Ep. 353 - Are We Getting Stupider？
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Summary
IQ scores are plummeting in the United States and throughout the West. Meanwhile, at certain wealthy high schools, upwards of one in three students says a learning disability means he needs to take extra time on the SAT. Is everyone getting stupider?
Transcript
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get the truth about debt. IQ scores are plummeting in the U.S. and throughout the West.
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Meanwhile, at certain wealthy high schools, upwards of one in three students says a learning
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disability means he needs to take extra time on the SAT. Congressional Democrats try to make
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former pediatric neurosurgeon and current HUD secretary Ben Carson look like an idiot.
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CNN's Alison Camerota accidentally makes Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris look like
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an idiot. And hippies can now legally compost their dead in the state of Washington. We will ask the
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question on everyone's mind, is everyone getting stupider? I'm Michael Knowles and this is The
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Michael Knowles Show. The answer is yes, by the way. Everyone is getting stupider. That's it. That's
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our show. Good night. See you tomorrow. We have a crisis of intelligence happening, not just in the
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United States, but around the West. We will examine why that is happening and how we can try to fix it
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People are getting stupider in the U.S. and around the other developed nations. How do we know this?
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Well, one, because we have eyes, so we open them and we can see it happening around us. We can measure
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it to a certain degree as well. So for much of the 20th century, IQ, intelligence quotient,
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scores were increasing. They were increasing throughout most of the world. And this bewildered
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a lot of researchers because IQ, you would expect, would be static. IQ is just supposed to be inherited.
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It's not, IQ doesn't measure the facts that you've learned throughout your life. IQ measures how smart you
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are. So we were told that by the age of 10, people's IQ is set, it's static, you inherit it from your
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parents. It actually turns out that environmental factors can play a role in your IQ. So over time,
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the IQ of whole populations can increase. It's more than just hereditary. This rise is called the Flynn
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effect. This was named after James Flynn, who was the first guy to bring this phenomenon to the
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intention of a lot of psychologists. So this was going on for much of the 20th century. Everybody was getting
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smarter. Now, fast forward to the 21st century, you're seeing the exact reverse phenomenon. People are getting
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stupider. IQ scores are decreasing. And you don't need to take my word for it. Flynn himself admits this.
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James Flynn admits the IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered. So in, it's, by the way, it's not just
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reversing everywhere uniformly. It's reversing specifically in the most economically advanced
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nations, the United States being at the top of that heap. So why is IQ declining? There have been
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a few theories proposed, some of them more eugenicist and racist than others. One theory that is being
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proposed is that people are getting stupider on average because stupid people are having more kids.
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So this is, this was the plot actually to the 2006 Mike Judge comedy film, Idiocracy. The idea is that
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smart people delay having children. They have fewer children and stupid people all have a bunch of kids
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by the time they're 18. That's one theory. Another theory, and this one's even more eugenicist, is that
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because of massive immigration over the last 30 years, you've got a bunch of people from the
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undeveloped world coming into developed countries and therefore the average IQ is being reduced. So
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the theory here is that you flood your country with stupid people and on average, your nation gets
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stupider. Again, a little bit on the more racially provocative side. Turns out neither of those
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theories are true. So a 2018 study came out of Norway that shot them down. It showed that IQ is not just
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dropping across all of society uniformly. It's, or on average, it's dropping specifically within
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individual families. So within, over the course of generations within the same family, IQ is dropping.
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That takes out the possibility that it's just stupid people having more kids and it takes out the
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possibility that you can blame immigrants from poor countries for the average intelligence going down.
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So why is it really happening? One theory, the theory that seems to me pretty likely is the
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internet. So now, because we have the sum total of human knowledge allegedly in our pockets, we don't
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need to memorize anything. We don't need to really study anything. I remember, I was taught this in
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school. I was taught, you don't really need to learn these facts and these historical dates and these
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people who did certain things. You don't need to memorize that because you can just look it up when you
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need it. You don't really need to figure out how to do advanced calculus or, or even basic arithmetic
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because we have computers. You can just look it up. You don't need to memorize those things. And so the
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end goal of this would be to say, just learn broad narratives. Just learn the kind of ideological
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narratives that we tell you. And the thing is, you can't learn broad trends really, unless you have the
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data that go into those trends. Otherwise you're just taking somebody's word for it. So for instance,
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if I said, in the United States, race relations have improved over the last 150 years, 200 years,
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you might say, oh, I don't believe you, Michael. I'd say, no, I can, I can prove it because in 1860,
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we had slavery. In 1865, we had the abolition of slavery. Then we had Jim Crow, but then we got rid
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of Jim Crow. And then we had, uh, segregation laws and we kept, uh, black people out of certain
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neighborhoods. Then we got rid of those laws. Then we elected a black president in 2008. See,
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I've got all these data points and I can see the trend. The races are coming together in the United
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States. They'd say, okay. Now plenty of students could be told as they are in public schools all
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around the country, that race relations haven't really improved. It's all a lie. Things are just
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as bad today as they were a hundred years ago. And if you don't have all of those facts, you might have
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the broad trend, but you wouldn't know if that's true. You'd be ignorant and you wouldn't even know
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to look it up. You wouldn't even know to Google it because you, you don't know what you don't know.
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Uh, Donald Rumsfeld, when he was secretary of defense 10 years ago, he said, there are known
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knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. So there are things that you know, that you know,
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that you know, then there are things that you know, that you don't know. For instance,
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I don't know much about the reign of Charlemagne. I know that Charlemagne existed. I know he was an
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historical figure. I just don't actually know the specifics. And then there are certain things
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that you don't know that you don't know. Increasingly, that category is expanding.
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And so I think that's a big part in why we're all getting stupider. There are other theories as well.
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A bunch of left-wingers are blaming it on global warming. They're saying that because of global
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warming, somehow food is getting less nutritious and it's killing our brains. And you know, the smog
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and the sun monster. And of course, there's no evidence for any of this. Really, we, we don't know
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for certain. We have a couple hunches and, but the effect does seem to be real. I really like this
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story for a couple of reasons. One, because it does cut against the premise of progressivism.
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What conservatives like to point out is that history doesn't go in a straight line. Sometimes
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things get better. Sometimes things get worse. Sometimes things get better in one place, but worse
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in another place. History is kind of like a big zigzag and the individual actions of men and
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communities and nations really matter. And what the progressives want to say is old time bad,
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modern time good. Old people, stupid, modern people, smart. That's what they like to tell us. So
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this is why we scoff at our own history. We, why we want to rename the Thomas Jefferson dinners
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because we say, Oh, that he's a bad old guy. He owns slaves. He's bad. We were good because we're
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modern. We live in the, in the modern age, which is much better. So this obviously cuts against that
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premise. We are not smarter than our forebears. At least our forebears 20 years ago, they had a higher
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average intelligence than we do. The other reason I like this story is I don't put a whole lot of stock
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in IQ. I do put stock into certain standardized tests like the SAT. The SAT is a standardized test
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that tests something really specific, which is whether students are ready for college.
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You get a score and that score reflects a student's readiness to go to college.
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The graduate school tests, test that the LSAT tests your readiness for law school.
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The GRE or readiness for graduate school. The IQ test isn't like that. The IQ test purports to test
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the generalized, total, complete intelligence of somebody, which I don't really think you can do.
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And I, I've, I know people with very high IQs. I know people with very low IQs and I don't see a
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huge correlation between success. Some of the most successful people I know have significantly lower
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IQs according to tests than, than people who have higher test scores and haven't done as well in
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life. Now we are still getting stupider. And this is true, not just on these generalized tests. It's
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true even on the specific tests like the SAT, speaking of which now at wealthy schools, huge numbers of
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students are pretending to be learning disabled in order to get extra time on the SAT. We talked about
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the SAT just the other day because the SAT is now adding an adversity score. So they're
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unstandardizing the standardized test. They're now pretending not just to measure a student's verbal
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skills or math skills, but also to measure the suffering that student has undergone. So the SAT
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is in trouble to begin with. Now we find out students at wealthy schools are all pretending to have
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learning disabilities to cheat, to get extra time on the test. At Scarsdale High School in New York,
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which is right near where I grew up, one in five students at that school has a learning disability,
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20%, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. I know a lot of kids from Scarsdale High
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School. I had a college roommate from Scarsdale High School. 20% of those kids do not have learning
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disabilities. At Weston High School in Connecticut, that number is one in four have a learning disability.
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At Newton North High School outside of Boston, a very wealthy high school, one in three.
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Does anybody really believe that 33% of students at these wealthy schools have learning disabilities?
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No. It would explain the IQ question. It would explain why these numbers are getting jumbled,
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but no, it's because they're cheating. But the very fact that they're cheating on these tests
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reflects a cultural problem that does help to explain why we're getting stupider. We'll get to it in a
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second and we'll get to stupid politicians. But first, what's one thing that is really stupid
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lender. So do we really think that a third of students at really rich high schools have learning
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disabilities? No. These are obviously fake diagnoses that are caused by a few factors. One,
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caused by a culture that values victimhood over accomplishment. The SAT used to be very simple.
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You go into a room. There's a teacher. They time it. You have to finish the test in the amount of
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time. You were always right up against the wall. It is a tough time limit. And you finish the test
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and you're done. Very simple. Very standardized. Now, you have a culture that doesn't value that
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real accomplishment nearly as much as it values victimhood. Ironically, victimhood has become a
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privilege. If you can pass yourself off as a victim, as some aggrieved group, as someone with a
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learning disability, even if you don't have one, then you get the privilege of extra time on the
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test and you get to cheat and you get an unfair advantage over all of your classmates. So it's a
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bad thing in our society that students would do this, that students would be willing to cheat
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on these exams. But it's even worse that their parents are letting them do it. Their parents are
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encouraging them. Kids are always going to cheat on tests. That's been true forever and it's always
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going to be true. Parents and teachers are supposed to come in and say, no, you can't do that,
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Johnny. You need to take the test. You need to study. You need to be able to take it in the right
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amount of time. You don't have dyslexia, Johnny. You just don't want to study. And the parents aren't
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doing that now. The parents are encouraging their kids to cheat. They're losing their scruples.
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They're losing their moral foundation. And why? Because this is being caused by a culture
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that values college degrees over education itself. Right? We talked yesterday about the
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millennials. The millennials are doing awful on every measure. They're poor. They have a ton of
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debt. They don't get married. They don't have kids. They don't have houses. The one area where
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they're allegedly doing well is education because they all have a lot of fancy college degrees.
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Except they don't know that much. When you actually test their intelligence, when you actually test
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their knowledge, they score worse than other generations. We talk about all the time how
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the left likes the appearance of the thing, but not the essence of the thing. They like the appearance,
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but not the reality. So they want to eat vegan bacon. They want to drink decaf coffee. Very bad idea in
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the long run. Because you can get a fancy degree, but if it doesn't actually reflect what you're learning,
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that's going to hurt you and your society in the long term. According to MarketWatch,
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nine out of 10 new jobs go to college graduates. Now, why is that? In part, it's because so many
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more people are going to college. But does that really reflect a student's education? Does that
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really reflect what a student knows? No. I mean, we've got a lot of studies of this. We know that
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students are learning less than they have in the past. We know that in some cases, students are
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graduating from college knowing less than they knew going into college. So as the educational value
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of a college degree plummets, the social value of a college degree skyrockets. It's a credential
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that allows you into a certain class. And that's being reflected in our whole society. We have become
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a society that cheats on the test. It's not just these kids at a high school in Massachusetts or in
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Scarsdale, New York. We as a society cheat on the test. We just get shuffled along from grade to grade
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from year to year without actually doing the things that all of that shuffling used to signify.
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When you graduated from high school, that used to mean something. Now it means much less.
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And now actually we've gotten so stupid. We can't even recognize the difference between real
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intelligence and bloviating. And this has never been clearer than in congressional testimony
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yesterday. You had congressional Democrats interviewing Ben Carson, the current Secretary
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of Housing and Urban Development, former presidential candidate, and former pediatric neurosurgeon,
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one of the smartest guys in this entire country. Ben Carson was the first guy to separate
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conjoined twins conjoined at the head. This guy is super duper sharp. And you've got these
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congressional Democrats interviewing him. And the videos went all around the internet trying to
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portray the Democrats as really smart and Ben Carson as an idiot. How did they do it? Because
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I'd also like you to get back to me if you don't mind to explain the disparity in REO rates. Do you know
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what an REO is? An Oreo? R. No, not an Oreo. An R-E-O. R-E-O. Real estate? What's the O stand for?
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E-organization? Owned. Real estate owned. That's what happens when a property goes to foreclosure.
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We call it an R-E-O. Oh, good. You got him. You got him. First of all, I love Ben Carson's answer here.
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They're trying to make fun of him for this answer, but he's obviously joking because she sets it up.
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This is the classic example of a gotcha question. We're talking about housing and urban development.
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She goes in and she finds this really specific jargony term and she doesn't ask him a question
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about it. Notice the way she phrases it. She starts to say, I want to ask you about R-E-O's.
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But then she doesn't ask him a question about R-E-O's. She just says, do you know what an R-E-O is?
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Ben Carson. So thanks for coming here. Do you know what the capital of Thailand is? Go, go.
00:19:50.980
Haha, you don't. You're an idiot. Yeah. Yeah. Hello, Secretary Carson. Thank you so much for
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being here. What number am I thinking of? Idiot. You can't even guess it, can you? She's asking him
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to use, to define this jargon for her. The whole thing is set up to make him look ignorant and to
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make him look stupid. And he is having none of it because Ben Carson is much, much more intelligent
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than this woman, Katie Porter, Democrat Congresswoman. So she's there. He says,
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do you know what an R-E-O is? Are you, you're asking me about R-E-O's during congressional
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testimony? You want, no, not R-E-O's. R-E-O's. I don't know. It's some stupid jargon that has to
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do with real estate. Well, yes, it does have to do with real estate. But do you, do you know what the
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O is? She even presses him on that letter. No, why don't you tell me, tell me what the O is.
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It's, it's owned. Haha. See, I've got you. How dumb you are. But who cares? Who cares what the term
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is? What are you asking about? What, what is your question as it relates to housing and urban
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development, as it relates to poor families in public housing, as it relates to the running of that
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government agency. It's just a way for this woman to try to get on TV and to grandstand.
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And it worked. But for the people who are going around trying to say that this is evidence that
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she's really smart and Ben Carson is really stupid, you could do that to anybody about anything.
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Just ask, even if it's in their own field, people are saying Ben Carson should have known
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this acronym because he's the head of HUD. There are a zillion acronyms in the government.
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There are a zillion jargony terms. I am certain that if I were interviewing Katie Porter and I
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looked through enough house bills that have been passed just in this session, I could stump her on
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some, some acronym. It doesn't tell you anything about the actual intelligence of the person. Her
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colleague, Ayanna Pressley, tried to do the exact same thing to Carson. It was even more egregious when
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she did it. Do you believe the substandard public housing conditions pose a risk to tenants' physical,
00:22:01.640
mental and emotional health? You already know the answer to that. Yes or no? You know the answer.
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Yes or no? I know the answer. Do you know the answer? Yes or no? Reclaiming my time. You don't get
00:22:15.240
to do that. No. The time belongs to the gentle lady. Would you let your grandmother live in public
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housing? You know very well. Would you let your grandmother live in public housing? Yes or no?
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You know very well. Under your watch and at your helm, would you allow your grandmother to live in
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public housing under these conditions? It would be very nice if you would stop.
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I love Ben Carson so much because he is having none of it. She asks, look, Ben Carson has made very
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clear that public housing is really awful and really dangerous and he wants to curtail it and stop it from
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spreading. And why is this the case? Because he grew up in horrible conditions and he is so thankful.
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He says that his mother, who had him when she was 13 or something, kept him out of public housing
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because of how dangerous it was. So he says, you know the answer to that question. And she keeps pushing
00:23:09.480
and she's getting angry and Ben Carson remains super calm. And this, again, people make fun of him for
00:23:14.480
this. They say, why is Ben Carson so calm? He's sleepy. The reason is that Ben Carson wasn't always
00:23:20.500
calm. Ben Carson was a real tough guy. He was a maniac. When he was younger, he was getting into
00:23:26.380
fights, hitting people with baseball bats. He stabbed one of his friends when he was 14. This guy grew up
00:23:32.120
in horrific conditions. He writes about it. He says, this was in one of his memoirs. He says,
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there was pretty horrendous violence, gangs, broken glass and boarded up windows and doors,
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murders. I had two cousins who were killed. I remember as a nine-year-old sitting on the ghetto
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stairs, looking to the building across the street out of which all the windows had been broken. And
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there was a sunbeam shining through and it made me think about my future. And I remember thinking,
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I probably won't make it to 25. That's what he grew up in. That guy knows something about public
00:24:05.740
housing. That guy knows something about poverty in America. That guy knows something about his job.
00:24:12.220
And he's highly intelligent. But these silly, frivolous congresswomen are trying to make him
00:24:21.040
look stupid. And people who are getting dumber by the day, overall in our society, can't tell the
00:24:28.400
difference. Ayanna Pressley is nobody. Her jobs before she became a congresswoman,
00:24:35.260
was she was a community organizer. So practically unemployed. And she was a model,
00:24:42.840
like model for photographs for Planned Parenthood. So that's what she did with her life. Ben Carson
00:24:49.440
fought his way out of the ghetto while his cousins were being killed and there were gangs all around
00:24:54.860
him. Fights his way out of the ghetto and goes on to, graduates from Yale. I think he went to Johns
00:25:00.380
Hopkins and then he becomes one of the leading neurosurgeons in the world. That guy, much more
00:25:08.460
intelligent. Also, by the way, even on the point of HUD, he's been a pretty good HUD secretary.
00:25:14.220
HUD probably shouldn't even exist as a department in the federal government. It was a product of the
00:25:19.620
great society. It was one of these LBJ poverty programs that has often hurt people that it intended
00:25:25.120
to help. And he's been pretty good there. First of all, the less he does at that department,
00:25:30.540
the better. And he has deregulated. He has cut various program budgets. He has empowered local
00:25:36.560
housing authorities, in particular, to impose more stringent work requirements on those who are
00:25:42.580
receiving government benefits. He's done a pretty good job there. If these people actually wanted to
00:25:48.300
ask him a question and learn something about what he's doing, do their oversight job in Congress,
00:25:55.040
they could have asked him a serious question about HUD. They didn't do that. They're just trying to
00:25:59.140
make him look stupid. And we are not even able to understand the difference between those things.
00:26:04.720
Now, there's another even better video of a politician accidentally looking stupid that was going
00:26:11.340
around CNN. We'll get to that in a second. Then we'll talk about how a presidential candidate for the
00:26:15.760
Democrats and the governor of Washington is allowing hippies to compost their dead. And I think come to
00:26:23.120
the final answer on why we're getting dimmer and dumber as a society. But first, you've got to go to
00:26:29.980
dailywire.com. Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew
00:26:34.820
Clavin show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Walsh show, you get to ask questions in the
00:26:38.980
mailbag, you get to ask questions backstage, you get another kingdom, and you get this.
00:26:48.040
Oh, that's good. That tastes like Oreos. That tastes, that's got that delicious Oreo taste as
00:26:53.280
the left screams and yells and cries. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.
00:26:57.320
So you've got those videos of Ben Carson and you've got all of these people going around saying,
00:27:17.020
see, he shouldn't be in the government. See, he's stupid. See how much smarter the Democrats are.
00:27:20.900
There's another former presidential candidate who has explained why that is not a measure
00:27:27.320
of intelligence. And it's one of the all-time great presidential candidates,
00:27:31.440
Herman Cain, who put this very well in 2012. Are you ready for the gotcha questions? They're
00:27:36.340
coming from the media and others on foreign policy. Who's the president of Uzbekistan? You know,
00:27:40.660
all of this stuff. It's coming. And how are you dealing with that? I'm ready for the gotcha
00:27:45.800
questions. And they are already starting to come. And when they ask me, who's the president of you,
00:27:51.440
Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, I'm going to say, you know, I don't know. Do you know?
00:27:56.320
And then I'm going to say, how's that going to create one job?
00:28:00.480
I want to focus on the top priorities of this country. That's what leaders do.
00:28:04.820
Absolutely fabulous answer. By the way, Herman Cain, another very serious guy that everybody
00:28:09.360
tried to make fun of. Herman Cain was the CEO of a major pizza company,
00:28:13.180
and he was on the Federal Reserve Board, I think in Kansas City or something like that.
00:28:17.780
This is a very serious man. And he gives a good answer. Anybody can ask a gotcha question.
00:28:22.880
You can ask it of anybody, and you can always get your zing in, and you can always get a viral
00:28:26.820
video clip. That does not measure intelligence. There's another video, though, on the Democrat side
00:28:33.680
over at CNN, which it does, if it doesn't tell you something about this candidate's intelligence,
00:28:39.960
it does tell you something about her absolute failure to be able to run seriously as a presidential
00:28:46.640
candidate. CNN's Alison Camerata gave the opposite of a gotcha question to Kamala Harris.
00:28:53.600
If we're talking about REO and the chairman and president of who's Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, Stan,
00:28:58.840
if that's the gotcha question, this is the polar opposite of that. And yet, Kamala Harris couldn't
00:29:05.960
even answer a simple question about naming one song by her allegedly favorite musical artist.
00:29:14.080
We have a little fun kicker that we like to do with all of the presidential candidates that come
00:29:20.600
on today. It's called Candidate Mixtape. That was the musical sting for it. And we like to talk a lot
00:29:27.680
about music here on this program. So what is your favorite musical genre? Oh, I mean, I'm hip hop
00:29:38.020
and reggae and jazz. Those are some of my favorites. Okay. Do you have a favorite band or a favorite
00:29:46.120
musician? I'd say one of my favorites is Bob Marley. Good choice. You can't go wrong with that.
00:29:52.940
That's a crowd pleaser. On your mixtape, what would be like your favorite three songs?
00:29:59.940
Oh, okay. Let's see. Aretha Franklin, anything Aretha Franklin. I would say Bob Marley. And then,
00:30:12.920
um, I don't know. I love Cardi B. Okay. As she says. Um, those are great. Thank you for playing
00:30:24.480
along. Oh, gosh. First of all, Aretha Franklin is not a song. Bob Marley, also not a song. And
00:30:33.920
Cardi B, not a song. Those are people. They're people that Kamala Harris is obviously unfamiliar
00:30:39.720
with, and she's just saying she likes them to try to appeal to certain demographic groups.
00:30:44.720
This is so not a gotcha question that Kamala Harris launched her campaign. You'll remember this. Her
00:30:50.940
presidential campaign launched on a mood mix where she talked about all the songs she's listening to
00:30:56.640
and how they get her in the mood to run for president. And she named Aretha Franklin. She,
00:31:01.540
she said one of her favorite songs was Young, Gifted, and Black. And one thing throughout this whole
00:31:08.640
video throughout Kamala Harris's whole campaign is she's so clumsy about how she's trying to appeal
00:31:15.260
to identity politics. So she names that song Young, Gifted, and Black. And she said she always loved
00:31:19.740
listening to that song when she was young. And what she's obviously trying to tell you is that she was
00:31:23.640
young, gifted, and black. And so you're supposed to like that. She doesn't talk ever about her actual
00:31:29.380
career, which is as a prosecutor. She doesn't talk about that because that she thinks that will hurt
00:31:34.420
her in the Democrat primary. She talks ad nauseum about anything in her past that can be related
00:31:40.780
to race or sexual politics. So she's always talking about how she's of Jamaican descent. She's always
00:31:47.420
talking about how she loves traditionally ethnic musical genres. So she loves reggae. She loves this.
00:31:54.600
She loves that. But then when you push her just even one question in on what she likes about those
00:32:00.760
genres, she can't name a single song. When she gets that question, what are your favorite genres?
00:32:06.160
You can just see going through her mind, she goes, okay, what, which musical genres are going to most
00:32:10.860
appeal to racial and identity politics? Um, uh, uh, uh, uh, reggae. Okay. That's good. Hip hop. That's good.
00:32:19.300
Jazz. Uh, okay. Those are my answers. And you can see it on her face. You can hear it in her voice,
00:32:23.900
how awkward she feels saying those things. And then you can almost hear her say, please don't ask me
00:32:29.200
anything else. Alison Camerata asks, well, who are your favorite musicians? He goes, um, Bob Marley.
00:32:35.400
Yeah, I've, I've heard that name before. Bob Marley. He goes, okay, great. Name any Bob Marley song ever.
00:32:42.080
And she draws a blank. Say no woman, no cry. Say any, Bob Marley is a very popular musician,
00:32:50.100
but probably Kamala Harris doesn't listen to those musicians a lot. She says she likes hip hop. And then
00:32:57.760
she was asked, she said, well, when did you listen to hip hop? She said, oh, when I was in college,
00:33:01.220
I was always smoking joints and listening to Snoop Dogg and all the time. And then you Google that
00:33:07.300
for five seconds and you realize Snoop Dogg didn't release his debut song until years and years after
00:33:12.520
Kamala Harris graduated from college. It's just a lie. She's just probably, here's what Kamala Harris
00:33:18.060
listens to because she's a serious woman who is a powerhouse in politics and has had a serious career.
00:33:24.540
She probably doesn't listen to that much music. She's probably just a very busy lawyer who doesn't
00:33:29.920
sit around and listen to music. She's probably never smoked pot before. When she does listen to
00:33:35.480
music, she probably listens to Bach or Brahms or something because she's fairly educated and she
00:33:41.640
exists in very elite tiers of society where that's what people listen to. But she doesn't think she can
00:33:46.840
say that on TV. So she has to pretend that she's a member of the choom gang puffing away on blunts,
00:33:52.220
listening to Bob Marley or something. I am genuinely shocked at how bad that woman is
00:33:59.380
at running for president, but it's not the same as Ben Carson's video. Ben Carson was asked a gotcha
00:34:07.440
question. Kamala Harris was asked a total softball question that she had already talked about multiple
00:34:14.040
times. She couldn't do it. She couldn't fill it in. She, she wasn't being portrayed as stupid. She was
00:34:20.660
revealing herself at least as unprepared and bad at running for president. But I think that is not
00:34:27.720
the stupidest gaffe of any 2020 presidential candidate. That honor goes to Jay Inslee, the
00:34:33.540
governor of Washington. He's the presidential candidate whose logo looks like a CD-ROM from the
00:34:38.760
1990s. He gets the award because he just signed into law the nation's first bill that will allow
00:34:44.780
hippies to throw their dead in the backyard and let them rot. He signed the first bill to allow
00:34:51.020
people to compost their dead. It's called the recompose program. Get it? Like repose, but compost,
00:35:00.700
recompose. Recompose. This is in the hill. Recompose would be similar to a crematorium,
00:35:07.380
but it uses a longer and less carbon intensive means of organic reduction, commonly known as
00:35:14.040
composting. So what that means is it's similar to a crematorium in that it's something that happens
00:35:20.680
to dead bodies, but it's less carbon intensive, meaning they don't light the bodies on fire.
00:35:27.460
They just throw them in the backyard and let them rot. They go on. It says, the process uses wood chips,
00:35:33.420
straw, and other materials and takes about four weeks. It is similar to livestock composting,
00:35:38.680
which farmers use to turn animals into odorless soil.
00:35:46.020
Yikes. First of all, credit goes to Jay Inslee. We've talked a lot about how environmentalism is a
00:35:52.380
top issue in the 2020 Democrat primary. The Green New Deal has become the biggest issue. And if this
00:35:58.900
is turning into an environmentalist primary, Jay Inslee is really turning this up to 11.
00:36:04.820
Jay Inslee is throwing dead human bodies into the backyard and letting them compost like dead cows
00:36:11.020
for the environment or something. I mean, it's hard to beat that. So credit on him for turning the
00:36:17.200
wacko up to 11. This story in particular brings us right back to how we are all getting much stupider as
00:36:26.700
a civilization. This gets to one of the basic behaviors of civilized society. We bury our dead.
00:36:37.960
Why do we bury our dead? Before we start letting people throw granny into the backyard and let her
00:36:44.940
rot, why do we bury our dead? I think it's becoming popular in this culture to say we shouldn't bury our
00:36:52.040
dead. We can cremate them or we can throw them into the backyard or throw them out in the water or
00:36:56.500
something. Can you answer why we bury our dead? Because it's not just some social construct. It's
00:37:02.840
not just something we decided to do a few hundred years ago. Burial of the dead goes all the way back
00:37:10.080
to prehistory. The Neanderthals buried their dead. Non-human ancestral relatives buried their dead. This
00:37:18.640
has been around a long time. Why? On a cultural level, it's because we have a relationship with our
00:37:24.400
dead. More broadly, we have a relationship with our past. Leftist politicians want to erase the
00:37:30.280
relationship we have with our past. They want to tear down murals and monuments and statues and
00:37:35.380
rename buildings and rename towns. But we have a relationship to our past, not just our national
00:37:40.520
past, but our family past. We like to have a gravestone where we can go and visit the remains of our dead
00:37:46.860
relatives. We have that relationship. You go and you pray or you go and you remember. It brings you back
00:37:54.940
to a certain memory of your past. On a religious level, we bury our dead because, at least in
00:38:01.780
Christianity and in the Christian West, we expect the resurrection of the body. This is what Christians
00:38:08.380
say in the Nicene Creed. We look forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to
00:38:13.540
come. When Christ was crucified, he was put into a tomb, and then he was bodily resurrected. He
00:38:21.740
resurrected, not just in some spiritual sense, but physically as well. And so we bury our dead because
00:38:27.960
we look forward to not just life in heaven, but the resurrection of the body in the glorified body,
00:38:33.320
whatever that means. That's the religious reason. On an ethical and political level, why do we bury our
00:38:39.640
dead? Because we respect humanity. We respect human beings simply for being human beings.
00:38:46.920
We don't want animals gnawing at granny's body in the backyard. We don't want to feed old granny to
00:38:52.580
the coyotes. We respect human beings, even after death. This is why it's a crime to desecrate bodies,
00:39:01.340
to improperly handle dead bodies. We offer them a certain respect. Now, however, we are losing that
00:39:07.740
respect for humanity. We are literally killing our own children through abortion. We are killing
00:39:13.480
our elderly through assisted suicide, which they call euthanasia. But sometimes we're killing them
00:39:19.300
against their will. There was a big case in the Netherlands where a woman said, please don't kill
00:39:25.120
me. I don't want to drink the poison. And her family held her down and the doctor poured the poison
00:39:29.960
down her throat. We are killing our sick people who are ill, even if they're young,
00:39:37.360
through assisted suicide. We're killing those who have mental deficiencies through abortion.
00:39:42.640
We are losing respect for humanity as they are humans. One of the arguments for this law to
00:39:49.900
compost the dead was, well, we do it to cattle. Why shouldn't we do it to humans? In the old days,
00:39:56.300
we would have said, because humans matter more than cattle. Now, however, we don't say that. We say,
00:40:00.660
yeah, it's a good point. We're just animals. We're no different than a bug or a snail or a dog or a cow.
00:40:08.100
But those are the reasons that we bury our dead. We're obviously getting stupider. We can see it on
00:40:15.740
the tests. We can see it when Kamala Harris goes on CNN. We can see it in these stupid laws that are
00:40:21.900
being passed, like allowing us to have dogs eat granny. But as we get stupider, this is affecting
00:40:31.560
our politics. As we forget our past, it's getting worse. So we're getting stupider. It's that line
00:40:38.140
we keep talking about from Ernest Hemingway. He's describing bankruptcy. He says, how do you go
00:40:43.280
bankrupt gradually, then suddenly? How do you get stupider gradually, then suddenly? As you get stupider,
00:40:49.260
you get stupider. As you forget your past, you really start to forget your past. You discard even
00:40:55.980
more traditions more quickly. You sever that connection to your civilization even more greatly.
00:41:01.560
This is what the Make America Great Again slogan is all about. Make America Great Again. It's about a
00:41:07.160
real sense that we've lost something. It's a process that is speeding up and it does threaten our
00:41:14.520
civilization. I don't think we're all going to start walking around and become total nincompoops who
00:41:20.460
can't spell our own names. But we are socially becoming stupider as well. And before we go, just one
00:41:28.200
story that I guess offers a little bit of hope in this is it sums up this neglect of our past,
00:41:35.860
this forgetting of our past, and this hatred of our past. Steve Mnuchin over at Treasury just announced
00:41:41.140
that Harriet Tubman will not be going on the $20 bill. During the Obama administration,
00:41:47.000
they announced Harriet Tubman was going to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill.
00:41:52.980
And this was widely criticized, even among left-wingers. This was widely criticized because of the
00:42:00.220
popularity of the musical Hamilton. So young liberal people like Hamilton now. So they said, okay, we're not
00:42:06.120
going to replace Alexander Hamilton. We'll replace Andrew Jackson, that awful, terrible founder of the
00:42:11.980
Democrat Party. We're going to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman. And everyone said this was a
00:42:16.200
great idea. And Andrew Jackson, for most of our nation's history, has been considered a very, very
00:42:21.940
good president. And in recent years, he has been portrayed by the revisionist left as this genocidal
00:42:27.780
maniac. And he's been accused of crimes he didn't commit. And he has been smeared as saying things that he
00:42:35.260
never said. But the result of all of this rewriting of history has come out that people on both sides of
00:42:41.020
the aisle hate Andrew Jackson. And it's totally unfair. And I'm very glad that Harriet Tubman isn't
00:42:46.100
replacing him on the $20 bill. I like Harriet Tubman very much. I'm a huge fan of gun-toting Republicans.
00:42:52.360
But if they want to give her some denomination, they can give her a denomination. That's make a $3 bill
00:42:57.460
or something. But you shouldn't erase Andrew Jackson from history, which is what people are trying to do.
00:43:03.100
Andrew Jackson was pretty great. Andrew Jackson was a hero. He was literally a hero. He was the
00:43:08.880
hero of New Orleans in the War of 1812. So he's a military hero, saves the United States. He,
00:43:16.780
as president, threatened to invade South Carolina if South Carolina seceded. The first time South
00:43:23.040
Carolina wanted to secede from the Union was in 1828. He threatened to go in there, kept the Union
00:43:28.040
together. He settled a Most Favored Nation treaty with the British, which is pretty impressive,
00:43:32.640
since he's one of the toughest hombres fighting the British in the War of 1812. And then he comes in
00:43:39.860
and secures that Most Favored Nation treaty. He recognized the Republic of Texas. So he brings
00:43:44.760
the Texas closer to the United States. He did a lot of good things. He had a lot of accomplishments.
00:43:51.020
The question to ask when you want to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill is,
00:43:55.960
why did they put him on the $20 bill to begin with? What the revisionists will tell you is,
00:44:00.460
because America was a terrible, awful place in the past, and everyone was stupid,
00:44:04.480
and they really liked him because of how evil he was. That's not sufficient. You know that isn't true.
00:44:11.540
Andrew Jackson's vices, which are legitimate. I mean, he's an imperfect guy like everybody,
00:44:17.800
and great men tend to have great imperfections. His vices have been vastly exaggerated,
00:44:24.220
and his many, many virtues and accomplishments have been totally ignored by history. People aren't
00:44:29.420
learning it. We're severing our connection to the past, and we're getting dumber. The thing that he
00:44:33.180
gets dinged on all the time, and they say it's the reason we need to erase him from history,
00:44:37.420
is Indian removal, because he presided over the removal of some Indians from the southeast of the
00:44:45.040
United States. This whole period of Indian removal has been totally misrepresented. When you say
00:44:51.140
Andrew Jackson to a left-winger and a revisionist, the first thing they're going to say is the Trail
00:44:57.000
of Tears. Andrew Jackson, he caused the Trail of Tears on which the Indians were removed. He didn't.
00:45:05.120
He wasn't even president during the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears was enforced by his successor,
00:45:10.660
Martin Van Buren. As with everything in history, the true story is much more interesting and much more
00:45:17.980
complicated. The way that Indian removal happened was that the United States purchased tribal land
00:45:24.180
in exchange for land to the west that were outside of state borders. So you had this real political
00:45:31.200
problem, which is you had whole Indian nations inside relatively newly formed states in the
00:45:36.840
relatively newly formed United States. Did anybody really think that the United States was going to
00:45:42.020
develop and permit these relatively large nations, independent nations, to exist within their
00:45:47.760
boundaries? Of course not. That would not be able to happen. The United States could not develop that
00:45:52.840
way. If you were president, you would have removed the Indians too. You would have secured treaties to do
00:45:57.060
it, which is what he did. So the early treaties stipulated the tribes could either move west or surrender
00:46:03.060
their sovereignty and obey the state laws. So there was either or. One of the first tribes to move were the
00:46:10.960
Chickasaw. The Chickasaw moved with relatively little trouble. So they secure this treaty and the way
00:46:17.240
the Chickasaw moved is they got a sum of money and they were able to pay for much of their own
00:46:21.900
removal. So there was tragedy along the way, but relatively little, relatively little famine,
00:46:26.940
relatively little death. They quickly agreed. They agreed to favorable traditions. They did it. That was
00:46:34.120
an act of pretty brilliant diplomacy. Then the Choctaw were a little tougher because the chiefs
00:46:39.180
of that nation were bribed. They also came to a treaty, but at pretty unfavorable terms. They moved
00:46:45.580
during the winter of 1831, 1832. There was a lot more misery on that route. Then you get the Seminoles.
00:46:51.540
The Seminoles agreed to move. They signed a treaty, the Treaty of Paine's Landing, but then they refused
00:46:57.100
to move. Renegged on the treaty, this launched the Second Seminole War. This happened to other tribes
00:47:02.860
as well. In the case of the Cherokees, this is what people think that they remember in history.
00:47:10.180
That case made it to the Supreme Court and it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the line
00:47:16.460
that everybody remembers is after Chief Justice John Marshall made his decision, Andrew Jackson said,
00:47:23.340
John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it. This was seen as a tyrannical move
00:47:29.780
to steal power and upset the balance of powers in our government. The trouble with that line,
00:47:34.000
which everyone knows Andrew Jackson said, is he never said it. There is no evidence that he ever
00:47:38.420
said it. The line comes to us from Horace Greeley, who said that he heard it from another guy who said
00:47:44.340
that he heard it from Andrew Jackson. The way that we know Andrew Jackson almost certainly didn't say
00:47:48.680
that is there was nothing about the Supreme Court decision to enforce. So the sentence itself
00:47:56.460
doesn't make any sense. How did this play out? Eventually the Cherokees signed a treaty,
00:48:00.920
but then some rejected that treaty because they said that the chiefs who signed it were not
00:48:04.740
legitimate leaders of the tribe. And this led to the Trail of Tears in 1938, which I don't mean to
00:48:10.840
underplay it. The Trail of Tears was horrific. The particulars of lots of Indian removal was horrific.
00:48:17.740
However, again, that wasn't Andrew Jackson. Martin Van Buren was the president. Jackson didn't
00:48:25.380
preside over that. If you want to remove Martin Van Buren from the, oh yeah, he's not on any money.
00:48:29.800
Okay, fine, I guess. Van Buren was not a great president. But Andrew Jackson actually was a pretty
00:48:35.220
great figure in American history. And as the culture gets stupider, I think the key thing,
00:48:42.340
one of the key symptoms of it is we think we're getting smarter. We think we have fancy college
00:48:49.660
degrees. We think the millennials are the smartest, best educated generation ever.
00:48:55.380
This is a key among stupid people. Stupid people think they're smart. Smart people know that they're
00:49:01.460
not smart. Socrates famously said, all that I know is that I know nothing. That's a key. And so when
00:49:10.340
you, as this 2020 race goes on, as the political battle heats up, you're going to have a lot of
00:49:15.700
people trying to convince you of how smart they are. And the more they protest about it, I think the
00:49:20.100
clearer it is that those IQ scores are right. Those SAT scores are right. The culture, unfortunately,
00:49:25.380
getting dumber and dumber. That's our show. We got more to get to. We'll do it tomorrow.
00:49:29.160
Come on back. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.
00:49:55.380
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show. The left moves to embrace abortion as a moral good,
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and they let the homeless run wild in major cities around the United States.