John Lovitz is joining a chorus of entertainers speaking out against cancel culture. Is it like McCarthyism? Is it the same thing? And is it not? Today on the Michael Knowles Show, host Michael Jay Knowles talks about the differences between cancel culture and McCarthyism.
00:05:17.600The question is not, do you have taboos or do you not have taboos?
00:05:21.100That's a, that's a stupid question because we're always going to have taboos.
00:05:24.200We're always going to say some things are off limits.
00:05:26.180I know that there are some idealistic, utopian, libertarian, I don't know what term you want to use, who say, no, there's no limits whatsoever, but it's just silly.
00:05:57.320Kim Reynolds, governor of Iowa, signed that bill that says that if you teach in such a way as to assign fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex, you can't do that in the classroom.
00:06:13.280Critical race theory, of course, a derivation of critical theory, which is a huge part of the politically correct slash woke project that has brought us to our current state of censorship, which you can read about in my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order.
00:06:51.560You shouldn't be banning critical race theory in the classroom.
00:06:54.780The founding fathers are rolling over in their graves.
00:06:57.820First of all, the founding fathers banned all this sorts of stuff, okay?
00:07:00.580Let's not forget, within just a few years of the existence of our republic, our second president and one of our most conservative presidents, John Adams, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized making false statements about the federal government.
00:07:13.740Parts of those laws still exist today.
00:07:16.140A lot of it was gotten rid of, but some of it still exists today.
00:07:19.820There are all sorts of laws that have prescribed this kind of speech.
00:07:23.240But now we are to believe that critical race theory is just the sort of thing that Americans must defend.
00:07:29.380But, of course, you're hearing this from people such as David French, who are former Republicans or former conservatives who are now, I don't know how David would describe himself now, but he spends most of his time, you'll notice, criticizing people on the right.
00:07:44.100You're also hearing this, though, from quite serious conservative professors.
00:07:49.220I'm thinking of Robbie George at Princeton, who has been a conservative leader for many years.
00:08:25.760I can't tell if Robbie George knows that this is not true, but is trying to carve out some space in the university for conservative points of view.
00:08:35.100He's done a very good job of that at Princeton.
00:08:36.840So maybe he's trying to pretend that what he just said is true so that the liberals are more likely to give him some space to run, for instance, the James Madison program or to hire more conservative faculty members.
00:08:47.460If that's the case, tactically, it's probably smart, but as an objective matter, what he just said is not true.
00:08:53.300There are plenty of views that are completely off limits that are, there are plenty of views that are given a monopoly, actually, in various institutions.
00:09:00.440And those views tend to just be derivations of the broader leftist ideology.
00:09:08.680Many of them, some are immunized from criticism and some are prohibited.
00:09:12.780As Bill Buckley famously stated in God and Man at Yale, the Yale Department of Sociology would never hire an Aryan supremacist to teach about the glories of white people in the university, nor should they.
00:09:26.840That the university would not do that.
00:09:54.480Now, interestingly, I think David French makes the more sophisticated criticism here of the critical race theory bans.
00:10:02.680He's saying, look, some of these critical race theory bans are so broad that you're going to end up shooting yourself in the foot
00:10:07.300and banning speech that even you would support.
00:10:10.360So some of the critical race theory bans are creating protections from criticism in the classroom for religions, for other things that are creeds, whatever that means.
00:10:21.880So if you have a protection for a creed, is that protecting communism from criticism?
00:10:26.160Obviously, we wouldn't want to do that.
00:10:27.660So I actually agree with David French's criticism there.
00:10:32.060We're not banning from the classroom all sorts of criticism of all sorts of things.
00:10:36.620We are specifically banning this radical, stupid, ugly, false theory called critical race theory, which is a derivation of the broader critical theory project.
00:10:50.360We all use this term, and yet people don't seem to know what it means.
00:10:56.900Well, you can read the academic literature on it.
00:11:00.400It's developed by this woman, Kimberly Crenshaw, or a number of other people who have contributed to this particular subset of critical theory.
00:11:07.160But it's probably easier just to watch a video on what critical theory looks like in action.
00:11:11.480Here is Ashley Shackelford, a, quote, queer, agender, black, fat femme writer, artist, and cultural producer.
00:11:19.240She is giving a lesson through the analytical lens of critical race theory to a group of deluded and poor white people.
00:11:28.320I think it's sort of a mixed, mixed crowd here.
00:11:30.320This is what CRT looks and sounds like in practice.
00:11:35.300So, I put this up because I really want any white person in the room to know up front that this is what we're dealing with, that it's not going to be this coddling of white tears and what that looks like.
00:11:47.800We're not going to discuss, oh, maybe some of us have worked it out.
00:11:50.900No, you're always going to be racist, actually.
00:11:52.980So, even when you're on your path to trying to figure out how to be a better human being, because I believe that white people are born into not being human, like that actually instead of people of color and black folks being dehumanized, that actually everyone is dehumanized off rip within white supremacy, that y'all are born into a life to not be human.
00:12:13.680And that's what y'all are taught to do, to be demons.
00:12:16.360So, in this particular way, white people are all racist.
00:16:53.860Now, what she, I think, fails to recognize is what, it's the same mistake that so many conservatives, they tend to be the squishy types of conservatives, fail to recognize.
00:17:06.140Which is they say, this typical expression, we shouldn't teach students what to think.
00:17:13.380Sure, but you can't teach someone how to think unless you teach them what to think.
00:17:21.360You can't teach them how to think about calculus if you don't teach them that two plus two equals four.
00:17:27.140To get back to our earlier example, you can't teach them how to think about history until you teach them that America declares dependence in 1776.
00:17:35.3801776, and the Civil War breaks out in 1860, and Ronald Reagan gets elected in 1980.
00:17:41.600You can't tell them how to think about these things until you tell them certain facts about it.
00:17:47.300And when you tell them facts, you're stating this is true and this is false.
00:19:16.120The transformation of the word prejudice from something that is actually quite good and reliable in the sense used by Edmund Burke to this awful, evil, terrible thing is an amazing transformation in and of itself.
00:19:30.020But they say these words can distract your audience from the ideas or information you're trying to convey.
00:19:34.400The bias terms to be avoided include blacklist, can't do that, it's offensive to black people.
00:19:41.300Grandfathered, that you can't do that, that's a racist term too.
00:19:43.980How, we would need some more time to describe that silliness.
00:29:18.980In a society where we think about our past, we think about our future, we're bound together as countrymen.
00:29:26.300Isn't that a nice thing to say one group of people did a thing for another group of people?
00:29:30.120Well, we're not allowed to believe that anymore because everything has to be focused only on, one, the tyranny of our own will and our own ability to save ourselves without accepting grace from anybody else.
00:29:42.400And everything has to be about vicious racism and division.
00:29:46.280And no group of people can ever do anything for another group of people.
00:29:52.260Tom Hanks canceled, at least according to the far left.
00:31:53.780And when we gave up on the Christian understanding of human nature and of society and of our eternal selves, then everybody had to be perfect.
00:32:06.600Because then we couldn't make sense of original sin.
00:32:10.060We've transformed the idea of original sin into this idea of white supremacy or racism.
00:32:15.360Which is just a very stupid way of talking about original sin.
00:35:05.660You have been leading an effort since you left Congress to deal with the issue of revenge porn and on the Violence Against Women Act and really these issues altogether about what women endure and should not endure.
00:35:26.340Listen, I haven't written anything off.
00:35:30.260The last two years have, well, year and a half have been really, you know, tragic and important for my family and for me in terms of figuring out what the next steps are.
00:35:40.060And right now I need to figure out my role in making sure that this gets passed, helping women run for and get elected to office.
00:36:20.040You got to be a pretty slick politician to pull this one.
00:36:24.320We need to stop this revenge porn, whatever revenge porn is if your boyfriend has photos of you or your husband, I guess, in this case, has compromising photos of you that they shouldn't be released.
00:36:33.760Of course, it's very wrong to release these sorts of things.
00:36:36.840But we have to recognize you shouldn't be doing these sorts of things either.
00:36:41.940It's not the injustice is not just that the husband exposed Katie Hill in many ways for having this affair with her staffer.
00:36:53.540The injustice is that she had the affair.
00:36:57.400Now, it's the same issue with Jeffrey Toobin.
00:37:00.380The problem is not just that he did it in public.
00:37:04.060The problem is that he did it in private too.
00:37:08.660And we need to be willing to say no to certain kinds of private behavior that are destructive and that harm individuals and that harm society.
00:37:20.260I know we're not allowed to say that anymore.
00:37:21.460The simplest one, the lowest hanging fruit, would be porn.
00:37:26.860And not just revenge porn, not just child porn, not just other forms of illegal porn that are currently illegal.
00:37:34.100Porn in general, the sort of stuff that Jeffrey Toobin may have taken a look or two at.
00:37:40.760In this country, we have always had laws against porn.
00:38:15.740It's this younger generation where the millennials at least got to grow up at least for some period of time without internet porn all over the place.