Knight and Rose Show #69: Lora Ries: Border Security and Immigration Policy

Welcome to episode 69 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss the border security and immigration policy with Lora Ries from the Heritage Foundation. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Lora Ries to discuss border security and immigration policy. They explore Biden’s policy changes, like ending Remain in Mexico, resuming catch and release, and creating mass parole programs. Ries critiques refugee expansions, NGO incentives, and “welcome the stranger” misuses. She discusses unaccompanied minors. Ries recommends merit-based reforms, assimilation, and enhanced vetting, drawing lessons from Europe’s crime and balkanization issues.

Outline and transcript

Here is a transcript of the show provided by TurboScribe AI. TurboScribe AI allows you to translate the transcript into many, many different languages. You can also export the transcript into many different formats, with optional timestamps.

Episode 69:

Speaker biographies

Lora Rees is the Director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, with nearly 30 years of experience in immigration and homeland security. She has worked in various roles, including at the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. She also worked in the private sector as a homeland security industry strategist and in government relations. Ries earned a law degree at Valparaiso University Law School in Indiana, and a BA in International Economics and Cultural Affairs; and Spanish from Valparaiso University.

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Where are all the good women? New poll finds men vastly more pro-life than women

I’ve been blogging about the emerging ideological split between young women and young men. Young women, under the influence of feminism, have taken a hard left turn. They are now extremely likely to support abortion, gay rights, and other non-Christian views. Young men, now being influenced by the red pill and the manosphere, have becoming increasingly conservative.

First, let’s review what the surveys say about the political views of young men and women.

The far-left UK Independent explains:

An analysis of survey data from across the developing world had found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging. The analysis, conducted by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal. Young men, however, have either become more conservative (as in the US) or been much slower to become more progressive (as in the UK). Gen Z, Burn-Murdoch concluded, is “two generations, not one.”

Who is influencing these young men? Well, it’s not Christian feminists, who talk about “servant leadership” and twist the Bible to attack masculinity and eliminate male headship. Christian feminists think that men are supposed to be silent ATMs that dispense cash without judgement, and show off their muscles. “Protect and provide” they demand. But they never want men to fight against lies or make moral judgments – that’s “mean”.

Who are young men listening to that’s causing them to become so conservative? Men are listening to leaders in the manosphere – the online community of people who are concerned about men’s rights. And what are they hearing there? They are hearing that feminism is terrible for men. They are learning that that women on dating apps are chasing the top 20% of most attractive men. They are learning that women initiate most (69%) divorces, and that family courts are extremely unfair to men. They are learning that the more men that a woman has sex with before marriage, the greater the risk that she will initiate divorce. And they are learning that lesbians have the highest rates of marital instability AND domestic violence. Men are learning to be more careful with women.

And do you know what else young men are learning in the manosphere? Pro-life convictions.

Here are the numbers from National Right to Life:

Lydia Saad handles much of Gallup’s coverage of the abortion issue and does so in a comprehensive way. This morning, she authored “Gender Gaps on Abortion Reach Historic Highs” which is well worth reading.

You would expect self-identified Democrats to support abortion—and the current survey bares that out. Likewise, you would anticipate Republicans to be more supportive of unborn children—also borne out by Gallup’s latest poll.

Currently, as of May 2025,

* 32% of women and 54% of men identify as pro-life. 61% of women and 41% of men consider themselves pro-choice. The difference—the gap—was 13-points in 2022 “and no more than 10-point differences in any reading before Dobbs,” according to Saad. “The gap has expanded since 2022 because pro-choice identity has dipped among men, from 48% to 41%, while it has held steady among women.”

In 2022, in the aftermath of the leak of the draft showing that Dobbs would overturn Roe, the “pro-choice” was ahead of the pro-life by 16 points, but by this year the margin had been halved–down to 8 points.

Basically, young men are learning that abortion empowers young women to choose recreational sex with the hot bad boys that they find so desirable. Abortion provides feminists (and the hot bad boys) with a way to get out of the consequences of recreational sex. It enables feminists to delay “boring” marriage to the “unattractive” good man for as long as possible, and that’s what feminists want.

The manosphere’s reach extends all over the world. So, other countries are seeing this male pro-life trend.

Here is an article about young men in the UK, from the far-left UK Independent:

Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, far less than the general population, a shocking new poll has found.

Just 46 per cent of 16- to 34-year-old males believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 71 per cent among the general population.

And it’s not just abortion that the manosphere teaches young men to oppose. It’s no-fault divorce. Feminists, including Christian feminists, LOVE no-fault divorce. It allows reckless feminists to choose a husband based on appearance, and then pretend to be surprised when the hot bad boy they chose turns out to be… a hot bad boy. Rather than having to take responsibility for their reckless choice, they can get out of it easily – and with cash and prizes. Young men understand that like abortion, no-fault divorce is a tool that feminists use in order to avoid “boring” marriage to an “unattractive” good man. Young men oppose frivolous divorce. They even have a funny phrase for it in the manosphere.

By the way, if you think that the manosphere is “Andrew Tate” or “Myron Gaines”, that’s just uninformed. Those are pick-up artists, which is only one segment of the manosphere. It’s not those pick-up artists that are causing this massive swing back to conservatism. Pick-up artists are the bogeymen that the traditional “Get Married!” people try to scare you with, to get you to not care about the effects of feminism, e.g. – abortion and no-fault divorce.

Ironically, some women actually do very well in the manosphere. Three of the more popular women influencers are Emily King, Courtney Ryan and Jedediah Bila. I don’t always agree with those people, but they certainly are more respectful of young men’s conservative beliefs than Christian feminists.

So, now that men are being influenced by manosphere voices, instead of feminist voices, where will these good men find good women to marry? I don’t think that church is producing anti-feminist women these days. Churches are still stuck in feminism, blaming good man bystanders for every poor choice that reckless women make with hot bad boys.

The hidden message of these impressive pro-life numbers among men is that traditional men will not be pursuing non-traditional women. Young men are becoming more conservative, and young women are becoming more leftist. Just because young women expect to claim a husband “when they are ready”, that doesn’t mean that the marriage-minded man they expect to comply will be there. Nothing against women in general. Just saying that non-traditional women will not be able to get traditional men to commit.

Brian Miller’s thermodynamics argument for design in the origin of life

I’m doing prep work for a possible episode of the Knight and Rose Show. This time, I’ve been looking into Dr. Brian Miller’s argument about thermodynamics and the origin of life. So, the first thing I did was read his chapter in “The Mystery of Life’s Origin”, which is available online for free. Then I listened to a recent episode that he did with Dr. James Tour, on The Science & Faith Podcast.

First, here is the podcast:

I actually made a transcript of the episode using TurboScribe AI, so I could read along while I listened. You can also grab just the audio from that transcript page, too.

Just keep in mind that the video is BETTER than just the audio, because Brian shows SLIDES in the video, with quotes and diagrams.

Here are the main points in their discussion:

  1. Brian’s personal testimony, going from atheism to Christianity
  2. Brian’s thermodynamic argument against a naturalistic origin of life
  3. The minimum requirements of a simple living system
  4. Can natural selection be invoked to explain the origin of life naturalistically?
  5. The role of experimenter interference in origin of life experiments
  6. Evidence for engineering in biological systems
  7. The requirement for a minimum level of information just to maintain the basic functions of the cell
  8. The problem of the origin of biological information present in the first living system
  9. Implications for theories about life emerging on other planets
  10. Additional evidence for biological big bangs in the fossil record

If you’re looking for something to read, and send to your friends who also like to read, you can send them Brian’s chapter – chapter #14 – from the new second edition of “The Mystery of Life’s Origin“.

Here is what it is about:

The thermodynamic barriers to the origin of life have become decidedly more well defined since this book’s first publication. The initial challenges described in the original edition still stand. Namely, spontaneous natural processes always tend toward states of greater entropy, lower energy, or both. The change of entropy and energy are often combined into the change of free energy, and all spontaneous processes move toward lower free energy. However, the generation of a minimally functional cell on the ancient Earth required a local system of molecules to transition into a state of both lower entropy and higher energy. Therefore, it must move toward dramatically higher free energy. The chance of a system accomplishing this feat near equilibrium is astronomically small.

Many origin-of-life researchers have responded to this challenge by arguing that a system driven far from equilibrium could self-organize into a functional cell through processes that are connected to such monikers as complex systems, emergence, synergetics, or nonequilibrium dissipative systems. The basic hope is that some new physical principles could overcome the barriers to life’s origin mandated by classical thermodynamics. However, advances in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have proven that the odds of a system driven far from equilibrium generating an autonomous cell are no greater than the odds for one near equilibrium.

Others have proposed that “natural engines” on the early Earth converted one form of energy into another that could drive a local system to sufficiently high free energy. These approaches have proven equally disappointing. The only plausible explanation for the origin of life is intelligent agency.

He seems to be saying that a living system exhibits low entropy, and high free energy. And that there is no known naturalistic mechanism that can produce a result like that, without an intelligent agent to guide it. I wonder if I will have to add this to my list of arguments against naturalism.

Then it would grow to:

  1. origin of the universe
  2. cosmic fine-tuning
  3. origin of life (specified complexity)
  4. Cambrian explosion (and other explosions)
  5. galactic, stellar and planetary habitability
  6. molecular machines
  7. non-material mind, e.g. – split brain surgery
  8. the waiting time problem
  9. origin of life (thermodynamics)

I wish we had one more to make it 10 arguments. We need the scholars to make MORE progress in science, so I can have an even 10 arguments in my list.