The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles calls trans people “demonic,” using a 19th century drawing of Baphomet as evidence

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From the March 14, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show

MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): This is demonic stuff. Really demonic stuff. And I made this point -- I got in trouble with our publicists over at Media Matters because I said that the -- the attacks on man's sexual nature and sexual difference and complementarity are demonic. And they are. And they go back throughout all of history, throughout some of the earliest depictions of demons. Even one of the most prominent depictions of demons comes from an artist Éliphas Lévi, who was an occultist who did a depiction of Baphomet. If you just think, what's a demon look like? You're probably thinking of this picture. And this picture is of a weird goat head with horns, and then one arm looks like a man's arm, and then one arm looks like a woman's arm. And it's got breasts, a female upper body, then a male lower body. And it's a trans depiction. It's a depiction of a man and a woman, kind of, blended together in this grotesque way.

And what's written on the arms - two words, solve coagula, which means to break apart and to put back together. And this is a slogan that crops up frequently in the occult. Break everything down, put it back together in this really grotesque, weird, unnatural sort of way. It is no coincidence that these depictions are what we see in this highly, highly dangerous ideology. It is no coincidence that when you attack this ideology -- I've gone after so many different leftist views, leftist hobby horses, leftist ideologies -- and you get pushback. If you defend the Second Amendment, you get pushback. If you push back on critical race theory, you -- you get some angry people sending you messages. Nothing comes close to when you push back against the transgender agenda. The images that people send you, the threats that people make against you. It's exactly what that woman described. And it is demonic. The whole thing is demonic.

And the libs, kind of, make fun of us when we talk about spiritual realities. But I don't know why. They use spiritual language all the time. Even Joe Biden said it's close to sinful not to chop off a kid's genitals. Says it's close to sinful. You'll hear the libs all the time say, this is a violation of human rights, it's a violation of the human spirit. Come on, I'm going to send you good vibes, man. You know, let's all just, kind of, you know, put out our thoughts into the universe, man, you know. They use all of this weird spiritual language. They just tend toward the occult and away from true religion, traditional spiritual language that defines our civilization.

So, they'll make all kinds of pseudo-religious, pseudo-arguments about transgenderism. I mean, the whole idea of transgenderism is a pseudo-religious argument. It's the idea that your body has nothing to do with your real identity, that your real identity is something immaterial. Call it your soul. I don't know if they would want to use that language, but that's what they're talking about. They'll say, your soul is who you really are. Your body is not who you really are. Your soul can be opposed to your body. And so, when there's an apparent conflict between your soul and your body, you should chop up your body. Which is -- they did that in the ancient world too, except they attributed it to demons in the ancient world.