Ep. 699 - Everyone Loves Cancel Culture
Episode Stats
Summary
Gina Carano, a star of Disney s Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian, has been canceled apparently for a controversial comment she made about the Jews. Michael talks about it and why it s not a big deal.
Transcript
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Gina Carano, a star of Disney's Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian, has been canceled.
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She has been canceled apparently for something that she said about the Jews,
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which sounds really bad, you know, and bigoted and everything.
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We're going to get into what she actually said.
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I don't think she said anything wrong whatsoever.
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But even more broadly, if Disney executives don't like what Gina Carano has to say about the Jews,
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just imagine their shock when they Google Walt Disney.
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from yesterday is from Django Mike, who says,
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I'm a brown-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed Native American who is a white supremacist,
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according to the woke left, because I don't want to toe the line with their lunatic ideas.
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You are. I know. I mean, I know that you're sort of saying this tongue-in-cheek, but they believe this.
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I mean, they say this about Candace Owens or Ben Carson or Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas or,
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you know, sort of, especially black, but, you know, other racial minorities too, who are conservative.
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They will say, you are a white supremacist. You are, you're maybe not aware of it,
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but you're laboring under a false consciousness. And that's why we need to raise awareness,
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raise consciousness, and make you woke, right? It's all talking about the same thing.
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And that way you'll realize that you're oppressed. You think you're happy and content. You'll have to
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realize you're oppressed, and then you will stop supporting white supremacy. That's the thing.
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I think I was a little unfair to Walt Disney. You know, Walt Disney, there's this kind of
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rumor that he hated the Jews or something. He was kind of a bigot. There's actually really no evidence
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of this, but I figure it's a funny enough hit. Sam Canopy said a Baby Yoda though. I can't believe
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they haven't canceled that guy yet. You get a couple drinks in Baby Yoda. You set him off talking
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about the Jews and the Mexicans and the Italians. Oh my gosh. It's like, it's like little green David
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Duke or something. But Gina Carano didn't say anything wrong. Disney put out a statement based
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on Gina Carano's old social media posts. They say her social media posts denigrating people based on
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their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable. Gosh, abhorrent and unacceptable.
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Okay. What did she say? So I pulled up the post. This is the worst post they could find.
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This, this is the height of her bigotry on social media. Gina Carano wrote, quote, Jews were beaten
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in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children. Because history is
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edited, most people don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up
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thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
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Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
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Like she's saying, the Nazi regime had this hatred of Jews ethnically and religiously. And so it's not
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like they just came in one day and everyone was being really nice to the Jews. And then the Nazis said,
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well, no, we're going to be awful to them and round them up and, you know, commit all these atrocities.
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No, they fomented a culture in which Jews were otherized, castigated, whatever term you want to use.
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And Gina Carano is saying, this can be done politically as well. This can be done to people
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based on their political views, just as it can be based on their ethnicity or based on their
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religion. Duh, of course that's true. It's nothing, it's not denigrating Jews at all.
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She's denigrating Nazis, but that seems perfectly fine. Is the issue here for Disney that Gina Carano
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was making a Nazi comparison? Is Disney saying, you know, it's, it's wrong to invoke any sort of
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Nazi imagery ever when making a political point? Fair enough. But if you were to, if you were to
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hold that view, then most people would fall silent because the only two historical events, most people,
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especially leftists know anything about is World War II and the fall of the Roman Empire, right?
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That's all. Those are the only sort of events anyone ever invokes. Joe, Joe Biden just did this.
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Joe Biden just compared Donald Trump to Goebbels like a few months ago.
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We're not, the, the left, the entire left has been calling Donald Trump literally Hitler
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and calling 75 million Americans Nazis for years.
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But it's, it's wrong when Carano, she's not even exactly comparing the Democrats to Nazis. She's just
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saying that this kind of culture in which conservatives are being ostracized and censored
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and, and deplored that has historical parallels. Is that, is that the issue here?
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Really the reason they're doing this, because I actually thought Gina Carano had already been fired.
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This story came up months and months ago and it's, it's not because she said anything about the Jews
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or because she said anything about the Nazis or because she said anything about anybody.
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It's because she is a conservative and she supports Trump and she's made fun of woke culture. And so
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the fix was always in, they were always going to try to get her. Now they're using this ridiculous
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excuse. It's kind of like what they did to Megyn Kelly, which is you, you had people on network news
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who wore blackface, right? You had, uh, uh, what's her, Joy Behar darkened her skin for a costume.
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You had people on NBC where Megyn Kelly was working who would wear blackface in sketches. Totally fine.
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But then Megyn Kelly one day was discussing the topic of blackface. She said, you know,
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if you were to darken your skin to be part of a costume to portray an individual, not a race
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broadly, but an individual, is that okay? And they fired her for it. They call it her blackface
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controversy as it, as if raising the mere topic of blackface was so offensive. And yet for the other
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hosts to actually wear it, not offensive at all. It's, it's because there's no principle here.
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It's just that NBC didn't like Megyn Kelly. So they were going to kick her out.
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People are calling this cancel culture. I wish we could retire that phrase because I don't think
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it's helpful. It's obviously describing a real phenomenon. We're seeing it. It's where
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conservatives or anyone who's not a radical leftist gets ostracized or fired or censored,
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uh, for refusing to adhere to left-wing orthodoxy. So it's a, it's a real thing that's happening,
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There are plenty of people who should be canceled. I'll give you an example just at Disney.
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James Gunn made all those jokes about how he wanted to have sex with children.
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If anybody is going to be canceled, James Gunn should be the one to be canceled, not Gina Carano.
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I'll give you a further example though, because James Gunn might say, well, I was kidding. It was
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in poor taste, but I'm a comedian. And so, you know, you got to give me a pass. Uh, Mark Hamill,
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Luke Skywalker is accused of trying to coerce his son's girlfriend, who his son had knocked up
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into killing the baby. So Mark Hamill allegedly pressured his son's girlfriend to kill his own
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grandson. And there are apparently texts and messages and all this sort of stuff.
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If that is true, Mark Hamill should be canceled. He should be not just fired from Star Wars,
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not just fired from Disney. He should be removed from polite society. He should be ostracized.
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He should be shunned. He should be canceled. He should not be invited to participate in things.
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It's a very, very bad thing. He certainly should not be invited to participate in things until he
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repents and says, he's sorry and acknowledges how awful that is because nobody seriously opposes
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this broad definition of cancel culture. Nobody seriously believes that there ought to be no
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consequences whatsoever for things that people say and do. Nobody believes if Gina Carano had walked
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onto the set one day and said, Zig Heil, Heil Hitler had a swastika on her clothing. Nobody believes she
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should keep her job. What people are saying, when they, when people oppose cancel culture, what they're
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saying is that it, not that there should not be standards by which people rise and fall in their
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careers, but rather that the standards that people are being judged by are ridiculous because in the
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golden days, you would be judged by traditional standards. If you violate the traditional moral
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order or traditional social mores, you would face consequences. But now it's completely upended
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standards. It's left wing standards. And that's the real problem. But let's, let's not overstate our
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case. Let's not say we're free speech purists. What does that mean? There's never been such a thing as
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free speech purism. There have always been categories of speech that are not permitted in society
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and sort of behaviors that are not permitted. What we are saying, we're actually saying something a
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little harder. I think conservatives think it's really simple. It's easy. It's inoffensive to just
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say, we support all speech. We support all actions. We don't want any standards. It's really easy. This
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is why we've lost on political correctness. We need to say something that requires more courage. We need to
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say some things are right. Some things are wrong. You should be permitted to say and do some things and
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you should face consequences for saying and doing other things. We have to be willing to do that.
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That kind of a regime of speech and behavior is going to exist. It has in every society and always
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will. It's just right now we've completely ceded that ground to the left. Here's something else we
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should cancel. Gender theory. We should cancel it. We shouldn't permit it. This radical gender theory
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that says that men can be women and women can be men. You can't have a society that holds both views
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at the same time because they're contradictory views. Either men are men and women are women and one
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cannot become the other or there's no such thing as men and women and men can be men and women can
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be become men can become women and women can become men. See how confusing this is? And there's
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really no, no such thing as an immutable natural category of sex, but you can't hold both at the
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same time because they're contradictory. So we have to cancel one. We have to exclude one. We have to
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censor one. And the one we're going to cancel should be gender theory. This is what's happening right
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now in Utah. Utah House of Representatives advanced a bill that would ban, quote,
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biological boys from competing on female sports teams. There's no such thing as a biological boy
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as distinct from some other kind of boy. I may have been, I mentioned this the other day,
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but I may have been a little confusing in my language. There's just boys. They're biological
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boys. They're spiritual boys. They're, they're boys in every way. And I, I actually think we err when we,
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when we qualify these terms, well, he's a biological boy, but he's, therefore he might be some other
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kind of girl. I don't, why, why are we qualifying it? Boys are boys, girls are girls. That's it.
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Don't qualify it. If you're, if you say, well, I'm a biological boy, but I think I'm a girl. Well,
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then, but you're a boy. You're, you're not a girl. You're, you're a confused boy. Utah trying to ban
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gender theory. North Dakota just passed a similar bill. The, the lesson here is that real freedom
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requires certain limits. It excludes certain things. It can't include everything.
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Chesterton had a great line. He said, there's a thought that, that undermines thought. And that's
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the only thought that ought to be undermined, right? There, there's a, if we don't have any limits in our
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society, then we don't really have a society. You see this most clearly with borders, right? The
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physical limits of our society. If we don't have borders to our society, then there's no country,
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right? Because people can just come and go as they wish. There's no delineation of jurisdiction.
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There's nothing holding the people together. There is no people. It's just nothing. You need,
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you need limits in all aspects of this finite world. And we need to acknowledge that.
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00:15:17.800
Something else that we should cancel these days, Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is the
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failed governor of California. Some of us call him Mussolini. He should be canceled. He should
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lose his career. We should hear from him no more. He should go be a private citizen and enjoy fancy
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dinners at the French Laundry and live his life. The effort to recall Gavin Newsom is actually picking
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up steam. You know, this has been going on for, for years now. They've been trying to get to one and a
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half million signatures to recall Newsom and then force a new election. And you'll have a lot of
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different people running. They've done this in California before. That's how we got Schwarzenegger.
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We have 1.4 million signatures right now. You need to get, by March 17th, you need to get 1.5 million.
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So you'd say, okay, we're very close. It's easy. We're going to get a hundred thousand signatures,
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but it's actually not that simple because what's going to happen then is democratic operatives are
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going to come in and start taking out signatures and disqualifying them and saying, that guy no
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longer lives here. That's not that guy's address, right? This happens in every campaign. So you
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actually need to have many more signatures than the 1.5 million threshold. You probably need like 1.8,
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maybe even 2 million signatures to really make this work. Good news. The RNC is investing a quarter
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million dollars into the California recall campaign right now. So the Republican National
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Committee is finally getting involved. This to me is a very good sign. Thus far, the RNC has not
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gotten involved because these are long shot campaigns. The RNC has finite resources, so they
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don't want to blow it on a campaign that's not going to work. The injection, even of just a quarter
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million here, is a signal that there's a chance this recall effort is going to work. They're going to
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need to put some money in here, just especially as the Democrats start putting more money to tamp
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down the recall effort. Republicans are going to need to get a lot more signatures, maybe half a
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million more, you know, even, even within the next month or so. But that's a good sign. We should
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cancel Newsom. Somehow Newsom is not even the worst governor in the country right now. The worst governor
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in the country, a man we should certainly cancel, Andrew Cuomo. You know, Andrew Cuomo has gotten credit
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for being the greatest governor on COVID, even though his state leads in, or is at least very near to the top,
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in total death count, death rate, just an absolute failure in the handling of coronavirus. And this
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guy had the unmitigated goal to write a book about leadership lessons from COVID. It probably has the
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same content as my first magnum opus, reasons to vote for Democrats, totally blank book.
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So we've been saying for months and months, I spoke to my friend who's a New York state
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We've been saying that Cuomo is directly responsible in his policies for a lot of extra deaths,
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particularly among senior citizens, particularly in New York's nursing homes. The media won't cover
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this sort of thing, but now it turns out we're right. Andrew Cuomo's top aide, her name is Secretary
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to the governor, Melissa DeRosa. She just admitted and apologized in a phone call to Democratic lawmakers
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for the coverup in New York nursing home deaths during the COVID epidemic. A coverup, I use that
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word very specifically. This woman says that the Cuomo administration, quote, froze out of the fear
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that the nursing home deaths, quote, the numbers would be against us by federal prosecutors and therefore
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they wanted to hide the numbers from the feds so there wasn't an investigation. Thousands and
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thousands and thousands of New York senior citizens died needlessly because of the Cuomo
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administration's policies. They knew this at the time. When they realized it, they hid the numbers, not just
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from you and me and the public, but from federal investigators and prosecutors because they knew how bad
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this looked. She says, we apologize. We do apologize. I do understand the position that you were put in.
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I know that it is not fair. Now, I'm hoping, listening to this, that she's apologizing to the families of
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these dead senior citizens, right? It was not fair. We put you in this terrible position. I'm so sorry. No, that's
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not who she's apologizing to. She goes on. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with
00:19:40.480
the Republicans. The woman is not apologizing. The Cuomo administration is not apologizing to the
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families of these dead senior citizens. She's not apologizing to the senior citizens themselves.
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She's apologizing to Democrats because their reckless policies that killed thousands of seniors
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and the coverup that followed put Democrats in a bad political position. That's the kind of
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administration we're talking about. This man, Andrew Cuomo, the worst governor in the country,
00:20:13.460
a truly corrupt politician. I've, I've had the privilege or displeasure of, of meeting Andrew
00:20:21.180
Cuomo a couple of times because I actually, we're from right around the same town in New York and I run
00:20:27.800
into him in other places. A real bulldog type of a guy, a pure political animal. He's been in it since
00:20:33.240
his dad was governor. It was clear to anybody with two eyes, what was going on during COVID,
00:20:39.800
but the mainstream media refused to report on it. Take a listen to their, as Andrew Cuomo's policies
00:20:45.060
were killing all these seniors. And as he was covering it up from the feds, this is how the
00:20:48.800
media covered him. David, we're standing by for governor Cuomo's press conferences, daily briefing.
00:20:54.260
How would you contrast Cuomo and President Trump's handling of the crisis?
00:20:59.340
Truth versus mendacity. Governor Cuomo, um, out there day after day after day, everything Trump
00:21:05.720
isn't honest, direct, brave. Real leadership of the kind the president of the United States
00:21:11.000
should have provided. Governor Cuomo is clearly living in a totally different reality,
00:21:16.780
the actual one, than the president of the United States. Governor Cuomo has become a national leader.
00:21:21.860
For a lot of people, Andrew Cuomo has become the leader of the Democratic Party.
00:21:25.340
He is conveying incredible strength. You spoke to National Guard troops today in a stirring speech
00:21:31.700
that if I wasn't listening carefully, I thought you were sending soldiers off to war. This has been
00:21:37.000
a remarkable show of leadership by Governor Cuomo in recent days. He's providing hope, but not false
00:21:43.000
hope. Governor Cuomo, I think is, is, is one of the heroes on the front lines. With all of this
00:21:48.240
adulation that you're getting for doing your job, are you thinking about running for president?
00:21:53.080
Are you? You should be. You're doing such a good job, Andrew Cuomo. You're doing such a wonderful job,
00:21:58.400
says his brother, Chris Cuomo. How corrupt is this whole edifice?
00:22:03.220
All the while they were pushing this propaganda, this dude, Cuomo, was through his policies,
00:22:10.760
killing senior citizens and through his other policies, covering it up.
00:22:14.500
Remember that next time you trust the media. The media is, frankly, that might not even be the
00:22:20.300
most embarrassing set of clips I've seen from the media recently. The most embarrassing one might
00:22:26.200
go to the, the eulogy for the founder of Hustler, Larry Flint. I didn't actually, I didn't even realize
00:22:31.960
Larry, Larry Flint had died. Larry Flint dies and this guy is one of the most famous pornographers
00:22:38.060
in the country, other than Hugh Hefner, probably the most famous one. And to show you how far our
00:22:44.560
speech regime, our, our understanding of the moral order has fallen and how much it has shifted in
00:22:52.040
recent decades, listen to the way that CBS covers the death of this pornographer.
00:22:57.940
Flint fought several high profile legal battles and became a target for feminists and the religious
00:23:02.340
right. Flint died of heart failure in Los Angeles. He was 78 years old, love him or hate him. He was
00:23:09.220
a controversial figure, but he really did change the way people thought about the first amendment.
00:23:14.060
That's absolutely true. He was also, I mean, it's interesting. He was, he opposed the death penalty.
00:23:17.540
He favored same-sex marriage. He spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Politically,
00:23:22.080
he was very progressive. He was not what you might think that Larry Flint was going to be.
00:23:27.020
Yeah. Yeah. Some, and some reader of Hustler left a copy in a construction site when I was 10 near my
00:23:32.300
friend's house. What'd you do with it? And it changed my life forever.
00:23:36.180
And here you are on CBS's point. How about that?
00:23:40.180
This is very embarrassing for these people on, on many levels. It's a funny line. You know,
00:23:46.100
I found this, this porn magnet changed my life forever when I was 10 years old.
00:23:50.740
I think that's true. You know, I think that actually is true. And part of the reason right
00:23:55.800
now that on the right, this porn debate has come up, this question of should we regulate porn or
00:24:00.200
ban porn? You'll notice it's come up not from Gen X or the boomers or even millennials. It's really
00:24:07.340
come up from Gen Z. Why? Because Gen Z is the first generation that grew up with the internet all the
00:24:14.360
time, basically in a world saturated by not just a little nudie magazine, but by high speed internet
00:24:19.100
porn from the age of 10 or whenever, I think on average, it's people are about 11 years old when
00:24:23.520
they first discover porn in these younger generations. And it can really ruin your life.
00:24:28.420
You know, it can really make your life a lot harder. I think people make fun of, of these
00:24:33.620
zoomers when they say, we need to regulate porn. They say, oh yeah, you probably look at porn. Yeah,
00:24:38.600
they probably do. Because something like, what is it? 92% or something of men look at porn,
00:24:43.500
certainly have looked at porn. I think in terms of have seen naked ladies on the internet,
00:24:47.300
it's like 92% of men have done it and 8% of men are lying. It's what people say about the,
00:24:51.600
the statistics. Yes, they realize it's a real problem. And Larry Flint is in no small part
00:24:58.000
responsible for that. I couldn't get over it when that reporter said, you know, though,
00:25:02.740
believe it or not, Larry Flint was politically very progressive.
00:25:06.540
Gee, you don't say, oh, I thought he was a conservative Republican. I thought he was like
00:25:10.680
Edmund Burke, but oh, he's progressive, the pornographer. Wow. Shocking. Yeah. Larry Flint,
00:25:14.720
when Republican politicians would oppose the ubiquity of porn, he would go in and try to gin
00:25:21.180
up sex scandals for them in the 1990s. He endorsed Mark Sanford in 2013 for South Carolina's first
00:25:27.680
congressional district. As he said, quote, his open embrace of his mistress in the name of love,
00:25:32.000
breaking his sacred marriage vows was an act of bravery that has drawn my support.
00:25:37.200
That guy should be canceled. That kind of, that sort of culture should be canceled. That view of the
00:25:42.580
first amendment, which is completely at odds with the, with the understanding of our founding fathers
00:25:46.260
and the history, most of the history of our country, that should be canceled. It has to be,
00:25:50.460
you can't have both views. You can't have the view of the founding fathers of the first amendment and
00:25:54.600
the modern view at the same time. One view says we need to prioritize liberty, not licentiousness.
00:25:59.680
Licentiousness will destroy liberty. The modern view says licentiousness is liberty. Can't have them
00:26:04.040
both. You got to pick one. We should pick the founding fathers. We can all pray for Larry Flint's soul.
00:26:08.460
But when we think about his legacy, we should not celebrate it in the way that, that CBS is doing.
00:26:16.360
You know, one thing we can celebrate is getting a great deal on auto parts. You can do that at
00:26:21.620
rockauto.com. Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
00:26:26.860
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers. Best of all,
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prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low. They're the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
00:26:38.320
And the catalog is so easy that even I can navigate it. You know, look, I'm not going to,
00:26:43.260
I'm not going to pretend to be somebody I'm not. I'm not the handiest guy in the world. Okay.
00:26:48.240
When I go into the brick and mortar auto parts store and they start asking me questions about
00:26:51.720
whether I need the doohickey for the gizmo on my GT7 Hondas, I don't know. I have a, I have a,
00:26:57.360
I have a Honda. I don't know. You tell me what I need. And they go in the back,
00:27:01.020
they charge you twice as much and they probably order it on rockauto.com anyway. Skip all that
00:27:05.740
nonsense. Rockauto.com makes their selection so easy, so simple. Even I can do it. Go to
00:27:11.080
rockauto.com right now. See all the parts available for your car or truck. Simple enough. If I can do
00:27:18.340
it, you can do it. Uh, then write Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S in there. How did you hear about us box?
00:27:22.880
That way they will know that we sent you. Go check out Rock Auto Family Business. So simple
00:27:28.000
to navigate. Even I can do it. Go check out Rock Auto. So the journalists have completely humiliated
00:27:36.580
themselves, not just in the last few weeks, obviously over many, many years, but, but
00:27:40.980
especially in the way they've covered Cuomo, uh, especially in the way they've, they're eulogizing
00:27:46.460
pornographers. It's, that is embarrassing stuff. Meanwhile, real journalists, real investigative
00:27:53.420
reporters doing real work who, who are exposing crooked leftists are getting canceled themselves.
00:28:00.520
James O'Keefe, James O'Keefe from Project Veritas. He's having his main Project Veritas account
00:28:05.680
being kicked off of Twitter. Why is he being kicked off of Twitter? Allegedly for sharing private
00:28:11.220
information. The real reason is because he's investigating big tech. So one of his investigators
00:28:15.960
goes up, finds a Facebook's VP, Guy Rosen, and, uh, starts talking to him outside of his
00:28:21.420
home. Uh, Twitter now says, this is private information because they showed part of the
00:28:26.480
guy's house in the shot. Obviously he was outside there and, uh, therefore, uh, you know, he's
00:28:32.540
got to be kicked off of Twitter. James O'Keefe responds and says, that's a ridiculous double
00:28:36.380
standard. Project Veritas talked to Rosen outside his residence. We asked him for comment.
00:28:43.120
He did not reply. There he is. When you talk about freezing comments containing hate speech,
00:28:48.820
what do you mean by that? The VP of integrity at Facebook showing how much integrity he has.
00:28:55.940
There's nothing in this tweet that violates private information. By the way, it's the
00:28:59.300
paragon of television reporting to speak with residents outside their homes when it comes
00:29:04.260
to matters of public importance. CNN also confronted an alleged Russian operative inside an apartment
00:29:10.160
building. Uh, the Telegraph does this all the time. Many reporters speak with people outside
00:29:16.120
on the street. It's just what reporters do. So we're actually not going to delete this tweet yet
00:29:22.020
because I think it would be unconscionable for me to have a different standard than the mainstream
00:29:27.540
press. Fair enough. James O'Keefe is making a very narrow point here, which is this is a typical
00:29:34.860
practice of journalists and they're holding me to one standard and they're not holding everyone else
00:29:39.100
to another. Broadly speaking, I think it's very wrong to go to the houses, even if prominent
00:29:43.900
people are public figures where their wife and children sleep. You know, I, I, I'm very fortunate
00:29:49.740
to live in a state with, uh, a broad understanding of the second amendment. And if anybody shows up to
00:29:55.080
my house to try to do any of us harm, uh, that would be unfortunate for that person. So I, in a way,
00:30:01.740
I'm, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the, uh, Facebook VP's point of view here, but we're talking
00:30:08.920
about a speech regime. We're talking about how big tech is going to handle this and the way they're
00:30:13.300
going to handle it is not with a standard. I'd actually be perfectly fine saying can't show up
00:30:17.620
to people's houses anymore. Sorry, can't do it. Okay, fine. You're going to apply that across the
00:30:21.500
board. I think maybe that actually is a little bit more civilized than what we're looking at now,
00:30:25.360
but that's not the standard. The standard is you can do whatever you want to the conservatives.
00:30:30.180
You can have elected Democrats saying, go show up to conservatives houses and scream in their
00:30:35.320
windows and scare them half to death. You have actual prominent Democrats doing that.
00:30:40.500
Meanwhile, if a conservative reporter shows up to a liberal guy's house and starts asking questions,
00:30:47.140
can't do that. Speaking of investigative journalism, this is a story I, we don't have too much to talk
00:30:53.400
about here, but I do want to at least bring it up. Uh, interesting piece in national review by Andy
00:30:58.660
McCarthy. Uh, this was based on reporting by revolver news, asking a simple question. What
00:31:03.900
happened to officer Sicknick? Officer Sicknick is that Capitol police officer who was killed following
00:31:09.900
the riot on January 6th. Uh, we've been told by the New York times and others, he was killed by this
00:31:15.520
pro Trump mob. We've been told that he was killed because someone smacked him over the head with a fire
00:31:20.260
extinguisher. But what Andy McCarthy does here and what the, what the revolver news piece does that
00:31:24.520
the national review piece is based on is asking, uh, is, as asked this question, why is the timeline
00:31:31.840
changing? We still don't have a cause of death for officer Sicknick. This event happened more than a
00:31:35.920
month ago. The story has changed. Now we're told he didn't die at the Capitol. He wasn't taken to the
00:31:41.120
hospital from the Capitol as we were initially told. He actually went back to his office and then
00:31:45.400
something happened and the, the story doesn't really add up. He had texted, uh, an associate
00:31:52.120
of his later on after the Capitol and said, Oh, I'm fine. You know, I, it doesn't say anything about
00:31:56.780
a head wound. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of a head wound now. So the story is very strange.
00:32:00.820
Obviously the death broadly, terribly sad event, but we need to know exactly what happened because
00:32:06.640
this is being used as basically the, the chief piece of evidence against Donald Trump in this
00:32:13.040
impeachment trial, the chief, chief, um, mode of ginning up this emotion, uh, during the impeachment
00:32:22.000
trial. We don't know what actually happened and no journalists are really looking into it other than
00:32:26.400
these guys, a revolver and now Andy McCarthy at national review. The central feature of this
00:32:31.520
impeachment trial, uh, as you'll have noticed, if you've been paying any attention to it, which I
00:32:36.980
don't recommend that you do is not argumentation. They're not making the argument that, you know,
00:32:42.680
Trump really committed this impeachable offense that they're referring to as incitement. They're
00:32:47.660
not really, they're not establishing any serious legal standard for incitement. Uh, they're just
00:32:53.260
trying to gin up emotion and playing lots of videos that really haven't, not a lot to do with
00:32:57.700
the case. So Senator Cruz was asked about this and he said, yeah, the impeachment trial, I was just
00:33:02.560
with Senator Cruz in, in DC. We were talking about it as well. He said, you know, this, this trial,
00:33:07.340
it's a, it's a lot of smoke, but there's, there's a lot of hot air, but there's no, nothing really
00:33:12.560
there. Well, I think we'll see that the trial continue for the rest of the week. Um, it, it,
00:33:18.760
it is reminiscent of, of Shakespeare that it is full of sound and fury and yet signifying nothing.
00:33:25.920
Right. It sounds, it sounds about right. Andrea Mitchell from NBC heard Senator Cruz describe the
00:33:32.820
impeachment trial this way. And she took to Twitter to say, quote, Senator Cruz says the
00:33:37.120
impeachment trial is like Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No, that's
00:33:42.900
Faulkner. I saw that tweet and I thought, is this real? Is this a real tweet? And it's funny. I saw
00:33:52.380
Senator Cruz maybe an hour after she sent this and he comes to me and says, you're going to get a real
00:33:56.300
kick out of this. Did you see what Andrea Mitchell just said? I said, I did. I couldn't, I didn't know if I
00:33:59.920
was missing something. And I actually see how she might've gotten a little confused because
00:34:05.600
Faulkner has a novel called the sound and the fury, which is, but the, the title is based on
00:34:10.580
Shakespeare. The sound and fury signifying nothing. This is one of the most famous lines
00:34:14.540
of Shakespeare in, in his entire body of work. You, I'm sure you've heard it before. The whole,
00:34:20.520
the whole little bit is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day
00:34:26.300
to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty
00:34:32.200
death. Out, out, brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and
00:34:37.360
frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
00:34:42.900
and fury, signifying nothing. Tale told by an idiot. What I loved about Andrea Mitchell's tweet and to her
00:34:50.460
defense, she later apologized and she left the tweet up, kind of took her, took her lashings on social
00:34:55.460
media. What I love about it is this combination of ignorance, right? She doesn't know where the
00:35:02.460
quote is from and arrogance. To me, that perfectly describes our liberal elite. Ignorant, uneducated.
00:35:12.920
They have good credentials. I think Andrea Mitchell went, she went to a fancy school. I think she
00:35:16.520
majored in literature or something. A lot, a lot of good that did her, but also extraordinarily arrogant.
00:35:22.000
They, they really think that they're so much smarter than all the people who came in the past
00:35:25.560
and all the Republicans and all the half of these deplorable Americans.
00:35:32.160
You know, you're going to hear a lot of calls for unity and healing. You already are.
00:35:38.380
But there is a way we can unify and heal and the left understands it and the right does not.
00:35:44.940
Actually, Bruce Springsteen summed this up. One of the, one of the great minds of the left,
00:35:48.820
relatively probably is. Bruce Springsteen, a far left winger. He, he had an ad during the Super Bowl
00:35:54.940
where he talked about how we got to get back to the middle. This was an ad for Jeep, cars and trucks,
00:36:01.160
but it was really a political ad. Take a listen.
00:36:04.820
There's a chapel in Kansas standing on the exact center of the lower 48. It never closes. All are more
00:36:16.780
than welcome to come meet here in the middle. It's no secret. The middle has been a hard place to get
00:36:26.500
to lately. Between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear.
00:36:37.540
Now, fear has never been the best of who we are. And as for freedom, it's not the property of just
00:36:45.300
the fortunate few. It belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, it's what connects us.
00:36:56.500
And we need that connection. We need the middle.
00:37:01.900
We need the middle. Now it's, it's ironic because Bruce Springsteen is one of the most radical left
00:37:06.120
wing guys in public life, you know, in the entertainment industry. Uh, and he's talking about
00:37:11.140
how we need to be in the middle. It's also ironic because it's an ad for Jeep and, uh, Bruce Springsteen
00:37:15.480
just in the last few days got busted on a Dewey. He was, he was drunk driving. So that's kind of
00:37:19.660
funny too. But I actually want to get to the point he's talking about. He's saying it's all about the
00:37:23.180
middle. We got to meet in the middle. How is the middle defined? The middle has moved a lot
00:37:27.020
in the last 60 years in this country. It's moved very far to the left. Why? Because the middle is
00:37:32.180
defined by boundaries. The middle is defined by the left most limit and the right most limit.
00:37:37.820
And beyond those limits, you get canceled, right? Beyond those limits, you are not allowed to say
00:37:44.840
those things. Those are not socially acceptable. Some people call it the Overton window, the window
00:37:49.420
of acceptable dialogue. The middle is defined by where the ends are, where the limits are.
00:37:55.100
Therefore, we need to define those ends. We need to get past this kind of vague talk about cancel
00:38:01.200
culture and actually talk about the limits, talk about those ends. What the left has done very
00:38:06.880
successfully is they've pushed the right side of it way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way in their
00:38:11.300
direction. So now if you're just a mainstream, regular old conservative, you're Gina Carano and
00:38:15.960
you say, I like Donald Trump and you use a kind of basic political metaphor that everybody uses,
00:38:21.340
you get canceled. You're not allowed to say that. Meanwhile, on the left, you can say, I hate my
00:38:24.220
country. You can bail out rioters. You can do it. You can kind of do whatever you want and you're
00:38:28.660
totally fine. So if we want to reclaim the middle, we've got to reclaim the boundaries and move
00:38:32.340
them back in a saner direction. Drew is going to be talking about Gina Carano getting canceled.
00:38:38.400
So tune in for that on the Andrew Klavan show. He's also going to be talking about China and
00:38:42.420
Christian politics. You know, a Daily Wire membership, it's the only way you should be
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viewing Daily Wire content right now using promo code Knowles. You'll get 10% off any membership
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plan you choose. You will get, oh gosh, I don't know. I don't even have time to go through all the
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wonderful new content. You will also get 10% off when you use promo code Knowles. Stop depriving
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yourself. Come join in on the fun. We'll be right back with the mailbag.
00:39:20.860
Welcome back. My absolute favorite time of the week, the mailbag. First question from Skylar.
00:39:27.480
Dear Mr. Knowles, on your show, you said that you were strongly opposed to the free market
00:39:33.020
mentality that many conservatives continue to maintain in light of the big tech oligarchy.
00:39:37.400
Regarding this, what is the remedy you propose outside of the free market? And if your remedy
00:39:41.740
is found in government intervention, how do you justify it looking to the government to
00:39:44.860
solve our problems? I hope that this piques your interest. I'm a big fan of your show and
00:39:49.180
the Daily Wire as a whole. Thank you very much. I want to clarify because I don't think this
00:39:52.780
is my position at all. I'm not strongly opposed to the free market. I love the free market.
00:39:58.780
I consider myself a strong defender of free markets in their proper place.
00:40:06.440
The free market is a wonderful instrument for human flourishing, but the free market is not an
00:40:12.640
end in and of itself. It's not a political end in and of itself, nor is it even a practical
00:40:19.040
concept. There's no such thing as a purely free market. The market is defined by its boundaries,
00:40:25.220
which are defined through politics. And you want to have a robust market setup, but there's no such
00:40:35.580
thing as a market without boundaries. Just think of a regular physical marketplace. The physical
00:40:39.820
marketplace has boundaries to it. It has different shops in it. It's got different rules of how exchange
00:40:46.520
is done. It has currency. It has all of these kinds of features that, that we get, not from
00:40:51.440
our brilliant reason and abstraction exclusively. We get it also from our tradition. We get it also from
00:40:57.960
practice. We get it also from our ritual. We get it also from how it's existed in America before.
00:41:02.680
So specifically to your question on big tech, you're right. I, I think that the heretofore
00:41:10.480
conservative line of, uh, you don't like big technology companies controlling the flow of
00:41:15.480
information, build your own Google, build your own Twitter. I think that's preposterous.
00:41:20.500
These are not private companies in any real sense of that word. They work with the government. They
00:41:25.680
work with the ruling regime. They are monopolistic in many ways. They've, uh, they've grown in large
00:41:31.480
part through fraud by defrauding customers on what they are really getting, what kind of freedom
00:41:35.600
they'll have on the platform and by exploiting legal loopholes. Notably, as we've often talked
00:41:42.380
about, not just on this show, but on the right through section 230 of the Communications Decency
00:41:47.140
Act. So yeah, I don't think we should have any sentimentality for, for these big tech companies.
00:41:55.020
What they are doing is controlling the flow of information in what is the public square now,
00:41:59.600
which is the internet and in a republic, in a self-governing republic, that communication,
00:42:04.840
that, that ability to persuade people. That is politics, right? That is how politics is conducted.
00:42:09.340
So we can't allow them to have that kind of power. What am I proposing? You're saying,
00:42:12.820
are you going to turn to the government for help? You can't turn to the government.
00:42:15.980
Government can't help you. This presumes a, what I think is a, an unfortunate view of politics that
00:42:25.740
has cropped up over the last 20 or 30 years or so on the right that, that says basically there's no
00:42:31.680
legitimate role for government whatsoever to do anything in society. If we really believe that
00:42:37.820
we are anarchists, do you think that conservatives, if they're really being true to their principles,
00:42:43.820
are anarchists? No. The, the only anarchists we see in public life right now are the ones in
00:42:49.420
Portland with Antifa burning down buildings. Do you think they're conservative? Do you think
00:42:52.880
they're right wing? No. The, there is a role for the state. I'm a great defender of the state,
00:43:00.080
just like I'm a great defender of free markets. I'm at, I'm going to go on the other side and I'll
00:43:03.240
say I'm a great defender of the state in its proper place. The state is good. Law and order
00:43:08.800
is good. You can't have freedom without law and order, without a state to protect the rules,
00:43:15.980
you know, to police certain people, to protect private property, among other things.
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ensure your title is still in your name. You don't want the state to get out of its place.
00:43:54.960
When, when you make an idol out of the state, you become a statist. Statism is wrong. When you make an
00:44:03.240
idol out of the free market, you become, I don't know, a worshiper of mammon or something. I don't
00:44:08.060
know. You, you, you, you go very wrong though. Chesterton had this great line. He said that,
00:44:12.560
you know, heresy generally speaking, he's talking about religion here, obviously. Heresy is not
00:44:19.180
the promotion of vice over virtue so much as it is the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of
00:44:26.220
the other virtues out of place. You know, he was, he's talking about his friend, George Bernard Shaw,
00:44:30.660
who was a sort of radical atheist socialist, pretty good playwright actually, but you know,
00:44:36.600
radical left winger, but he was friends with Chesterton. He said that the problem with Bernard
00:44:40.460
Shaw is not that he doesn't have a great big heart. He's got a very great big heart, but it's in the
00:44:45.000
wrong place. So we don't, we want things to be in their proper place. We want markets. We want
00:44:50.600
a state. We want a respect for the individual. We want a respect for family and these civil
00:44:57.460
institutions. We want them all ordered toward the good, which is what, which is what society aims at.
00:45:04.640
The constitution is clear about this, right? To promote the general welfare, to secure the blessings
00:45:10.100
of liberty. Not even liberty as an end in and of itself. Liberty as an instrument to secure
00:45:13.860
the blessings of liberty, which is human flourishing, ultimately ordered toward the good. I hope that
00:45:19.380
clears it up from Timothy. Hey Michael, thank you for your insights and wisdom. Thank you for the
00:45:23.400
compliment. I have a question about George Orwell. I recently looked up Orwell on Wikipedia. I was
00:45:27.600
shocked to see them proudly proclaim that he was a democratic socialist. How can that be true? It seems
00:45:32.540
to me that 1984 is not just a rebuttal of totalitarianism, but also of socialism. Orwell describes
00:45:37.600
in the book how capitalism created so much surplus in the world that the governments had to come in and
00:45:42.720
control the supply so that the people were kept in a state of constant misery. How could a socialist
00:45:47.140
write this book? Thank you. Yeah, it's a good question. This comes up a lot. Orwell was a democratic
00:45:51.120
socialist and he said, actually in other writings, he said, everything I've written is in defense of
00:45:56.560
democratic socialism with an important caveat, as I understand it. And I hate to presume to say that he
00:46:03.720
didn't understand it very well, but what you have to understand the historical context of the times
00:46:08.320
end of these terms. You just use the term capitalism. Capitalism is a word basically
00:46:14.220
popularized by Karl Marx, right? It's, it's a term that is, the reason we use it today is basically
00:46:21.380
because of communists. And Marxism presupposes capitalism, right? Capitalism is actually a part
00:46:27.080
of Marxism. It's a stage in historical development after which we can then, you know, overthrow our shackles.
00:46:33.160
There'll be a big class revolution and there, there'll be no state in this kind of utopian world.
00:46:36.560
That, of course, never happens in reality. So when Orwell is writing, he's writing against
00:46:42.420
Stalin, Stalinism, that is to say the reality of the Soviet Union. But he's still laboring as so
00:46:49.620
many intellectuals labored at that time, probably most intellectuals labored at that time under the
00:46:54.340
idea that socialism or even, I suppose, communism could be redeemable. It's just they got the wrong
00:46:59.960
one. You know, you see this with the Trotskyists and the Trotskyites. They're, they're called both
00:47:05.060
terms, which is people who were disillusioned with how Stalin was running the Soviet Union,
00:47:09.340
but they couldn't, they couldn't admit that, that Stalin was a natural conclusion of their
00:47:15.060
ideology. So they, they had to say, no, it just went wrong. You know, true socialism,
00:47:19.000
true communism has never been tried. If Trotsky had held power, you know, this kind of rival
00:47:23.600
of Stalin, if Trotsky had held power, then we would have this utopia on earth. And it's just not true.
00:47:29.500
You know, Trotsky, because he didn't really amass ultimately this political power, he's made this
00:47:34.620
kind of martyr of the true good communism. But you know, if Trotsky had power, it would have been the
00:47:38.220
same exact thing. Stalin just managed to do it. And one could, one could go on at, at great length
00:47:45.620
about what actually happened in the Soviet Union. But suffice it to say, Orwell was writing against
00:47:54.240
communism and socialism in practice. And he, he was not able to give up his, his views of
00:48:00.020
what socialism could be, which, which was true of virtually all the smart people at the time,
00:48:04.640
and even many smart people today, even though there's so, so misguided on it. From Owen,
00:48:09.320
dear Michael, I was just confirmed into the Catholic church and my saint name was Thomas
00:48:12.920
after St. Thomas Aquinas. What was your saint name? And what is your advice for me as I move on to the
00:48:18.960
next phase of my faith? Thanks and God bless. Why that's so wonderful. I, my confirmation name is
00:48:24.040
also Thomas. I don't know if it was Thomas the Apostle or Thomas Aquinas. I picked it when I
00:48:33.660
was 13, when I was a precocious and ignorant little agnostic veering toward atheism. And I chose that
00:48:40.260
name one because Thomas was a doubter and also because Thomas Aquinas was very intelligent. So I
00:48:45.540
think I chose Thomas the Apostle. I consider Thomas Apostle to be my confirmation saint, but I don't know,
00:48:50.660
I guess it could have been Thomas Aquinas too. Hope I get both of those guys to,
00:48:53.500
you know, pray for me. I am right now reading Boethius or rereading Boethius. I haven't,
00:48:59.700
I haven't read him since college. On whose consolation of philosophy and on whose writing
00:49:04.360
Thomas Aquinas or from whose writing Thomas Aquinas draws great inspiration. So, and I'm also
00:49:11.060
watching all these series from the Thomistic Institute. So I'm really trying to delve a little
00:49:14.200
bit more into, to Thomas Aquinas. So that's great. I would encourage you to check out Boethius and the
00:49:19.380
Thomistic Institute. And most importantly, to just make sure your prayer life is, and your
00:49:24.520
ultimate, the ultimate prayer, you know, going to the Holy Mass and receiving the Eucharist and
00:49:27.980
receiving the sacraments. To make sure that you are doing that regularly. Nightly rosary is very,
00:49:33.240
very important sort of thing. And welcome home. That's great. From Bernard. Hello, Michael.
00:49:38.460
Wonder if this is Bernard Shaw. Wouldn't that be weird? From beyond the grave. He's looking up at us
00:49:42.920
right now from, from the afterlife. I hope that you and your new baby are doing well. Greetings
00:49:47.040
from a fellow trad Catholic. Oh, that's great. Good to hear from you. So my question has to do
00:49:51.340
with something you said that was not the focal point of anything that you were saying, but it
00:49:55.760
always irritates me when people say it. Why did you say that America was founded with Plymouth Rock
00:50:00.600
in 1620, not Jamestown in 1608? I get that you have a personal connection to the Mayflower and I'm
00:50:06.440
asking you this question, realizing that it is, it is commonly taught. I just do not understand why
00:50:10.720
people place so much importance on Plymouth Rock that they literally act like Jamestown never
00:50:14.420
existed. I mean, isn't that kind of insulting to Virginians like Washington, Jefferson, Madison,
00:50:18.940
Henry, et cetera, to write out the first English settlement in the States? Great, great question.
00:50:23.680
I'm so glad you asked this because it's true. Jamestown happened before the Mayflower. Jamestown
00:50:30.100
was 1608, right? The slave ship arriving, the 1619 project happened before the Mayflower. It was 1619,
00:50:36.940
Mayflower was 1620. We just celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower. The reason I trace
00:50:43.300
America's founding to the Mayflower and the reason that so many people in American history have traced
00:50:48.660
it to the Mayflower is that the Mayflower provides a philosophical and a theological basis for the
00:50:55.420
country in a way that Jamestown did not. Obviously, Jamestown contributes to the founding of America.
00:51:00.340
Christopher Columbus greatly contributes to the founding of America.
00:51:03.380
I guess 1619, in a way, contributes to the founding of America. I guess a lot of these
00:51:09.200
things did. 1776, obviously, is the founding of the country, and yet we tend to trace the founding
00:51:14.360
of our country earlier, right? It's the founding of the United States, but we tend to trace the
00:51:19.600
founding of our country earlier. I choose 1620 because I think it represents the, in economic ways,
00:51:28.140
in cultural and social ways, in religious ways, a sort of coherent vision for the founding of the
00:51:35.620
country. The 1619 project did not seek to rewrite American history. That's what they ended up kind
00:51:41.520
of doing because they had, they lied in many ways about the American Revolution. But what that woman,
00:51:46.320
Nicole Hannah-Jones said, is she wants to reframe American history. History has to have frames,
00:51:50.700
you know, you're, you're kind of defined by the limits, right? And I think we ought to frame
00:51:54.460
American history largely on the Mayflower, on 1620. I think that frames the country in a way that is
00:52:01.020
true to, to its history, conservative history, and even the kind of puritanical, neo-puritanical
00:52:08.480
progressives. I think American history makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens
00:52:13.720
of the Mayflower than through other lenses. All right, that's our show. I'm Michael Knowles.
00:52:17.460
This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you Monday.
00:52:24.460
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