New Indictments In Mueller’s Final Report

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The following is an adapted monologue from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1765-after-big-wins-trump-s-head-on-mount-rushmore?elementPosition=3&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=The+Michael+Knowles+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
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There were horrific storms and massive floods in Texas this past weekend. So far, over 100 people are confirmed dead, and that number is almost certainly going to rise. Many people are still confirmed missing, including dozens of girls from a Christian summer camp. Just absolutely horrific. We all pray for everyone, for the family, for the dead, and for the rescue efforts.
One thing we should not do, however, is react in the way that prominent people on the Left have been reacting. Their reactions are repulsive and nauseating. But they get to a real problem at the heart of liberalism.
Here’s just one example. <a href="https://x.com/KyleKulinski/status/1941856657069252610">Kyle Kulinsky</a>, a fairly well known Internet person on the Left, writes:
<blockquote>With the flooding in Texas and all of those precious little girls dying it&#8217;s important to remember this was 100% preventable. Elon and Trump slashed the national weather service and massively reduced the number of weather balloons in the country, destroying our ability to accurately forecast severe weather events. I&#8217;ve personally experienced forecasts being way off multiple times already. They have blood on their hands and they should be arrested for the deaths of those little girls.</blockquote>
Listen to the sanctimony, the self-righteousness from this guy: “&#8230;all of those precious little girls dying,” “They have blood on their hands.”
None of this is true. This was not “100% preventable.” Elon and Trump slashing the National Weather Service? As Michael Shellenberger <a href="https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1941616444724346983?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet">points out</a>, the National Weather Service got this right. The issue was not the National Weather Service. There do seem to have been errors in sending out alarms at the state level, but there&#8217;s no evidence that the National Weather Service failed at all. There&#8217;s also no evidence that suddenly, just now, in the first year of the second Trump term, the meteorologists are getting forecasts wrong. Obviously, that has happened so frequently that it&#8217;s a punch line for as long as there have been meteorologists.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
We also know this isn&#8217;t true — that it’s not attributable to any supposed “cuts” made during the second Trump term — because of Hurricane Harvey. The confirmed death toll so far in this awful storm is now 100. Hurricane Harvey killed at least 68 people in 2017 — many years before the supposed cuts to the National Weather Service by Trump and Elon. What would the Left and Kyle Kulinsky blame that on?
Let’s go back further. Tropical Storm Allison <a href="https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weather/severe/this-day-in-weather-history-june-5-2001-tropical-storm-allison">killed</a> 41 people in 2001, long before anyone really considered President Trump a serious presidential candidate.
Well, let&#8217;s go back even further than that, because the other thing that people are going to blame this on is climate change or global warming. How about the Galveston Hurricane? The storm surges and floods from that storm killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in 1900, long before any global warming — “climate change” — and long before Trump, and long before any of the things the Left is going to blame this natural disaster on.
Plenty of people on the Left have reacted the same way as Kyle Kulinsky.
This reaction entails a lot of vice. You have to have a lot of personal vice and sin to have this kind of reaction. But ultimately, ideologically, it&#8217;s about a denial of original sin.
The tragedy has to be preventable because the world can&#8217;t be fallen, because there can&#8217;t be any such thing as original sin, because there can&#8217;t be any limits on human potential. We must be able to control everything. We must be able to prevent every bad thing. We must be able to perfect society. It must be true. That is the premise of liberalism.
But it&#8217;s not true because it is a fallen world. And you couldn&#8217;t have prevented any of these things. Not in 1900, not in 2001, not just this past week. Bad things just happen sometimes. And bad things happen to good people. It’s called theodicy. Great thinkers have dealt with this problem for millennia, but modern people — modern liberals in particular — cannot deal with that because there cannot be such a thing as original sin.
‘Bad things can&#8217;t just happen,’ they say. ‘We must be able to stop it. We are human beings. We have the potential to totally control the world. We can make ourselves into gods.’
That&#8217;s the theory, and it’s false.
When you ask liberals what would you have done to prevent the flood? They will say things like, “I would have funded the National Weather Service.”
There&#8217;s no problem with the National Weather Service. 
They might say, “I would have had more carbon tax credits. I would have had more electric vehicles.”
But nothing they’ve proposed will stop natural disasters. They wouldn’t have stopped Hurricane Harvey, they wouldn’t have stopped Tropical Storm Allison or the Galveston Hurricane or any of the others. There has been flooding. There have been natural disasters. There has been evil and sin and death in the world since Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden.
Yes, there are things we can obviously do to protect ourselves, to try to cope, and to comfort people who deal with the suffering that life entails. But this ain&#8217;t it.
What it comes down to is a fundamental error in modern ideology — in liberalism, most notably: the hubris, the pride to say, “We can prevent evil. We can just totally stop it. We can perfect the world. We can save the world.” That&#8217;s the error.
These people certainly can&#8217;t. None of us can. There is one person who can save the world. And He has.

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Texas Floods And Liberal Hubris

This is going to be my most controversial take of many months, but it&#8217;s urgent now, because there is a bipartisan group of senators with the backing of President Trump who want to end daylight saving time.
I don&#8217;t like this. I am a big supporter of daylight saving time and I&#8217;m not just saying that to be contrarian. I really like daylight saving time, and I think it is a mistake to end it.
When all the senators get together across both parties and they all agree on something, you know that thing is going to be terrible. In this case, what they want to do is lock the clock. Why? Because every person who&#8217;s never given a second thought to daylight saving time and has just scrolled through Twitter will say, “Actually, daylight saving time is really bad, because people die every year. Did you know that it actually increases deaths every year?”
To that I say, “Oh, really? How&#8217;s that?”
“Because I saw a tweet about it one time. It increases deaths because people have to wake up a little earlier. Plus, they have heart attacks,” they will say.
Well, there is a negligible uptick in deaths but that is a statistically dubious observation. What that argument ignores, however, are all of the benefits we get from daylight saving time. I guess the question you have to ask yourself, which really gets down to a difference between the Left and the Right, is “Why do we have daylight saving time in the first place?” Before we go and tear down Chesterton&#8217;s Fence, how about we ask, ”Why is that fence up in the first place?”
Most people will say, “Well, because of farming. It used to be when a lot of people were farmers, having that extra daylight was really helpful. But, you know, now most people don&#8217;t really farm, so it&#8217;s not a big deal.”
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mks-ep-1714-member-exclusive?elementPosition=4&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=The+Michael+Knowles+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
Okay then, what are the other benefits of daylight saving time? Daylight saving time extends daylight in the warmer months when you want to be outside playing around. You don&#8217;t need that extra daylight in the winter months when you really don&#8217;t want to be outside much anyway.
According to the Department of Energy, daylight saving time <a href="https://energyharbor.com/en/energy-resources/energy-savings-tips/daylight-saving-time-save-energy#:~:text=To%20be%20clear%2C%20the%20U.S.,to%20turn%20on%20the%20lights." target="_blank" rel="noopener">reduces energy usage</a> and energy costs, not by a ton, but by 0.5%. That’s pretty good when you consider all the energy of the United States. There is also evidence that daylight saving time actually reduces deaths, because it reduces car crashes. That&#8217;s from <a href="https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.85.1.92" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a study</a> back in 1995. It also saves property and might save people&#8217;s lives because daylight saving time reduces street crime, pretty significantly. Robberies, for instance, dropped 27% during the sunset hours during daylight saving time. That&#8217;s according to a more <a href="https://jenniferdoleac.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Doleac_Sanders_DST.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent study</a> from 2015.
Daylight saving time increases economic activity because you can go out, and you&#8217;re more inclined to go shopping. You&#8217;re more inclined to work a little bit. It increases economic activity both domestically and internationally, because other countries use daylight saving time too.
But here’s my most basic argument for daylight saving time: it&#8217;s a tradition. It&#8217;s a kind of fun tradition. It&#8217;s a tradition that recognizes, in a particularly pronounced way, the changing of the seasons, the movement of time, the variety of life. It&#8217;s kind of fun, and kooky. People will say, “Well, we shouldn&#8217;t have to change our clocks twice a year, what a hassle. It&#8217;s not efficient.” Life is about more than efficiency, my friends. Our modern, clinical, robotic culture just wants to maximize efficiency in everything.
I am a conservative. I don&#8217;t want to maximize efficiency in everything. I like to enjoy fun, quirky little things. I enjoy our culture, and that&#8217;s a fun little cultural habit. It actually does produce economic and health benefits as well, and it kind of makes sense. And we&#8217;ve forgotten why we had daylight saving time in the first place. And like so many levelers and radicals, when we forget why a tradition exists, we just want to get rid of it. We don&#8217;t ask ourselves, “Why did that tradition arise in the first place? Why, if we maintain that tradition, have we ever tried to get rid of the tradition? How has it worked out?”
It seems like there&#8217;s a mass psychosis that&#8217;s going on that convinces everyone that we&#8217;ve been wrong for so many decades now.
I&#8217;m pro daylight saving time and you should be too. Call your congressman.

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Should We End Daylight Saving Time?

This is the second part of an edited <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/michael-knowles-live-at-yaf-ordo-amoris-the-hierarchy-of-political-love" target="_blank" rel="noopener">speech</a>, titled “‘Ordo Amoris’: The Hierarchy of Political Love,” delivered by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Knowles</a> at the YAF Freedom Conference in San Diego, California.
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Saint Thomas’ reasoning is, as always, clear and persuasive in his discussions of the order of charity. In the “Summa Theologiae,” Secunda Secundae, Question 26, he writes, “There must needs be some order in things loved out of charity, which order is in reference to the first principle of that love, which is God.” This expression alone proves editor of The Yale Review James Surowiecki had no idea what he was talking about when he <a href="https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1885302779058557080" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claimed</a> that the ordo amoris is not in the Gospels.
Not only is the ordo amoris in the Gospels, but it is also the principle articulated in the most famous line of the Gospels, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022%3A37-39&amp;version=ESV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matthew 22:37-39</a>: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
There is, in other words, an order of charity — a hierarchy of love — and this order is the very foundation of Christian morality. We must love God first, and only then and upon that basis do we love everything else. And this order does not just comprise two categories. It isn’t just “God” and “everyone else.”
We find further scriptural evidence of the order of charity in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy%205%3A8&amp;version=RSV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1 Timothy 5:8</a>: “If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” A man does not necessarily disown the faith — he is not necessarily worse than an unbeliever — if he does not care for some random guy on the other side of the world. We have greater obligations to those who are closest to us.
This moral insight is attested to both by philosophy and religion — reason and revelation — and yet many liberals deny it. And we know they deny, not just because of their snarky tweets about JD Vance, but also from social science. Shortly after the ordo amoris debate kicked off, a graph went viral on social media.
<div id="attachment_886629" style="width: 678px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-886629" class="wp-image-886629 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/41467_2019_12227_Fig5_HTML.jpg" alt="Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence. SOURCE: “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle.” Adam Waytz, Ravi Iyer, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham. National Center for Biotechnology Information. National Library of Medicine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31558713/" width="668" height="281" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/41467_2019_12227_Fig5_HTML.jpg 668w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/41467_2019_12227_Fig5_HTML-300x126.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 668px) 100vw, 668px" />SOURCE: “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle.” Adam Waytz, Ravi Iyer, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham. National Center for Biotechnology Information. National Library of Medicine.</div>
It’s from a 2019 <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31558713/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> titled, “Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle.” The graph depicts heat maps “indicating highest moral allocation by ideology.” The “moral circle rings” extend from the center outward. Care for “your immediate family” is in the center, followed by “all of your extended family,” then “all of your closest friends,” then “all of your friends (including distant ones),” then your acquaintances, people you’ve ever met, your countrymen, people on your continent, all people, all mammals, all other animals, all living creatures (including amoebae), all potential life in the universe (including aliens), all living things (including plants and trees), all non-living things (including rocks), and finally all things in existence.
The study found that conservatives, being normal, tend to care more about the things closest to them; they tend to care more about their immediate families than they care about rocks. Liberals, being the sort of people who hug trees and hate their dads, tend not to care more about things closer to them. The study found that “the more liberal people were, the more they allocated equally to humans and non-humans.” A distinguishing feature of Right-wingers is that they are more likely “to morally prioritize humans over nonhumans.”
Some libs have attempted to argue that conservatives simply misunderstand the study. They argue the study shows that conservatives don’t care more about their families than liberals do; it’s just that liberals care more generally. Now, even if that were true — and it’s a perfectly plausible hypothesis given liberals’ frequent inability to control their emotions — it would still be extremely disordered to care more about strangers than about one’s own parents. Even if they cared more overall — which, it turns out, they don’t.
Liberals really do care more about rocks and trees than they do about their own families. We don’t need a chart or study to show us that. Just ask a liberal about climate change and abortion. Liberals will rend their garments over environmental threats to the coral reef, but they’ll dance in the streets to celebrate the murder of their own children through abortion.
And, it turns out, the study shows as much. Because the study “constrained the number of units that participants could assign to each group, forcing participants to distribute moral concern in a zero-sum fashion” (i.e., the more concern they allocate to one circle, the less they can allocate to another circle). And the researchers did this because research suggests that’s how people really do distribute “empathy and moral concern.” Of course: It’s a finite world. We only have so many hours to worry. We only have so many tears to shed.
But just to prove how deep this moral perversion runs on the political Left, the researchers conducted another study to test what would happen if they did not constrain people to zero-sum moral thinking. And what they discovered was that “even when participants’ allocations were not constrained, the same pattern replicated.” Conservatives, the researchers showed, exhibit “greater concern and preference for family relative to friends, the nation relative to the world … and humans relative to non-humans.”
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
So what conclusion are we to draw from this? Is it just a matter of preference? “Conservatives love their family and friends; liberals love trees and rocks” — de gustibus non disputandum est! No accounting for taste! I don’t think so. Any reasonable person knows that one should care more for his children than for rocks and trees. If liberals do not, it is because they have made a moral error.
And the liberals didn’t even necessarily fall into this moral error because they’re wicked. More likely, I think, they fall into it because they’re trying (and failing) to be good. I suspect most of the time it actually comes from a place of love. But that love is misplaced. It’s out of order. And disordered love tends to evil, just as the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
G.K. Chesterton explains the phenomenon with regard to his friend, the socialist atheist George Bernard Shaw.
“Bernard Shaw,” Chesterton <a href="https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/439/orthodoxy2-3.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">writes</a>, “has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical society of our time. The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.”
“When a religious scheme is shattered,” he concludes, “it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.”
Our nation’s — our whole civilization’s — religious scheme has obviously been shattered. The vice president invoked Thomas Aquinas, and our political elites were left drooling and scratching their heads.
The scheme has been shattered, the virtues have wandered, and these wandering virtues — these errant loves — have caused our present political ills. The only remedy is to restore order — not just to our streets and our communities but to our loves — if for no other reason than that without order, without caring for ourselves and our own, we can’t properly care for anyone else either.

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Restoring The Order Of Love: The Remedy To Political Ills

This is the first part of an edited <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/michael-knowles-live-at-yaf-ordo-amoris-the-hierarchy-of-political-love">speech</a>, titled “‘Ordo Amoris’: The Hierarchy of Political Love,” delivered by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show">Michael Knowles</a> at the YAF Freedom Conference in San Diego, California.
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It’s always nice to be in San Diego. I feel even better about it now that we have a functioning southern border again. We’re less than 20 miles from Tijuana. But since January 20, our odds of running into face-tattooed foreign gangsters in the Gaslamp Quarter has dropped precipitously. 
The ones who are still here are most likely in hiding right now. They know that at any moment, Tom Homan might leap out from behind a corner with a big butterfly net and drag them all back to Mexico. This is a happy turn of events. But some on the Left seem not to realize it. Some of the Left argue — and even some on the squishy Right argue — that rounding up and deporting even the very worst illegal aliens in our country is somehow anti-American.
Now, whatever you think about mass deportations, it’s silly to argue that it’s anti-American. Deporting people is a tried-and-true American tradition, whether we’re talking about Indian Removal in 1830; the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920, which deported foreign communists; deportation of Japanese nationals after Pearl Harbor; Operation Wetback in 1954, which deported well over a million people in a single year; the deportation of Haitians and Cubans who had arrived during the Mariel boatlift in 1980; or any other number of deportations. 
One can argue over the necessity or prudence of those various deportations, most of which, ironically, were carried out by prominent Democrat presidents. But no one can argue that deportations aren’t American. As a simple matter of history, mass deportations are as American as apple pie.
The “anti-American” charge vanquished, opponents of immigration enforcement will next argue that deportations are somehow “un-Christian.” This claim is contradicted by the plain text of scripture. Deportations or worse — usually worse — are frequently carried out with approval in the Bible. Just ask the Canaanites. (Or the Amorites. Or the Hittites. Or the Perizzites, the Hivites, or the Jebusites.)
Now, in fairness, scripture also instructs us not to oppress or mistreat foreigners who live in our lands. “Thou shalt not molest a stranger, nor afflict him: for yourselves also were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2022%3A21&amp;version=DRA">22:21</a>). Quite right. But what exactly does it mean not to “molest” or “afflict” the stranger? We are not left idly to wonder. Scripture tells us.
Just 10 chapters prior in the Book of Exodus, we read, “There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you” (Exodus <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2012%3A%2049&amp;version=ESV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">12:49</a>). Further, in Deuteronomy, we read, “Cursed be he who perverts the justice due to the sojourner” (Deuteronomy <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027%3A19&amp;version=RSV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">27:19</a>). To hear the open borders crowd tell it, it’s the enforcement of the law which oppresses the foreigner. But scripture says the opposite. 
Scripture tells us that it’s lawlessness which oppresses the foreigner. The injunction not to oppress the foreigner does not run contrary to justice; rather, it is bound up in the execution of justice. God demands that the civil authority give the foreigner his due; He doesn’t demand that it give him more than his due. He tells us that there must be one law common to native and foreigner alike; he does not insist that foreigners be given a more lenient law, that foreigners be given special privileges over and above those afforded to citizens. Civil authorities must give appropriate care to foreigners, but they have to care for their own citizens too.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
So how do we determine the right balance between hospitality to foreigners and the enforcement of justice owed to citizens and foreigners alike?
Our Vice President JD Vance took a stab at that question on TV, and his answer sparked a national debate. Vice President Vance <a href="https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2025/02/full-time-vice-president-part-time-public-theologian/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>, “There’s this old school — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” 
It’s a simple enough concept. Let’s say you’re walking by a public pool, and you see a random little kid drowning. Any decent person would immediately jump in to save the kid. (That actually happened to my father a few years ago at his apartment complex. He saw the kid, he jumped in, and he pulled him out of the water.) Everyone applauds. You’re a hero.
Now imagine you’re walking past the same pool — it’s a very large pool — and you see two kids drowning, each at a different end. One of the toddlers is that same random kid and the other is your own son. You, being a decent person, want to save both. But you help your own son first. In fact, if you did not — if you were to ignore the cries of your son and go to help the other boy first — everyone would not applaud when you climbed out of the pool. You would not be a hero. You would have made a moral error. Because you, as a father, have a greater responsibility to your own son than you do to someone else’s son.
This is common sense. But is it Christian? Immediately after Vance made those remarks, a former U.K. government minister and current Yale professor, Rory Stewart, said no. He <a href="https://x.com/RoryStewartUK/status/1884952501197078922" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>, “A bizarre take on John <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2015%3A12-13&amp;version=ESV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">15:12-13</a>”— which is “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” “Less Christian,” Stewart wrote, “and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.” 
This comment was ironic, of course, because Rory Stewart is also a politician presuming to speak for Our Lord, albeit with far less knowledge and seriousness than JD Vance. Vance shot back. He <a href="https://x.com/JDVance/status/1885073046400012538?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>, “Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” which means “order of love,” a concept developed most notably by Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Just a quick pause for a moment. Can we just take a moment to appreciate how beautiful it is that we have a vice president lecturing leftists on moral philosophy in Latin? I knew the second Trump administration was going to be good. I had high hopes. But even I did not have “vice president explicating scholastic philosophy in Latin” hopes. I remember in 2016 when many on the Right yelled at me for supporting Trump on the grounds that he wasn’t a “true conservative.” Now his vice president is invoking Saint Thomas Aquinas in Latin on X. How much more conservative do you want him to get?
But I digress. At this point in the conversation, after Vance had dunked on the U.K. politician-turned-Yale professor, another Yale figure — James Surowiecki, editor of The Yale Review — decided to chime in <a href="https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1885302779058557080" target="_blank" rel="noopener">to claim</a> that “ordo amoris is not in the Gospels.” He claimed, “It’s an essentially Aristotelian concept that Aquinas, cleverly if unconvincingly, imported into Catholic theology.” 
Now, up until this point, I was aware that very few people presently associated with Yale had even a passing familiarity with the Bible. But with that comment it became clear that these Yale luminaries don’t even know their Aristotle! What is going on in New Haven? This is embarrassing.
The ordo amoris — or the ordo caritatis, as Saint Thomas would call it — is not “essentially Aristotelian,” and Saint Thomas — among the clearest thinkers who ever lived — did not import that or any other concept “unconvincingly” into Catholic theology. Aristotle touches on the concept broadly in Book IV of “Nicomachean Ethics,” where he writes that “the liberal man” — liberal in this case meaning “generous” — “like other virtuous men, will give for the sake of the noble, and rightly; for he will give to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time, with all the other qualifications that accompany right giving.”
Early Christian writers, notably Saints Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux, also discuss this order of charity, all before Saint Thomas, who brings the concept to its fullest expression in the “Summa Theologiae,” Secunda Secundae, Question 26, where he <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3026.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">writes</a>, “There must needs be some order in things loved out of charity, which order is in reference to the first principle of that love, which is God.”
So, we are obligated as a matter of reason to love God before ourselves, then to love ourselves before our neighbors, then to love our neighbors more than our own bodies, then to love those neighbors nearer to us more than those further away from us, then to love those connected to us by ties of blood more than others, and so on. 

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The Hierarchy Of Love: Balancing Hospitality And Justice

Adapted from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1650-mel-gibson-preaches-to-joe-rogan">“The Michael Knowles Show,”</a> January 13, 2024.
Today’s song is by my friend, Tom Macdonald, and features Nova Rockafeller. It has gotten 8.4 million views.
Though the song was released in 2024, its lyrics are certainly timely now. In the second line of the song, he sings, “The streets are full of fire and smoke.” It is as though he is referring to the California wildfires, which just began last week.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="&quot;Goodbye Joe&quot; - Tom MacDonald ft. Nova Rockafeller" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nQOqExemZvk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Tom engages an older tradition of popular music and poetry. The older tradition to which he harkens back is one of works written by poets and musicians that are going to stand as a testament for all time, eternal musings on profound truths. Much of the history of popular music and certainly of poetry involves punditry. In this tradition, music and poetry responded to particular political affairs of the time. Even Dante, my favorite poet, does this. In some ways, Dante is a commentator, a pundit. In the “Divine Comedy,” he writes about contemporary Florentine political figures, continental European political figures, and even the pope. So Tom is partaking in a long-standing tradition — to air his political grievances in real time.
He ends the song with the line, “Burn someone else’s flag” — a recurring notion in this song. The image that he creates at the beginning is our country being on fire. He is pointing out there is a relationship between the symbol and the symbolized. He is connecting the people who regularly burn the American flag — their policies, their neglect, their hatred of our home — has led to the literal burning of our country.
He continues returning to the line, “We love our home.” This is probably my favorite line in the whole song: “We love our home. And if you don’t / Pack your bags, you’re free to go.” This is not the ideological patriotism of the liberals, or even the libertarians — despite the Gadsden flag and “don’t tread on me” references. The song says we love our home.
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Now, why do I love America? I love America, not because of the Declaration of Independence, nor because of some law that was passed at some point. I love America because it is my country, because it is my home.
I started <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mayflower-cigars-celebrates-monumental-year-of-success" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mayflower Cigars</a> because the brand relates to my family, to a true feeling of home going back to the year 1620, to a deeper form of patriotism than can be written in some manifesto. I do not agree with everything the pilgrims believed. In fact, there is much that the pilgrims believed with which I do not agree. And though they were really smart fellows, I do not agree with everything the Founding Fathers believed. But I love them because they are my forebearers, my ancestors; they helped build my country — and I love my home.
Notably, my home is different from your home. But it is good to love one’s home simply because it is one’s home. It is good to have care for one’s home simply because it is one’s home. The late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote about the love of home, the same love of home that Tom is referring to here. It is deeper than any Gadsden flag or political slogan on the Left or Right.
These passing ideologues who want to burn our country down come and go, but we are still here. So, “goodbye Joe.” We are going to remain here, and we are going to defend our homes.

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Tom MacDonald’s Song ‘Goodbye Joe’ Reminds Us Why We Love Our Home

Adapted from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1645-daughters-sacrificed-for-multiculturalism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“The Michael Knowles Show,”</a> January 6, 2024.
Today’s Music Monday song is “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4HsZ4fbmAE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Smile</a>,” by Morgan Wallen — of chair-throwing fame and fellow Nashvillian. 
His new song has nearly 3.5 million views on YouTube.
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I quite like this. Art is supposed to make you see. That is what the purpose of art is. Joseph Conrad wrote that the scientist has one job, the thinker has another, some deal in facts, some deal in ideas; but the primary role of an artist is to make you see something.
Morgan Wallen does this right at the beginning. He is calling your attention to something — something we can all recognize but, at the same time, are probably not all that conscious of — which is that, sometimes, our loved ones react differently when they are in a group than when it is just us. We fall into our ruts and our routines. But when they are in a group, they do not behave the same way. Instead, they behave and react a little differently, and we recognize the old person, the way they once behaved with us. Many people have probably had this experience before, and Wallen calls your attention to that in this song. That is artistic.
I like the image he describes in the chorus: It was good to see you smile. You haven’t really smiled like that with me in a while, but it was good to see you smile. Is it because we are just having fun in this bar? Is it because this is what we used to do, and we don’t really do it anymore? Or, is it simply artifice? Is it because we are about to take a picture so your muscle memory just went right back to that old smile? Is it just a habit? What is it? What that real? Is there really hope that we might recover something that has been lost that is desirable? Or are you just going through the motions? Is that just an artifact of your former self — and really there is no hope?
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His conclusion makes a good point about behavior, about how human beings really work. It implicitly addresses the question of if an action should not be performance-motivated, driven by pure and authentic desire. Or, can you “fake it til you make it”? If you just smile enough, will you eventually become happy? Wallen’s conclusion is: It doesn’t really make much of a difference to me. It was nice to see you smile anyway.
Then, Wallen sings the last couplet: “If someone were to see this they’d think everything’s alright / At least we got a pretty little moment frozen in time.” Everyone knows couples like this, couples who post pictures on Instagram looking so in love. They are all smiles in their really happy, cute photo. But because you know the behind-the-scenes, you know their life is a complete disaster and they are always at each other’s throats.
He reminds us that appearances can be beguiling. Images are beguiling. When an artist calls your attention to that, they are often calling your attention to something about their own art. Here, Morgan Wallen is dealing with moving pictures, with images he is creating in your mind that happiness, joy, and a flourishing life are not about a moment frozen in time. Anyone can fake a moment or experience an accidental smile. He is emphasizing that what matters is the course of one’s life.
A human life moves through time so flourishing occurs through time. We live in this snapshot culture that denies time. We live in the Insta-culture, the “smile for the camera” culture. But the more we focus on that artifice and the ephemeral, fleeting little smile, the more likely we are to come back to our dressing room and our lady is gone, as he does. This song sends the message that you have to reorient how you think about life.
* * *
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Morgan Wallen’s New Song Helps Us Reorient How We Think About Life

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