Ep. 706 - Conservatism Uncanceled
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
174.7798
Summary
After the left mourned the loss of Merrick Garland, the Democrats rent their garments and gnashed their teeth over his nomination to the Supreme Court. But I m not so upset about that. I m more upset about how they treated him.
Transcript
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We all thought Merrick Garland was gone after Cocaine Mitch kept him off the Supreme Court.
00:00:47.700
Long after the left mourned his loss, the Democrats rent their garments and gnashed their teeth.
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He is Joe Biden's nominee for attorney general.
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And I actually don't mind this nomination all that much relative to some of the other picks.
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Merrick Garland became this meme after he was nominated to the court.
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It'd be sort of like if Harambe came back to that zoo, you know, everyone would kind of get a kick out of that.
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But the other reason, the more substantive reason why I wasn't so upset about Garland is
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he was the most moderate of the Joe Biden prominent nominees.
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So I thought, okay, we can breathe a sigh of release.
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At least he's not going with some crazy left winger for attorney general.
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And then Merrick Garland testified on Capitol Hill.
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He was grilled by a bunch of senators on his views.
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Here is Josh Hawley, Republican senator, asking a very simple question, Merrick Garland.
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Will you continue to enforce our southern border?
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Do you believe that illegal entry at America's border should remain a crime?
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I think, you know, the president has made clear that we are a country of,
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with the borders and with the concern about national security.
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I don't know of a proposal to decriminalize, but still make it unlawful to enter.
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Will you continue to prosecute unlawful border crossings?
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Well, this is, again, a question of allocation of resources.
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We will, the department will prevent unlawful crossing.
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I have to admit, I just don't know exactly what the conditions are and how this is done.
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I just know it doesn't, well, simple question, Merrick.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from July 24 Pictures, who says,
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The woke left says, hey, how racist of you to appropriate their culture.
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Yes, this is the, uh, paradox here, too, with the, the be less white campaign that, uh,
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It's part of Robin DiAngelo's broader and anti-racist curriculum that a lot of corporations
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And when, when you say be less white, first of all, it's not pot, you can't, you know,
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But even if you lose your own culture as a white person, then what do you do?
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The only thing you, you have to have some kind of culture.
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You have to have certain behaviors and manners of speaking and things like that.
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So the only thing you can do is take on the attributes of other cultures.
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But then the minute you do that, you're accused of cultural appropriation.
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You are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
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That testimony that Merrick Garland gave to Josh Hawley was even worse, I think, than many
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Because I think the way most people analyze that is they say, okay, Merrick Garland, he's
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this very serious procedure-focused lawyer who's nitpicking all the minor details, and he doesn't
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want to give a flippant answer to anything, sure, maybe the first question might lead you
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He says, hey, are you going to continue to enforce the law at the border?
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He says, well, and I don't know that there's a way that you could, there's no proposal to
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keep the border secure, but then not enforce the law and this, and he's getting into all
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this minutiae, then he says sort of platitudes like, Joe Biden believes this is a country
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So the grand, brave, courageous statement from Joe Biden is America is still a country, at
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But then, the reason that I don't think you can just chalk this up to Merrick Garland
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is trying to be really precise, is when Hawley pushes him on, it's a simple question, it's
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illegal to, it's illegal by definition to enter the country illegally.
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So he doesn't just say, well, what do you mean by illegal and this and that?
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He then says, well, that would be a matter of allocating resources.
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It would be a question of where we want to put our resources.
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Really bad stuff if this is the most moderate guy.
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Uh, Garland is catching probably most flack right now for saying, uh, that it refusing
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to, uh, acknowledge that burning down federal buildings is domestic terrorism.
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I actually think here, Merrick Garland is showing a kind of restraint.
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I actually think conservatives shouldn't totally attack him for his answer, though it didn't
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Let me ask you about, uh, assaults on federal property in places other than Washington, D.C.,
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Do you regard assaults on federal courthouses or other federal property as acts of domestic
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Well, Senator, my own definition, which is about the same as the statutory definition,
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is, uh, a use of violence or threats of violence, uh, an attempt to, uh, disrupt, uh, democratic
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So an attack on a, uh, uh, uh, courthouse while in operation, uh, trying to prevent judges from
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actually deciding cases that plainly is, um, domestic, uh, um, uh, extremism, um, um, um, uh,
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domestic, uh, terrorism, um, an attack simply on a government property at night or any other
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kind of circumstances is a clear crime and a serious one and should be punished.
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I don't mean, I don't know enough about the facts of the example you're talking about, but
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One, one is both are, uh, criminal, um, uh, but one is, uh, a core attack on our democratic
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So this answer filled with Garland's usual ums and awes and hmms and stammering is a
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little bit weak in that he's conflating extremism, which is a very vague term that can really mean
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anything you want it to with terrorism, which is a much more specific term.
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But I actually don't think that burning down a federal courthouse, for instance, is necessarily
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And the reason for that is terrorism traditionally defined is specifically the use of violence
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against civilians for the purpose of achieving political ends.
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And this is why if you attack a political target, you know, a government target that
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is different than attacking an elementary school.
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Those are, those are different things, both very bad, you know, both should be discouraged,
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but we don't want the definition of terrorism to become overly broad just as, as has happened
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Now, the reason this is a bad answer from Garland is it, the takeaway technical details aside,
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and conservatives should pay attention to the details, but the takeaway is he's not going
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to go after groups like BLM for burning down courthouses and federal buildings and, and
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But still, I, I actually think he's getting too much flack for that answer.
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A much more radical answer, even than the extremism, terrorism answer that Garland gave.
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And this, this is like sort of the third and final point, and maybe it's worth considering
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I don't think there's any way to stop this Garland nomination.
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I think we already, we already stopped the main Garland nomination, but he gave an answer
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on the transgender question that to my mind shows he is basically unfit for this job.
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Um, is it right and just and lawful for girls to have to compete against boys?
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In other words, uh, does the law say that boys can just define themselves in girls for
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the purposes of say, playing women's sports for the purposes of going into the girls' bathroom?
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This is not a difficult question, but Merrill, Merrill Garland seems to think that it is.
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In my last 20 seconds, I'm going to ask you if you agree with this statement, uh, allowing,
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and I'm not suggesting the answer one way or the other.
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Allowing biological males to compete in an all-female sport deprives women of the opportunity
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to participate fully and fairly in sports and is fundamentally unfair to female athletes.
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This is a very difficult societal question that you're asking here.
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I know, but you're going to be attorney general.
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Oh, but, uh, I, I may not be the one who has to make policy decisions like that, but it's
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Look, I think every human being should be treated with dignity and respect.
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Um, and that's an overriding sense of my own character, but an overriding sense of what
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the law, uh, requires, um, um, this, the particular, uh, question of how Title IX applies in schools
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is one, and in light of the Bostock case, which I know, I know you're very familiar with, is
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something that I would have to look at, um, uh, when I have a chance to do that.
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The Bostock case is the case that, uh, thanks to our good friend, Neil Gorsuch, uh, the Bostock,
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who's a, you know, the ostensibly conservative judge who totally, totally broke with conservatives
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and, and redefined, uh, sex as gender identity in that case.
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I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but that's, that's the takeaway of it.
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Uh, if, if Garland is saying in light of Bostock, I'd have to revisit it.
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What he's saying is, yeah, boys can compete against girls and girls can't really say anything
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When, when he says, well, this is one of the most difficult societal questions.
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And is there therefore no difference, really no substantial difference between men and women?
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He can answer it, but he doesn't want to answer it because his answer is radical.
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When he says, look, I don't know if I'm going to be making policy on this.
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If you're the attorney general of the United States, this is one of the most hotly debated
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issues and you are going to have to interpret specifically this kind of law, then it is
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not only important that you know the answer to that question, but it is your job.
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So if you're going to, in this sort of cowardly way, say, well, I don't know that I'll have
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But he, he doesn't want to say, and then he comes out with that very courageous statement.
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Look, my guiding principle is I think people should be treated with dignity and respect.
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That's almost as brave as Joe Biden saying, I believe the nation should still have borders
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But is it your view that we should force little girls to compete against grown men, grown,
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I mean, physically grown, I suppose they're the same age, but much more grown out.
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They're bigger, they're stronger, they're faster because men are different than women and lose
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their scholarships and lose their trophies and by that same principle, have to go to
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the men's changing room in the public pool, or rather have men go into their changing room
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in the public pool, which destroys the entire concept of men's and women's changing rooms.
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Speaking of Supreme Court nominees, I guess in this case of successful Supreme Court nominees,
00:15:34.580
unlike Merrick Garland, who was an unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee.
00:15:39.520
Justice Thomas is the last tough guy left in America.
00:15:44.240
The last guy with really rock-ribbed moral vision.
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Honorable mentions to Alito here, and I suppose even Gorsuch, even though I still haven't
00:15:53.680
forgiven Gorsuch for that transgender decision.
00:15:56.780
The Supreme Court was asked to hear a case, the final case of the 2020 election, regarding
00:16:06.440
There were lots of questions about mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania because, probably most
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importantly, the Supreme Court, or I'm sorry, the Constitution of Pennsylvania prohibits
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the use of these widespread mail-in ballots that we saw in the 2020 election.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a very politically motivated decision, just chose to ignore that
00:16:30.520
The U.S. Supreme Court didn't want to hear about it.
00:16:33.420
Then there was this issue of mail-in ballots coming in after election day, whether or not
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Supreme Court actually was sort of willing to weigh in on that, but now they're not willing
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to hear the case regarding the validity of these ballots.
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Sadly, you got all the libs voting not to hear the case.
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You also have John Roberts, but I guess I repeat myself.
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You also have Amy Barrett voted not to hear this case.
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You also have Brett Kavanaugh voted not to hear this case.
00:17:07.320
We fought real hard to get Brett Kavanaugh that seat.
00:17:09.800
We fought real hard to send Merrick Garland into political irrelevance, at least for a few years.
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They went squishy on what should be a very simple answer.
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Now, Thomas Alito and Gorsuch did think that the court should weigh in on this matter.
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So Thomas, in his dissent, said something very important.
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And it's important for not just this election, because the court, generally speaking, they did
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say, we don't think that these votes would have changed the results of the 2020 election.
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However, they could have very serious impact in the future.
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And so we need to, we need to take a look at them.
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Thomas said something here that I have been saying since the 2020 election.
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Actually, I have argued with many conservatives on this point since the 2020 election.
00:18:07.960
And Thomas, you know how much I hate to say I told you so.
00:18:10.440
Thomas seems to be on my side of this question.
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Thomas wrote, and actually a little footnote on the case.
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He says, we are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes,
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But that observation provides only small comfort.
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An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election
00:18:33.300
Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.
00:18:40.560
I don't know how you're going to highlight it in the air as you're listening to this
00:18:47.400
An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election
00:18:55.700
When some of my friends on the right, in the days after the 2020 election, were demanding,
00:19:03.020
they said, we need the evidence, we need the evidence, we need the evidence.
00:19:06.420
I said, yeah, you know, the Trump team obviously needs to make the case in court and they're not
00:19:10.240
going to be able to make the case if they don't have evidence.
00:19:12.400
However, this election looks pretty crooked to me, folks.
00:19:15.720
It seems like there was a lot of irregularity going on.
00:19:18.680
And what some of my friends, even on the right, would say is, if you can't provide all of the
00:19:23.460
evidence, then we must conclude that the election was totally fine and there were no
00:19:32.120
You don't get to, in the weeks and months before the election, change practically all the rules,
00:19:37.620
all of the important rules surrounding election integrity.
00:19:40.260
You don't get to violate the state constitution, for goodness sakes, in Pennsylvania to give an
00:19:46.200
You don't get to extend election day into election month, thereby diminishing election
00:19:53.580
integrity and making it more vulnerable to fraud.
00:19:56.300
You don't get to extend the counting of the ballots.
00:19:58.540
You don't get to do all these things that cut at the heart of election integrity and then tell me
00:20:04.100
the burden is entirely on me to prove that there was some shenanigans going on.
00:20:13.880
Therefore, it is absolutely my right to raise questions.
00:20:16.900
I, it is absolutely my right to not have much confidence in this electoral process.
00:20:26.000
Justice Thomas, the man, the man left on the Supreme Court.
00:20:31.100
I like some of the other guys too, depending on the day, especially Alito, but Thomas, Thomas
00:20:38.660
is one of the most clear eyed conservatives in the entire country.
00:20:46.260
And I don't think that there is anything illegitimate or wrong or shameful about pointing out that
00:20:53.480
when you get rid of a lot of the election integrity measures, people are going to lose some
00:20:57.780
confidence in the election. Speaking of frauds, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Fauci is back. Actually, speaking
00:21:04.260
of frauds and things that I hate to say I told you so about, Dr. Fauci is back. He's, he's really
00:21:11.740
losing his appeal, I think by the minute, even among some people who are more in the center and
00:21:17.340
maybe even on the left. Dr. Fauci of 15 days to slow the spread fame is telling us that we will
00:21:24.620
probably need to wear masks, even after the vaccine, after this, after that, until 2022.
00:21:31.660
Why do you think Americans might have to wear masks into 2022?
00:21:36.600
You know, because it depends on the low, on the level of, of, of, of, of dynamics of virus that's
00:21:43.360
in the community. And that's really important because that gets back to something again,
00:21:47.600
that you said, if you see the level coming down really, really very low, I want it to keep going
00:21:53.420
down to a baseline that's so low that there's virtually no threat or not. No, it'll never be
00:21:59.420
zero, but a minimal, minimal threat that you will be exposed to someone who is infected. So if you
00:22:06.220
combine getting most of the people in the country vaccinated with getting the level of a virus in
00:22:12.560
the community, very, very low, then I believe you're going to be able to say, you know, for the
00:22:17.860
most part, we don't necessarily have to wear masks. So I love this. The CNN lady is giving me a lot of
00:22:24.760
respect for, I don't even know her name, but I am getting some respect for it because she is pushing
00:22:28.340
back on Fauci. She says, well, hold on. We'll get the vaccine. We get, why do we have to do this?
00:22:33.360
Because, well, you see, because I want the virus to get down to below zero. I want there to be negative
00:22:40.660
virus in the world so that, uh, of course it can never be negative virus. It can never be zero.
00:22:47.820
So you're always going to need good old Dr. Fauci. Dr. Fauci is always going to have to tell you what
00:22:53.100
to do, but, uh, we'll get a very, very, very low and then we'll eliminate germs and live in utopia.
00:23:00.300
That's what I want. I say, uh, how about we just, you know, we just take off the masks then. If that's
00:23:06.360
your argument, let's just take it off. This is the sort of thing that the people who said many of my
00:23:13.820
friends, many conservative friends said from the beginning, they said, just wear the mask. It's not
00:23:20.140
a big deal. And I have said basically since the very beginning, the masks are not just dumb, but
00:23:28.760
really bad as a political matter for all of the various left-wing censors out here. I, I, I suppose
00:23:36.820
I need to clarify. I'm not talking about the science because this isn't really about the
00:23:40.860
science. This is about the politics as a political matter. What the people who believe just wear the
00:23:46.580
mask, it's not a big deal. What they thought was, well, if we all wear the masks, we can go back to
00:23:49.960
normal, but the opposite is true. Every minute that we wear the masks is, is more likely to extend
00:23:58.160
the length of this whole lockdown, this epidemic, this social upheaval, because the masks are not a
00:24:03.720
source of comfort. The masks are a sign of visual sign and a very blatant one to everybody that we
00:24:10.660
are in the midst of something really, really crazy and probably pretty dangerous because we haven't
00:24:16.340
done this before as a society. We've never mandated, mandated that we all just put filthy cloth over our
00:24:21.800
mouths, wherever we go and muzzle ourselves outdoors, indoors, anywhere you go. So it, it,
00:24:28.160
it doesn't serve the purpose that the people who said, oh, it's not a big deal. Just do it. We'll
00:24:33.360
get back to normal. Doesn't serve the purpose that they thought it would. As long as we are wearing
00:24:38.360
the masks, Dr. Fauci is in control because the masks are the sign that we're amid the historic
00:24:46.300
unprecedented public health crisis. And all we can do is empower Dr. Fauci, our brilliant, wonderful
00:24:52.460
leader who is venerated as an icon in, in, in many parts of the left. There's Dr. Fauci Day now on
00:25:00.720
Christmas Eve in Washington, DC. Do you remember that? The mayor named it Dr. Fauci Day. Didn't
00:25:06.320
acknowledge, uh, you know, this is Christmas Eve. Isn't that a little, isn't that kind of a weird
00:25:09.300
liturgical calendar? And Fauci himself sort of admits it. We want to get that number low, low, low,
00:25:15.500
but it's never totally gone. And Dr. Fauci has never totally gone either. As long as we empower
00:25:21.440
him in this way. And as long as we radically change our behavior and our appearance, I mean,
00:25:26.140
the most intimate kind of decisions that we make about how we comport ourselves in the world,
00:25:31.440
as long as we entirely defer to him on that, that little dude is in control. You know,
00:25:39.420
we are going to be hearing quite a lot about the authoritarian left on the march from Mr. Shapiro
00:25:45.980
coming up after this. Uh, so go be sure to check that out. Also, we are going to be having our
00:25:50.780
backstage tomorrow, February 24th. It's going to be a ton of fun. There's going to be a lot of stogies.
00:25:55.460
There's going to be a lot of drinks. It's going to be very, very enjoyable. And we have a new show
00:26:00.660
coming out this Friday featuring our very own Ben Shapiro. There are many narratives going on around
00:26:05.260
hot topic issues. It is very difficult to keep track of all the newest controversies and non-troversies
00:26:10.300
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00:26:50.620
I read a headline the other day. Headline said, Boy Scouts welcomes first class of girl Eagle Scouts.
00:26:58.700
My first thought was, no, they didn't. They didn't. The Boy Scouts did not welcome the first
00:27:07.920
class of girl Eagle Scouts. Now, I know that there is an organization called the Boy Scouts.
00:27:17.260
And I know that the Boy Scouts now lets in girls. And I know that there's a designation called the
00:27:25.400
Eagle Scouts. And I know that the Eagle Scouts now have some girls in it. But it is not possible
00:27:32.280
for the Boy Scouts to have girls in the Scouts because the Boy Scouts are the Boy Scouts. And the
00:27:40.440
minute they let in a girl, they cease to be the Boy Scouts. They might pretend to be the Boy Scouts,
00:27:49.900
but they are not. It is not possible. Going back to our friend, old Uncle Aristotle,
00:27:55.500
as we call him around these parts. You cannot simultaneously have a thing and the opposite
00:28:02.840
of the thing and have them be true at the same time. The Boy Scouts can only have boys in them.
00:28:11.560
I can't believe that we have to spend time saying this. But I think the reason we have to say this
00:28:16.580
is because we live in a culture that's very open and very liberal and very inclusive. And there are
00:28:25.540
some benefits of this, but it can be taken to absurdities. And even conservatives embrace all
00:28:31.780
this kind of language. We're open-minded. You know, I'm a free speech absolutist. I, yeah, man,
00:28:36.880
I don't want any sort of exclusion or censorship whatsoever. You need exclusion
00:28:42.980
for societies to make sense. I'm not saying unjust exclusion. I don't want that, but you do need
00:28:51.940
just exclusion. For instance, the men's bathroom must exclude women. Simply for it to be the men's
00:29:01.380
bathroom, it has to exclude women. Same thing is true of the women's bathroom. If the women's bathroom
00:29:07.300
is open and liberal and inclusive of men, then it hasn't become an inclusive, open,
00:29:13.480
liberal women's bathroom. It just stopped being the women's bathroom. The same thing is true of
00:29:16.940
the Boy Scouts. If the Boy Scouts, in the name of liberality and openness and inclusion and diversity,
00:29:22.640
accepts women, you haven't created this more open Boy Scouts. You've just abolished the Boy Scouts.
00:29:29.660
There's been a lot of talk about norm, normal. When are we going to get back to normal?
00:29:36.960
We're wearing masks. We're not seeing our grandparents. We're not having Thanksgiving
00:29:40.220
dinner. When are we going to get back to normal? Norms define normal. We are edging day by day by day
00:29:48.320
that we let this nonsense go on. Day by day by day that we wear the stupid masks. We are creating
00:29:53.620
a new normal. It is, it is now normal to wear the masks and it's abnormal not to wear the masks.
00:30:01.900
And you're, you can't have a society that's free of norms. There's no such thing. I think we like to
00:30:08.260
fool ourselves of that. The left really pushes this idea that you don't need any norms. Nothing,
00:30:13.760
there's nothing that we ought to do. There's, you know, we just do whatever you want as long as it
00:30:17.380
doesn't hurt anybody else maybe. And the right has adopted a lot of that same language.
00:30:22.620
Oh man, I don't care what you do. It doesn't affect me. Live and let live, man.
00:30:28.680
Norms are inevitable. Norms are inevitable. If you are, I think a lot of us want to pretend
00:30:34.260
that, oh man, just who cares if the Boy Scouts let some girls in? You know, it's not such a minor
00:30:39.380
issue. Well, I mean, it's, it is and it isn't. It's a minor issue in that I'm not a member of the
00:30:44.900
Boy Scouts and I have no intention of sending my son to the Boy Scouts. But it's a big issue in that
00:30:50.220
we as a society are now saying you're not allowed to have the Boy Scouts. You're just
00:30:53.700
destroying those sorts of things. And if you, if you follow this gender ideology to its logical
00:30:59.760
conclusion, not only do you get rid of the bathrooms and the girls sports, you get rid of
00:31:02.620
girls schools, you get rid of sororities, you get rid of fraternities, you get rid of anything that
00:31:07.460
makes any distinction between men and women. I don't know about you. I find the distinction between
00:31:14.420
men and women to be one of the things that gives life its joy. You know, one of, one of the things
00:31:20.640
that makes this world kind of nice, that men and women are different. I like women, you know, it's
00:31:24.440
sort of that, that men are from Mars, women are from Venus. That's kind of one of the playful aspects
00:31:29.260
of the world, the complementarity between the sexes. But we are now being told you can't have that.
00:31:34.180
And if you want a society that does still have that, you have to stand up for that.
00:31:37.440
And that's an exclusive claim. Truth claims tend to be exclusive.
00:31:41.020
But the gender ideology is marching onward. My friend, Ryan Anderson, Ryan T. Anderson at the
00:31:47.580
Ethics and Public Policy Center, he was with the Heritage Foundation for a long time. He wrote a
00:31:51.620
book with, I think, the greatest title I've, I've ever read on a book. The title is When Harry Became
00:31:57.700
Sally, Responding to the Transgender Moment. Just a tremendous, that guy could have scribbled in
00:32:05.740
crayon in between the covers. He still would have sold a bunch of copies. So very, very enjoyable book.
00:32:10.460
I highly recommend it. Amazon took it down. Amazon took down when Harry became Sally because,
00:32:18.700
I don't know, because it's politically incorrect. It's hateful. It's bigoted.
00:32:23.400
You've got one of the most respected for public scholars in the entire mainstream conservative
00:32:30.200
movement, Ryan T. Anderson, puts out this, you know, very academic work on transgenderism,
00:32:38.240
taken down for hate speech. Meanwhile, I just read from Ryan's Twitter account, Apple iBooks is
00:32:46.960
taking it down now. You can't download it. It's going to be banned. I have a book, by the way,
00:32:52.040
I may have mentioned this, coming out on this very topic, why conservatives have gotten this issue so
00:32:57.320
wrong. Why every attempt that they've made to fight political correctness has actually helped advance
00:33:03.060
political correctness over the last several decades. I have this book coming out. It's called
00:33:07.080
Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. It is currently up on Amazon. I don't think it's
00:33:11.400
going to stay up on Amazon. I think that when the left understands the thesis of this book and some of
00:33:19.300
the arguments that are made in the book, I think they are going to take it down. So if you want to
00:33:22.220
get it, I would urge you to pre-order it now because I really, I'm not just selling books,
00:33:27.940
though I would like to do that too, but I don't know. If they're going to take down Ryan's book,
00:33:30.920
I can't imagine what the future is for my book or even many other conservative books that dare
00:33:35.820
to talk about anything other than, you know, cutting taxes or something, that dare to talk
00:33:40.140
about any cultural issue. And what we're really talking about here is cancel culture because what
00:33:45.780
you're hearing from some of the squishes who can call themselves conservatives, but also from the
00:33:51.680
left is, it's not cancel culture to take down Ryan's book. We don't like that book. Amazon has no
00:33:57.800
obligation or Apple has no obligation to host a book that they disagree with.
00:34:02.960
Come on, they're private companies. It's a free market, right? That's not cancel culture.
00:34:09.760
I have said basically from the beginning of this whole thing, this whole show is basically just,
00:34:14.540
I hate to say I told you so, from the beginning of this whole thing, I have said that I don't think
00:34:19.480
cancel culture is a particularly precise or helpful term because it falls into the classic trap of
00:34:27.100
political correctness, which is political correctness is the instrument by which the
00:34:32.020
left attacks traditional standards. It's just an attack. It's just a criticism. You've heard of
00:34:36.960
critical theory. It's like that. It just criticizes and criticizes and criticizes and tries to tear down
00:34:42.620
the old traditional order. Then conservatives respond to that either by acquiescing and saying,
00:34:48.520
okay, well, I'll go along. You know, what's the big deal, right? Sort of the thing on masks.
00:34:52.220
Okay, no big deal. I'll just go along. Or the other way conservatives react is they say, hey,
00:34:57.740
I oppose any kind of standards. I oppose any kind of censorship. I oppose any kind of guardrails
00:35:05.180
on our society. So I'm against cancel culture. And then either way, the left wins because now
00:35:13.940
nobody is defending the old traditional moral standards. I've mentioned this before. You know,
00:35:21.760
sometimes you see this on left-wing Twitter accounts and things. They'll send these memes around.
00:35:27.940
It'll be a picture of Joe McCarthy and they'll say, you know, conservatives were doing cancel culture
00:35:32.320
before it was cool. Conservatives originated cancel culture. And there's some truth to that.
00:35:36.760
McCarthyism, which until very recently was defended by all the mainstream conservatives,
00:35:42.100
the idea that you could root out communists who are working for foreign governments who
00:35:46.520
were seeking to subvert your country, it's not a particularly controversial point of view,
00:35:50.380
though it's been revised through various political activists to say that it would be.
00:35:55.240
That's not wild. That's not extraordinary. That's been true since the beginning of the country.
00:36:00.020
We've always had laws against sedition. We've always had laws against fraud. We've always had
00:36:03.660
laws against obscenity, though they're not really enforced much these days. They were still being
00:36:08.020
enforced even a dozen years ago. We still have, or I suppose now, now going on 14 years ago when George
00:36:15.660
Bush jailed a pornographer because he, because the pornography was so obscene. There are always
00:36:20.960
constraints on language and speech. Do you think that if some guy walks into your office,
00:36:27.960
he's got a Nazi armband on, he walks up to the water cooler and starts screaming,
00:36:32.700
Zig Heil. Do you think that guy has a right to keep his job? Do you think that if he were fired
00:36:38.380
for that, that would be cancel culture? No, of course you, you absolutely agree as we all do
00:36:43.000
that private associations and businesses and even whole societies have the right to determine their
00:36:49.400
standards and their norms. Just by definition, every society does that. So I don't use the term
00:36:55.920
cancel culture. Cancel, when I use it, when I, when I invoke that term, I'm referring to a very
00:37:00.460
specific thing, which is what's, what we see going on right now. It's when the left targets
00:37:04.660
conservatives for saying perfectly reasonable things. The difference between my definition
00:37:11.620
of cancel culture and the kind of abstract version is I'm talking about a real thing that's
00:37:16.200
actually happening. I'm describing a discrete specific phenomenon and the substance of them.
00:37:22.300
It's not just the form that matters. It's not just that people are being censored or
00:37:25.080
ostracized. It's the substance. What are they being censored for? What are they being ostracized
00:37:30.060
for? If, if some guy has the, the armband on and he says, Zig Heil at the water cooler,
00:37:36.400
then I don't think it's wrong to ostracize him from the company. But if that, if another guy walks
00:37:41.560
up to the water cooler and he's got an American flag and he says, I'm a Yankee doodle dandy and he
00:37:44.920
gets fired for that, that I am against. That is the sort of cancel culture that we're seeing right now.
00:37:50.280
People saying perfectly mainstream, patriotic, traditional American things and having their
00:37:55.760
lives ruined for that. That, but the substance there really matters. And this brings us to CPAC,
00:38:01.180
the conservative political action conference has been going on for a long time. The American
00:38:04.100
conservative union puts it on. It's always a very fun event. I went last year where we did a
00:38:08.780
verdict episode with Ted Cruz. A lot of, I've been going for years and years. I think I went to my
00:38:13.660
first CPAC 10 years ago. CPAC's title this year is America Uncanceled, fighting back against cancel
00:38:21.980
culture and fun. Fair enough. But they just found out that one of their speakers, this guy,
00:38:27.560
young Pharaoh, who I don't know what he does, but I don't know. He's like some pop culture guy or
00:38:35.080
something. Young Pharaoh has said some very offensive things about Jews and other people.
00:38:41.040
So what does CPAC do? They cancel them from their roster. Now CPAC is being called hypocrites
00:38:47.260
because they're indulging in cancel culture. I don't think CPAC is being hypocritical at all.
00:38:52.760
I think it is the shallowest, stupidest read of the term cancel culture to suggest that you can never
00:38:59.480
have any standards at all. I think it is that that kind of a shallow interpretation that has allowed
00:39:06.060
political correctness to advance for decades and decades. And actually, if you believe the argument
00:39:13.140
in my book, it's been advancing for about a century. There is nothing conservative about
00:39:21.200
removing all the guardrails. Think about it like a country. Think about it just like a country. A
00:39:26.520
country needs borders. That was, that was what Merrick Garland finally acknowledged that Joe Biden
00:39:31.080
thinks about it. He says, look, he believes that it's a country that has borders. All countries have
00:39:35.560
borders. And what borders mean is some people are in and some people are out. A certain area defines
00:39:43.120
what the country is and things outside that area. That's not the country. The same thing is true in
00:39:48.240
our philosophy. Do you think if CPAC invited someone to speak, forget about, you know, anti-Jewish
00:39:54.380
commons, let's make it even more basic than that. Some guy gets invited to speak at CPAC. And then in
00:40:01.160
between the time he gets invited and the time he speaks, he becomes a liberal Democrat. And he wants
00:40:05.640
to give a speech on how great AOC is and how he can't wait to vote for Joe Biden's reelection or better
00:40:10.880
yet, Kamala Harris. Do you think CPAC has an obligation, you know, in its opposition to cancel
00:40:18.880
culture and obligation to put that guy on stage? No, of course not. If anything, CPAC has an obligation
00:40:24.840
to take that guy off the roster because this is the conservative political action conference and
00:40:30.160
conservatism stands for something. We're debating what that stands for, but, but we, we absolutely
00:40:38.480
must define it. And actually the unwillingness, the cowardly unwillingness to define what conservatives
00:40:43.760
stand for is what has made us lose many, many, many times over the past several decades.
00:40:50.560
President Trump, one of the few Republicans to win in recent years, though then he sadly is no
00:40:57.340
longer president, but he did win in 2016. Trump is going to speak at CPAC and the reports are that
00:41:03.280
President Trump is going to speak on the future of the GOP. There are some reports that he's going to
00:41:09.240
say he's the presumptive nominee in, in 2024. I don't know. They might just be floating that just
00:41:13.980
to get some buzz or some publicity or something. But it does seem likely that he's going to be
00:41:19.080
speaking on the future of the GOP. What is the future of the GOP? I don't know. We're going to be
00:41:26.160
debating that. Obviously I have my preferences. Other people have other preferences, but the one
00:41:30.260
thing I know that it's not going to be, if the GOP has a future at all, is the old GOP of the last 20
00:41:36.880
years. It's not going to be that because that GOP doesn't win any battles. Even when they win
00:41:44.060
elections, they don't win any substantive battles. You lose all the important issues. You lose,
00:41:50.600
you, you, you lose every important issue up to and including the freaking girls' bathroom. You
00:41:55.860
couldn't even conserve that. Whatever the future of the GOP is, whatever the future of conservatism is,
00:42:01.720
it's going to have to conserve something. Which brings us to an article in Reason.
00:42:09.520
I just read an article in Reason Magazine. Reason is the sort of libertarian website and magazine,
00:42:17.620
and I have a great respect for many libertarians. I am not myself a libertarian, but I have respect for
00:42:24.480
many libertarians, but I don't have respect for libertines. There should be a difference between
00:42:30.360
libertarianism and libertinism, but increasingly there really is not. The article in Reason is,
00:42:36.340
is there a future for fusionism? Fusionism refers to the kind of conservative coalition that cropped up
00:42:44.580
after World War II and defined the Cold War. And it was put together by guys like William F. Buckley Jr.
00:42:51.200
and Ronald Reagan and National Review and God and Man at Yale and all this sort of movement. And Buckley is
00:42:57.480
kind of the central figure. Now, I actually think it's worth reading this Reason article, even though
00:43:05.540
they're wrong in their conclusion. But they say, the fall of the USSR meant the collapse of the common
00:43:11.340
foe that had sustained the fusionist partnership of the kind of traditional conservatives and the
00:43:17.060
libertarians and the war hawks. It was able to trundle on for a while, powered by a reservoir of goodwill,
00:43:22.800
but it has long been running on fumes. In the last few years, the alliance's inherent tensions have
00:43:27.780
come to a head. It's increasingly common to hear that whatever value there may have been
00:43:31.260
in cooperation during the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, the era of good conservative feelings is over.
00:43:36.480
I agree with that. That's a good take. For many libertarians, this is where it goes off the rails.
00:43:41.480
For many libertarians, the Trump years revealed their traditionalist allies to be hypocrites and
00:43:46.700
opportunists, all too willing to sell out the ideals of fusionism in service of an aspiring
00:43:53.160
dictator. Okay, here we go. Am I reading? What is this? Is this CNN that I'm reading?
00:43:57.960
What it would, the libertarians now are going to sound like MSNBC. Conservatives have commenced a not
00:44:03.780
so slow dissent toward authoritarianism. Oh, if that word could be struck forever from the English
00:44:09.180
language, I would, I would pass a law to do it in my authoritarian abilities. It's what a stupid word.
00:44:16.600
It's basically a meaningless word. And they're not so slow dissent toward authoritarianism. Some in this
00:44:21.360
group suggest, for if the philosophy of liberty is to have a future, it must involve building bridges
00:44:27.420
to the left, not to the right. And there it is. Russell Kirk, one of the great conservative writers
00:44:31.760
and thinkers of the 20th century, long warned that the alliance between libertarians and conservatives
00:44:40.080
never made any sense, that conservatives should be very wary of that because ultimately the
00:44:44.800
libertarians were going to break to the left. And the many, many people who I think call themselves
00:44:49.040
libertarian, but they're not really, they wouldn't agree with Reason Magazine. You know,
00:44:52.540
they're really more conservative than all that. They're going to have to pick a side. They're either
00:44:56.320
going to have to go to the left and sound like MSNBC, like Reason Magazine here, or they're going to have
00:45:01.280
to go and be conservative. What they really misunderstand here is, they could change one
00:45:10.080
word in this article and it would make sense. If they changed it to, if the philosophy of
00:45:14.540
licentiousness is to have a future, it must involve building bridges to the left, not the right.
00:45:19.480
But liberty and licentiousness are very different things. Lord Acton, a man revered by true libertarians,
00:45:26.660
by libertarians of many, many decades and longer. What he said was, liberty is not, as many people
00:45:36.740
commonly think it is, the ability to do whatever you want and pursue your appetites however you want,
00:45:42.300
your desires however you want. Liberty is the right to do what you ought. I know this is a shocking
00:45:49.600
statement for a lot of people. Liberty, freedom, is not just the ability to do whatever we want.
00:45:54.700
Because the thing is, if you just pursue your base passions all the time, then you're going to lose
00:46:00.140
your liberty. If you, let's say, you know, I really want heroin. You're going to go out and shoot up a
00:46:05.220
bunch of heroin and you say, oh man, I've never been more free. Do you think heroin addicts have a whole
00:46:09.700
lot of liberty? Do you think they're the freest people? No, they're slaves. They're slaves to their
00:46:13.660
appetites, which gets to the classical conservative understanding of liberty. The man who sins is a slave to
00:46:20.700
sin. We need liberal education to make sense of our liberty, to tame our base passions, to tame our
00:46:25.400
vices, to practice virtue, to develop our and cultivate our reason, cultivate our will, control
00:46:32.800
our will. Then we can be really free. This is what all the founding fathers believed. And the
00:46:39.140
more libertine camp that has found itself on the right, that, that they no longer are like that.
00:46:46.800
Now, I don't think, as some people on the right have said, some conservatives have said, we need
00:46:52.460
to, you know, boot out all the libertarians or anything. I think that's a losing battle. You know,
00:46:56.000
I think that politics is the art of inclusion. You've got to bring people in if you want a winning
00:47:01.020
coalition. So people who say, I'm a libertarian, you know, and they wave their Gadsden flag and they
00:47:05.940
say, darn it, I stand for the American tradition of liberty. Yeah, those guys, obviously, those are
00:47:10.880
conservatives. Those are, those are people who I think make common cause with us. But there's another
00:47:16.440
type of libertarian, you know, the type I'm talking about. If you've ever spent any time around
00:47:20.580
a college campus or even high school, I guess, you, you know, those libertarians where the most
00:47:26.680
important political issue to them is legalizing pot. You know, they forget about, you know, foreign
00:47:32.940
policy, immigration, abortion, any sort of economic policy, trade. No, forget about that. The most
00:47:40.480
important thing is that everyone gets to smoke the devil's lettuce, you know, the sin spinach.
00:47:45.760
Those guys, I don't think they really have a future on the right. I don't think there's,
00:47:50.000
there's nothing really conservative about them. Their understanding of liberty is totally wrong.
00:47:54.440
I mean, those are the kind of guys I think that Reason Magazine is talking about right now.
00:47:58.800
But the thing Reason gets right that I think Trump is getting right in giving the speech at CPAC
00:48:06.340
that all of us are intuiting is that whatever was meant by conservatism in the 20th century up till
00:48:16.000
the end of the Cold War, that was great. That worked. That defeated the Soviet Union.
00:48:20.160
And then whatever was meant after that didn't really make a whole lot of sense. And when you
00:48:24.500
look back on the Bush years, do you really think like, oh yes, that was the triumph of conservative
00:48:29.140
values in America? No, it was mostly a period of decline and loss of things that we cherish.
00:48:35.240
So whatever is going to come next, it's going to be different than what it was in the past.
00:48:42.100
For, for too long now, I think conservatism has been canceled to use a faddish and sort of stupid
00:48:49.060
word. Conservatism has been canceled by people who want to make conservatism basically the same thing
00:48:54.280
as liberalism and not let us defend any of the things we want to defend and not let us preserve
00:48:58.960
anything resembling the American way of life. We're barely allowed to go outside anymore. And when we go
00:49:04.700
outside, we have to listen to some technocrat egghead tell us what to wear, even on our faces.
00:49:10.120
No, if we're going to, if we're going to be conservatives in the future, we're going to
00:49:13.760
have to conserve the, the traditions and the way of life that we've long cherished in this country.
00:49:20.000
I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:49:21.540
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
00:49:50.820
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
00:49:55.820
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.
00:50:01.540
Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup by
00:50:07.580
Nika Geneva. And production coordinator, McKenna Waters. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire
00:50:15.520
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, Democratic Congress people seek to purge media outlets that they don't
00:50:20.740
like. Plus, President Biden holds an empathetic commemorative event for 500,000 Americans who
00:50:25.800
died of COVID and the media go gaga. That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show. Give it a listen.