonderful Catholic answer, which I agree with completely, Michael, is completely correct. Animals do not have souls.

Sorry, guys, they don't. In fact, we should take dominion over the earth. Now, interestingly, in the Noahic covenant, we must respect animals. And in fact, animals make an appearance in the Ten Commandments. Even your ox gets a Sabbath.

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That's amac.us slash Charlie. I hope everyone understands that in pagan culture, animals were abused. I think this is important in the Noahic covenant.

It set up. This was the law for all people, right? And so this is this is all human beings, according to the Torah, are supposed to live under this.

This covenant that God put with his chosen people via Noah after the flood, prohibition of murder, prohibition of theft before the Ten Commandments, prohibition of grave sexual immorality, such as incest and adultery, and the prohibition of eating the limb of a live animal, which is a paradigm for cruelty. You know, Michael, we have to do a better job, I think, as Christians talking about, yes, there is a human animal distinction, but you should never be cruel or torture an animal. In fact, it is the scriptures that pushed back against pagan practices of animal torture. Yes, and I've always found that the living limbs of animals are just not very tasty anyway.

So even for gustatory reasons, you should probably put it to the side. You make such a great observation here about how the true religion comes in and just shifts everything into perspective. It shifts everything into its order.

Paganism, whether we're talking about the old kind of paganism or the new creeping kind of paganism, it puts everything out of order. GK Chesterton wrote about this. He said, so much of what is wrong about modernity is not explicitly bad.

In a way, modernity is bad because it's too good. It's not the vices, it's the virtues. It's just that today, we have the virtues all separated from each other and they're running wild and they're running mad. So we have one virtue to the exclusion of the others, mercy for poor little cricket or something.

But where's the mercy for the baby in the womb? Where's the recognition that a human being has a role in the order of creation that is above the irrational animals? And we have a responsibility to those animals and we ought to be good to them.

But C.S. Lewis describes this well, the reason not to be cruel to animals is because we are moral beings and that deadens our conscience, it deadens our humanity. It's wrong, not because the animals have any particular rights, but because we're human beings who have obligations toward the moral law.

Now we just shift it all the way out. So on the one hand, we worship animals, you know, we're a culture of tree huggers. But on the other hand, I don't know, we would diminish ourselves, we would make ourselves even lower than the beasts. Well, and it's important when you follow your heart, you do a lot of goofy stuff.

So when people say that, well, I feel like the animals are better than humans. Genesis 8 21, very important that your heart, every inclination of a human heart is evil from childhood. You don't follow your heart.

In fact, that's really bad advice. This is this is not a small issue, though, Michael, because we do kind of have and again, I'm very pro dog for the record. I loved my family dog growing up.

Winston was his name, like Winston Churchill. So I'm very I'm very pro dog. I think dogs enrich our lives. But you must understand the hierarchy of being that the dog is not your child. The dog is not your daughter. The dog is subservient to man. And if the dog is there to enrich our life as human beings, and if and when the dog is not enriching your life, you have a duty and an obligation to either give that dog away or to deal with it humanely, not to ever torture or hit the animal. And if you hit an animal, you're sitting against God.

Let me be very, very clear, because the way that you kill animals in the Old Testament scriptures must be done quickly, must be done humanely. Well, just to put a little bow on poor Governor Noem out there, you make a great point on on how she took care of the little pooch. Maybe she could have given it up for adoption. Maybe she could have tried to train it, whatever, but she put him down in a humane way.

What we do, though, is we never want to get our hands dirty in modern culture. So what do people do? They'll give the dog away to a shelter, to the pound, to this, to that. They'll call PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA, I think, probably kills more animals every single year than anyone else. And by the way, the people who are whining about this are probably all eating their hamburgers and their steaks and their chicken while they do it.

It's a it's a layer of abstraction. So it backfired on Kristi Noem. But the point she was trying to make is a good point, which is that we've got to be responsible. We've got to be stewards and we can't back away from difficult decisions. And I'll do that as governor and I'll do that as president, too. In principle, there's nothing wrong with what she said and what she did. Yeah, I just I want to be very clear. Politically, it is so foolish.

People said, well, she wanted to get it out. No, no. You want to never get that out. That's a story that it's not like Barack Obama, like I smoked weed and I was trying to. No, no, no, no. This is this is worse than like Bill Ayers. This is worse than Michelle Obama, birth certificate, driver's license stuff. This is bad, bad, bad, bad.

You are not reading the room at all. You politically people love their dogs. I love dogs. And remember Romney?

I put my dog on a you know, on the roof of a car and they like just mercilessly. I can say this talking to people inside the Trump camp, I can say confidently, I don't think Kristi Noem will be selected over this. It's too bad she's a great person.

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Go to CharlieKirk.com, click on the preborn banner. Michael, I want to get your take on this bill that passed the House of Representatives very quickly with remarkable speed, essentially censoring speech that is deemed anti-Semitic. Now, I don't like Jew hatred. You don't put up with it.

What's going on here? In principle, we all agree. But the problem with legislation through the House is the nicer sounding the title is, the worse the legislation is, generally. So this is called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.

All of us hate Jew hatred. And it's a real problem and it actually is obviously rising very quickly on the American left. And there are some places in the American right where it rises to. So I understand generally why they would push for a law like this. Especially pertaining to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act with all of the craziness going on on the college campuses right now. The campus intifada with these young, purple-haired, half-lesbian sort of left-wing activists wearing keffias and calling for the abolition of Israel.

I get it in principle. And then I read the bill. This might be the stupidest legislation that has come before the House Republicans in my lifetime.

The bill, in practice, would censor parts of the Bible and would limit American citizens from criticizing a foreign government. It's so crazy. And it's classic Republicans. Republicans just can't resist clutching defeat from the jaws of victory. We are watching the left implode right now. There is this major wedge issue, the Israel-Gaza war, that is tearing the left apart because the left's base fanatically hates the state of Israel. And the left's establishment kind of likes the state of Israel.

And most Americans broadly support the state of Israel. So you've got this issue where the left looks outrageous, looks hateful, looks insane, looks totally out of step with the American people. And one of the chief rules in politics is when your enemy is destroying himself, don't interrupt.

Let him do it. But the Republicans can't help themselves, so they insert themselves into this debate. And they do so in an egregious way where they say, okay, we're going to amend the Civil Rights Act to specifically prohibit anti-Semitism in Title VI. We're not going to define anti-Semitism. We're going to outsource that to an organization that also doesn't define anti-Semitism. I read the definition today and it said anti-Semitism is speech or behavior that attacks Jews or non-Jews that might be considered harmful, that might be this, that might be that.

It's totally bogus. Then they give a list of examples of anti-Semitism. And you get some solid ones in there like calling to kill the Jews. I think that would be a pretty clear example. Everyone would condemn that, at least on the American right in the mainstream.

But then you see things like, if you were to quote 1 Thessalonians, if you were to quote portions of the Gospel that discuss the passion and the crucifixion of Jesus, that would be deemed anti-Semitic. What would happen? Would your Bible study on campus be shut down?

Would the school lose funding? I want to make sure that, no, sorry to interrupt. To repeat that, this was put forward by Mike Johnson and many people saying that, you know, again, I have no tolerance for Jew hatred. It's violent, it's terrible, it's awful. However, a lot of violent, terrible, awful things are allowed to be said under the First Amendment. That period. End of story.

So the question then is, I want you to dive into this. Let's say that there is a Christian group that is doing a Bible study reading John 8. Could they then get in trouble with the federal government for reading the Holy Scriptures?

I'm not being sarcastic. By the letter of this law, which has passed the House, which I hope, now that there's a little attention on it, every even semi-reasonable Republican senator will shoot this down out of hand. I mean, for goodness sakes, Jerry Nadler, a liberal Democrat, Jewish, also came out and he said, this law is obviously unconstitutional and it's going to go nowhere. By the letter of this law, if a campus Bible study is reading the Gospel of St. John or 1 Thessalonians or the Book of Acts, they could be guilty of violating Title VI. They could lose their funding.

Who knows, the school could lose their funding. Even when we look over to, you know, my group, the mackerel-snapping Catholics, there are two of the most important masses of the year that deal with the Passion and the Crucifixion. That would be on Palm Sunday, where we read the Passion narrative of our Lord, and on Good Friday, obviously, which is the Crucifixion. You've come up Vatican I.

But, I'm telling you, you know, I'm talking about even in modernity. This is important though, because Vatican II removed some of the segments during the Passion that would be deemed anti-Semitic under this law. I don't think they're anti-Semitic, but that's an important point. So, yes, after the Second Vatican Council, there were these liturgical changes that, and this even started a little bit before the Second Vatican Council, where they changed some of the language about the Good Friday service or some of the language during Holy Week. But actually, it's even worse than you're describing, because even today, even under the newer liturgy, which is considered more liberal, even today, those liturgies could be banned from campus under the letter of this law, which is, I don't know.

I mean, you want to talk about painting with a broad brush. That seems like something that nobody would support. I was reading a great Twitter thread by a Jewish writer yesterday who said, you know, this is supposed to be the anti-anti-Semitism act. This is going to increase anti-Semitism.

You think this is going to help the Jews to ban the Bible or parts of the Bible on college campus, to ban certain liturgies? It's just completely insane. And then the cherry on top of this awful legislative Sunday was one of the final provisions or one of the final examples of anti-Semitism, which is comparing the Israeli government to the Nazis. Now, I think the Nazi comparisons are so overblown. I think they're usually stupid and they show that people don't have any other historical reference other than the Second World War.

But it is simply a fact. All of our political discourse today, especially on the left, is about calling the opponents Nazis. Every attack on Trump, he's the mango Mussolini. He's orange Hitler. They're all the Nazis. We're about to face the Night of the Long Knives.

That's all we ever hear. And so what it comes down to is, according to this law, if you if you criticize the government of the state of Israel, a foreign government, you would be in violation under Title six. Have we ever seen anything like this in the United States? It's just so misguided. Why do you then think that out of nowhere, that while the left is destroying itself, a Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, threw this out of the House floor? I know so many Jews that are upset with this. In fact, we have this amazing Jewish friend from Chicago who just messaged me saying we didn't ask for this. We don't want this. This is insane.

I mean, I don't even know. I was just texting with, you know, Mark Levin and others. And Ben Shapiro has publicly come out against this. And yet the Republicans in Congress, were they afraid of voting no against a bill that was anti-Semitism?

Help me break this down, Michael, because I'll repeat it for those that are just tuning in. Jew hatred, no place in decent society. However, you're allowed to say things that are indecent. So especially we're talking about penalties now where you can go after students on campuses. I'm trying to understand and grapple why with all the pressing problems in our country, Republicans especially feel the need to go obliterate the First Amendment. I think it's a typical moral panic.

And I'm all for taking morality very seriously and I like urgent action, but we can't allow our passions to run away with our reason. Yes, there is an increase in Jew hatred on college campuses. It is a left wing problem. The campuses are run by the left. The students who go there are left wing. The faculty who work there are left wing. It's funded by left wing donors. It's an intra-left fight.

Now when my opponents are fighting, I usually like to let them do it, especially when they look so ridiculous. It's not as though this were BLM and they're torching the country for eight months. This is just a bunch of leftists making themselves look absolutely terrible. But they are saying some really rotten things and they are shutting down classrooms and that's very disordered. And so the Republicans I think are rushing in and they say at a political level they realize that Jew hatred doesn't play in Peoria actually. Most people find that repellent and most Americans support the state of Israel. And that's especially true among conservative Christian Republicans. They don't like this and they want to pick a side and they want to identify the Democrats with Hamas.

That's true. But you know what Americans like more, even than the state of Israel which they broadly support? They like the First Amendment. They like our tradition of free speech with its traditional limits and standards and norms and taboos. And you know what else Americans like? They like the Bible and they don't want to be punished for reading the Bible.

And Americans like their ability to participate in public debate. It was just such an overreach. And that combined with the ignorance and the cowardice and the laziness of members who saw the headline, Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. They don't want to be identified as anti-Semites.

That's one of the worst things you could possibly be called. And so they vote for it. But not all that glitters is gold, guys, and I just think it was a completely unforced political error from Speaker Johnson and the House Republicans. I hope they just scrapped the whole thing, but at the very least the Senate needs to shoot it down pronto.

Well, they do that a lot, it seems. You know, it's funny, I have the Constitution here. In just the last couple of weeks, Mike Johnson has said the Fourth Amendment and the First Amendment don't matter. He's on pace. He's really doing a great job. Really, really good.

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SalemNow.com. So, Michael knows I could read from 1 Thessalonians 2, 14 through 16, for you brothers and sisters became imitators of God's churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus. You suffered from your own people the same thing those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets that drove us out. They displeased God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles, so that they may be saved. In this way, they also heap their sins to the limit.

The wrath of God has come upon them at last. So this is just the context. This is the Apostle Paul writing to the early church in Thessalonica, which is in Greece.

You understand all these things in context. That is not an anti-Semitic chapter or verse. This is Paul, who was born a Jew and became obviously a Christian. And so why are there not more Christian groups outraged about this, Michael Knowles? I think it's mostly that people didn't know about it. These kinds of laws, they just kind of sneak through and you read the headline, and you don't even examine the consequences, because think about how this law was crafted. The fact that any Republican would even vote for a law that was crafted in this way is shocking. The law is supposed to add these new prohibitions on anti-Semitism, but the law doesn't define anti-Semitism. Don't you think if you're going to prohibit something by law, you should define the thing that you're prohibiting?

But they don't. They give it to this outside group to come up with whatever definition it wants, which I suppose means that if the group changes the definition at some point, then the prohibition changes, meaning this outside group now has some power to alter in perpetuity American law. And so then I went to the outside group and I read the definition, and it was no definition at all. It was just a bunch of gobbledygook that was totally circular that said that the word means whatever we want it to mean. And so then you have to go even further down the page to read these examples.

In the first example or two, you say, okay, well, that makes sense. But then you have to get down to the 10th and 11th example, and you say, hold on, you're banning 1 Thessalonians. You're banning the Gospel of St. John.

You're banning the traditional understanding of the faith that's persisted for 2,000 years. To your point, Charlie, obviously these verses have to be understood within context, and it's theologically important to remember that it is the Roman state that executes Jesus. And I think what's theologically important is because our Lord was not just, you know, murdered by a robber on the street or something.

This was not an accident. He was a sacrifice by the civil authority, which in this case we're talking about the Roman Empire, has the right to rule, practically speaking, the whole world. This is the fullness of time in which our Lord is born under the reign of Caesar Augustus, the prince of peace, the prince of terrestrial peace.

He's the prince of true peace and eternal peace. Theologically this matters because our Lord redeems not only salvation history, he redeems secular history, the whole world, you know, every knee shall bow. And so that's a very important context.

And also, as we see in the Gospel of St. John in the Passion narrative, in 1 Thessalonians and in the Book of Acts and elsewhere, also it is the Jewish high priests who hand our Lord over to the Romans and who demand that he be executed. So I'm all for context. I'm all for reading Scripture. And I think the more we delve into the faith, the more beautiful it even appears to us. So now we've got, ostensibly, Christians in the Congress who are saying, no, we have to censor parts of the Bible, censor parts of the liturgy and the mass. What? You know, I just love hearing Catholics say we need to dive into the Scriptures.

I think that's great. It's very rare. You know, we don't crack the spine. We read it liturgically, but I have to admit, I played a Bible trivia game, you know, name the verse, name the character, with a Protestant friend of mine. And you Protestants, you know, you crack the spine a bit, quite a fair bit. I say in all humility. It's tough for us.

Just a couple times a day. That's okay. That's all right. So we don't really have a lot of time to get into this, but Michael, how should we think about abortion? Okay, you know it's going to be a brutal issue this election year and everyone's talking about, are we going to remain really, really pro-life?

Are we going to squish and embrace baby killing or something? They're only thinking about it on one axis. You can have another axis, and that is, do you talk about it a lot?

Do you talk about it a little? This is not a top issue. Inflation, immigration, the wars. These are issues that are very, very important to people.

Biden is deeply underwater on all of them. He wants to make the election about abortion, putting Republicans in a tough position. We need to maintain our principles and defend life because it's the moral thing to do. In the long run, I think it's the politically right thing to do. And we need to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, to quote scripture, and recognize that in prudence, we can not talk about the issue all the time.

We can articulate our views and then focus the fight on Biden, where he's weak, where people are really focused, all the way to November. Matthew 10-16, I think it's still legal to use that Bible verse. Michael Knowles, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for listening. Everybody email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.