Ep. 564 - Thomas Jefferson Gets Canceled
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
180.80646
Summary
A statue of Thomas Jefferson was knocked down in Portland, Oregon, and rioters spray painted it with "Jefferson the slave owner." A statue of Christopher Columbus was taken down in Columbus, Ohio, and renamed in honor of the Columbus Day holiday.
Transcript
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Thomas Jefferson is canceled. He's canceled. It was only a matter of time, but the man who wrote
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the Declaration of Independence, one of the fathers of our country, he's canceled. A statue
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of Thomas Jefferson that was erected outside of Thomas Jefferson High School was toppled in North
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Portland, Oregon. It was then spray painted. One of the bits of spray paint said slave owner. There
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were lots of signs and insulting things written all around it. Rioters knocked down two more statues
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on the very same night. And I'm trying to remember, I'm thinking back to way, way back,
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like maybe two years ago, if somebody could have predicted this.
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George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner?
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So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down, excuse me, are we going to
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take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas
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Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major
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slave owner. Now we're going to take down his statue. So you know what? It's fine. You're changing
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history. You're changing culture. He's right. You're changing history. You're changing culture.
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And no one, including many, many conservatives, is willing to do a damn thing about it. And I have
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a hunch why. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back. Not just Thomas Jefferson who got knocked down. Basically anybody who was involved
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in any way in the creation of this country is getting knocked down. And even some conservatives
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are kind of okay with this. I'm not saying they're calling for the statues to come down,
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but they're kind of okay with this. They're playing into the left-wing premises. I have
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a hunch why. And I think the problem actually runs a lot deeper than anybody's talking about.
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I think most of our modern political problems all tie in to the same central issue. Jefferson
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goes down. Two other statues go down in Portland a couple nights ago. Columbus, Christopher Columbus.
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You know they've been tearing down statues, beheading statues, vandalizing statues of Columbus
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for years now. A Columbus statue is officially coming down. This is according not just to the
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rioters, but to the school administration at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio.
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I don't know if they thought through this all the way. If they're going to give in to the premise
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here that Columbus is a really bad, terrible, racist, bigot, terrible guy, that they're going to take
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the statue down, they're probably going to have to rename the school, right? Well, if they rename the
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school, they're probably going to have to rename the town, right? You can't, you can't live in this
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racist town named after a racist person. If they're going to rename the town, they're probably going
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to have to rename the country, right? Columbia, you know, like Pablo Escobar, Columbia, they're
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named after Christopher Columbus. Why aren't there popular uprisings in Columbia? We have to rename
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the country because of the terrible history of this terrible, terrible man. This, this according to
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the president of Columbus State Community College. The removal of the Christopher Columbus statue is
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a symbolic gesture of our commitment to our college and in our community to continue and
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accelerate the fight against systemic racism. Recent events, including the senseless deaths of
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African-Americans and the resulting anguish across the nation, compelled us to act on a years-long
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internal dialogue about the statue and the message it sends to our community. The message, namely,
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that it's, that the place is named after Christopher Columbus. I mean, it's the, it's pretty simple
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message, right? This inflection point will inform college policy and action both now and for years
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to come. It will, you're right. It will inform college policy and probably town policy and probably
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state policy and probably national policy as well. The most dispiriting part of this for me, but I think
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also the most illuminating is that it's not just these liberals running colleges. It's not just the far
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left rioters running Chaz and Chop and every riot around the country. Even some conservatives are
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buying into this bogus premise. We'll get to that in one second. First, I got to thank our friends
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Really dispiriting here that pretty much everybody is going in on the statue toppling.
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Most conservatives are not saying we actually need to pull down the statues or we actually need to
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rename things. But what some conservatives are doing is granting the left's premise
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promise that these people, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, actually were terrible
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rotten people. And the reality is it's just not true. So there's a writer at the Washington
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Examiner, Tiana Lowe, who, you know, I like watching her when she goes on cable news. I have
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nothing against her personally. I don't, I don't mean to attack her. But she published a very bad
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take, very incorrect take, which is titled, Christopher Columbus was pretty evil by the standards of his
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own time. We've heard this. I've, I've read versions of this article many, many times,
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specifically since 2006. That's when it's become especially popular. And the story runs something
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like this. We think Christopher Columbus is a good guy, but actually there are accounts that came out
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that say he was a monster. He was the tyrant of the West Indies. He was evil by the standards,
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even of his own day. And everyone around him thought that he was a no good, terrible, rotten person.
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Not true. All of those accounts rely on one defamatory letter written by Francisco de Bobadilla,
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Columbus's chief political rival in the new world. To rely on this guy's account to give us the whole
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picture of Columbus's life would be like relying on Hillary Clinton's biography of Donald Trump to tell
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us everything about Donald Trump. Maybe there's a thing or two that's true in there, but the bias
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is so overwhelming. The conflict of interest is so overwhelming that it's not a reliable source.
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And they all, every one of these attacks on Columbus uses this one guy who had it out to get
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him. And Columbus, by the way, was so offended by the account that Bobadilla wrote of him that he
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actually turned down money from the crown to, to fight against this defamatory stuff. Okay. He spent,
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he spent every moment practically until his dying day after this was written, trying to get this
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written out of his, his record because he felt it was so untrue, so defamatory. And the crown,
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by the way, the Spanish crown that set Columbus on the voyage and then picked Bobadilla to replace him,
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the Spanish crown had a lot of interest in believing Bobadilla's account because then it
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could withhold the full amount of money that they owed Christopher Columbus. There was a lot of
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politics involved. The reality is Christopher Columbus is one of the greatest men who ever
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walked the earth. Okay. Even on this issue of how he treated the natives compared to the Spaniards who
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he traveled with, Columbus was relatively a pretty good guy who weighed in on their behalf, who adopted the
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son of one of his native American friends who even, uh, Bartolome de las Casas, the first resident
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bishop of the Americas, one of the great defenders of native Americans, probably the first great
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defender of native Americans wrote of Columbus that he was a good guy. He was an admirer of Christopher
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Columbus until the end of his life. On top of that, he was the greatest navigator of his age.
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He was more or less self-taught. He was of relatively low birth. He married well, you know,
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he moved up. He was relentless. He traveled all over the place. He lobbied Portugal to send him on
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this quest around the world or to the, to the Indies. He lobbied Spain to do it. He, he read books
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and books and books, worked every angle of the system, and then he made it to the new world using
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nothing but dead reckoning. Okay. He, he didn't even have the most basic equipment as he was traveling.
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He was dead reckoning and discovered this world that we now get to enjoy and from which we get to
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spit on Columbus's memory. It's just unfortunate not to put too fine a point onto it.
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Why are we doing this? Why are even conservatives buying some of these premises?
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Maybe we shouldn't tear the statue down, but Columbus was a pretty bad guy.
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Ah, he wasn't great. Ah, you know, Thomas Jefferson, he was a pretty bad guy. Ah, Robert E. Lee,
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that guy, especially Robert E. Lee. I mean, he was a Southerner. He, he fought for the Confederacy.
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Dag nabbit. That's the only thing they ever say about him. Why are some conservatives willing to
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do this? Some people still don't get it. Some people think that this is just about only the
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left or only the right, and they're totally different and totally different perspectives.
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They think this is, we only have economic problems. They're totally different from cultural
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problems. They're completely separate. They think that one odd feature of our culture today is we're not
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replacing ourselves. No one's having any kids anymore, so our birth rate is below replacement.
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They think that problem is totally disconnected to the fact that our nursing homes are overrun
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and just got wrecked by coronavirus. Specifically in New York, that story came out with Andrew Cuomo
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packing up the nursing homes. They think these are totally disconnected, that, that we're not
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replacing ourselves. We're not having any kids, and we don't know what to do with our old people,
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with our parents and our grandparents. Seems to me, they're not completely separate problems,
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any of these things. Seems to me, all of these issues derive from the same central pathology of
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modernity. Selfishness. I think it's simple. I think it's actually a simple answer. You don't need
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some highfalutin political jargon here. I think it comes down to selfishness, okay? And you know that
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we're a bit of a selfish culture now. We spend an entire month celebrating pride. Pride, the definition
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of selfishness, right? And self, self-obsession. I think there's a, a real connection here.
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A, a culture that does not value its inheritance, whether it's a financial, you know, money inheritance,
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or whether it's a cultural inheritance, is going to squander that, and it's not going to pass anything
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along to its posterity except for debt, right? And so, this is a weird thing that we live in a culture
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now that does not leave an inheritance to the, to the future generations. It leaves debt. Likewise,
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a generation that's not interested in the future, not interested in posterity, not interested in
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having kids or leaving them anything, has no reason at all to pass on their, their cultural inheritance
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or their financial inheritance or anything. Who cares about the history of America? Who cares about
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Thomas Jefferson? Who cares about any of our traditions? We don't even care about the future. We don't care
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about who comes after us. The fact that we're forgetting about our past ties into the fact
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that we're forgetting about our future and vice versa. And what you have, I'm remembered of this line
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from George Orwell in 1984. The line goes, every record has been destroyed or falsified. Every book
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rewritten. Every picture has been repainted. Every statue and street building has been renamed. Every date
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has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
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Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right. That's George Orwell
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describing this, this sort of dystopian hellscape in 1984. And that description, I think suits
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progressives pretty well. Progressives hate the past. It's right there in their name. They want to
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progress beyond the past. The progressives always want to topple those statues down. And maybe even the
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sadder part is, it basically suits conservatives well as well. Because conservatives, at least in
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recent years, have only been focused on the present. They haven't been focused on conserving very much of
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anything. You saw this at the Supreme Court just this week. But you've seen this in recent decades.
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We've lost on so many issues. We've given up so many things. And then there's this irony, which is that
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conservatives always talk about fiscal responsibility. Yet when we get into the government,
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we spend just as much money, if not more, as the left. Because we're trying to paper over cultural
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problems by just spending our way out of it, by just having this facade of prosperity. We don't
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care if the left topples all the statues and ruins our whole culture, as long as we get a few tax cuts
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every once in a while. Yeah, not permanent ones, but you know, just every so often give us a tax cut.
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And then that's fine. Well, that doesn't conserve much of anything at all. And I think it just comes down
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to this myopic focus on the present, not the past, not the future, not the people who came before us,
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not the people who come after us, just us, ourselves, just this kind of selfishness. We conserve nothing.
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I made this point just a few days ago. If you are not able to conserve anything, that there's no point
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in being conservative, right? They're in the word. If you're not doing the thing the word says, then what's the
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purpose? And I said this specifically with regard to the conservative legal movement. Call it
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originalism, call it textualism, I guess, call it what at the Federalist Society, I don't know.
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We've gotten a lot of conservative judges and yet we haven't gotten a lot of conservative decisions.
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We've kept Obamacare. We haven't overturned Roe versus Wade. We've radically redefined marriage
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according to modern ideas from the bench. Now we've redefined sex to mean whatever I want to
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think that I am. We've redefined sex to be modern gender ideology. We haven't conserved much at all.
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Senator Josh Hawley, who I think is one of the senators kind of waking up to these ideas,
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he gave an absolute barn burner speech on the Senate floor yesterday addressing this precise point.
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This decision, this Bostock case and the majority who wrote it, it represents the end of something.
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It represents the end of the conservative legal movement or the conservative legal project as we
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know it. After Bostock, that effort as we know it, as it has existed up to now, it's over.
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And I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism
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and originalism in order to reach a decision, an outcome that fundamentally changes the scope
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and meaning and application of statutory law, then textualism and originalism and all of those
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So Hawley is part of a trend that you're seeing, not just in the Senate, but among conservatives
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broadly, to actually fight back a little bit, to actually try to conserve some things, to not just
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focus on the occasional tax cut and let the left take over the whole culture. And I think it's about
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damn time that people started thinking that way. We'll get to that in one second. We'll get to how
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he's doing it. First though, got to thank our friends over at Bambi. Having a good HR department
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right after the show ends. Josh Hawley is one of the people pushing back, finally, in the conservative
00:17:37.460
legal movement. I guess, what's the movement? I don't know. The movement's changing right now.
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The old consensus was don't ever use the government when the left attacks you.
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When the left attacks you, don't use the government because if you use the government now
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to fight an actual attack from the left, then maybe someday, hypothetically, the left will use
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that same government mechanism that it's already using against you. You understand the illogic here?
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But I still hear this. I hear this from friends of mine. They'll say, Michael, conservatives can't use
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the few levers of power that we have to fight back against, for example, big tech censorship right now.
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Because if we empower the government to fight back against censorship in this way,
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that the left is foisting on us right this very minute, then the left someday, hypothetically,
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might censor us. Right. I don't need to think about that hypothetically. I don't need to imagine
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that. It's already happening. They're already doing it. The question is not whether we're going to set
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ourselves up in this terrible position for the left to censor us. That's already a given. The question
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is, are we going to fight back? Yes or no? Hawley and others are saying, does it make sense
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to worry about this future hypothetical problem? And because of that future hypothetical problem,
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ignore the current one that is attacking us? And I think censorship is the best example here.
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We saw a huge story on this yesterday. NBC News, news, I put news in quotes because NBC News
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is not a news organization and they've more or less admitted they're, they're a leftist activist
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organization and they lobbied Google to kick off a conservative investigative outlet. So NBC News
00:19:26.760
tried to get the Federalist, maybe you, I read the Federalist, maybe you read the Federalist. They do
00:19:32.500
great journalistic work. They were really good on the Obamagate scandal. They've been really good on
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some of the corruption that's going on in the government. They tried to get them kicked off of
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Google's advertising platform. And what that means, by the way, Google has, I think, the largest
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advertising platform in the world. What that means is it's not like you're totally banning the
00:19:50.620
Federalist from the internet, but you're cutting off more or less any way it could make money.
00:19:56.100
And so if it can't make money, obviously the company is going to wither and die. This is what NBC writes.
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Google's ban of the websites, which would be the Federalist and another website, Zero Hedge,
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comes after the company was notified of research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate,
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a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 US-based
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websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protest. Pause right there.
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The Federalist is not a racist website. If the Federalist is a racist website, then the word
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racism truly has no meaning. What they mean by racist is contradicting the leftist narrative. What
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they mean by racist is in any way disagreeing with leftists at NBC News. They call it racist and
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they smear it baselessly. They found that 10 US-based websites have published what they say are racist
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articles about the protests, you know, the riots, and projected that the websites would make millions
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of dollars through Google ads. Google blocked the Federalist from its advertising platform after the
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NBC News verification unit brought the project to its attention. Zero Hedge had already been demonetized
00:21:03.440
prior to NBC News' inquiry, Google said. Now, Google came out yesterday after a big hubbub. The Federalist
00:21:09.720
was trending all day on Twitter and they said, oh no, the Federalist wasn't, wasn't demonetized. A big
00:21:14.820
misunderstanding. Don't worry. It was an issue with the comments section, but don't worry. We got rid of
00:21:19.240
that. It's a trial balloon. That's what they always do. The fake news, truly fake news, NBC News made a
00:21:28.280
political operative attack on a competitor and a conservative, the Federalist. Google obliged and
00:21:34.780
demonetized it and more or less said they were going to destroy the business. Then there was enough
00:21:38.800
of an outcry that NBC backed off and Google backed off as well and said, oh no, it was a big
00:21:43.820
misunderstanding. Meanwhile, by the way, the other website, Zero Hedge, demonetized because no one
00:21:48.160
made a big hubbub about that. This is going to increase throughout the election. We are still five
00:21:54.920
months away. The old consensus would have said, well, you know, if, if you don't like what Google's
00:22:01.540
doing, just make another Google. Yeah, sure. They have a monopoly of the, over the flow of
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information around the internet, but ah, well, that's too bad. Nothing we can do. My hands are
00:22:09.060
tied. Let the left destroy the culture. Let's just hope for another tax cut at some point, please.
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We got to get those judges. Look, we'll get the judges in and the judges will stab us in the back,
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but hey, it's okay. Cause I guess we'll get another tax cut or something, right? That, ah, that's not a good
00:22:23.800
way to conduct politics. That's the old consensus. I think the new idea says hold Google to account
00:22:29.080
by whatever means are available to us. Section 230, right? The section 230 is part of the
00:22:34.940
Communications Decency Act. That is one way that conservatives might be able to go after big tech
00:22:39.960
oligarchs for abusing their powers and violating the law. Ah, break them up as a monopoly. Just break,
00:22:45.340
just do it. Why not? Why wouldn't we? They are now trying to tip elections for the left.
00:22:51.060
They are barring conservatives from doing business anywhere even. Go after them.
00:22:57.980
Got to grow a spine, folks. Got to grow some cojones if you want to have an effective political
00:23:02.820
movement. Speaking of these sorts of questions, just to see what we're up against from the other
00:23:10.400
side of the Senate aisle, Tim Kaine, U.S. Senator, the man who was almost one heartbeat away from
00:23:16.600
becoming the second woman president, Tim Kaine, gave a speech yesterday on the Senate floor in which
00:23:22.760
he blamed America for inventing slavery. And the only problem with Tim Kaine's speech is that it was
00:23:31.560
completely untrue. We need to do much more within the criminal justice system, but also within all of
00:23:37.540
our systems to dismantle the structures of racism that our federal, state, and local governments
00:23:43.560
carefully erected and maintained over centuries. We know a little bit about this in Virginia.
00:23:49.480
The first African Americans into the English colonies came to Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619.
00:23:55.240
They were slaves. They'd been captured against their will, but they landed in colonies that didn't have
00:24:00.520
slavery. There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. The United States didn't inherit
00:24:07.560
slavery from anybody. We created it. I think maybe Tim Kaine should check up on his history. Actually,
00:24:15.560
in the Declaration of Independence written by that guy who got canceled, Thomas Jefferson,
00:24:19.680
Jefferson complains about how the incipient United States inherited slavery from the British
00:24:25.960
and complained about that as an institution that has had a negative impact on the country. Where does
00:24:32.400
Tim Kaine think the slaves came from when they landed in Virginia? The slaves came from Africa
00:24:38.640
and they were bought from African slave traders, people who still practice slavery to this day.
00:24:45.620
Slavery still practiced in the Middle East to this day. Slavery still practiced in East Asia to this
00:24:51.040
very day. As a matter of fact, not only did the United States not invent slavery, because slavery goes
00:24:56.520
back not just to those slave traders in the centuries before the United States came to be, goes all the
00:25:03.080
way back to ancient Egypt, for instance, might behoove Mr. Kaine to read the Bible, see what the Egyptians
00:25:09.960
did to the Jews in Egypt, goes back throughout all of human history. Ironically, the West is the only
00:25:16.600
place that's ever abolished slavery. It's not that we invented slavery, we didn't, but we did abolish it,
00:25:21.720
and virtually no one else has. That's a good thing. Ironically, Tim Kaine mentions how slavery came
00:25:29.060
to Virginia. The first officially declared owner of an arbitrarily declared slave for life, right,
00:25:38.400
the beginning of what we would call our modern system of slavery in America, was a black man. He
00:25:43.420
was a black man from Angola. Now, obviously, slavery then went on to become a highly racialized
00:25:50.400
system that led to racial consequences that went on for centuries, but it shows you that the situation
00:25:57.700
of how slavery began, much more complicated than Mr. Kaine would have you believe. A lot of people
00:26:03.960
believe this thing. If a sitting U.S. senator believes a lie like this, think about how many people have been
00:26:10.560
taught the very same lie. Our goal as conservatives, our job, is to push back against those things, and yet,
00:26:20.180
unfortunately, we keep giving into left-wing premises, and unfortunately, I think even some of
00:26:24.560
the advisors around the president are beginning to buy into some of those premises. We'll get to that
00:26:28.940
in one second. We'll get to President Trump's big announcement yesterday. We will get to how the riots
00:26:34.120
actually did cure coronavirus. I called that one, too. And we will get to my interview with the White
00:26:39.640
House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, at the White House. I was in Washington last week, got to stop
00:26:45.180
by the White House and take a minute to sit down with the Chief of Staff. We'll get a little bit of
00:26:49.740
that. First, though, got to thank our friends over at Keeps. I think I've told you many times,
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so that you too can, can keep 80% of your power. K-E-E-P-S.com slash Knowles. So president yesterday
00:28:01.640
made a big announcement. The announcement was on police reform and I get it. I get the political
00:28:11.660
calculation here, but I think the president is getting bad advice from his advisors. We'll get
00:28:18.880
to that in just one second. First though, got to thank you. Thank you so much for subscribing to
00:28:22.140
the Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel. Not the Daily Wire YouTube channel, though I'm, you know,
00:28:26.120
I'm glad to go over there, give Ben some views, but we love that you're going over to mine and
00:28:29.400
subscribing. We're very close to 70,000, so thank you for that. We've got bonus interviews there,
00:28:33.520
segments, breakouts, that sort of thing. And recently two brand new interviews with Maddie
00:28:36.960
Kearns and John Birch. Maddie Kearns, one of the great journalists in the country on this issue of
00:28:41.480
gender ideology and John Birch, the lead lawyer on the big Supreme Court case that has enshrined gender
00:28:46.940
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mainstream media. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. We'll be right back with a lot more.
00:29:21.800
President Trump announced yesterday, a big police reform plan in the Rose Garden.
00:29:34.020
The plan is receiving mixed reviews. I will tell you the good, the bad and the ugly. Here's the
00:29:41.480
president. Thank you all for being here as we take historic action to deliver a future of safety and
00:29:48.400
security for Americans of every race, religion, color, and creed. We're joined today by law
00:29:57.240
enforcement professionals and community leaders. Though we may all come from different places and
00:30:04.960
different backgrounds, we're united by our desire to ensure peace and dignity and equality for all
00:30:12.000
Americans. Okay. Of course we believe all of this. It's good that president Trump is taking charge.
00:30:17.140
We need strong leadership as the cities are burning, but is this the way to do it? Police reform.
00:30:24.520
If, if I had my druthers, if I were advising the president, I would have president Trump release an
00:30:29.640
executive order on criminal justice reform that puts more of these criminals burning the cities down
00:30:35.400
into prison. I think that's probably the better angle. I think, unfortunately, some of president
00:30:40.440
Trump's advisors are convincing him to buy into the left-wing premise that the police are hopelessly
00:30:45.900
racist and bigoted and slaughtering innocent black men around the country. We know that isn't
00:30:49.620
happening. Okay. We have the statistics. We went through them just last week, I think on the show.
00:30:55.620
How many unarmed black men were killed by police last year? And by the way, unarmed does not mean
00:31:00.980
not dangerous. Unarmed does not mean that the use of force was not justified, but let's even use that
00:31:06.240
number. Unarmed. How many? 9,000? No. 900? No. 90? No. It's nine. Every death is a tragedy.
00:31:13.840
But nine is not evidence of systemic police brutality and racism. And yet that's the premise
00:31:20.920
that the left wants us to buy into. And it wants us to buy into that so that they can get their agenda
00:31:25.220
in there without really having to sell it to the American people. So I just think the whole idea of
00:31:31.080
this. Am I against police reform? No. I think powerful institutions should constantly be reforming
00:31:36.340
themselves, of course. But is that the message we want to send now? I mean, what does the EO do?
00:31:41.220
It doesn't do very much at all. It requires new federal credentials for police departments,
00:31:45.340
which is just another federal regulation being foisted on states and local governments. And it
00:31:50.500
bans chokeholds in most instances. This is, this is the only part of the EO with teeth.
00:31:57.000
The attorney general standards for certification shall require independent credentialing bodies
00:32:00.780
to at a minimum confirm that the state and local law enforcement agencies use of force policies
00:32:06.200
prohibit the use of chokeholds, except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed
00:32:11.000
by law. So even there, if the use of deadly force is allowed, then they can use a chokehold. But are
00:32:15.180
they saying they can't use a chokehold now in any case? That, that seems like you're tying law
00:32:19.840
enforcement's hands behind its back. The problem, it's not going to do very much as an EO. I guess the
00:32:28.060
White House thinks it's going to be good messaging for people. I don't think it's good messaging
00:32:32.160
though. I think we lose ground. I think we lose debates because we give up premises. The best
00:32:39.260
example of this would be how we lost the marriage debate on the right. The marriage debate, where are
00:32:45.780
we going to expand the definition of marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions? The marriage
00:32:51.480
debate focused on a question. What is marriage? For all of human history, sexual difference seemed to
00:32:59.300
be at the center of marriage, whether it was polygamous marriage in certain instances in some
00:33:03.900
places, whether it was monogamous marriage for most of the history of the West. Is it, is, does sexual
00:33:10.840
difference have something to do with that? Does the, the logical possibility of the creation of life have
00:33:14.760
something to do with that? Yeah. The answer to that was always yes. And then a few years ago,
00:33:18.740
we decided, no, that doesn't have anything to do with it. So that's a debate. That's an interesting
00:33:22.180
debate to have. The way the left avoided that debate, which is favorable to the people who want
00:33:28.200
to maintain a traditional meaning of marriage, is they just presumed the new definition. They said,
00:33:35.920
oh, marriage is a union of two people who love each other. They just, they, they redefined it first.
00:33:40.380
And then they said, the marriage debate is about rights. Do you have the right to get married?
00:33:44.540
But that was never what the debate was about. And nobody opposes equal rights. So by the time they,
00:33:49.200
they gate, they got that premise through, the people who wanted to keep a traditional definition
00:33:54.500
of marriage already lost the debate. It was already over. There was no debate to be had.
00:33:59.200
I think that's what the left succeeds at maybe more than anything. And that's how they get so much
00:34:03.880
institutional power. If you cede the premise that the police are racist, terrible, bigoted people who
00:34:09.640
are brutal and they use too much force and they need to be reined in, then it's a lot easier to
00:34:15.240
get through BLM's radical leftist premises, most of which have nothing to do with black lives mattering
00:34:22.040
or civil rights for racial minorities or anything like that. But they get the premise in. And so
00:34:26.720
they get their policy solutions. We lose ground because we give up the premises. You see this not
00:34:33.660
just on, on these racial issues. You see this on the virus as well. You know how much I hate to say,
00:34:37.980
I told you so. I would never do that. Me. Well, sometimes, maybe. Okay. And on this case, I will.
00:34:43.600
I did a show a week or two ago that said race riots cure coronavirus because the mainstream media
00:34:51.460
and the public health experts and the politicians told us coronavirus was super duper deadly. If you
00:34:55.760
ever walk outside your home, you're going to kill grandma. And then all of a sudden there were all
00:34:58.920
these leftist riots and the public health officials, the very same one said, oh no, go out there. Yeah,
00:35:03.760
go out by the tens of thousands and breathe all over each other. That's fine. You're not going to get
00:35:07.740
coronavirus. That'll actually help stop the spread of coronavirus. But if a few conservatives want
00:35:12.460
to maintain their civil liberties, that is deadly. You can't do that. So I said, oh God, I guess the
00:35:18.360
race riots cured coronavirus. Turns out, turns out that might be true. Or in a way it's true.
00:35:24.080
Minneapolis, which had the biggest uprisings, is now reporting over two weeks later,
00:35:29.740
few new positive cases, according to health officials. So you would think after this craziness
00:35:37.740
out there, two weeks later, past the incubation period, you'd have a spike in cases, right?
00:35:44.420
Hasn't happened. More than 3,300 protesters have shown up to be tested for coronavirus.
00:35:50.880
40% of them, so about 1,300, have gotten their results back already. 1.4% tested positive.
00:35:58.520
That is lower, significantly lower than the positive rate statewide. The positivity rate statewide is
00:36:08.780
3.7%. And among the rioters, peaceful rioters, protesters, it's 1.4%. That's also lower than the
00:36:18.160
current seven-day average rate of positive tests, which similarly stands at 3.7%. And this trend isn't
00:36:24.300
just in Minneapolis. It holds up in Chicago, Illinois, Philly, Pennsylvania, Boston, throughout
00:36:30.180
Massachusetts. They've, they've also seen very few cases, new cases of COVID-19 cropping up.
00:36:38.820
So when they tell you, and this is going to be inevitable, that there's going to be a second wave,
00:36:44.640
you can't go outside, if conservatives want to hold a protest or something, the RNC is going to happen,
00:36:49.160
they're going to say, no, you've got to stay indoors. Forget about our encouragement of those
00:36:52.740
riots. You have to stay indoors because of coronavirus. Just point to all that great science
00:36:56.220
and show that the science, at least the latest science, doesn't back them up. Speaking of cures,
00:37:03.200
President Trump is being unfairly attacked. I know you'll be shocked to hear that. He's never
00:37:07.340
unfairly attacked, is he? Well, yeah, I think he is pretty much every single day by the mainstream
00:37:11.860
media. He's now being attacked because he spoke a little loosely. He got a little wording wrong when
00:37:19.060
he was talking about whether or not we had found a vaccine for AIDS. But the attack that the left is
00:37:25.000
making on Trump, I think reveals a lot about their own hypocrisy. They have come up with things and
00:37:30.960
they've come up with many other cures and therapeutics over the years. These are the people,
00:37:36.840
the best, the smartest, the most brilliant anywhere. And they've come up with the AIDS vaccine.
00:37:43.860
They've come up with, or the AIDS, and as you know, there's various things and now various companies
00:37:50.060
are involved. But the therapeutic for AIDS, AIDS was a death sentence. And now people live a life
00:37:59.240
with a pill. It's an incredible thing. Now, lots of people are attacking Trump. They say,
00:38:05.420
we don't have a vaccine yet for AIDS. We've got very effective preventive measures and we've got very
00:38:10.760
effective treatments and we've got a vaccine in development, but we don't have a officially
00:38:15.340
certified, certified vaccine yet. So you're spreading fake news, Trump. I can't help but
00:38:21.580
notice though, that this minor gaffe is revealing a big flaw in the left's argument about coronavirus
00:38:29.560
because many of the same people who are mocking Trump right now for, for saying that we have an AIDS
00:38:36.720
vaccine when we still don't have an AIDS vaccine, even after what, 37 years of research are the very
00:38:43.340
same people telling us that a coronavirus vaccine is right around the corner. What makes you so
00:38:50.960
confident that we're going to have this coronavirus vaccine within the next few months? We've been
00:38:55.380
spending 37 years on an AIDS vaccine. We don't have it. How many other diseases have gone around? We don't
00:39:02.060
have a vaccine. We're nowhere close to a vaccine. It's not as though when scientists go into the
00:39:07.040
laboratory, they say, okay, we're going to make a vaccine. I'm going to estimate it's going to take
00:39:11.520
us about four or five hours, like making a pizza. You know, it's going to, that's, we know we're going
00:39:16.620
to get it. We just have, no, you're discovering the vaccine. You're developing the vaccine. You don't
00:39:22.140
know what your timetable is going to be on that. So fine, you want to attack Trump for misspeaking
00:39:26.740
about the AIDS vaccine. That's okay. But then I think we need to drop what has become the new
00:39:31.020
left-wing argument, which is we need to shut down our whole country until we find a cure.
00:39:35.820
Initially it was flatten the curve. We did successfully flatten the curve and slowed the
00:39:39.960
rate of transmission and didn't overwhelm the hospital system. Then they transferred finding,
00:39:45.240
flattening the curve to finding a cure. No evidence that we're going to get that cure.
00:39:50.380
It's one of these gaffes, quote unquote, that Trump makes that I think actually was pretty
00:39:55.120
advantageous. I think it shows a flaw in their argument. Now, speaking of the White House,
00:40:00.000
I was hanging around there last week and I sat down with the White House chief of staff,
00:40:05.460
Mark Meadows, on my show with Senator Ted Cruz called Verdict. This was Mr. Meadows's first
00:40:12.000
interview since he became the chief of staff. And I figured there's no way this guy's going to tell
00:40:17.880
us anything, right? He's got a very private job, arguably the most powerful man in the world,
00:40:22.560
right? Because he's the chief of staff at the White House. So he's deciding who gets to come and see
00:40:27.420
the president, what makes it to the president's desk, all from behind the scenes. He's going to
00:40:30.660
be a behind the scenes guy and he's not going to tell us much. He spilt some tea. I got to tell you,
00:40:34.960
Mark Meadows really took us behind the scenes a little bit on some of the challenges that the
00:40:40.260
administration is facing, specifically when it comes to leakers. And the good news out of that
00:40:44.480
is the White House is finally beginning to figure out how to identify those leakers.
00:40:50.320
The other thing that I think that is critical is, you know, you've got this massive bureaucracy
00:40:55.440
with agencies and you think, well, there's a Republican administration. So you, but there
00:41:01.160
is the swamp that continues to go on, whether it's a Democrat or Republican in, uh, in the Oval
00:41:07.840
Office. The elected people come and go. Yeah. And they just kind of wait them out. It's just exactly
00:41:12.100
what Ted was saying. They wait them out. And so one of the great things is, is that if Ted or one of
00:41:18.420
his colleagues, they're getting, you know, the stiff arm, I call it the legislative Heisman,
00:41:22.820
you know, if they're getting that, uh, it's real easy for me to pick up and say, you know,
00:41:27.520
why am I getting this phone call from this Senator, uh, on you not responding to their phone call?
00:41:33.780
Oh, well, we were busy. Well, I was busy too. And I took his call. I mean, why aren't you taking?
00:41:39.320
And so sometimes it's just making them aware that there's somebody else, uh, willing to hold them
00:41:44.100
accountable. And two branches there. I mean, this is actually something that Senator,
00:41:46.700
I know you've talked a lot about is you've been talking now for years about social media
00:41:51.020
censorship, censorship of conservatives. Well, just recently we got out of, out of the executive
00:41:56.140
branch, this executive order on social media censorship. We still don't know a whole lot
00:42:01.020
about that. At least I don't know a lot about that. Maybe could you tell us a little bit about
00:42:04.100
how that came to be? Well, I think Ted and I, uh, know that as conservatives, sometimes our
00:42:08.580
conservative voice, uh, doesn't reach the audience as quickly or as effectively as it is normally
00:42:15.680
intended. It's a diplomatic way to put it. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I was one of the few members
00:42:19.280
of Congress back when I was in Congress that was actually shadow banned by Twitter. Yeah. And so
00:42:23.840
we ought to put that out on a tweet and see if they take that down. They'll say it wasn't shadow
00:42:28.080
banned that we were, but it only happened to be four conservative members of Congress, myself,
00:42:33.720
Matt Gates, Devin Nunes, and Jim Jordan. So you're saying AOC didn't fall into that?
00:42:37.880
No, she didn't, she didn't make it into that. Uh, so, so one of the things that that's important
00:42:43.240
is, is that we need to make sure that the free press is really the free press and it's not censored.
00:42:49.520
And what, what Twitter has done probably more so than some of the other social media platforms,
00:42:55.180
but YouTube is doing it as well, uh, is that they come in and they start to actually monitor content.
00:43:02.660
Yeah. And so it's not this free open, what I call the wild, wild west of social media. That's the way
00:43:08.660
I, and, and as freedom loving individuals, we want the free market to work, but when the free market
00:43:14.360
starts to get, uh, monopolized, uh, by content police, uh, then it's important for us to step in.
00:43:21.980
So we did an EO that actually has the potential of taking away their, their protection from litigation.
00:43:28.240
So if, if we can't fix it, or if Congress can't fix it, let the trial attorneys fix it.
00:43:32.580
It'll happen real quick. Unleashing the trial attorneys is a really powerful weapon. And I
00:43:38.220
got to say, this is an issue where a white house leadership was so needed. And it's so important
00:43:43.180
because we've, you and I've talked about this before. One of the challenges on the issue of
00:43:47.400
a big tech censorship is all the federal agencies are siloed and, and, and it's a hard issue where
00:43:53.100
the antitrust division at the department of justice doesn't quite fit into what they think they want
00:43:57.260
to do. The FTC, it doesn't quite fit in. What do they want to do? The FCC, everyone has,
00:44:01.700
is sort of looking at their own slice of the problem. And the president's executive order
00:44:05.640
on this was important to say, damn it, this matters. I think it's the biggest threat to
00:44:10.300
democracy in the whole country, but we needed, we needed the president and the white house to lead,
00:44:16.140
to get the rest of the executive focused on protecting free speech altogether.
00:44:22.220
Right. Well, the interesting thing. And so I always try to give you a little bit of a backstory
00:44:26.640
that no one else knows. So that EO, as it relates to section 230, uh, we started putting it around
00:44:33.460
for a little bit of comment on a very limited basis. All of a sudden this proposed EO shows up
00:44:39.880
in the New York times. And, and it really was fed to the New York times by a federal worker that didn't
00:44:48.660
agree with, uh, this administration, or at least it appears that they didn't, and they didn't agree with
00:44:55.000
the EO. And so they took it and fed it to, uh, um, outside sources. And I'm glad to say that we were
00:45:02.720
able to track that person down. They no longer work for the federal government. I'm glad too,
00:45:06.300
because that's, let me ask a question here. That's a great, I hadn't heard that story. And
00:45:11.180
that's, that's a great story. Let me take it a slightly different direction. So, so the job Mark
00:45:16.500
has now, I think is, is may well be the hardest job in all of Washington.
00:45:20.820
I think that's probably true. And I, I love seeing the surprise on Cruz's face when he hears about
00:45:29.060
this leaker. It's funny. You, you just expect everybody's on the same page in Washington and
00:45:33.140
they all are constantly talking to each other. And I have found talking to a lot of big players
00:45:38.340
in Washington. That is not the case. There actually is surprise. There are these human interactions
00:45:42.380
really do matter. And I love the way that Mark Meadows says that. He says, that individual is
00:45:47.220
no longer working for the federal government. Yep. That's a very diplomatic way to put it.
00:45:52.160
A lot, a lot more great stuff in that interview. So head on over. You can check that out at the
00:45:55.400
verdict podcast. Also, I'm on Dave Rubin's show today. I'm on the Rubin report. This is my first
00:45:59.680
time, believe it or not, going on the Rubin report, even though I've been friends with Dave for years.
00:46:04.360
So head on over, check that out too. And then I'll see you tomorrow. I'm Michael Knowles.
00:46:12.380
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:46:19.720
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends
00:46:24.100
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00:46:30.100
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro show,
00:46:34.760
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00:46:37.720
The Michael Knowles show is produced by Ben Davies.
00:46:43.100
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
00:47:01.100
The Michael Knowles show is a Daily Wire production.
00:47:05.720
You know, the Matt Walsh show, it's not just another show about politics.
00:47:09.360
I think there are enough of those already out there.
00:47:11.400
We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
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Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.