The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 691 - The Circle of Strife

00:00:00.000 The job of the White House press secretary is to take questions from the press and then answer

00:00:06.600 them. And when the press secretary doesn't want to answer the questions, her job is to answer

00:00:12.940 different questions and thereby evade the questions that she was asked. But our current

00:00:18.040 White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, cannot do either of those things. So instead, she circles

00:00:24.760 back. I can, I'll circle back if there's more I can share with you. I'll circle back with you if

00:00:29.480 there's more to convey. I'll have to just circle back with you. We can circle back. I'm happy to

00:00:33.760 circle back with you. I can circle back. I will have to circle back on that one. That's an excellent

00:00:38.780 question. Oh, such an important question. We will circle back with you and we'll circle back with

00:00:42.600 you. It's an interesting question, but we'll circle back. I'm happy to circle back, but I'll have to

00:00:46.680 circle back with you on it. It's a good question, but we'll circle back with you on this today. We

00:00:50.280 will certainly circle back with you more directly. I hate to disappoint you, but I will have to circle

00:00:54.860 back with you on that as well. No disappointment at all, Jen. I know you got to circle back. We

00:01:00.740 will circle back on all the things that she doesn't want to tell us about. I'm Michael

00:01:04.500 Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment

00:01:16.380 from yesterday is from BPOW246, who says, I keep forgetting that Joe Biden won a fair

00:01:25.360 election and is now president. Fortunately, YouTube is here every day underneath the

00:01:30.940 Michael Knowles Show to remind me. I didn't even realize they did this, but underneath my shows,

00:01:36.660 it'll say very often, Joe Biden won the election and it was fair and don't question anything about

00:01:42.680 the election. You just think, you know, that's the sign of a really confident ruling class.

00:01:47.700 You know, the ruling class is so confident that the election was totally fair and square and nobody

00:01:54.400 has any questions about it that they need to tell us every single day, every place that they

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00:03:15.440 LifeLock. Conservatives have been having some fun at Jen Psaki's expense because of the incessant

00:03:24.760 promises to circle back. And just in my own experience, maybe if you've heard this phrase,

00:03:31.660 there are similar phrases that people just throw out and say, oh, we're going to follow up. Hey,

00:03:36.620 you know, we're just, we're going to follow up and we're going to circle back and synergy and I don't

00:03:40.820 all this kind of jargon that millennials use. The thing about circling back is nobody ever circles

00:03:45.760 back. They only say that because they don't have the answer and then they leave the meeting or

00:03:50.660 whatever and that's it. And hopefully they never have to answer it again. So we were all making fun

00:03:54.720 of Jen Psaki for this on the internet. Apparently she took note because now she finally did decide

00:04:03.940 to circle back. And last thing I just want to do before we get to your questions. I often note I'm

00:04:09.900 going to circle back. I hate to disappoint conservative Twitter, but I am going to circle

00:04:13.260 back on a number of things as we often do directly. Yeah. You're going to go circle back now because we

00:04:18.580 all made fun of you because you never circled back. That's what we, we made you do this. We

00:04:23.460 conservatives of Twitter where Jen Psaki obviously was scrolling and scrolling. And I think

00:04:29.240 maybe got, we got under her skin a little bit. In a way I miss those halcyon days when Jen Psaki would

00:04:35.220 just not answer any questions because when she gives us the answers to questions, those answers

00:04:40.760 are pretty radical. One example, this in the continued persecution of Donald Trump, who they're

00:04:49.600 still trying to convict in his impeachment trial after he's left office. If that doesn't work, I'm sure

00:04:54.680 they're going to go after him in the Southern district of New York or some other sort of court.

00:04:58.120 Now they're trying to take away his intelligence briefings. So it has been a custom for a very long

00:05:03.180 time in this country that former presidents receive intelligence briefings. And many presidents avail

00:05:11.080 themselves of this opportunity. You know, it's part of the honor that goes with the office and to keep

00:05:15.080 them involved in the public life. Now, many members of the press and the administration are suggesting

00:05:22.680 that we deny Trump his daily intelligence briefings. Here is the softball question.

00:05:30.740 Has the White House made a determination about whether it will continue to extend the privilege of

00:05:35.320 intelligence briefings to former President Trump, given the concerns among some Democrats that he'll

00:05:39.740 either misuse it or leverage it to enrich himself?

00:05:42.620 Mm hmm. This is a good question. I've raised it with our intelligence teams or our national

00:05:47.380 security team, I should say. It's something obviously that's under review. But there was

00:05:52.260 not a conclusion last I asked him about it. But I'm happy to follow up on it and see if there's more

00:05:55.780 to share. Just think about how much of a sort of Democrat propaganda that reporter was able to cram

00:06:02.940 into that one question. Yes, Jen, do you know, is the White House going to extend the privilege,

00:06:09.940 not the tradition, not the right, the privilege of intelligence briefings to Trump, given that,

00:06:16.180 you know, some Democrats, namely me, worry that he could use this to undermine the administration,

00:06:24.300 enrich himself or collude with Russia or collude, I don't know, whatever nonsense. And she says,

00:06:30.140 wow, yeah, what a great question. Oh, my goodness. Wow. So smart. We're looking at that.

00:06:35.200 We're looking into it. We're circling back everywhere. My reaction, first reaction to this

00:06:41.780 is, are the press and the members of this administration, are they trying to deny Trump

00:06:48.860 his intelligence briefings because they think he's totally not popular at all? And he definitely

00:06:54.240 lost that election, you know, without any sort of irregularities whatsoever. And is that,

00:06:58.260 is that why they're, seems to me, they're pretty afraid of the guy. It seems to me,

00:07:02.300 they think he might still be sort of popular. Seems to me, they think that their grasp on power

00:07:06.520 is a little tenuous. But then beyond that, which, you know, we're seeing that all the time and all the

00:07:12.980 constant signs from the administration, no questions with the election, you know, all over big tech,

00:07:20.240 you see this. The Capitol, I think, is still under, under guard all over the place with a giant wall.

00:07:27.820 You can't possibly get in there now. Beyond that, do you think Donald Trump is an intelligence risk?

00:07:36.620 Donald Trump discovered many problems in the intelligence community. He discovered that the

00:07:41.680 intelligence community was illegally spying on the political opponents of the dominant regime.

00:07:46.820 he discovered that there was massive abuse from Obama-Biden associates through the FISA process.

00:07:54.640 He discovered that there were all sorts of problems with the IC. A lot of people got fired because of

00:08:00.900 it. But do you think Trump himself is, I guess if you believe that Trump is colluding with the

00:08:06.080 Russians or something, then you think he's in a security risk. We had a multi-year Mueller investigation.

00:08:12.760 You remember that? Remember that saga? It's Mueller time. And they concluded that there was no collusion

00:08:19.120 with the Russians whatsoever. However, there is some collusion with the Russians from the new

00:08:25.140 administration. Namely, there's a photo of Jen Psaki herself standing with John Kerry, standing with some

00:08:31.940 Russian dude, wearing a giant Russian hat with a hammer and sickle on it. I'm not joking. She's got the

00:08:38.580 symbol of the Communist Party on her hat. She's wearing it. This was apparently a gift from the Russian

00:08:43.220 delegation. And Jen Psaki foolishly put it on her head and took a picture. Do you think that the Russians

00:08:50.200 didn't realize this would be very embarrassing for the Americans to have this official wearing a

00:08:56.140 communist hammer and sickle hat? But they did it anyway. Ha ha. That's how we'll reset our relationship. If

00:09:02.600 anybody in this situation is the security risk, one guy, Donald Trump, the one who hugs and kisses

00:09:07.620 the American flag, one lady, the person wearing a hammer and sickle on her head in Russia, got to

00:09:12.740 tell you, I don't think it's Donald Trump. The other things she's saying, just as radical, perhaps more

00:09:19.980 radical. Jen was asked about President Trump, his Twitter account, and the question of big tech

00:09:27.580 censorship more broadly. As you know, President Trump has been barred from a lot of social media

00:09:32.120 sites. I'm curious whether you think his absence has made your job any easier or the White House's

00:09:38.300 job any easier as it kind of goes forward on these COVID negotiations. In what way? Well, he created a lot

00:09:44.600 of noise, right? He would have a certain gravitational pull of Republicans who may be

00:09:48.660 more inclined to take a harder position. I wonder if that's been anything that you guys have thought

00:09:54.700 about or kind of considered. This may be hard to believe we don't spend a lot of time talking about

00:10:00.120 or thinking about President Trump here. Former President Trump, to be very clear. Ha ha. She did

00:10:05.260 it too. She did that same thing that Joe Biden did. Joe Biden just the other day was saying, well,

00:10:10.960 you know, I was talking to the president. I mean, the former President Trump. The Freudian slip is where

00:10:16.940 you say one thing, but you mean your mother. Jen Psaki just did the same thing. My broader take on the

00:10:20.920 question, though, is, goodness gracious, White House press corps, get a room. Get a room.

00:10:27.340 Hey, Jen. Oh, yes, Johnny. Isn't it awesome that Trump's off Twitter? Well, Johnny, you'll have to be

00:10:34.220 more specific. What's awesome about it? Well, you know, he's bad and he's orange and bad. Wow. Great

00:10:41.540 question, you know, but I don't even think about him. Ha ha ha. Giggle, giggle. She goes on, though,

00:10:47.560 to actually address the substance of this question. And I don't think we're going to like it.

00:10:52.700 I think that's a question that's probably more appropriate for Republican members who are looking

00:10:58.560 for ways to support a bipartisan package and whether that gives them space. But I can't say we miss him

00:11:04.900 on Twitter. Does President Biden support the continuing ban of President Trump on their sites?

00:11:10.200 I think that's a decision made by Twitter. We've certainly spoken to and he's spoken to

00:11:14.660 the need for social media platforms to continue to take steps to reduce hate speech. But we don't

00:11:21.660 have more for you on it than that. The question was, does Joe Biden think that his predecessor

00:11:27.400 should be deplatformed, kicked off of social media? Her answer was that is a decision that Facebook and

00:11:34.300 Twitter made, which is true. But the question was, what is your boss's opinion on that? What is your

00:11:41.420 boss's opinion on the handful of Silicon Valley oligarch billionaires who have the power to censor

00:11:49.540 the then sitting duly elected president of the United States? Don't you think that might be an

00:11:55.580 issue that the current sitting president of the United States might be able to weigh in on? But

00:12:01.560 she doesn't want to answer it because, of course, Biden does support Trump's continued deplatforming

00:12:07.840 because they're never going to deplatform Biden. They're never going to deplatform Democrats.

00:12:11.480 They're going to deplatform Republican presidents. And she goes on, she actually underscores this,

00:12:16.540 right? She says, Joe Biden, he's talked about how we need vigorous hate speech policies. And

00:12:23.600 I know conservatives react to this phrase, hate speech, kind of a knee-jerk reaction because we know

00:12:30.880 what the left means by that. What they mean is generally ridiculous. But I do think conservatives need to

00:12:37.020 rethink how we're talking about cancel culture, how we're talking about deplatforming,

00:12:42.180 how we're talking about censorship, and how we're talking about free speech. Because I think we're

00:12:45.420 actually getting this topic wrong. And the fact that we are getting it wrong is what is allowing

00:12:50.380 the left to just run absolute roughshod over us and claim that every single thing they don't like at

00:12:57.020 all, up to and including, I don't know, Christian doctrine, sort of broad points about the moral order,

00:13:03.680 that is all hate speech. You're not allowed to say it. And we don't want to listen to that.

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00:14:27.000 One example of hate speech, according to the left, would be a Christian news organization

00:14:35.280 that was just suspended from Twitter for saying that men cannot be women.

00:14:39.980 The Daily Citizen, which is a part of Focus on the Family, it's a sort of right-wing

00:14:43.720 Christian group, engaged in, quote, hateful rhetoric, according to Twitter, because this

00:14:50.300 is what they tweeted out. You know that Joe Biden has chosen for one of his senior health

00:14:55.320 and human services officials, a man who believes that he's a woman and presents himself as a

00:14:59.820 woman. So this is what the Daily Citizen tweeted out, quote, on Tuesday, President-elect Joe

00:15:04.820 Biden announced that he had chosen Dr. Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health

00:15:08.360 at the Department of HHS. Dr. Levine is a transgender woman. That is a man who believes he's a woman.

00:15:17.600 That's, hate, you're not allowed to say that now. You may recall a couple of years ago now,

00:15:21.600 I had a speaking tour, a national speaking tour called the Men Are Not Women and Other

00:15:27.260 Uncomfortable Truths Tour. And I was giving various speeches on things that are perfectly

00:15:33.660 common sense, such as babies are people, you know, and things like that. When I gave the Men

00:15:39.300 Are Not Women speech, I was screamed at the entire time, full first 20 minutes of the speech,

00:15:45.200 and then someone comes out with a super soaker and sprays me with some noxious sort of substance.

00:15:49.060 Then the cops got him out of there and he leaves. Now, this issue has caused a lot of consternation

00:15:59.220 on the left. And I think it's caused so much consternation because it's so undeniable. Men

00:16:05.260 are not women. Men cannot become women simply by wishing it so or by dressing like a woman or

00:16:11.120 putting on lipstick and high heels. Now, in order to affect the gender ideology that the left wants,

00:16:18.520 in the face of this, the clear things that we're seeing with our own eyes, in the face of this

00:16:25.020 obvious truth, they have to censor you. And they think that by censoring you, by changing the words,

00:16:31.240 by changing the speech codes, they will thereby be able to alter reality. And this is the kind of

00:16:38.300 hate speech policy that the left wants to pursue. This ties in with something that we refer to as

00:16:42.960 cancel culture. Ethan Hawke, who is not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination,

00:16:47.860 Ethan Hawke just came out against cancel culture too. He's plugging this new novel that he's written.

00:16:51.940 And he said, quote, in the light of cancel culture and shaming, while a lot of this moment's very

00:16:56.740 helpful, it's a difficult time to say, I want to be open about the idiosyncrasies of human sexuality.

00:17:02.580 He's got this book, A Bright Ray of Darkness, where he's talking about confused sexuality. And he says,

00:17:07.480 well, if you talk about sex too much today, you could get canceled. And because of this cancel

00:17:12.960 culture, we've got to watch what we say. So what we have to do is cancel cancel culture. And once you

00:17:16.720 cancel cancel culture, then we can all say what we want. I think conservatives need to be a little

00:17:21.760 more specific here. Obviously, there is something called cancel culture. It's a discrete phenomenon.

00:17:29.860 It's what happens right now when the left destroys your career, destroys your livelihood,

00:17:36.820 ostracizes you from society for contradicting leftist politically correct orthodoxy. That's

00:17:42.120 specifically what it is. Nobody's getting canceled for being too conservative, right? Nobody's getting

00:17:48.020 canceled for criticizing communism, okay? People are getting canceled for criticizing the dictates of

00:17:54.140 radical leftist political correctness for saying that men cannot become women.

00:17:59.860 We have fallen into the trap that we continue to fall into through political correctness,

00:18:07.260 wokeism, cancel culture. It's all, they're all basically describing the same phenomenon.

00:18:13.180 Political correctness replaces the old moral standard with new speech codes. A moral code

00:18:20.540 becomes a speech code. And in so doing, the left upends society. Conservatives react to this

00:18:29.420 one of two ways, generally speaking. Either they acquiesce, they bend the knee, they're the squishy

00:18:36.540 Republicans who go along with political correctness and follow the dictates of cancel culture and just

00:18:41.280 say what the left wants them to say. Or they abandon standards altogether and they say, I'm a free

00:18:46.960 speech purist. I think you should be able to say whatever you want. I think everybody should be able to

00:18:52.280 say exactly what he thinks and doesn't matter how radical or how subversive or how threatening or

00:18:56.640 how fraudulent. And he should face absolutely no consequences from that. And both of those reactions

00:19:02.420 are wrong. And the, even the latter, which I think most conservatives are taking right now is giving

00:19:07.980 the left an opportunity because what the left is doing is they're going in and they're saying, wait a

00:19:11.200 second, you were perfectly fine ostracizing people for holding this view or silencing people for holding

00:19:16.080 this view or firing people for holding this view when it suited your purposes. But now, now that it's

00:19:21.940 going in the other direction, now that we're doing it to people for saying conservative things, that's

00:19:25.520 totally wrong. I don't think you'd find any conservative out there who would say that if

00:19:31.520 some guy walks into his employer and, and yells Heil Hitler, that the employer has some right not to fire

00:19:37.140 him or rather that the employee has some right not to be fired, right? That the, that the employer

00:19:43.020 doesn't have the right to fire him. I don't think anyone would suggest that if you walk into,

00:19:48.120 I don't know, a government job or into your public school and you start screaming Heil Hitler,

00:19:52.620 that you can't face some punishment for that, some consequences. Is that cancel culture?

00:19:58.460 Well, it's not cancel because when we talk about cancel culture, we're talking about what's happening

00:20:01.560 right now, this very discreet leftist phenomenon. But broadly speaking, of course we have standards.

00:20:05.720 Of course we think people should face consequences for the things that they say.

00:20:09.320 Bill Buckley used to, he was the sort of founder of the modern conservative movement,

00:20:15.000 as mainstream as they get, founded National Review, hosted Firing Line, the longest running

00:20:20.100 public affairs program with a single host in television history. Bill Buckley, totally urbane,

00:20:24.600 totally acceptable. He was doing an interview in 1966 on his show Firing Line and they were

00:20:30.380 discussing McCarthyism and talk about the original cancel culture. McCarthyism really gets into it,

00:20:35.380 but it was in the other direction. And the guest of Bill Buckley is on the show said,

00:20:40.900 wait a second, Bill, if you're in any way defending Joe McCarthy, that means you're not for a totally

00:20:45.400 open society. You're not for free speech absolutism. You're not for the perfectly open marketplace of

00:20:52.940 ideas. And Bill Buckley, the, as mainstream a conservative as it gets, came out and he said,

00:20:58.160 of course I'm not. The society must be closed to certain ideas.

00:21:04.180 Because as I read you, listen to you, speak with you, the open society is an urgently necessary

00:21:13.420 aspect of all that we both value. I don't agree. No, I don't want the society to be open to certain

00:21:19.260 ideas. I am an epistemological optimist, as the unfortunate word they use, to describe people

00:21:29.340 who believe that by reason you can make certain exclusions and those exclusions don't have to be

00:21:35.380 reconsidered. I don't feel any obligation to protect the liberties of a Nazi or of a communist or, as for

00:21:41.940 that matter, anybody who seeks class legislation or genocidal warfare between people. So I want it

00:21:46.600 to be closed, at least to that extent. Of course. And by the way, every society has been closed to

00:21:54.100 some extent because societies are finite things, because language is a finite thing. If I call a

00:21:59.600 man a man, if we all agree the man is a man, then the man cannot be a woman. If the man can be a woman,

00:22:04.560 then we are talking about totally different things. We use words in society to communicate to one another

00:22:10.060 so that we use these symbols of words to refer to real things. But if the words that we're using

00:22:15.100 cannot be known what they refer to, if it cannot be known what we mean by a certain word, then we

00:22:21.680 can't communicate with one another and we can't have a society. And this is true at the very basic

00:22:26.700 level of what words mean. And it's true at a higher level of what we all believe, what binds us

00:22:31.180 together, what we're all doing here as a country. We have to share certain things. This is why we've had

00:22:36.560 broad prohibitions against seditious speech, against subversion from the very beginning of the

00:22:43.820 country. And it's taken different forms over the years, but we've always had it. Is it because

00:22:47.760 our founding fathers were authoritarian, fascist, not? No, it's because they understand that all

00:22:53.860 speech regimes have to be somewhat constrained because this is a finite world. So what does

00:22:58.600 that mean for us? It means we need to be, I think, more honest with the left. We are not saying that we

00:23:05.620 have no standards whatsoever and we can all say whatever we want and we'll descend into meaningless

00:23:10.000 cacophony all in the name of free speech, which ironically, of course, if we're just spouting

00:23:14.900 nonsense and words have no meaning, it's the opposite of free speech, right? We've totally

00:23:18.560 undermined free speech. We need to be more honest with the left and with ourselves and say, no, we

00:23:23.140 stand for certain things. It's not merely enough to stand for free speech. We have to stand for

00:23:28.380 something to say. This gets back to something we were talking about yesterday with Ryan Anderson over

00:23:34.240 the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It's not enough to say we stand for religious liberty. Sure,

00:23:38.840 religious liberty is a great thing. Free speech is a great thing. We also have to say we stand for

00:23:43.460 what we believe. What do we believe? What are we doing here as a country? Where are the boundaries,

00:23:51.440 the inevitable boundaries of society? Where are they going to be? Is it going to be on wokeism

00:23:56.980 and gender radicalism and pumping kids full of hormones to convince little boys they're little

00:24:01.540 girls and that's going to be the acceptable realm of speech? Or is it going to be in the other

00:24:05.620 direction? Little boys can't become little girls and we're not going to confuse them and

00:24:08.700 we're going to love our country. We're not going to burn our flag. We're going to have

00:24:11.700 a more traditional moral order. Which one? They're mutually exclusive. We can't have a society

00:24:16.440 that simultaneously holds all of those ideas. It requires courage to come out and say what

00:24:22.100 we actually believe. Requires courage and conviction. Buckley said this very well in God

00:24:27.620 and Man at Yale. Buckley pointed out something that we all used to know to be true. Skepticism has

00:24:33.960 utility only when it leads to conviction. What is our conviction? What is our conviction? Speaking of

00:24:42.140 convictions, Ben is going to be talking about the impeachment trial and whether or not Trump is going

00:24:48.020 to be convicted on his show. So be sure to stay tuned for that. And you know, earlier this month,

00:24:52.520 we released our first film, Run, Hide, Fight, exclusively for Daily Wire members. The audience loved it.

00:24:58.820 I loved it. I loved watching it. We got to do a premiere here with the director and the producer.

00:25:03.340 It was a lot of fun. The critics, they did not love it. This was a politically incorrect film.

00:25:09.560 Wasn't agitprop. Wasn't conservative propaganda. Just wasn't woke. So they hated it. They didn't want

00:25:16.960 it to get distribution. So we distributed it. You can get it at dailywire.com, on our mobile app,

00:25:21.300 or on our streaming apps, Apple TV, Roku. If you're not a Daily Wire member yet, use promo code RHF to get

00:25:27.780 25% off. That is RHF for 25% off. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:25:44.140 We always have speech codes. The speech codes used to be that you couldn't openly avow your allegiance

00:25:50.680 to the communist party in Soviet Russia. That might have some professional consequences for you.

00:25:56.440 That would incur some opprobrium. Now, the speech codes mean that even if you're a duly elected

00:26:03.260 senator, you're not allowed to criticize the vice president of the United States if the vice

00:26:08.100 president is a member of certain protected and aggrieved identity groups. This we just learned

00:26:14.200 from Kamala Harris. Really, we learned it from Whoopi Goldberg, describing an interaction between

00:26:22.080 Kamala Harris and Joe Manchin. So Joe Manchin is the sort of moderate Democrat from West Virginia.

00:26:27.560 Kamala Harris, radical Democrat, most radical member of the Senate back when she was

00:26:32.600 fully a senator. Now she's the vice president, but she'll also vote in the Senate.

00:26:36.440 Obviously, they don't agree on a lot of things. So Kamala Harris did something that was pretty

00:26:42.780 tough by political measures. They're trying to work out this new stimulus deal. And Kamala Harris

00:26:51.740 went down to go on local television in West Virginia and Arizona, two states where the Democrats

00:26:58.140 are a little bit more conservative, to go circumvent those slightly more conservative Democratic senators

00:27:04.360 and try to convince the voters in those states themselves and put pressure on those senators

00:27:10.400 to go vote for the Biden-Harris plan without even talking to people like Sinema in Arizona or

00:27:17.600 Joe Manchin in West Virginia. So Joe Manchin was very upset about this and he expressed his displeasure

00:27:27.360 on TV. I saw it. I couldn't believe it. No one called me. We're going to try to find a bipartisan

00:27:33.000 pathway for it. I think we need to, but we need to work together. That's not a way of working together

00:27:38.560 what was done. Fair enough. It's not like he was out there throwing bombs, but he came out and he said,

00:27:44.380 you know, this, this was really unprofessional, uncalled for, you know, pick up the phone. Let me know

00:27:49.760 what's going on. Don't go behind my back to try to turn my voters against me. Whoopi Goldberg

00:27:54.740 was very offended, not by what Kamala Harris did, but by what Joe Manchin did.

00:27:59.640 Okay. So let me just point this out, Joe. She is the vice president. She does not work

00:28:07.300 for you. She doesn't need your permission to go do this. And when you talk like that,

00:28:11.860 it sounds a little bigoted. Like you think you have the right to tell her when she can

00:28:17.360 and cannot come someplace. So Republicans are offering less than a third of what President

00:28:23.240 Biden requested. Less money for emergency employment benefits, smaller checks for individuals.

00:28:29.180 So why would she need to come to you first or would come to him first, Sonny, when she knows

00:28:35.860 what she's supposed to be talking about? This is such a cheap and lazy political shot. I, I,

00:28:42.660 when I'm considering all of the sort of left wing commentators out there,

00:28:46.520 Whoopi Goldberg is one of my favorites. I actually don't, I don't consider her the worst of the worst.

00:28:50.860 To me, this just seems like she was hastily putting her show notes together and didn't want

00:28:55.480 to take two seconds to formulate an interesting and serious thought about it. So she just plays

00:29:00.200 the race card. But it's really, really pathetic because what she's saying is Kamala Harris,

00:29:06.800 she doesn't work for Joe Manchin. Well, first of all, Kamala Harris is the, is the vice president,

00:29:11.560 right? So she's not the president, vice president, not one of the most important spots in the federal

00:29:17.240 government. In this administration, she'll be fairly important because she'll be casting the

00:29:21.340 tie-breaking vote, but the tie-breaking vote means she's got to work with senators, right? So her job

00:29:27.080 is to work with the senators to get consensus and pass legislation. She especially needs to work with

00:29:35.580 members of her own party, the Democrats. One way to really undermine all of that is to go behind

00:29:42.880 their backs and apply a lot of pressure to them in their own states without even giving them a heads

00:29:46.640 up. Forget calling them first without even giving them a heads up. And Joe Manchin expressing his

00:29:52.460 displeasure. Do you think he's displeased because Kamala Harris is black? Do you think he's displeased

00:29:57.240 because Kamala Harris is a woman? No, I think he's displeased because she behaved in a very

00:30:01.720 disrespectful and unprofessional way and they're supposed to work together for the entire administration.

00:30:07.040 Does Whoopi even believe that this is about race or sex or something like that? I don't think so.

00:30:13.480 I think it's just so easy. That is the reflex now because, speaking of standards, our new national

00:30:20.300 standard is this kind of bizarre racial and sexual caste system whereby you can just throw every sort

00:30:28.120 of complex issue or any kind of grievance onto those matters. It reminds me of when David Webb,

00:30:32.700 the political commentator, he had this woman on. She was a black left-wing woman and they were

00:30:39.800 debating some issue and it was a radio show. So she says, well, David, you only think that because

00:30:45.480 of your white privilege. And David starts laughing. He said, you know, if you knew me, lady, I don't

00:30:51.500 think you'd make that claim. She goes, no, it's just because of your white privilege. For those who don't

00:30:56.040 know David, David Webb is black. He is not a white guy. He does not. I don't know him terribly well,

00:31:01.900 but I've spent some time with the guy. I've never seen any evidence of white privilege dripping out

00:31:06.680 of the man. So she just said this to him because it's just a reflex. It's easy. Sure. Throw it off.

00:31:14.580 That's what Whoopi was doing here. And it's really, really dangerous for society to be engaging in those

00:31:20.820 sorts of things. It's so unreasoned. It's so degraded. Did you know that over 85% of grass-fed beef

00:31:30.900 sold in U.S. grocery stores is imported? That's why I buy all my meat from GoodRanchers.com

00:31:36.420 instead. Good Ranchers products are 100% born, raised, and harvested right here in the USA from

00:31:41.660 local family farms. Plus, there's no antibiotics ever, no added hormones, and no seed oils. Just

00:31:47.520 one simple ingredient. That's meat. Best of all, Good Ranchers delivers straight to your door for

00:31:52.000 added convenience. So lock in a secure supply of American meat today. Subscribe now at GoodRanchers.com

00:31:57.440 and get free meat for life and $40 off with code DAILYWIRE. That's $40 off and free meat for life

00:32:02.680 with code DAILYWIRE. Good Ranchers, American meat delivered. Speaking of degradation and a lack of

00:32:08.140 reason and the new standards, PETA is giving us an even more radical set of standards. PETA is very

00:32:15.760 concerned about speciesism. This was a story from last week. We didn't have time to get to it, but I

00:32:21.160 think it actually fits in better with what we're talking about this week. So PETA writes, quote,

00:32:25.160 words can create a more inclusive world or perpetuate oppression. Calling someone an animal as an insult

00:32:32.740 reinforces the myth that humans are superior to animals and justified in violating them. Stand up

00:32:38.480 for justice by rejecting supremacist language. All gobbledygook, but it gets even crazier.

00:32:44.900 In the image that PETA attaches to this, they say, using animals as insults perpetuates

00:32:52.560 speciesism. Speciesism, it's the new racism, I guess, or the new sexism or whatever. Instead of

00:32:59.260 chicken, say coward. Instead of rat, say snitch. Instead of snake, say jerk. Instead of pig, say

00:33:07.420 repulsive. Instead of sloth, say lazy. Because otherwise the sloth's feelings will be hurt.

00:33:14.460 And that's no good for anybody. Most people have been talking about this and making fun of it as

00:33:20.560 just a kind of ridiculous example of the extremes of the left. There is something deeper here that

00:33:28.740 I think undergirds a far more mainstream cut of the left.

00:33:34.900 They want us to fight against speciesism because it reinforces the myth that humans are superior to

00:33:42.100 animals. And this is sort of supremacist. So to briefly try to understand what all of that nonsense

00:33:49.300 means, their argument is this hyper-egalitarian argument that we can't be supremacists. Every,

00:33:55.480 not just every person has to be equal to every person, but every, and not just equal as a matter

00:34:00.980 of sort of natural rights or spiritual equality before God, but equality of outcome, equality of

00:34:07.240 property, equality of condition. But it's not just among people, it's among animals too. That any kind

00:34:13.580 of natural hierarchy, the difference between me and a cockroach and between the angels and me,

00:34:20.920 right? Any kind of natural hierarchy is wrong. It's illegitimate. It's supremacist.

00:34:29.660 Okay. Obviously that's crazy, but you start with a crazy premise, you get to crazy places.

00:34:35.940 We therefore, because we're just the same as animals, right? We're no different than animals.

00:34:40.640 We need to use all of these kinds of words and we need to change the meanings of words more broadly.

00:34:45.640 It's kind of the politically correct project. Speech is what distinguishes human beings from

00:34:52.220 other animals. Aristotle wrote about this many, many years ago. Speech is our distinguishing

00:34:57.580 characteristic. Other animals can grunt and they can make certain sounds and they can communicate

00:35:02.760 even sort of in very, very basic ways that are proper to their nature. But only human beings have

00:35:08.820 speech. And because we have speech, we can persuade one another and we are the political animal. We can

00:35:13.920 discuss how to live together and debate and have civilization. Great. When you rob words of their

00:35:23.680 meaning, when you utterly pervert words, when you try to use the distortion of words to rewrite reality,

00:35:31.580 you rob human beings of our humanity. You do exactly what PETA is trying to do. You lower us to the

00:35:38.860 level of animals, of brutes, which is what has happened to our politics. You'll notice our

00:35:43.520 politics has become far less reasoned, far less sophisticated over the past couple of decades.

00:35:49.940 If you look at, I mean, the classic example is look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These debates

00:35:56.240 that would last for hours. It wasn't sniping and interrupting each other with foul language and

00:36:01.860 jabs and barbs and all these kind of vulgar things. They were making very, very long reasoned

00:36:07.200 arguments and people would stand there and listen to them for hours. Now, if you watch the most recent

00:36:12.100 presidential debates, you'll see how degraded it's become. That's because our language has become

00:36:17.440 very degraded too. Our attention span, our ability to reason has become very degraded.

00:36:22.360 As that happens, our Republican form of government starts to crack, starts to break. As I said,

00:36:28.660 we're sort of coming apart at the seams. Now politics becomes less the matter of reasoned groups debating

00:36:36.520 one another and it becomes the matter of brute interest. We no longer have high-flying oratory.

00:36:42.140 We have grunts and shouts and screams and ultimately political violence in the streets

00:36:47.420 like animals. PETA is not just making some flippant sort of silly radical comment.

00:36:53.520 They are prophesying what is happening right now, which is that we are lowering ourselves to the level

00:37:00.340 of animals. We are giving the left exactly what they want and society does not seem the better

00:37:05.880 for it, at least from my vantage. Now there is at least one area of disagreement between a leftist

00:37:13.200 interest group and the liberal establishment. Namely, the liberal establishment wants us to eat bugs.

00:37:23.380 They do. They do. Don't doubt me on this. I'm not being hyperbolic. Obviously, I think PETA would

00:37:29.020 take some issue with this, with eating bugs. But the liberal sort of mainstream, neoliberal,

00:37:35.160 globalized left has been trying to get us to eat bugs for many years. The Economist just ran a

00:37:40.140 headline on this. The Economist, a classic sort of center-left liberal magazine, is saying,

00:37:47.220 yes, we still think the world should be eating more insects. Still not convinced? We explain why

00:37:53.240 bugs are coming to a table near you in the world in 2021. Notice this language. This is always the

00:37:59.880 language you hear from the mainstream left. It's this language of inevitability.

00:38:06.900 We think you should eat bugs. Oh, you're not convinced? Well, we're going to tell you why you

00:38:12.440 will eat bugs. Not why you will want to eat bugs. Not why you will choose to eat bugs.

00:38:17.940 But you will eat the bugs. This has led to a meme on the internet that people have sent around,

00:38:24.640 which is, I will not live in pods. I will not eat the bugs, and I will not consume. You know,

00:38:33.180 this kind of caricature of neoliberal modern society, whereby we're all locked in our tiny

00:38:40.280 little apartments, and we can't really go outside, and we're supposed to just work from home,

00:38:44.340 and we can get everything delivered to us, and we probably don't even own our apartments. We're

00:38:48.900 just probably renting them, and we're not going to eat, you know, really inefficient sort of fancy

00:38:55.040 nice meals. We're going to eat the most utilitarian, efficient way to get nutrients, and that's going

00:39:00.620 to be good. It'll be good for the environment. It'll be good for society. We're going to eat the

00:39:03.540 bugs, and we're going to consume whatever mass-produced products through globalized trade are given to us

00:39:09.020 because it'll be cheap, and that's progress, and that's modernity.

00:39:15.020 It doesn't sound like the sort of future that I want to live in, does it? You know, when people

00:39:20.440 today, when all the advanced modern people talk about, oh, in the dark ages, people lived,

00:39:25.460 they had this horrible life. Oh, in the middle ages, and in antiquity, it was so terrible.

00:39:30.760 You mean antiquity with the Roman Empire? You mean the middle ages of the height of Christendom,

00:39:39.060 the height of Western art and architecture, where we were building beautiful Gothic cathedrals

00:39:43.880 instead of hideous modern architectural blights on our landscape? They're so ugly and disgusting.

00:39:51.920 You mean that? You mean the antiquity in the middle ages where there was a cultivated sense of taste

00:39:58.680 rather than eating the bugs, rather than this kind of sterilized modern culture? I'm not engaging in

00:40:07.040 nostalgia, by the way. Nostalgia, they say, is history after a few drinks. I'm not saying everything

00:40:13.740 was better in the past and nothing's better in the present. There have been many great changes that

00:40:18.240 have happened in modernity. You know, more people are fed. They're sort of better fed, even forgetting

00:40:23.420 the bugs for a second. There's certain things that are nice about modernity. But overall, I don't think

00:40:29.860 it's this perfect, wonderful era that's uniformly better than the past. In many ways, it's much,

00:40:33.540 much worse than the past. Now, a lot of people are saying, in response to the Economist article

00:40:37.320 and these many protestations that we're all going to eat bugs, a lot of people are saying,

00:40:41.080 I won't eat the bugs. I'll never eat the bugs. Let me ask you something. If they can make you wear a

00:40:47.520 mask or two masks wherever you go in society, always like you're some sort of bandito or you're

00:40:52.540 wearing a full burqa, if they can lock us up in our pods for months and months and months at a time

00:40:57.420 and not let us go out and not let us socialize and cancel Thanksgiving and cancel Christmas and sort

00:41:02.220 of cancel election day by totally upending our electoral system in the weeks and months before

00:41:07.140 the election through, in some cases, explicitly unconstitutional measures, you really think they

00:41:14.240 won't make you eat the bugs? You really think they won't find a way to inject sort of new regulations

00:41:20.500 into our agricultural system that strongly encourages the use of bugs or something? I'm

00:41:26.180 using a sort of intentionally outlandish example to show society has been extraordinarily upended

00:41:35.000 over the past year alone, but certainly over the last 10 or 20 years.

00:41:38.920 How, how would you ever conclude that it's just going to stop? Why would you conclude that it's

00:41:47.180 just going to stop? There is hope for reopening society. At least we're told this by the geniuses at the

00:41:57.040 CDC. After almost a year of school closures and social closures, the CDC is coming out in a paper that was

00:42:04.840 just recently published saying that schools operating in-person learning with appropriate

00:42:09.820 antiviral precautions have seen only, quote, scant transmission of the virus, according to a number

00:42:16.100 of studies conducted in districts across the country. So all these teacher unions, these lazy,

00:42:22.280 overpaid teacher unions in Chicago and elsewhere who don't want to go back to work, the great heroes

00:42:28.980 don't want to go back to work. There's no evidence for that. That's not based up, based by the science.

00:42:36.540 Finally, the scientists are telling us, good, we can sort of restart society.

00:42:41.100 How do you restart society? How do you do it? You, you've shut down the country for a year. You've,

00:42:48.380 you've totally reordered how we all get along together. You've reordered how we conduct our

00:42:53.800 government. You've reordered our political or social or even our, even our familial world.

00:43:00.700 Loved ones aren't allowed to see one another. We're not allowed to bury our dead. We're not

00:43:04.060 allowed to celebrate occasions. We're not allowed to get married. We're not allowed to do anything,

00:43:07.660 or at least we're strongly discouraged from doing all those things.

00:43:12.060 How do you just reopen? You can't. It's so much easier to destroy these things. It's so much easier

00:43:18.660 to break society than it is to get it going again. This is a central conservative insight,

00:43:24.920 very easy to destroy, very difficult to build. And cynical politicians have spent the last year,

00:43:33.900 really in a broader sense, they've spent the last hundred years, but in a very, very tangible way,

00:43:39.100 they've spent the last year destroying society. We're just going to flip a switch and it's going to,

00:43:45.440 we're all going to go back then? I don't think so. I think the tail on this thing is going to be very,

00:43:50.080 very long. Even just think among your friends and relatives, all the varying degrees of concern

00:43:57.000 about coronavirus they have. For instance, me, I am living my life effectively as though there is no

00:44:04.040 such thing as coronavirus. I wear the mask when I have to, to go pick up, take out, or sometimes even,

00:44:10.460 sometimes I don't have to, or when I get on an airplane because they won't let me on the airplane if I

00:44:14.320 don't wear the mask. Otherwise, I don't wear the mask. I don't take any sorts of precautions.

00:44:18.820 I shake hands. I hug people. I practically French kiss people I see on the street, okay?

00:44:23.680 Except when they ask me not to. But other people take insane amounts of precautions.

00:44:29.840 They'll wear multiple masks. They won't see anybody. They'll lock themselves up at home

00:44:33.180 for a long time. And then everybody in the middle taking varying degrees. Well, I'll wear the mask,

00:44:39.360 but I'll shake hands. Well, I'll wear two masks and I won't touch anybody, but I'll go out

00:44:44.440 and I'll touch this person. I'm in this cluster with people. And it's so awkward because in the

00:44:51.620 casual social interactions that we have, everything is now politicized. Anything you do, if you go to

00:44:57.700 shake a hand, if you go to say hello without a mask on, if you go to hug somebody, if you even

00:45:01.440 go to see somebody, you are making a political statement. This has been another tactic of

00:45:08.740 political correctness for about 100 years. It became clearest during 1970s, 1980s, especially

00:45:16.160 through the second wave feminists who said that the personal is the political, that every kind of

00:45:21.200 personal interaction has a political connotation to it. Well, they succeeded. They did it. They've

00:45:26.440 politicized everything now. Everything is open to criticism. Everything is open to public scrutiny,

00:45:32.140 your most intimate interactions. How do you just restart that? I don't, I don't really see how you

00:45:39.600 can. Joy Behar over at The View, this is a really view heavy show today. I usually don't put two

00:45:46.300 view clips in a show. I'm going to, I'm going to have to talk to the producers after this. This is too

00:45:50.100 much for me even to stomach. But Joy Behar did make a stupid point, but it's thereby, therefore

00:45:58.040 interesting for us to discuss. How do you send the kids back to school? How do you get this all going

00:46:03.540 again? We've basically paused our lives for a year, but, but you can't really pause life. So she says,

00:46:09.800 sending kids back to school this year is so fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Why not just have

00:46:16.780 everyone repeat the year? Is that such a far out idea? Another way to put that, I suppose, is why not

00:46:24.400 have everyone just circle back? Just, just circle back because you can't circle back. You can't, you

00:46:31.240 can't go back in time. You can't repeat the year. You can't pause life. One of the subtle temptations

00:46:41.320 I've noticed about liberalism is that we all forget about time. We all just, we think that time

00:46:47.800 doesn't matter. This I think is why you have the perpetual adolescence of so many people today

00:46:53.500 who want to put off moving out of their parents' house, who want to put off getting married, who

00:46:58.280 want to put off having kids, who want to put off buckling down on their job, who want to put off

00:47:03.840 everything and everything into the future. They want to put all of that off because they think time

00:47:09.900 doesn't matter. That's what, what's the difference? If I do these things today or I do these things in

00:47:14.440 10 years, it's no big deal. Well, the difference is that the death of society, right? The difference

00:47:20.620 is even, I mean, very specifically on the birth rates and marriage rates because people keep putting

00:47:26.220 these things off so long and they, and they put them off more and more each year. We now have a dying

00:47:31.080 population, which is one of the arguments that the open borders left has for why we need to flood the

00:47:36.820 country with immigrants is because otherwise we don't have enough people to replace the current

00:47:41.200 American population. You can't just pause things. You know, this is one of the lines of John Maynard

00:47:47.820 Keynes, the, the liberal economist who said, he was asked about the effects of his policies in the

00:47:54.240 short term. He said, oh, these are great effects in the short term. They said, what about in the long

00:47:56.740 term? He said, in the long term, we're all dead, right? At a certain point, you run out of time.

00:48:01.440 You're going to tell kids who you have psychologically tortured for a year, keeping them locked up in

00:48:07.880 their little pods, away from their friends, away from learning, put their life on pause. You're going

00:48:11.360 to tell them, hey, we're going to delay it another year too. Ha ha, whatever. It doesn't matter. Just

00:48:15.820 click, click pause. It's like a video game. It's not a video game. Life is not a video game. Life is not

00:48:22.280 some simulation. Life is not something that can be lived purely virtually or digitally, ordering in

00:48:28.860 everything you need to your pod, doing all of your work from your couch, never going out and living.

00:48:33.940 That is not life at all. Putting everything off into the future and we're going to circle back and

00:48:38.760 we're going to circle back. You have to do things. Life involves action, doing things right now.

00:48:46.120 But has society become so lethargic, so decadent that we can, can no longer muster ourselves to do

00:48:51.540 those sorts of things? I sure hope not. We're going to keep trying to do things here. I know you want to

00:48:55.640 do things too. Let's do more things tomorrow. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:49:05.720 If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the

00:49:10.320 word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. We're available on Apple

00:49:15.820 Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to check out the other

00:49:21.380 Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.

00:49:26.780 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Our technical

00:49:32.100 director is Austin Stevens. Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling. Production

00:49:37.760 manager, Pavel Vidovsky. Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina.

00:49:44.360 Hair and makeup by Nika Geneva. And production coordinator, McKenna Waters. The Michael Knowles

00:49:50.180 Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2021. Today on The Ben Shapiro Show,

00:49:55.960 the Democrats unleash their impeachment strategy and it is all about emotions. Plus, President Biden

00:50:00.600 moves to ram through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Doesn't sound like a lot of unity is

00:50:05.440 breaking out. That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show. Give it a listen.

The Michael Knowles Show - February 02, 2021

Ep. 691 - The Circle of Strife

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