Ep. 677 - The “Free Speech” Myth
Episode Stats
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Summary
There's a big clampdown on conservative voices on social media right now, and it's enough to drive a man crazy. But is it really about free speech? Or is it about censorship? And what does that really mean?
Transcript
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President Trump has been kicked off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and most other
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internet platforms. A handful of oligarchs in Silicon Valley have the power and the willingness
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to censor the duly elected sitting president of the United States.
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And conservatives let it happen. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show for now. I guess we're still on for now. I feel as though we're on. Who
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knows? This might cut out at any minute, judging by the way social media are going. My favorite
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comment though, until then from Friday, is from user 115 who says, so when Kamala Harris raises
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money to bail out criminals arrested in violent riots, she is not inciting violence. But when
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Trump says, go home peacefully and be responsible, he is guilty. Yes, that's the way that it works.
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That is the way that the new standards work. And it's obviously the left's fault and the left is
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clamping down very hard right now. And it is legitimately threatening conservatives' ability
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to participate in our republic. However, conservatives let it happen. Conservatives got this thing wrong
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from the beginning. This debate over free speech. This debate over censorship. This debate over all
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manner of these questions. And we're paying the price right now. It's enough to drive a man crazy.
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Go check them out. Big clampdown going on right now on conservatives on social media. And it's
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important to remember the history that conservatives have had with social media. Social media is the
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reason that conservatives were ascendant for much of the last 10 years. Because before that, we were
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shut out of the mainstream media. Even when we did manage to get presidents elected, they were pretty
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liberal like George Bush, for instance, or the other George Bush. Social media allowed conservatives to
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have a voice when we had been shut out of the TV networks, when we've been shut out of the newspapers,
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when we'd been shut out of Hollywood. The new media gave us that kind of freedom. And now they're
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taking that freedom away. The clampdown that's going on right now is pretty significant in that
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basically every prominent right winger on social media is losing lots and lots and lots of followers.
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And when people complain about this, it seems sort of petty. It seems like a vanity contest. Oh no,
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you lost 30,000 Twitter followers. Boohoo for you. I've got real problems. But I think actually that's
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sort of why big tech is pursuing this strategy because it sounds petty, but it is significant
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because if you take away conservatives followers, all of a sudden conservatives no longer have a
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voice. And it doesn't just affect some pundit and it doesn't just affect some elected representative.
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It affects all conservatives who can't get our voice out there. That's what they're betting on.
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Jake Tapper came out and he said, I don't know how many Twitter followers I've lost because I don't pay
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attention to that because I'm an adult, which is not true. Jake Tapper has bragged about his Twitter
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followers in the past, but that's not even the point. Tapper hasn't lost any Twitter followers.
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Actually, they've increased significantly over the past few days. Whereas every prominent
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conservative just about has lost a lot up to and including the president who lost his entire voice
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on social media. Why does Jake Tapper gain followers? Why is Twitter gaming their system to give him
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a larger audience? Because Jake Tapper is a submissive vessel for the liberal establishment.
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So obviously they're going to reward him and that he's going to continue to do their bidding.
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Whereas for conservatives, we're not going to do that. And so Twitter won't either.
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Twitter's ridiculous excuse for the clampdown up to and including the man that the American people
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chose to be president, at least until January 20th, that guy's the duly elected president.
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Twitter says to clear up confusion about fluctuations in follower accounts. Fluctuations. It's just going
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down, by the way. It's not like going up 50,000 and then down. It's going down. To clear up the
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confusion, in order to prevent spam, we regularly challenge accounts to confirm details like email
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and phone number. Until that info is confirmed, these accounts are not included in follower accounts.
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That's obviously untrue, right? What Twitter is saying is, yeah, look, we think there, this happens
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every so often. First of all, we've never seen this happen before and it's not happening evenly.
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It's only happening to conservatives, but they're saying, look, what happens is there are a lot of
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accounts. We don't know if they're real accounts or not. So we just take all of them out of the follower
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accounts. And then as people confirm their details, then all of a sudden we add them back in.
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But if that were true, then all the conservatives, I guess everybody, including liberals,
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their follower accounts would drop dramatically and then slowly increase as people confirm those
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details. That's not what's happening. The follower accounts are steadily decreasing,
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but only for conservatives. And the only time it's not steady is when you're talking about the
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president of the United States and associated accounts, which have been shut down by some hipster
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looking radical oligarch in Silicon Valley named Jack Dorsey, who runs Twitter.
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Now you might say, okay, well, you have no right to use Twitter's platform. Twitter's a private
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company after all, sort of. We'll get into that in a second. What, what very often liberals and
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squishy conservatives, fake conservatives have said for in recent years is make your own Twitter.
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Oh, come on. You have no right to use Jack Dorsey's platform. Make your own Twitter. Yeah. Okay. Maybe
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Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Google have conquered the entire public square and they now control
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discourse in our Republic, but look, private company, they can do whatever they want.
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The problem with this, there are many problems with this argument, but the main one, the most obvious
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problem with this argument is you can't make your own Twitter. When they say, go make your own
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Twitter, they won't let you make your own Twitter. Dan Bongino did go make his own Twitter. He called
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it Parler and he put it up there. And then when Twitter started censoring conservatives, a lot of
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conservatives went over there and then Google and Apple came out and they said, we're not going to
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allow Parler on our operating systems. They're not going to be in the app store. So I guess if you've
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got it installed, good for you for now, but that's it. It's, it's over. Google and Apple control 99%
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of the mobile operating system market share. 99%. If they kick you out of their stores,
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you're gone from cell phones. So they won't let you make your own Twitter. Okay. Well, hold on.
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You can still access Parler through the web browser on your phone. Can't you? Sure. You can't use the app,
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but you have no right. Google and Apple private companies sort of. So you have no right to force
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your app into their app store. Just go on the web browser. Well, that's what Parler said they would
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do. And guess what? Amazon web services, the web host said that Parler is not allowed to even have
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a website. If you go to parler.com right now, chances are it will not load. Now, Dan, friend,
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friend of the show says that he's got a backup plan. I hope Parler is back online quickly.
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But how long before that web server says, no, we're not going to host you either.
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This happened to a gab. Gab was this, this alternative to Twitter that came up before
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Parler did. Same thing, kicked out of the app stores, kicked off their web hosting,
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their domain registrar, GoDaddy. They couldn't even get the website.
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So all of a sudden we go from build your own Twitter. Come on, just build your own Twitter to,
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come on, build your own mobile operating system, to build your own cell phone, to build your own
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web servers, to build your own domain registrar, to build your own internet, to, I guess, build your
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own government. Is that the end of it? Oh, wait a second. That's what we should have been doing the
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whole time. We should have been engaging in politics so that we could wield political systems
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when the people gave us power. And the fact that we did not do that on the right is the fault of
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conservatives. You know, we stopped engaging in politics. And part of the reason for this
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is that we took expressions, like Andrew Breitbart's famous expression, when he said,
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politics is downstream of culture. That's obviously true to a degree. But we took an expression like that
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as an excuse not to engage in politics. We, we took it as an excuse to say, well, no government,
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it's always bad whenever government does anything. And that's why you need to elect us so that we
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won't do anything that you want us to do. And we need to let big business run roughshod over our
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culture because we've, we've exclusively got to focus on the culture and not on politics. Well,
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look where that's gotten us. As if by the way, there were some totally distinct line between
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culture and politics. There obviously isn't. Culture affects politics, movies and TV and books
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and art affects politics and politics affects culture. We know that conservatives are willing
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to admit that in our most candid moments, right? When conservatives talk about the disastrous policies
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of LBJ and the great society, all those welfare programs that trapped people in generations of
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poverty, that was politics affecting culture, wasn't it? Thomas Sowell writes about this all the time
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when he says black Americans were doing a whole lot better before the great society. And then the great
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society comes in and all of a sudden they start doing much worse. What changed? Did the movies
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change? I guess a little bit. Did the art change? Yeah, sure. No, what changed is the government
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policy. Obviously politics can shape culture. And, and I think it's just a recourse for people
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who in a cowardly way don't want to engage in the political system, who don't want to go in and say,
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no big tech, you don't get to do that. We're going to break you up. We're going to break you up under
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antitrust laws. We're going to break you up because of section 230 of the communications decency act.
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We're going to bake you, break you up because of the fraud that you've engaged in. This was so
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predictable. This was so predictable. They, they had been signaling this for months. The minute that
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Twitter put a fact check on the president's tweet, I thought it's only a matter of time before they
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kick him off. The fact check was so ridiculous. You remember Trump said, we, I think we won the
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election. And then Twitter says this claim is disputed, but they didn't really mean this claim
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is disputed. Any claim on social media could be disputed. And if a claim is disputed, that means
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that the counter claim is disputed too. But they didn't put, when Biden said we won the election,
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they didn't put a claim that said this claim is disputed too. Obviously that claim was disputed by
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Trump. They had picked a side. Well, okay, fair enough. Questions of free speech and censorship,
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I suppose people can pick a side, but are we comfortable, whatever you think about,
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whatever you think about the election, whatever you think about Joe Biden, whatever you think
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about Donald Trump, ask yourself this, are you really comfortable with a handful of radical left
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wing oligarchs in Silicon Valley, billionaires censoring the duly elected president? I did not
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elect Jack Dorsey. I did not elect Mark Zuckerberg. And conservatives helped this happen.
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Go check Ring out. Conservatives are, are largely responsible for this.
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The left is, I don't want to victim blame. The left is the aggressor here. Conservatives let it
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happen. How did we let it happen? Well, first of all, we had four years of the Trump administration
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and two years of unified government to, to attack big tech, bring them down to size. We didn't do it.
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Do you know what we did instead? We called in the big tech executives and then the legislators
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got really good sound bites on TV yelling at the big tech executives and they got really good
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campaign commercials out of it. And then nothing happened. And then Mark Zuckerberg goes on TV and
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he says, yes, we have to do better. Oh, we will do. Yes. Oh, I, oh, this was bad and we'll do better.
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And he's obviously lying, right? He's obviously not telling the truth because they didn't do better.
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They, they got a lot worse. At least Jack Dorsey, to his credit, he's never even pretended to care.
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Jack Dorsey, it looks like hipster Rasputin with his beard. And he basically says, I don't,
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I don't care about any of you guys. So we let that happen. But the problem's even deeper than that.
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And it's going to take a lot of soul searching on the right. Republicans have been shilling for big
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business for decades now, for decades. Really starting, I guess in the seventies, but really
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ramping up in the eighties and nineties and two thousands. Conservatives have been shilling for
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giant multinational corporations that hate our culture, that ship our jobs overseas,
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that don't give a damn about this country. They've, they've embraced this line, build your
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own Twitter. Oh, you can never tell Mark Zuckerberg what to do. He has his sacred right to censor the
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president. It's his platform. We shilled. We made an idol out of the free market and a boogeyman out of
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big government. Now, am I saying that I don't like free markets? No, I think the free market is wonderful.
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I think it is one of the most brilliant mechanisms ever devised and discovered that is conducive to
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human flourishing, but it is not the moral arbiter in, in my political philosophy. If, if the, the free
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market, if the invisible hand of the free market and the morality of the free market tells me that I've got
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to let Mark Zuckerberg censor the duly elected president, then something's gone wrong in that
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ideology. Same goes for big government. We made this huge boogeyman at a big government such that we ended
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up defending big business. This is not what the, the libertarians of the 1960s talked about. The young
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conservative writer Saurabh Sharma posted a pretty funny meme the other day. It was about how libertarians
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in the 60s, like Barry Goldwater said, we're against big everything. We're against big government. We're against
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big monopolies. We're against big corporations. We, we realized that that kind of unrestrained power,
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unrestrained, there's the key, is what is the threat to liberty. Some conservatives embraced
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small government. There is no small government in America. There cannot be small government. You cannot
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govern a nation that, that spans not just an entire continent, but beyond a continent, to Hawaii,
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to Alaska, to the Philippines, to Guam, to all of our overseas interests. Do you know that we have
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something called AFRICOM? Have you heard of AFRICOM? That's the United States African Command.
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Last I checked, we don't have a state in Africa. Well, why do we have something called AFRICOM?
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Because we have a massive empire all over the world. And you might say, well, that's bad and we've got,
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okay, fine. All I'm saying is you don't govern that country with small government.
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You can, however, govern that country with limited government. Those are not the same thing.
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Limited government means you are restraining the powers. You don't let the government do whatever
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it wants to do capriciously, arbitrarily. Well, that's good. You got to rein that in. Absolutely.
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But don't just give a blank check to big business. Big business is just as capricious and dangerous as
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big government. Actually more so because there's no accountability whatsoever. When Zuckerberg and Jack
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Dorsey want to censor the people's representative. At the same time that this was going on, the left
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was pursuing a similar policy. So, so what the right was doing was shrinking the legitimate realm of
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politics saying we can't, we can't, we actually can't question Mark Zuckerberg's behavior. Private
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company, business good, government bad. At the same time, the left was going in and also shrinking
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the realm of politics. In the, in the seventies, these awful screechy second wave feminists had
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this expression, the personal is the political. What they meant by that is that personal behaviors,
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the way a husband relates to his wife, the way you relate to your kids, the way you educate your
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kids, that's all open to public scrutiny. While at the same time, political questions get taken out
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of politics. So a way to kind of bring this to earth and give a good example is abortion. Abortion,
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highly controversial political issue. Obviously it's not addressed in the constitution. The people
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have a right to debate and decide, do we want to permit the killing of a million babies a year
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in the womb? Or do we want to outlaw it? Or do we want to outlaw it after 10 weeks? Or do we want to
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outlaw it after 20 weeks? Or do we, whatever, right? That's a political question. And then what the left
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said with Roe versus Wade is that they had the Supreme Court invent a fictional constitutional
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right to abortion. So while everything's becoming really political, they take a, a very important
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political question, remove it from the realm of politics. So in that way, the political realm all
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shrinking, the private realm growing, growing, private realm taking over these political questions
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and who sets the rules? Jack Dorsey. Don Jr. to me, nearly, he nearly got this exactly right.
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He observed something that was very true and he just missed a couple of words. He tweeted
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out, big tech has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America. I think a lot of people
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feel that way right now. It's not quite true, but it's close. It's not that big tech has totally
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eliminated the notion of free speech in America. It's that big tech has totally eliminated the
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American notion of free speech. Let me ask you a question. Is speech in America today freer or less
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free than it was in the past? What do you think? I think most people right now, most conservatives are
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going to say, well, speech is much less free. We used to be able to speak more freely. I'm not so sure
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about that. Is speech today more or less free than it was in the fifties? Well, for conservatives,
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I guess it's less free, right? You know, now if you wave an American flag, you can, you can be kicked
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out of school or if you wear a make America great again hat, you will, you can actually be suspended
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from school. So it's less free, but it's more free today for communists. In the 1950s, we had
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something called the Smith Act through which hundreds of communists were prosecuted for their
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associations, for their beliefs, for their free speech. In the 1950s, you had people who expressed
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communist political views. They were blacklisted. They couldn't work anymore. So, so today speech is
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less free for conservatives, more free for communists. How about the 1790s? In the 1790s,
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we had the Alien and Sedition Act, which meant that if you were to criticize, there were a lot of
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aspects to this law, but if you were to criticize the government wrongly, if you were to lie and
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criticize the government, slander the government, you could be prosecuted for that. So, so today
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speech is much more free for dishonest critics of the federal government than it was in the 1790s,
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but it's much less, less free for conservatives. Go a little further back, go back even before the
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Declaration of Independence. Go back to the 1620s, earliest days of our country, you know, after the
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pilgrims came here. There was a colonist by the name of Thomas Morton. Thomas Morton was guilty of
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a heinous crime. He wrote poems and sundry verses, according to then Governor William Bradford,
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that were lascivious. They were verses that were kind of like sexy, you know, he wrote some like sort
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of sexy poems. Governor Bradford marooned him on an island and banished him to Britain.
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Do you, do you think, do you think that speech is more free or less free today for people who want
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to write sexy poems? Probably more free for them, but less free for conservatives. The
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aspect of this social media purge of this battle over political correctness or wokeism or big tech
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tyranny or whatever term you want to use. Everyone thinks it's about free speech and
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free speech and censorship. It's not. It's not. At all times in all societies, some speech is permitted
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and some speech is censored. What it really is about is a fight between competing standards,
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the conservative, the old standard, where you're allowed to wave the flag, but not the hammer and
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sickle, or the new standard where you're allowed to wear the Che Guevara shirt, but not the MAGA hat.
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Now, that's the competition right now. That's the debate. Which standard are we going to live
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under? And the more we talk about free speech absolutism, we don't censor any speech. The more
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we talk about that, we're actually playing into the left's hands because they know there's got to be
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some censorship. There's always got to be some censorship. You're not allowed to say whatever
00:24:27.960
you, no society has ever permitted that. Least of all the United States, you can't preach sedition.
00:24:32.520
You can't preach fraud. You can't preach fighting words. You can't preach threats.
00:24:36.420
There's got to be some censorship. Which standard is going to reign? Which is going to reign? Right
00:24:41.200
now, it's not looking good. And it's really not looking good for us here. I mean, I, as I referred
00:24:46.820
to earlier, conservatives are being clamped down on, on social media. We are losing tens of thousands of
00:24:54.960
our audience by the day. It's not because people are unsubscribing. It's because big tech is limiting
00:24:59.420
our reach. Then when we try to go to other platforms to get the message out so that we
00:25:03.100
can communicate with one another, they shut those down too. How long before they come after us?
00:25:08.720
How long before they kick these shows off of social media? It could be days. This is,
00:25:15.480
I hope it's not. I hope we get to stay on, but it could be days. They've already tried shenanigans.
00:25:21.300
And then how long before we're kicked off of the internet? I don't know. I, we, we've just got,
00:25:28.220
this is going to go through a period of pain right now and we've got to be very careful. One way to do
00:25:32.540
that is you have to subscribe. You know, I, I usually don't pitch subscribing to Daily Wire
00:25:38.140
super duper hard because you can listen to the show on radio. You can listen to the show on your
00:25:43.960
podcast apps for free. You can watch some of it on YouTube. I just don't know how, for how much
00:25:48.480
longer that's going to be true. They're, they're very likely will come a time when you need to
00:25:52.900
subscribe. It's the only way that we can fight back and get a voice out. So please head on over
00:25:56.500
to dailywire.com, become a member. We'll be right back with a lot more.
00:25:59.860
We have got to ditch these shallow slogans like free speech absolutism or these shallow ideas like
00:26:21.560
we don't want to censor anything. We do, we, I want to censor threats. I think we should censor
00:26:27.460
threats. I think we all agree with that. I want to censor fighting words. I think we all agree with
00:26:33.700
that. I want to censor fraud. I think we all agree with that. I want to censor sedition. I think most
00:26:40.800
of us agree with that, don't we? I think so. I want to censor ideas that undermine the very basis
00:26:51.180
of the country, the philosophical basis of America. Conservatives always agreed with that. Now, I don't
00:26:56.820
know. Maybe it's more split. Conservatives used to agree with the idea that we shouldn't be able to
00:27:01.420
desecrate the American flag because it's an incoherent act. You're not allowed to claim
00:27:06.020
First Amendment protections as your justification for burning the American flag, which is a symbol of
00:27:12.300
the entire country, including your First Amendment protections. It doesn't make sense. In recent years,
00:27:17.220
we've taken a much more permissive stance. What's it gotten us? Not, not very far, not very far.
00:27:22.600
Big tech used this excuse of the Capitol riot to clamp down on us.
00:27:31.620
If the riot had not happened, I think they would have eventually found something else.
00:27:37.380
I think they've been looking for an excuse for a long time. And they've done it to some people,
00:27:42.920
right? They kick Alex Jones off the internet and no one really says boo. Some of us did. I mean,
00:27:49.240
I, I, at the time I said it was a very bad thing, but most people didn't care. Because Alex Jones,
00:27:55.060
he's that crazy guy who talks about how they're turning the fricking frogs gay. Remember that?
00:28:00.000
Which, you know, it's funny of all the things that Alex Jones has said, some of which are a little,
00:28:03.920
a little more out there than others. The thing about the gay frogs actually turned out to be true.
00:28:09.460
This is how I looked it up one day. There actually, there was some study, I think it was between Yale and
00:28:12.980
the EPA that some chemicals in the water had been making frogs hermaphroditic. So actually it's not
00:28:18.300
that they were turning the fricking frogs gay. They were turning them trans. They were, Alex Jones
00:28:22.680
was actually too reserved in his, in his take on things. Neither here nor there. Very few people
00:28:28.460
spoke out for Alex Jones. Now they're taking off the president. That's quite a, even the New York
00:28:35.020
Times, which has gone so insane. Even Kevin Roos, the technology columnist at the New York Times
00:28:39.180
published a column. They said, man, this is bad. This is at least very scary
00:28:44.060
that this amount of power resides in the hands of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and these
00:28:53.360
unaccountable billionaires. But they're going to keep using this. They're going to use the Capitol
00:28:59.320
Hill riot as the excuse to shut us all up. And you're going to have squishy fake Republicans,
00:29:05.080
guys like Mitt Romney or Arnold Schwarzenegger come out. Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor
00:29:09.160
of California, but he was basically governed like a Democrat. He wasn't, wasn't particularly strong.
00:29:13.280
They're going to come out and use any manner of hyperbole to cram this narrative down our throats.
00:29:22.900
Schwarzenegger just came out. He posted a video comparing the Capitol Hill riot to the Nazis in
00:29:29.480
Kristallnacht. I grew up in Austria. I'm very aware of Kristallnacht or the night of broken glass.
00:29:37.040
It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the proud
00:29:45.380
boys. Wednesday was the day of broken glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in
00:29:52.640
the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol.
00:29:58.280
They shattered the ideals we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building
00:30:03.980
that housed the American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.
00:30:15.680
Last I checked, during Kristallnacht, rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany,
00:30:25.360
Austria, and the Sudetenland. They murdered at least 91 Jews, very likely many more. 7,000 Jewish
00:30:34.660
businesses were damaged or destroyed. And 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration
00:30:41.700
camps. And during the Capitol Hill riot, one of the pro-Trump rioters, Ashley Babbitt, was shot and
00:30:51.920
killed by police. And a police officer sadly died. And a rioter took, took photos messing up Nancy Pelosi's
00:31:04.060
office. And some other fellow took a podium and posed for funny pictures with a podium.
00:31:11.860
Both bad things. I'm not saying that either of those events were, you know, Kristallnacht or the
00:31:16.620
Capitol Hill rioter. I'm not, not defending either, either of those events. Not on the same level.
00:31:21.520
Very different. Torching hundreds of synagogues, deporting tens of thousands of people,
00:31:29.320
killing lots and lots of people, damaging 7,000 businesses. Different. Very different.
00:31:36.060
Not every bad thing is the Holocaust. This should be emblazoned on every debate stage,
00:31:46.380
on every camera that films a political commentator or a politician. I wish people would take this to
00:31:54.100
heart. Not every bad thing is the Holocaust. Idiots compare bad things to the Holocaust all the time
00:32:01.280
because they don't have any other historical perspective. So the two, you know, the two things
00:32:06.860
you'll hear, everything is either the Holocaust or the fall of Rome. I suppose some things are like
00:32:12.020
the Holocaust and the fall of Rome in some ways, but very few. There are other historical events.
00:32:19.940
And, you know, Schwarzenegger was not alone in, in this kind of hyperbole. AOC, everyone's favorite
00:32:26.840
darling socialist congresswoman, went on television and said, look, you think that, you know, it was a
00:32:34.200
demonstrator who died and then a police officer died later from wounds and apparently some other
00:32:38.300
medical condition, but it's sort of unclear. No, it wasn't that. And then I think three other people
00:32:43.640
just like happened to be around the protest and had heart attacks, things like that.
00:32:48.740
Obviously not from the violence. But regardless, say, I don't know, five, five people, four of whom
00:32:54.520
were demonstrators, three of whom then died from their own medical emergencies. Okay. Very, very sad,
00:33:01.920
right. AOC took that and somehow read that as, uh, nearly half of Congress almost dying.
00:33:10.640
Well, you know, I absolutely believe that, um, impeachment should be scheduled for several
00:33:14.860
reasons, several reasons. One, of course, uh, our main priority is to ensure the removal
00:33:19.760
of Donald Trump as president of the United States every minute and every hour that he is in office
00:33:25.540
represents a clear and present danger, not just to the United States Congress, but frankly,
00:33:31.300
to the country. But in addition to removal, we're also talking about complete barring of the president
00:33:37.960
or rather of Donald Trump from running for office ever again. And in addition to that, the potential
00:33:44.200
ability to prevent pardoning himself from those charges that he was impeached for. We came close
00:33:52.260
to half of the House nearly dying on Wednesday. I don't think that we did. I don't, I don't think
00:34:02.540
nearly half of the House almost died. Uh, I don't think nearly any member of the House almost died. I don't
00:34:10.860
think any member of the House was even injured. Uh, that's just a complete lie. It's just completely made
00:34:18.740
up. Well, why does AOC, AOC is very good at this. You might call it the big lie. She's, AOC is very
00:34:26.280
good. That's, that's a phrase by the way that you're going to be hearing a lot of left-wingers
00:34:29.680
now referring to. Like for instance, because, uh, Joe Biden has been comparing Republican politicians
00:34:34.940
to Joseph Goebbels because Joe Biden is a liar and an idiot and a cynic and a hack and a very,
00:34:42.080
very, very bad man. And so they're going to, they're all going to call everyone Nazis. And then
00:34:48.420
AOC is going to come out and lie and say, oh, half the members of Congress almost died. Not, uh,
00:34:53.760
none of them. The, the last time that members of Congress almost died like that
00:34:58.820
was not the Capitol Hill riot. It was 2017 when a Bernie bro shot up the congressional baseball game
00:35:05.380
and very nearly killed Steve Scalise and other members of Congress. Steve Scalise really was close
00:35:11.740
to death, but other guys, right? Rand Paul was hiding out, right? Rand Paul could have been hit
00:35:16.180
other people too. That, that story disappeared from the news. You didn't hear about the Nazi
00:35:23.040
Democrats and all these sorts of things because that was not helpful to their narrative. So even
00:35:29.380
though the congressional baseball game shooting was much, much, much, much, much more dangerous to
00:35:34.160
members of Congress, that one disappeared. And you didn't see the hand wringing and all of these
00:35:40.260
sorts of, uh, hysterical calls for, for instance, the impeachment of the president. Why do they want
00:35:45.460
to impeach the president? He's going to leave office in what? Eight days or something, 10 days.
00:35:51.940
Why do you want to impeach him? Because they don't want him to be able to run for office again. Why
00:35:55.600
don't they want him to run for office again? If this guy's such a failed president, he never would
00:35:59.900
have a chance, right? Wrong. They are not doing this because they believe that Donald Trump
00:36:07.380
is very, very weak and Joe Biden is very, very popular. Quite the opposite. They are not shutting
00:36:14.440
up every conservative on social media and trying to legally bar the president from running for office
00:36:20.420
again, because they think that he could never get a lot of votes, that he could never win,
00:36:26.340
that he's not popular. That's not it at all. Raises a lot, a lot of eyebrows. Moreover,
00:36:33.800
if we're told that now, because president Trump said, Hey, attend a rally in DC to support me and
00:36:40.980
the make America great again movement, but don't become violent. Be very peaceful. Go home. If
00:36:45.960
you're getting violent, don't be violent. If we're told that that is an incitement to violence that is
00:36:51.840
worthy of impeachment, what do we make of Kamala Harris who actively encouraged the BLM riots that
00:36:58.460
burn down cities coast to coast and killed dozens of people over the summer? I know that there are
00:37:04.060
protests still happening in major cities across the United States. I just not seeing the reporting on
00:37:08.340
it that I, that I had for the first few weeks. Um, they're not going to stop. They're not going
00:37:13.300
to stop. And that's, they're not, this is a movement. I'm telling you, they're not going to
00:37:17.880
stop and, and everyone beware because they're not going to stop. It is going to, they're not going
00:37:22.960
to stop before election day in November and they're not going to stop after election day.
00:37:26.900
And that should be, everyone should take note of that on both levels, that this isn't,
00:37:31.780
they're not going to let up and they should not. And we should not. They're not going to let up and
00:37:36.900
they should not. And we should not. They had been burning cities and burning businesses and killing
00:37:43.420
people all around the country to achieve a political end. And Kamala Harris encouraged it.
00:37:51.100
The equivalent would be if Mike Pence came out after the Capitol, let's say for instance,
00:37:55.480
that the Capitol Hill riot was much deadlier than it was. Let's say that they burned down,
00:37:59.680
I don't know, the Capitol building, or they burned down some other government buildings,
00:38:02.300
or they killed dozens of people. And then the next day, Mike Pence came out and instead of
00:38:06.660
condemning it, like all the Republicans did, including the president, let's say Pence came
00:38:09.880
out and he said, Hey, they're not going to stop. Huh? Those guys at the Capitol, they're not going to
00:38:14.900
stop, nor should they stop. And we shouldn't stop either. They're never going to stop.
00:38:19.820
So give us power. Could you imagine? No, you can't imagine. Because Republicans don't do that
00:38:27.240
sort of thing. But the left does. And they've somehow, because they've just taken over the
00:38:33.560
whole culture and they've taken over the politics and they've taken over the language that we use,
00:38:39.820
they have somehow convinced us that the Capitol Hill riot, bad as it was, was worse than months and
00:38:46.280
months of BLM death and destruction across the country. And the apparently elected vice president
00:38:54.680
elect Kamala Harris, encouraging it. Kamala Harris, when people got arrested for burning down
00:38:59.600
Minnesota, do you know what, do you know what she did? She posted a fundraising link
00:39:03.420
to, to their bail fund. Some of that money was used to bail out a child rapist,
00:39:10.140
a guy who raped an eight year old girl. She's apparently going to be the vice president.
00:39:18.000
Imagine that. And we're hand wringing about, oh, Donald Trump. Well, he should have condemned the
00:39:23.880
violence eight minutes prior. He, he waited five minutes too long. Give me a break. Goodness gracious
00:39:30.760
people. Somehow, some people are still sort of listening to Mitt Romney. Well, he lectures all of
00:39:37.140
us. Romney marched with these, with these guys, BLM and Antifa. He marched with them. Well, no,
00:39:44.240
he only marched with the, with the peaceful BLM protesters, not the violent BLM and Antifa rioters.
00:39:53.980
First of all, didn't see a whole lot of a difference if you look at the rubble of the
00:39:58.700
cities the day after. But do you think that that subtle distinction is, is being appreciated on the
00:40:03.580
right between the 99.999% of peaceful demonstrators and the 0.001% of people who stole a podium and
00:40:13.300
messed up Nancy Pelosi's desk? I don't think so. Not the only ones. Slate, former CNN contributors,
00:40:23.580
other prominent leftists, current CNN anchors, all promoting violence, all promoting violence.
00:40:31.120
These are the BLM stuff and the Capitol Hill stuff. They are analogous except in one way, two ways.
00:40:41.020
One, BLM was much deadlier, much more ruinous, caused much more damage to businesses and people's
00:40:49.120
lives. But two, BLM got something out of it. BLM got political concessions out of it. BLM helped shape
00:40:58.280
the Democratic Party agenda on defunding the police. Talk about, you know, attacking the heart of our
00:41:04.480
democracy. Law and order is, is the heart of our democracy, right? The, the police are the law
00:41:09.360
enforcement agency that go in and defend the American system. That seems like a threat to me.
00:41:15.460
The left got something out of it. The right didn't get anything out of the misguided and very,
00:41:20.860
very bad. Capitol Hill riot. Slate comes out, quote, nonviolence is an important tool for protests,
00:41:30.140
but so is violence. They tweeted that out June 4th, 2020. This was during BLM.
00:41:36.480
Nonviolence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence. Imagine if the Daily Wire the next day
00:41:43.400
tweeted out, you know, nonviolence is good for the Make America Great Again movement,
00:41:47.220
but violence is important too. Should have taken a few more podiums. Should have smashed a few more
00:41:53.800
windows. Maybe worse. That would be the equivalent. Slate still has its Twitter account.
00:42:00.360
If the Daily Wire ever tweeted anything like that, I assure you not only would our social media accounts
00:42:05.240
be gone, our web hosting would be gone too. The president tweets out, be peaceful. They take away
00:42:10.320
his Twitter account and Facebook access. Other leftists, CNN's Riza Aslan, who is actually a
00:42:18.080
cannibal. He's actually eaten human brains. That's the kind of person they put on CNN.
00:42:22.240
He tweets out, quote, if they even try to replace RBG, we burn the entire effing thing down.
00:42:29.080
I don't need to point out what would happen if a right winger said something similar.
00:42:33.620
Emmett McFarlane, who's some blue check mark on the left. I don't even know what he does.
00:42:36.680
Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court.
00:42:41.220
Laura Bassett, same thing. If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be
00:42:45.680
riots. Okay. Well, there were, I guess. Charlotte Clymer, who is this transgender fellow who is very
00:42:52.140
vocal and left wing. We're now walking to Mitch McConnell's house to protest. So now actually going
00:42:58.540
to threaten the guy's house. Obviously. Chris Cuomo, I guess is probably the greatest example
00:43:06.580
of this. Cuomo openly on national television. If you can call CNN national television, it's mostly
00:43:12.420
just an airport intercom system, but theoretically it's a big TV network goes out and defends violent
00:43:19.040
protests. Now, too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow
00:43:26.680
citizens to take to the streets, persistent and poisonous inequities and injustice. And please show me
00:43:34.520
where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful. As we have noted before,
00:43:40.540
the first amendment is where it says that protests are supposed to be peaceful because you have the
00:43:44.340
right to peaceably assemble. But I actually can't believe I'm saying this. I want to defend Chris
00:43:50.020
Cuomo for a second, not defend the point he's actually making, but to defend the thinking behind the point
00:43:56.300
that he's making. While we're all getting blue in the face, yelling about the double standards here,
00:44:04.320
we are failing to acknowledge that this is about standards. Getting back to what we were talking
00:44:10.720
about earlier in the show. This is not about free speech. This is not about censorship. All societies
00:44:18.100
permit some amount of speech and they all enforce some degree of censorship. This has been true
00:44:24.060
everywhere throughout the entire history of the world and it has been true in the United States,
00:44:29.080
maybe particularly in the United States. Areopagitica, which is the greatest defense of free speech in the
00:44:36.540
English language, says that we shouldn't give free speech to Catholics and Milton actually makes some good
00:44:41.100
arguments for it. John Locke in his letter on toleration says we shouldn't tolerate atheists and he makes
00:44:47.400
some good arguments for it. Even the most robust liberal defenses of free speech acknowledge that
00:44:54.540
there are limits in censorship. What the left is saying is that if you go out and you protest and
00:45:02.320
it becomes violent and you loot Gucci stores in the name of BLM, that is a good thing and we will
00:45:08.740
tolerate that. But if you go out and wave the American flag and let's say it becomes somewhat violent,
00:45:14.060
we will not tolerate that. We will give BLM spots at the Democratic National Convention and we will put
00:45:20.940
the MAGA protesters in jail and certainly the rioters are going to jail. Those are different
00:45:27.600
standards, but we've always had standards. In the 1950s, if you went out and held a big protest,
00:45:34.760
even a peaceful protest for communism, you could be prosecuted for that. As well, you should be.
00:45:41.680
Frankly, if we were a little tougher on communism today, we might not be in the position that we're
00:45:46.560
in. And if you went out then and waved an America flag or you said, make America great again, you'd be
00:45:51.860
totally fine. We had standards then too. We will always have standards. And what conservatives have
00:45:58.740
unfortunately done is we've come out and we've said, hey, I support all sorts of speech. I don't want
00:46:07.700
any standards at all. Say whatever words you want on television. Oh, drag queen story hour. It's a
00:46:12.140
blessing of liberty. Oh, it's wonderful. I would never, because if I tell you that you're not allowed
00:46:18.720
to host a drag queen story hour and have transvestites twerk for toddlers, well, then you might tell me that
00:46:25.680
I can't go to church. And so we're all just going to throw up our hands because they're all the same,
00:46:29.380
right? No, no. Good to go to church. Bad to go to drag queen story hour. We should encourage people
00:46:38.940
to go to church or, you know, practice their religion generally. Good religion though, not like
00:46:44.940
Satanism. I don't think we should promote Satanism. Don't think we should promote secular
00:46:50.000
liberalism. That's a pretty weird religion. There was just a video that went around, a New York Post
00:46:54.100
sent it out of this, this white woman forcing her children to kneel down and pray to black women,
00:47:01.960
actually to make an idol out of black women, actually to objectify black women, which is kind
00:47:06.660
of ironic. She doesn't think she's doing that. I just thought, man, secular liberalism, that is a
00:47:10.220
weird religion. That is one of the strangest religions I've ever seen. But you want to promote
00:47:14.400
the good. You want to discourage the bad. We've always understood this in America. Conservatives,
00:47:21.460
libertarians, liberals, all understood this. Well, liberals and progressives still understand this.
00:47:28.200
They still understand. You got to promote some things. You got to discourage other things.
00:47:32.400
Just they flip the standards. Right now, there's a tweet, went up on January 7th from the Chinese
00:47:38.980
embassy in the United States. It says, quote, study shows the population change in Northwest China's
00:47:44.500
Zhangjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region involves the overall improvement in population quality.
00:47:49.860
Oh, man. An increasing number of youths chose to spend more time and energy on personal development.
00:47:56.040
Population change and population improvement. This is an open call by an enemy nation for genocide.
00:48:04.660
Open promotion of genocide on Twitter. Totally fine. That's okay, according to the new standards.
00:48:10.160
But the duly elected sitting president of the United States calling for peace, not permitted on Twitter.
00:48:20.220
Are we going to say, well, I can't take a side. We can't promote one over the other. We need to support
00:48:24.700
every single view. Viewpoint neutrality. We're going to say that? It doesn't seem to be working well in
00:48:30.720
practice. Speaking of racial caste systems. Joe Biden is proposing one. President elect Joe Biden says
00:48:40.380
his priority when he gets into office is going to be to support black businesses and Latino businesses
00:48:51.280
and all sorts of businesses, but not white businesses. Our focus will be on small businesses
00:48:56.620
on Main Street that aren't wealthy and well-connected, that are facing real economic hardships through
00:49:02.920
no fault of their own. Our priority will be black, Latino, Asian, and Native American-owned small
00:49:09.420
businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild.
00:49:15.380
That's a new standard. That's a new standard. The older standard, which we've had for, you know,
00:49:21.460
at least about 50 years, at least half a century in this country, is we're not going to push racial
00:49:27.580
preferences. We're going to let people stand on their own. We're not going to prioritize race.
00:49:33.540
Now we've got a new standard, which is we are going to prioritize race. Certain races are going to
00:49:37.820
get preferences. Certain races are not. Pretty ugly stuff to me. That's the future unless you stand up
00:49:44.120
for a standard of your own. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.
00:49:52.480
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the
00:49:57.520
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00:50:02.660
Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to check out the other
00:50:07.960
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00:50:13.040
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring. Our technical
00:50:18.420
director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production
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is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2021. On The Matt Walsh Show, we talk about the
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