Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 441 ｜ Is Good Speech Better Than Free Speech？｜ Guest： Michael Knowles

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. I am really excited about you guys listening to my conversation

00:00:15.000 with podcast host and author Michael Knowles. We are going to talk about his new book,

00:00:21.920 Speechless, and you guys are going to love it. He is a very independent and I think compelling

00:00:29.480 thinker. You guys are going to love his book and you're also going to love the conversation

00:00:33.860 that I had with him. So without further ado, here is Michael Knowles.

00:00:43.060 Michael, thank you so much for joining me. We're going to talk about a few things today.

00:00:47.660 I want to talk about the birth of your baby, but also the birth of your book. Let's first talk

00:00:54.660 about fatherhood. How has that adjustment been? It has been fabulous and shocking and you can see

00:01:02.420 the under-eye bags are proof of my fatherhood. It's kind of a bit of cosmic sadism though,

00:01:10.380 or maybe providence, that my book and my baby were both due on the same day.

00:01:16.460 Wow. And you know, my baby, very punctual, he came right on time. And so I was, I kind of wish

00:01:24.780 he had like waited a day or two because I was in the room, the delivery room. The nurses must have

00:01:29.880 thought I was the most callous man in the world because I'm just there, you know, typing away

00:01:33.720 until midnight almost. But baby came out fine and I think the book came out fine too. So it was nice

00:01:40.820 that they were both delivered on time.

00:01:42.460 So are you getting any sleep? Like how has the newborn stage been? Anything

00:01:46.800 surprised you? What's it been like?

00:01:49.980 The thing that surprised me is I've always thought that I would be a really good grandpa.

00:01:55.460 I know it's sort of up in the air about being a father, but being a grandpa, I thought, you know,

00:01:59.160 the kid comes over, I like slip him a 20, you know, whatever. I give him his first cigar. But, uh,

00:02:04.180 I thought I would really enjoy fatherhood intellectually. It's sort of the thing that

00:02:08.820 we're geared to do. And, you know, not everyone gets to do it. It was a little bit of a rocky

00:02:13.840 road even for us to get there. So I thought intellectually, I'd really like it. Uh, but

00:02:17.500 emotionally, I don't know. I'm not the most touchy feely guy in the world. So I didn't think I'd have

00:02:21.440 that. And then the minute that kid comes out, not to get sentimental or anything, the emotional rush

00:02:31.200 of it really did surprise me. And even, you know, when the little guy is just like screaming in my

00:02:37.560 face, uh, which is a frequent occurrence, uh, there's something so cute and endearing about it.

00:02:43.320 It's almost like our nature was made to react that way.

00:02:47.000 It is almost like that. I talk about like the tidal wave of love that you feel when they put

00:02:52.540 that baby on your chest. It's like all of a sudden, all of your hopes and fears that you had for

00:02:57.300 yourself are transferred onto this human being. And you're like, I don't even care what happens

00:03:01.600 to me. I would die a thousand deaths if it just meant that this human being was happy. And yes,

00:03:07.480 of course you love your spouse. You love your parents. You love different kinds of people in

00:03:10.740 your life, even in maybe an unconditional way when it comes to your spouse. But the love that you have

00:03:15.560 for a child, I mean, like you said, it's just this other worldly, never felt before inexplicable

00:03:22.760 kind of thing. And I think that also, that surprised me too. People, you know, they tell

00:03:27.940 you that, but you, you don't know until you experience it. Would you agree?

00:03:33.060 Absolutely. And there, you know, on that very point, I was thinking in the final weeks before

00:03:38.840 the baby was due, I said, well, you know, you've got to my wife, I'd say, you've got the baby coming

00:03:44.840 out. That's the birth that you're giving. And I've got my book that's coming out. Hopefully that's the

00:03:48.380 birth that I'm giving. And, and not to be too cold about it, but I just, I was spending much

00:03:53.540 more of my time thinking about the book than I was about the baby and, you know, vice versa for her.

00:03:58.180 And then the minute the kid came out, it was really shocking. I had this sense that, oh,

00:04:05.220 the book just doesn't really matter. You know, like I, I think it, I think it makes important

00:04:09.600 arguments. I hope it changes the dialogue a little bit and the direction of the conservative

00:04:13.220 movement. But broadly speaking, who gives a damn, you know, compared to the kid,

00:04:17.400 like the book is nothing. Yeah. Do you have the same anxiety that I hear from a lot of parents?

00:04:23.580 And I don't know if it's different between moms and dads, the different feelings that you have,

00:04:27.580 just looking at the craziness of the world, how we live in this kind of post-truth. And as we're

00:04:31.620 going to talk about this cancel obsessed world, does it give you any anxiety about raising a child

00:04:38.620 in that kind of environment? It does for a number of reasons, but you know, when I think of my

00:04:46.940 own experience and then I think of the, the way that I want to raise my son, I see a conflict

00:04:54.080 and this creates a little bit of a problem. It's, it's sort of the issue that every parent faces

00:04:59.280 when you, you want to give your kid the best, but you don't want to spoil your kid. If you give your

00:05:03.520 kid the best of everything, the kid's going to be spoiled and that's actually not going to be good

00:05:07.580 for you. And so I, I think now I look at public schools here, even here in Tennessee, where,

00:05:13.440 you know, it's a little more sane than California or New York, but there's still this radical leftism.

00:05:19.520 The most notable extreme of this is gender theory has infiltrated all these institutions. So I think, 0.75

00:05:25.780 okay, I can't send the kid to public school. Then I look around some of the Catholic schools. I don't 0.99

00:05:30.540 know. I've heard kind of mixed things. I don't know if that's great. Then some of the other private

00:05:34.320 schools are one, exorbitantly expensive, but two, you don't even really know if they're getting the

00:05:40.740 education that you want there either in Los Angeles, for example, the private schools are

00:05:45.220 probably more crazy than the public schools even. So then you say, okay, I guess my option is to

00:05:49.720 homeschool. I have a lot of friends who are homeschooled. It's obviously a great option,

00:05:53.480 the kind of a heavy load on, on the mother specifically, but okay, that's an option.

00:05:58.460 But then you think of your own experience. I'm a product of public school. I met my wife in,

00:06:04.160 I think fifth grade technically, but we only remember it in sixth grade.

00:06:07.580 And I had all this kind of craziness that I was exposed to. And actually being in a very radical

00:06:13.240 leftist environment made me much more conservative. Being in a very atheist environment made me 0.98

00:06:20.020 much more Christian. I don't think that that's what happens to everybody, but for a certain kind

00:06:25.640 of contrarian personality, it does. So I think, well, if I could expose my son to the rigors of reality

00:06:33.080 and not shield him from it, he'll probably be stronger for it, but you don't want to expose

00:06:37.480 him to such dangers that it, it breaks the kid, that it ruins him. And so it's a very,

00:06:41.860 very fraught question. Yeah, I think it is really difficult. And there are a lot of different

00:06:45.780 perspectives on this podcast. We talk about the dangers or the problems with our public education

00:06:50.920 system a lot. And that's not to say that sending your kid to a private school, Catholic school,

00:06:55.340 Christian school, whatever it is, is going to guarantee their salvation, is going to guarantee

00:07:02.020 that they have their head screwed on tight. I went to private school, kindergarten through 12th grade,

00:07:07.420 and I graduated with people who were taught all the same things that I was. We were all taught from

00:07:13.400 a Christian perspective, and yet who are diametrically opposed to what kind of values we were raised with

00:07:19.600 today. So obviously, it doesn't guarantee that you stay sane or stay a believer your whole life.

00:07:25.980 But I do worry about sending young kids into battle so early on. I do think that there's a point that

00:07:33.400 you're making that, yes, they're exposed to reality and exposed to other views, and hopefully it toughens

00:07:38.000 them up and prepares them for the real world and being able to defend their faith and their values.

00:07:43.280 But, you know, I mean, sending a kindergartner to battle to where they're having to hear eight

00:07:49.040 hours a day different definitions of gender and marriage and family and sexuality and morality

00:07:54.200 and a different worldview, and then expecting me to compete against that for the few hours at night

00:07:59.340 that I have with them, that does kind of sound like a losing battle and something that I don't

00:08:05.540 really want to subject my kids to. Of course. I mean, even, I guess I came out of the whole process

00:08:11.600 more conservative and Christian again, you know, not just more Christian, but Christian rather than

00:08:17.760 not being Christian. But that only followed probably a decade in which I was a little bit

00:08:23.740 liberal. I had some dalliances, but moreover, I was an atheist for about 10 years. And I think if I had

00:08:29.940 been catechized in a more robust way in Christianity, right, you know, and not quite so catechized as I was

00:08:37.460 in secular liberalism, I might've been able to save myself a lot of trouble over those 10 years. All's

00:08:43.140 well that ends well, but that, that is a hefty price to pay. And the, you know, the whole point

00:08:48.540 of education is that you shape people, you know, education is not just even about the book learning

00:08:56.320 that goes into your head, though. It's obviously about that, but it's about your behavior. It's about

00:08:59.840 training in the virtue. I think actually sometimes conservatives get confused on this point.

00:09:05.040 They say, you know, we want to educate, not indoctrinate, but the words mean essentially

00:09:09.600 the same thing. They both come from the same root word. Sometimes you'll hear, we want to teach

00:09:14.100 students how to think, not what to think. And the thing about that is you need to know what to think

00:09:22.080 to know how to think. You need to know that two plus two equals four if you want to know how to think

00:09:28.720 about mathematics. And so I, you know, we're, we're, uh, very reluctant to use anything that

00:09:35.740 might seem coercive, especially on the right. But you know, all education is coercive. You're teaching

00:09:41.780 people some things you're, you're not teaching them other things. And, uh, you know, if, if a student

00:09:46.660 is raised on Shakespeare and the King James Bible and the best that has been written, he's going to

00:09:52.360 have a much more robust education than if he's raised on Ibram Kendi in common core.

00:09:57.240 Right. I think that you make a good point that in an effort to try to be opposed to progressivism,

00:10:03.260 uh, we try to say, well, no, no, no, we don't want to indoctrinate in the same way that secular 1.00

00:10:07.620 progressives do. So we just kind of want to be hands off and allow our kids to figure things out.

00:10:13.520 But I mean, the world isn't neutral. There is no neutral ground. Secularism is not a neutral 0.93

00:10:19.440 perspective. It's not a neutral worldview. And I think some people think that, that if you just

00:10:24.260 raise your kids, um, void of any kind of religious doctrine or religious values, then they'll just

00:10:30.320 learn how to critically think and they'll come up with their own conclusions. But that is a faulty,

00:10:35.540 it's, it's a misunderstanding of how the world works, how worldview works. Uh, they're going to be

00:10:40.840 indoctrinated one way or another. I remember reading this article by a Harvard professor.

00:10:46.040 I think her name is Elizabeth Bartholet, where she said that homeschooling is very

00:10:50.600 authoritarian. And I brought this up with someone that I was interviewing, um, to try to get their

00:10:55.520 counterpoint. And he actually made a better point than the one that I thought that he was going to

00:10:59.460 make. And he said, well, it is, it is authoritarian. Parenthood is authoritarian. Teachers, uh, teaching

00:11:06.540 kids in school is authoritarian in the sense that they have the authority.

00:11:10.840 They're telling them what to think. They're telling them how to think. They're telling them

00:11:14.740 what conclusions to come to. They're even indoctrinating them with a certain kind of

00:11:19.480 worldview and morality. And so the question is for parents is not whether or not there's going

00:11:24.520 to be an authority in your child's life, but who is that primary authority going to be? And what is

00:11:29.960 your child's going to learn from that authority? So I think you're right. Conservatives need to not be

00:11:33.820 so scared to say, yeah, we are going to also teach what to think in addition to how to think.

00:11:39.280 This is such an important point. I'm so glad you've said it. The classroom is not a democracy.

00:11:45.540 It can't be. The teacher is there to convey information, to, to, to educate people. And the

00:11:51.620 students are there to learn the very liberal, uh, but still smart guy, a former president of Yale,

00:11:57.220 Rick Levin said during a speech once that the truth is arrogant and it's kind of a modern liberal way to

00:12:04.720 say something that we all know that is true, which is, you know, there, there is objective reality

00:12:09.440 and you, you know, you, you can't, uh, descend into this kind of radical subjectivism. Uh, you're not

00:12:16.900 going to learn anything that way. It's not going to tell you anything about the world. William F.

00:12:19.900 Buckley Jr. Actually, in his book that is often credited with launching the post-war conservative

00:12:24.420 movement, God and man at Yale, he quotes, uh, another president of the university who, who said,

00:12:30.560 skepticism has utility only in as much as it leads to conviction. You know, keeping an open mind is a,

00:12:38.940 is an important thing, but you don't want your mind to be so open that your brain falls out.

00:12:43.380 The only reason to have an open mind is to consider different points of view and then to come to what

00:12:48.900 you think. You have to know what you think. You can't just remain totally open forever. Then,

00:12:53.540 then you really don't possess any thoughts at all. And you're utterly incapable of action.

00:12:58.140 Yes, exactly. And I do think that that is, uh, that's one thing that unfortunately I won't even

00:13:03.980 just say public education, but probably a lot of education centers and a lot of different kinds of

00:13:09.860 schools in general fail to do for our kids. Like we said, it is, you know, it's inevitable to teach

00:13:14.920 kids what to think, but you do also have to teach them how to think. And unfortunately I don't think

00:13:19.300 that's happening. Um, in some, you know, uh, public schools that are saying, well, we're going to

00:13:23.600 replace curriculum about history, uh, with curriculum about activism, or we're going to not talk about

00:13:29.940 the Holocaust. And instead we're going to talk about black lives matter. Something that I think that

00:13:34.080 parents can do really well. The only people in the world, by the way, who really have the best

00:13:38.680 interest of your child at heart is to say, yes, this is our values. This is what we believe.

00:13:43.180 This is the worldview from which we are approaching these issues. But look, I also want you to be able

00:13:49.080 to critically think. I also want you to be able to challenge these positions and think through these

00:13:53.480 positions and not just agree with me on everything. I think, um, that conservatives do a better job of

00:14:00.400 that than progressives do because progressivism really crumbles under any kind of scrutiny. Would you agree?

00:14:06.620 Oh yes. I love your point on the curriculum because this is another, uh, trap I think that

00:14:14.060 conservatives fall into, which is we buy the language about inclusivity very often or, or

00:14:20.880 expanding the curriculum. You know, you, you've recently heard that, uh, activists are trying to

00:14:26.040 decolonize different academic departments. They even, I thought this one was pretty funny. They said

00:14:30.840 they want to decolonize the English department at various universities by getting rid of all the 0.99

00:14:36.560 English writers. And so he said, there are too many, you know, old dead English men who are in

00:14:42.000 the department. So we need to add all these other people. You say, well, it sounds like you're

00:14:45.580 recolonizing the department, you know, to, to colonize is to sort of invade and to put a foreign element in.

00:14:51.140 So, uh, anyway, they, they obviously get that one a little bit wrong, but let's take their argument for

00:14:55.900 what it is. What they're saying is they want to add new voices to the curriculum. Say Robin DiAngelo,

00:15:02.880 this race hustling woman or Ibram Kendi, similar sort of things, radical left-wing activists.

00:15:09.740 Because there's a limited amount of time, because we live in a finite world, when you include some

00:15:16.780 absolute waste of ink, like Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi, you necessarily have to exclude something.

00:15:23.760 Every minute you spend reading Robin DiAngelo is a minute that you can't be spending reading

00:15:28.620 Shakespeare or Chaucer or Wordsworth or, you know, whoever. So you've, you've got to make these

00:15:34.260 choices. If you want to expand the curriculum, just realize you're not expanding it. You're simply

00:15:39.440 taking time away from other writers and you finally have to make a value judgment. What is more valuable

00:15:45.360 for my kid to read? Shakespeare or some 21st century race hustler? 0.95

00:15:59.960 Do you think the conservatives should be reading books like White Fragility or How to Be an Anti-Racist,

00:16:05.220 even if it's just for oppo research? Or do you think it's actually better to spend time

00:16:11.060 reading that which is good and right and true and affirming, you know, what we believe to be

00:16:18.180 a virtuous value system rather than reading the other side of the argument?

00:16:23.060 My answer is yes. That is my answer. I think you, you need to have a basic level of understanding

00:16:31.880 of the good, true, beautiful beliefs before you can expose yourself to these other ideas.

00:16:40.240 But I think you should expose yourself to the other ideas. It actually gets back to what you

00:16:42.820 were saying earlier. You don't want to throw a kindergartner into the lion's den, but when

00:16:46.340 someone has sort of formed a little bit more what they think, then I think it's very important to do

00:16:51.200 this. This is actually kind of the point of my book, this book Speechless, is I want to take

00:16:56.960 seriously the left wing authors who have pushed political correctness and wokeness and cancel

00:17:04.320 culture and censorship and whatever you want to call it. I don't think the conservatives take those

00:17:09.760 authors seriously. I don't think they read what they have written and I don't think that they really

00:17:14.660 know what they think. And so I dug into a lot of these very influential leftists who kind of created

00:17:21.560 political correctness. And my main takeaway from it is I actually think that the left,

00:17:27.240 the intellectuals on the left, understand free speech and censorship and culture much better than

00:17:34.060 conservatives do. The left comes to all the wrong conclusions and what they want to do to our culture

00:17:38.580 is absolutely terrible. But I think they actually understand the problem much better than conservatives

00:17:43.680 do. And part of that, I think, is because we shut ourselves off from taking seriously their

00:17:47.780 arguments. And can you unpack that a little bit more? What do you mean when you say that they

00:17:52.700 understand free speech and these things more than conservatives do? I think political correctness

00:17:58.660 lays a trap for conservatives. You know, there's this strange phenomenon over the past at least three or

00:18:05.080 four decades that we've noticed political correctness advance. And my contention in the book is it's actually

00:18:10.540 been going on for about a hundred years, since about the 1920s. And the trap is this.

00:18:15.420 Any way conservatives react to political correctness, even as they think they're fighting

00:18:21.140 against it, we lose ground. Because political correctness is a left-wing campaign, a radical

00:18:28.340 leftist campaign to ruthlessly criticize the prevailing culture and to destroy the traditional

00:18:36.420 moral standards. It exists in a purely negative way to knock down all the old moral standards that we

00:18:44.100 have long cherished. Conservatives react to that in, generally speaking, one of two ways. Either they

00:18:50.620 go squishy and they totally give in. And a lot of people do. You'll hear this in the pronouns. Maybe

00:18:55.360 they'll refer to a man who says he's a woman. Maybe they'll start referring to him as her. Maybe they'll

00:19:00.900 go along to get along with some of these cultural issues on marriage or even life or who knows. So that's

00:19:06.260 one way is they just give in. The other way they react, though, is they reject standards altogether.

00:19:13.120 So if the left comes in, as they did in the 1960s, and they say, we hate all your traditional

00:19:20.160 social mores when it comes to sex, when it comes to speech, when it comes to behavior,

00:19:24.100 and we're going to get rid of all of them in the name of freedom and liberation.

00:19:27.740 What conservatives have come to do, I think, is say, well, we oppose the new speech codes that

00:19:35.880 you're laying on us. We oppose the new mores and standards that you're pushing on us in the form of

00:19:41.680 political correctness or cancel culture, whatever. So we oppose standards altogether. We oppose

00:19:47.780 censorship altogether. We're free speech absolutists. We think you should be able to do

00:19:52.740 absolutely whatever you want. And the thing about that response is it gives the left what they

00:19:59.060 wanted in the first place, which is to destroy the traditional moral standards. No matter how

00:20:03.660 conservatives have reacted, the left gets exactly what they want and political correctness advances.

00:20:09.300 I've noticed that about conservatives as well. There's a couple of things that came to mind

00:20:13.500 when you were speaking. Number one, you talked about becoming squishy on these cultural, 0.97

00:20:18.820 social, controversial issues. We're so afraid. We truly are afraid of not just being canceled,

00:20:26.100 but being called bigots. And we say that we're not afraid of that, but we really are,

00:20:30.700 because we start to soften and bend our language or add caveats and qualifications to what we believe,

00:20:36.360 just to try to insulate ourselves for a little bit longer from the rage mob. And what I noticed,

00:20:43.400 even going back to what is so scandalous to talk about now, like the definition of marriage and the

00:20:49.400 government's role in all of that, is that conservatives and especially Republicans in Congress

00:20:55.220 were afraid to argue for the traditional definition of marriage on its merits. And it's starting to be the

00:21:03.040 same thing, I think, when it comes to gender. We're talking about it in terms of religious liberty, 0.92

00:21:08.600 or we might be talking about it in terms of privacy rights, which are all very important. But are you

00:21:13.900 willing to argue for it on its merits, that a man is a man, that a woman is a woman, and fundamentally,

00:21:19.900 no matter what the law says, like that is not going to change. And it's good for us to have those sexual

00:21:25.700 biological distinctions and to have rights based on that. I feel like conservatives get into like the other

00:21:32.120 realms to try to be like, well, morally, I'm not against that. I'm just talking about constitutionally.

00:21:37.980 The left never does that. The left is always talking on moral grounds. And it's like, we don't

00:21:42.840 want to have the moral argument as conservatives. We only want to have the legal argument. And I think

00:21:46.700 we lose when we do that.

00:21:49.160 We do. And by the way, when we're simply speaking procedurally or formally or abstractly,

00:21:56.120 we're completely missing the point. This is what I mean when I say the left understands free speech

00:22:00.600 better than we do. From the very beginning of our country, there have been whole swaths of speech

00:22:07.480 that have been illegal from the very beginning and all the way through. Fraud, sedition, obscenity,

00:22:14.720 which we prosecuted even at the federal level up until about 14 years ago. Now we don't really do

00:22:20.080 it as much, but obviously from the very beginning of the country. Fighting words, all manner of speech.

00:22:26.780 There were huge swaths. So you can't say from the beginning of the country or at any point since then

00:22:32.580 that there has been perfectly, wonderfully, pure, abstract free speech. That's never existed

00:22:38.820 anywhere. In part because if you say one thing, you can't say another thing. I'll bring it down to

00:22:45.040 earth with your point on marriage. The debate over marriage was not over rights, though I guess it

00:22:51.380 became a debate over rights when the left, through political correctness, manipulated the conversation.

00:22:55.640 The debate over marriage is what is a marriage? The contention of conservatives is that marriage

00:23:01.360 involves sexual difference. It's the union of husbands and wives. You can no more change the 0.80

00:23:07.100 definition of marriage than I can change the definition of my coffee mug. I can call my coffee

00:23:11.680 mug a pineapple, but it doesn't turn it into a tropical fruit. The same thing is true with marriage,

00:23:17.460 but the right did not want to acknowledge that there are limits on these things. You can't just

00:23:22.760 expand and liberalize and make inclusive concepts that are defined in concrete forever. At a certain

00:23:31.120 point, if a man is a man, then a man is not a woman. If the categories man and woman are to mean

00:23:38.440 anything at all, then a man cannot become a woman. And yet you see conservatives going squishy on this

00:23:44.460 point too. They'll start to add caveats, as you say. And now even conservatives who don't buy into

00:23:50.000 gender theory, they'll, they'll start referring to biological males as though there's any other kind

00:23:55.760 of male. As though there's a, you know, there, there isn't a man is a man and a woman is a woman,

00:24:00.040 but, but that sounds very exclusive. It sounds authoritarian to use a popular word. It doesn't

00:24:05.720 sound very liberal. And so, uh, I think people in a misguided way on the right have refused to make

00:24:12.020 those arguments, but it is not enough to defend free speech in the abstract. Free speech in the

00:24:18.680 abstract means absolutely nothing for people who have nothing to say.

00:24:23.800 And explain that a little bit more. So obviously you are an advocate of free speech, but your

00:24:29.600 argument is that there's always been limitations on free speech. And the left is simply saying,

00:24:34.180 well, we don't like those limitations. We want new limitations. And the right tends to disagree

00:24:38.900 with those kinds of limitations. So how do we kind of, how do we fight that battle? How do we set the

00:24:44.740 standards of what we think a free speech should include in what it shouldn't and why, how do we

00:24:52.580 make that argument? Well, I think you, you've summed up my views on this very well. I'm a great defender

00:24:57.920 of free speech in the actual American tradition. I'm not a defender of free speech in fantasy land

00:25:05.480 floating out in outer space, but I am a defender of the way that it has existed in the American

00:25:09.520 tradition. And this word tradition is very important here. I'm going to say something

00:25:13.920 that is so controversial. It's absolutely, you're not even allowed to say it in our highly

00:25:20.240 rationalist culture. I think the way that we can start to form a view of these things

00:25:23.660 is to look at what has worked in the past. You're not allowed to do that anymore. But when you look

00:25:29.500 back at the great defenders of free speech, you'll notice they all wanted limitations. Not just that

00:25:37.580 they wanted, they recognized that all speech regimes necessarily have some limitations,

00:25:42.680 such as the ones we discussed earlier. John Milton wrote,

00:25:45.600 Areopagiticates considered the greatest defense of free speech in the English language. And in it,

00:25:51.300 he says, we need to tolerate all sorts of speech, except for speech from those Catholics. 1.00

00:25:55.860 And now you may agree with this point. I have to sort of push back against it, except even as a

00:26:01.580 Catholic, I understand the point that John Milton was making. These religious wars had been

00:26:06.600 plunging England into absolute madness and bloodbaths and death. And, you know,

00:26:12.960 England could have been on the cusp of losing all sorts of legal protections because order was

00:26:17.820 breaking up. And so he said, certain things are simply beyond the pale of our norms. I wish it had

00:26:23.700 been otherwise at the time of Milton, but it wasn't. John Locke, in his letter on toleration,

00:26:29.280 the founder of liberalism, in his letter concerning toleration, talks about how we need to tolerate all

00:26:35.260 these ideas, except for atheists, because atheists don't believe in the, in the transcendent moral

00:26:40.180 order that we do. They, we can't really reason with them on the same premises that we're reasoning

00:26:45.200 with one another. And so we shouldn't tolerate that. The founding fathers took a similar view of

00:26:49.980 this. And so I, I, I suspect the biggest criticism and biggest attack that's going to come on my book

00:26:57.060 is that I'm advocating something that is authoritarian or, you know, the left is going to call it fascist

00:27:02.300 or it's illiberal. And I just think when you look at the actual history of these ideas,

00:27:07.580 if, if this book is illiberal, then John Locke is a fascist. John Milton is a, an authoritarian,

00:27:14.100 but of course that's not the case. It's that the left has perverted our understanding of free speech

00:27:20.440 and of censorship and of how to get along in society. And sadly, too many conservatives have

00:27:25.700 taken the bait. That's really interesting. I haven't thought about it like that, but my question is,

00:27:30.760 is who, who decides, who decides what the standard is? Because we, we do kind of see a movement

00:27:38.040 towards saying, yeah, all this speech is, it's fine and we can tolerate it except for, for example,

00:27:43.540 Christian conservatives or except for Trump supporters. And so is that not the danger of 0.94

00:27:49.860 this kind of thinking that whoever is in charge or whoever has the most cultural social capital,

00:27:54.820 whoever is in charge of these major institutions, like, you know, big tech and these major corporations,

00:27:59.580 in addition to now, you know, the white house in Congress that they set the standard of, you know,

00:28:04.460 what is acceptable speech. And then when we get back power, if we ever do, we set the standard of

00:28:09.260 acceptable speech. Like, is it not just going to be this kind of volleyball with what should be just

00:28:14.900 a fundamental right that shouldn't change based on who's in power? This is the sort of, I think,

00:28:21.460 most persuasive argument that carries the most weight against any sort of substantive political

00:28:29.120 vision, basically, you know, weighing in on one side of moral question or the other. But the reason

00:28:35.460 I think it's a pretty weak hypothetical warning is because it's already happening. The objection is

00:28:43.820 always, well, who will decide? And my answer to that is somebody. Somebody is always deciding the norms

00:28:52.040 and the standards and the boundaries of our discourse and politics. There has never been a society in which

00:28:57.680 somebody isn't deciding that. Now, it used to be that the way we decided those boundaries and those standards

00:29:02.800 and those norms was based on our traditional culture, was based on a Christian understanding of the world,

00:29:10.340 was based on the specific American political development and the American regime. And what

00:29:16.720 has happened with the rise of political correctness is a new regime has come in to decide totally

00:29:22.700 different standards. They went in and you can, I detail it in the book, you can read these thinkers

00:29:27.440 going back a hundred years saying, we hate that the conservatives broadly have what they called

00:29:33.120 cultural hegemony. The reason that a political revolution won't work is conservatives have this culture

00:29:38.680 and they have their standards and they have their norms and they have their behaviors. And so what

00:29:43.340 we need to do is destroy that. And once we institute our own standards, then we can pave the way for a

00:29:49.620 political revolution. And so if, as you say, this kind of neutral playing field is not an option,

00:29:57.080 and I'm saying it is not an option, the idea that secular liberalism is neutral is ridiculous. That is

00:30:01.480 purely for the left. So if that's not an option, and the two choices I have are a set of

00:30:07.780 cultural norms and standards decided by radical leftists who want to pump three-year-olds full

00:30:13.500 of hormones and tell little Johnny he's little Jane, or the traditional Christian and American

00:30:20.380 culture that has served our country very well for a long time, I'm clearly going to choose the latter.

00:30:25.900 You know, the way you can really highlight this distinction is the debate between David French,

00:30:33.580 former writer for National Review and I writes for the Dispatch, and Saurabh Amari,

00:30:36.900 who is a writer for the New York Post. And David French referred, and I suspect he might regret

00:30:43.880 this comment now, but he referred to drag queen story hour, where these transvestites would twerk 0.99

00:30:50.260 for toddlers at the public library. He referred to that as a blessing of liberty. And I think the

00:30:56.200 implication here was that if you tell some radical drag queen activists that they can't twerk for

00:31:03.900 toddlers, then they might just as reasonably tell you that you can't go to church. First of all,

00:31:09.080 they already are telling us we can't go to church. That has been maybe the most contentious aspect of

00:31:13.160 the entire COVID lockdown regime, where you could go to the marijuana shop, but you couldn't go to

00:31:18.740 church. But even putting that aside for a second, I'd like to think that we possess enough reason,

00:31:25.020 faculties of reason, in good sense, that we can distinguish between transvestites twerking for 0.99

00:31:30.460 toddlers and going to church. I think any way that we can fight back against this politically

00:31:37.040 correct, tyrannical regime is going to require that we trust our moral conscience and we trust

00:31:43.240 our faculties of reason to make distinctions between drag queen story hour and going to church

00:31:48.360 on Sunday. If we can't do that, then we're just going to keep up. The only other option is to keep

00:31:53.560 up the same losing strategy we've had for a decade upon decade. And at that point, we might throw our

00:31:58.640 hands up because it's simply not working. I'm seeing how this applies to so many different

00:32:09.420 issues. And you're kind of bringing a lot of different questions that I have had kind of

00:32:15.700 bouncing around in my mind for a long time, how we kind of balance the basic fact that we live in a

00:32:23.740 pluralistic society with people who don't agree with our values, who aren't going to align with

00:32:28.260 our values. And we don't want to force them to agree with us and believe the same things we believe,

00:32:33.480 but also depending on the only, the only moral order that we know has stood the test of time and

00:32:42.500 is defined by what is good and right and true. And we do believe is good and beneficial for

00:32:48.960 all people. Maintaining freedom and true tolerance in a pluralistic society while also saying,

00:32:56.100 look, these are the values that are good. These are the parameters that are good. These are the

00:33:00.460 definitions that are good. The left is doing that. Conservatives seem to not be doing that,

00:33:07.080 which it makes a lot of sense what you're saying, that we're losing that battle because

00:33:11.740 they're talking morality. They're talking values. They're talking principles. They're talking worldview.

00:33:18.400 Whereas we're talking in the abstract and we just keep on moving back and back and back saying,

00:33:24.080 oh, I'm just for everything. Oh, that's all I'm for. I'm just for tolerance. Like I'm just for,

00:33:28.460 you know, total freedom to do whatever you want. That's all I'm for. That seems to be the conservative

00:33:33.980 line right now. And what you're saying is that, look, that's not going to work. You're,

00:33:38.580 you're, you're bringing a, you know, plastic spoon to a knife fight, metaphorically everyone.

00:33:44.260 Right. And, and I'm, I think that's totally right. And I'm saying not only is it not working,

00:33:50.280 but it's not particularly conservative. And frankly, it's not even liberal in the sense of

00:33:55.860 John Locke or, or, uh, you know, thinkers of his era. I'm reminded of this, a great debate. Uh,

00:34:04.000 I think it was in 1966 between William F. Buckley Jr. Totally mainstream as mainstream

00:34:08.440 conservatives as ever there was and his guest, Leo Churn, and they were debating McCarthyism.

00:34:14.680 And, uh, so what Leo Churn's point was, the guest was that we need an open society and Senator

00:34:23.420 McCarthy by going after people who were, by the way, violating the law. And we know that there were

00:34:28.900 communists working for the government. One of them very famously was convicted of this. Alger Hiss

00:34:33.660 gave us president Nixon. That's a sort of history lesson for an, for another moment,

00:34:37.220 though. I think I do talk about it in the book. Uh, Leo Churn said, we need a totally open society.

00:34:41.840 And Buckley said, no, I'm not for a totally open society. I think there are some ideas that we have

00:34:47.160 considered that we can now cast to the side. I don't think that a Nazi or a communist who espouses

00:34:55.180 ideas and is seeking to subvert the entire American system that he's entitled to some broad freedom.

00:35:01.960 I don't think that anybody in our day and age who invades against cancel culture, which is a,

00:35:08.740 you know, discrete phenomenon. We all see it happening, uh, where conservatives are getting

00:35:12.500 their lives ruined for saying perfectly ordinary things. I don't think any of us believe that if a 0.91

00:35:17.840 guy shows up to his water cooler and he's got a swastika on his armband and he starts yelling

00:35:23.620 Zig Heil at the office water cooler, that that guy has any right to keep his job or to keep his

00:35:29.720 reputation or to be accepted into polite society. I don't think it's cancel culture to speak out

00:35:36.700 against that and say, no, we have a substantive vision of the world and it opposes your vision of

00:35:42.020 the world. Now, does this mean that each of us should install ourselves as the autocratic dictators

00:35:48.340 of America where everyone has to believe exactly what we believe? No, far from it. I mean, if I were

00:35:53.520 king, trust me, I would reformulate society in a very different way, but nobody is proposing,

00:35:58.220 no serious conservatives is proposing that we all be kings. What we're saying is we need to return

00:36:04.100 to the more traditional American understanding that is pluralistic, that allows for a lot of views,

00:36:10.740 that, that has in reality served us well for a long time while still having the courage and the

00:36:17.700 moral and political vision to say that certain things are simply beyond the pale. For instance,

00:36:24.000 the people who on the left are now actively working to utterly subvert our system, to reinstall racial 0.99

00:36:29.840 caste systems, to say all, all manner of horrible things that are now being embraced even in public 0.86

00:36:36.520 schools, even, even for kindergartners, we should be able to say that is wrong. Yeah. And the way I think

00:36:42.840 that, um, Christians in particular get scared from doing exactly what you're talking about and speaking up

00:36:49.240 for values and saying that, okay, these are good for society. Our ideas are good for society. They're

00:36:54.080 good for kids. They're good to teach children is this accusation of Christian nationalism, that if

00:36:59.640 you want to influence society or influence laws in any way with your Christian worldview, then you're a 0.63

00:37:05.420 Christian nationalist. You're pushing for some kind of theocracy. And I say, well, you should be seeking 1.00

00:37:11.940 to influence whatever spheres you occupy with the worldview that you have just as much, if not more

00:37:17.960 than progressive secularists do. Because like we said, that is not a neutral worldview. And they

00:37:22.860 certainly aren't worried about bringing their worldview and their religion or pseudo religion into the

00:37:28.240 workplace, into the school, into the spheres that they occupy. But as soon as a Christian does it, as soon 1.00

00:37:33.980 as a conservative does it, that person is bigoted and invasive and, and colonizing. And I think

00:37:41.240 Christians just have to kind of roll your eyes at that criticism and continue to remember that you 0.99

00:37:46.960 don't, you don't check your worldview at the door. You don't have to, you're not obligated to leave

00:37:50.580 your Christianity at home. And actually you're obligated to bring it with you. And I can't believe, 1.00

00:37:56.640 go ahead. I just, I can't believe that anybody would accuse me of being a Christian nationalist when

00:38:02.400 I'm very clearly a Christian imperialist. I mean, they're very different things. But to your, to your

00:38:07.580 point, seriously, this is something that conservatives have gotten wrong and it does tie in with everything

00:38:12.900 that we've been saying, which is you hear this line come up again and again on the right, which is you

00:38:19.520 can't legislate morality. And that is, I think the silliest statement. It is so, it's so perfectly wrong 0.94

00:38:30.140 because not only is, is it not true that you can't legislate morality, you must always legislate

00:38:37.620 morality. All laws from capital punishment and abortion all the way down to parking tickets makes a moral

00:38:45.340 claim, is, is a compelling action based on an interpretation of the moral order. And so you can't get around

00:38:53.740 that. And just as you say, I think you said it beautifully, what Christians have done is basically

00:38:59.340 cede all of that ground to people who are utterly wrong. The, the secular left has no problem

00:39:04.440 legislating morality because they understand, I think better than we do, that you necessarily

00:39:09.640 legislate morality. So the question is, what are you going to legislate? You know, I'm, I'm beginning

00:39:15.660 my understanding of politics with the assumption that people generally speaking can separate right

00:39:23.240 from wrong. If we can't do that, if we can't rely even on our ability to separate right from wrong,

00:39:29.140 then it's preposterous to have a system of criminal justice. There's no, we have no access to justice.

00:39:34.940 If you can't separate right from wrong, you can't pass a single law. You certainly shouldn't enforce

00:39:39.500 a law. You can't get along in society at all. I think we need to have the courage and the confidence

00:39:44.420 to say, no, you know, we do have a moral conscience. We do have faculties of reason and we can actually

00:39:49.660 look to our forebears in this country and even further back to, to get a general idea of what

00:39:56.420 has worked and maybe take some wisdom from them and to, to be able to exercise our own understanding

00:40:03.420 of that moral order. Otherwise, what are we even doing here in politics? Yes. Well, I hope that people

00:40:10.620 catch on to these ideas because I think there's a lot of cowardly conservatives who don't want to

00:40:15.160 accept everything that you've just said, but you're right. We're going to continue to cede ground.

00:40:19.920 We're going to continue to lose ground. Um, if we don't have the same understanding of morality and

00:40:24.920 moral order in law and speech, uh, that the left does, obviously, like you said, coming to different

00:40:30.180 conclusions, but we need to have the same kind of understanding and seriousness, um, that they have

00:40:35.780 when it comes to these issues. Uh, okay. Can you remind everyone what day your book is coming out,

00:40:41.500 what your book is called, where they can get it, all that good stuff? Absolutely. The book is called

00:40:46.380 speechless. I figured that the only way to follow my first bestseller, which was a book without words

00:40:51.260 is a book called speechless, which is entirely about words. Uh, so you can get that speechless,

00:40:56.620 controlling words, controlling minds. It is available for pre-order. The book is, is coming out June 22nd.

00:41:03.180 Uh, I do fear as some of my friends, more provocative conservative books have been taken off of the

00:41:08.660 internet. I do fear we might get canceled as well, uh, but you can pre-order it right now. So I would

00:41:13.660 encourage you to do that. It's available, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, uh, all over the place.

00:41:18.760 And, uh, I, I, uh, hope that people will read it. It took a lot longer to write than my,

00:41:23.980 my first book did. Oh, that's so weird. I know, you know, the first book, which was entirely blank

00:41:29.380 called reasons to vote for Democrats that took my whole life to research, but it took about 15 seconds

00:41:34.000 to write. And this one obviously took, took a little bit longer, but I, I hope worth it. I hope

00:41:39.200 it, it does, uh, wake conservatives up from what I think has been a totally losing strategy,

00:41:45.840 uh, to, to fight what, uh, is probably the greatest threat to our national future, which is this total

00:41:54.400 control over our, our culture, control over our politics, which comes from, uh, at the most basic

00:42:00.640 level, uh, control over our language. Is the title purposely ironic that this book is entitled

00:42:07.620 speechless and yet it has lots of speech in it. And your last book had no speech in it.

00:42:13.160 Is there supposed to be some irony in there or did I just point that out?

00:42:17.680 Entirely coincidental. I'm sure there's no, no relation could there be, uh, you know, I, I figured,

00:42:23.660 uh, one thing I loved about the topic of political correctness is it's a naturally just a very

00:42:30.180 funny topic. You know, when you, when you start referring to criminals as justice involved persons

00:42:35.900 and, you know, all this sort of crazy lingo, it's just a funny topic. So I decided I might have a

00:42:40.800 little fun with the title as well. Well, that is wonderful. I can't wait to read it. I'm super

00:42:45.100 excited. Everyone can watch your show on YouTube, on your YouTube channel. They can listen to the

00:42:49.880 Michael Knowles show wherever they get their podcasts, correct? Absolutely. Thank you,

00:42:54.140 Allie. It's so good to be with you as always. Thank you so much.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 21, 2021

Ep 441 ｜ Is Good Speech Better Than Free Speech？｜ Guest： Michael Knowles

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 21, 2021

Ep 441 ｜ Is Good Speech Better Than Free Speech？ ｜ Guest： Michael Knowles

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Ep 441 ｜ Is Good Speech Better Than Free Speech？｜ Guest： Michael Knowles