00:00:17.000I play along and ask some fun and lighthearted questions.
00:00:21.000It actually has triggered some thoughts in the episode since where I want to have him come back and dive into this deeper as I was listening to what he was saying and then I thought about it more.
00:00:32.000But it definitely, in my opinion, is one of the most important conversations I've had recently, which is, should there be limitations on speech?
00:00:40.000Should we shut down Drag Queen's Story Hour, for example?
00:00:45.000A very important conversation brought to you advertiser-free.
00:00:48.000If you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:01:24.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:33.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:48.000I believe it so firmly, I wrote it on the back of his book.
00:01:53.000Michael Knows, His Excellency, Your Majesty, the Wizard of Nashville, His Excellency, Your Majesty, a friend of mine, the Wizard of Nashville, Michael Knowles.
00:02:03.000Michael, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:05.000Thank you, Charlie, but I was hoping for a more flattering introduction.
00:02:16.000That is the ethos of the Charlie Kirk Show program.
00:02:20.000You have a new book of which I am obligated to plug many times because it's a good book and you wrote it.
00:02:26.000And also I wrote a blurb for it called Speechless.
00:02:29.000And it's very interesting and very important.
00:02:31.000I want to make sure I get the byline right, Controlling Words and Controlling Minds by Michael Knowles.
00:02:37.000You guys can all get a copy and it's very important.
00:02:39.000I'm going to just read a little bit of a blurb, then I'm going to let you take it from there.
00:02:43.000The culture war is over and the culture is lost, writes Michael Knowles.
00:02:47.000The left's assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the founders and Western civilization has succeeded.
00:02:53.000You can no longer keep your social media account or your job and acknowledge truths such as Washington, Jefferson, and Columbus were great men.
00:03:00.000Schools and libraries not coach children in sexual deviance.
00:03:03.000Men don't have uteruses are truths you cannot say.
00:05:00.000And actually, one of the Mac daddies of political correctness, going back to the 1920s, an Italian communist who you're talking about Gramsci.
00:05:09.000Gramsci is sort of the architect, though there were many architects of political correctness.
00:05:15.000And Gramsci said that a revolution cannot succeed if the radicals do not have some hold on the common sense.
00:05:22.000He kept going back to this idea of the common sense.
00:05:24.000You know, the Marxists and the Marxist ideological heirs wanted to totally remake society and free the oppressed masses.
00:05:33.000But the problem they kept running into is that the oppressed masses didn't like them very much.
00:05:38.000The oppressed masses actually liked their own countries and their own communities and their own way of life.
00:05:43.000So what Gramsci said was, we need to have a war of position, not just a war of maneuver where you go back and forth and advance and retreat, but a war of position where you take influential places in the established institutions and then you exercise that power.
00:05:59.000And one of the things that we're noticing right now with the parents showing up to the school boards to complain about CRT is you're seeing an alienation between regular ordinary Americans and the mediocrities who have styled themselves our ruling elite.
00:06:16.000And they're sneering at these parents and they're saying, you don't know what critical race theory is.
00:06:21.000You're a deplorable, irredeemable, bitter clinger, right?
00:06:25.000And that's further separating what I think is the bulk of common sense American people from these elites.
00:06:31.000And your other point, Charlie, on pro-life is an important example here because the one issue, basically the only major political issue where we've really held our ground or maybe made some advancements has been, uncoincidentally, I think, the one issue where conservatives are making actual moral arguments.
00:06:53.000They're not making arguments from convenience.
00:06:56.000They're not making arguments from efficiency like ordering tax cuts.
00:07:00.000Yes, they're not making utilitarian arguments.
00:07:02.000They're making arguments from justice.
00:07:05.000It is simply wrong to kill babies in the womb.
00:07:08.000And what we hear from the squishes in the Republican Party is that we've got to stop making those arguments.
00:07:14.000That alienates people and we need to have a big tent and win the moderates or whatever.
00:07:22.000The only arguments that people really are stirred up by are cultural and moral arguments.
00:07:28.000And I think we need to expand that, not just keep it at the level and the issue of abortion, but bring that out throughout all of the political arguments we're making.
00:07:37.000We need to set a standard and enforce that standard, something that conservatives have not done for decades.
00:07:43.000Letters from Prison is some of the most important writings I encourage every conservative to read.
00:07:48.000Antonio Gramsci, who basically articulated cultural Marxism and said, we need more than an economic revolution.
00:08:31.000I am really upset at how, over the past 15 or 20 years, conservatives have decided that it is somehow illegitimate or unjust to use the political power that the people give us on the happy occasions that we win elections.
00:08:58.000So, I have great sympathy for the conservatives who have fallen for it.
00:09:01.000But it creates a trap whereby, either way you react to political correctness, you will actually end up advancing the left's agenda in political correctness.
00:09:11.000What I mean by that is, on the one hand, you got the squishes.
00:09:14.000They're obviously going to advance the left's agenda because they just give in to the new politically correct standard, right?
00:09:19.000They just call Bruce Jenner a she and they pretend that babies aren't babies or whatever.
00:09:23.000You know, they just kind of go along with it.
00:09:40.000By declaring themselves in opposition to political correctness on the basis that we should have no censorship, you should be able to say whatever you want, do whatever you want, look at whatever you want, behave however you want.
00:09:50.000What these stalwart conservatives are doing is abandoning standards altogether.
00:09:56.000And the problem here is that the entire point of political correctness is to destroy the traditional standards.
00:10:02.000Karl Marx famously called for the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
00:10:06.000You get the critical theorists in the 30s.
00:10:09.000You get the debunking and the deconstructing and this entire very simple theory, which is just to criticize everything until you have no society or standards left.
00:10:18.000So either way you do it, either by giving in or by abandoning standards entirely, you are giving the left what it wants, which is namely the destruction of the traditional standards.
00:10:29.000So this is an important question I'm about to ask.
00:11:00.000And I'm mostly in agreement, but it takes a lot of nuance and time.
00:11:05.000So you could do it uninterrupted and you can go however you want.
00:11:09.000Because this is a really important point is that let's use this example that you have in your in your kind of teaser of your book, which is, should we cancel Drag Queen's story hour?
00:11:19.000Should we use political force to say that, you know, someone who's mentally disturbed should not be able to be able to read books to children?
00:11:31.000That would be, is that cancel culture, Michael?
00:12:44.000Just for putting out prurient, disgusting content, he went to prison.
00:12:49.000And this has been true throughout the history of the United States.
00:12:51.000What has changed, and I'm so glad you called it a shallow argument to say that the debate is just about whether or not we should shut people up.
00:13:01.000I think that the big mistake that we have made is that we believe that political correctness and wokeness is a battle between free speech on the one hand and censorship on the other.
00:13:12.000It's a battle between competing sets of standards, the traditional standards that we all like and the anti-standard, the withering criticism of the left.
00:13:57.000So what would you say then, Michael, to Nicole Hanna-Jones, that writes speechless, controlling words and controlling minds?
00:14:03.000How far right-wingers have shut down people that are trying to espouse a different opinion?
00:14:09.000What I'm getting at, Michael, is this book could be written by the other side or was written by the other side when they weren't in the cultural majority.
00:14:18.000Do they have a moral right to that argument?
00:14:20.000Or are you saying that our framework and our laws should have some sort of agreed upon principle of what is the good, what is beautiful, what is wondrous, what is true, and what is virtuous?
00:14:30.000Are you making an argument, Michael, that our government should reflect objective standards?
00:14:36.000You know, Charlie, I think that was a little bit of a leading question.
00:14:39.000But as a matter of fact, I think you're intuition.
00:14:48.000And actually, I think the Nicole Hannah Jones example is good, and I talk about her quite a lot in the book.
00:14:54.000But the simpler one is really this issue of Drag Queen Story Hour, because it's just so outrageous that we have perverts twerking for little children in the public library and in the schools.
00:15:04.000And you have some putative conservatives who will go out and say verbatim that Drag Queen Story Hour is one of the blessings of liberty.
00:15:13.000If you can't hear that, that's James Madison rolling over in his grave at that very thought.
00:15:18.000But I want to give that group of moderate or liberal Republicans their due.
00:15:24.000What they're saying is that if we ban Drag Queen Story Hour, why?
00:15:29.000Then the left might tell us that we can't go to church on Sunday.
00:15:34.000They've never done that, like for an entire year or something.
00:15:37.000And in some places, they're still doing it.
00:15:39.000So yes, as you point out, the practical side, it's ridiculous to begin with.
00:15:42.000But furthermore, getting back to the good, the true, and the beautiful, if you really believe, as these radical centrists do, I don't know what to call it, I just call them the squishes.
00:15:54.000If you really believe that we cannot make a distinction between drag queen story hour and church on Sunday, that's fine.
00:16:02.000If you don't think you're capable of making that moral judgment, that's fine.
00:16:05.000But then you need to admit that self-government is not possible because self-government is predicated on the idea that we have faculties of reason, we can interpret reality with some reliability, and we have a moral conscience that can discern with relative accuracy between right and wrong, good and bad.
00:16:26.000That's what the process of making laws is in a democratic republic such as ours.
00:16:31.000If we can't do that, if we're just throwing our hands up in the air, that's fine.
00:16:35.000But then we have to admit that we're abandoning the project of self-government altogether, and I'm not willing to do that just yet.
00:16:42.000So the progressive Republicans or the progressive conservatives, they are trying to defend a liberal order, small L liberal order, where we can have a marketplace of ideas.
00:17:03.000Or why is this a little bit flawed or overly simplistic?
00:17:06.000Why is the quote-unquote marketplace of ideas, why, for example, when David French and Saurob were having that debate, why instead of having drag queen story hour, we can allow that to happen, but then we'll also rent out the room next to it to have exorcisms.
00:17:29.000They're going to call me a theocratic, fascist, illiberal, authoritarian.
00:17:33.000It's funny, by the way, in my book, Speechless, I quote John Locke, the father of liberalism, and John Milton, one of the most famous defenders in the English language.
00:17:43.000Well, Milton had a very interesting intellectual pedigree, but he was a strong defender of free speech.
00:17:50.000He wrote Areo Pagita, which is this great defense of it.
00:17:53.000And yet both of those guys pointed out that we needed to censor some people because they would undermine the entire order.
00:18:01.000So if I'm illiberal, I am still far more liberal than the father of liberalism.
00:18:05.000I just want to point that out for my detractors.
00:18:08.000The reason that the marketplace of ideas rhetoric falls a little flat in certain instances is because, one, someone sets the rules of the marketplace.
00:18:22.000And not every institution is a marketplace of ideas.
00:18:26.000This is something that conservatives used to understand.
00:18:29.000It's really depressing for me to see conservatives defending the idea of academic freedom now, which does not mean what people think it means, but they defend this canard, this hoax.
00:18:41.000William F. Buckley Jr. launched the post-war conservative movement.
00:18:45.000This is the founder of National Review.
00:18:47.000This is as mainstream a conservative as ever there was.
00:18:51.000He launched it with a book called God and Man at Yale.
00:18:54.000The subtitle was The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.
00:19:00.000He pointed out the Yale sociology department would never hire a neo-Nazi to come lecture on the superiority of the Aryan peoples, nor should Yale do that.
00:19:12.000The educational enterprise is one of indoctrination, right?
00:19:16.000Education and indoctrination mean the same thing.
00:19:19.000If you teach a student that two plus two equals four, you are necessarily going to tell that student that two plus two does not equal five.
00:19:26.000You're going to punish that student if the student writes two plus two equals five on his paper.
00:19:30.000And so you are going to have to discern between truth and falsehood, goodness and wickedness.
00:19:35.000And The notion that this is an open marketplace of ideas only ever seems to cut in one direction.
00:19:43.000This is never used to say, permit the teaching of the Bible in schools.
00:19:47.000The Supreme Court told us you're not allowed to study the most important book ever written in schools, without which, by the way, none of the Western tradition makes any sense.
00:19:55.000You're not allowed to teach that, but you are, in many cases today, mandated to teach Robin DiAngelo, white fragility, Tana Easy Codes, any of these radical leftists.
00:20:06.000So do you think that conservatives embrace small L liberalism, the utopian belief of the exchange of these ideas?
00:20:14.000Do you think the totalitarians use that as a tactic to actually be able to have us be indifferent to their degeneracy while they remake our culture?
00:21:10.000And so, and by the way, in Milton's area of Pagitica, Milton says that we need to censor Catholics.
00:21:15.000I'm glad that we have since gotten rid of that particular censorship.
00:21:20.000But, you know, I say this even as a mackerel-snapping papist.
00:21:23.000The reason Milton pointed this out is because of the religious wars that had ripped his country apart, because he saw the threat to the political order if the people could not agree on at least some basic things.
00:21:34.000And to bring it back to the present day, that's what you're seeing here.
00:21:38.000I am not advocating that we throw people in the gulags for mentioning unpopular ideas.
00:21:43.000What I am saying, though, is that every culture must have standards.
00:21:47.000We must agree on a few basic things, at least in the rules of engagement, at least in the language that we're speaking.
00:21:53.000And today, the left has so confused things and upended the order that we no longer know how to refer to a man or a woman.
00:22:18.000To use Aristotle's observation, this is what makes us human, is our speech.
00:22:23.000So when the left muzzles us, whether through the physical muzzling that we've actually all had for the past year, thanks to Duck DeFeuci, or through the subtler ideological muzzling through the upending of our language, when they do that, they are really cutting at the heart of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a political society.
00:22:43.000And unfortunately, they're so clever at it, we haven't even noticed that they've been doing it.
00:22:52.000And if only our leaders actually understood the canon that created our civilization, which is this unified belief that there are certain things that are good and those things are worthy of protection.
00:23:06.000So I had a conversation with a very unimpressive person recently.
00:23:09.000I'm not going to say that person's name, who said, how dare you?
00:24:25.000All laws, whether you are talking about abortion or the death penalty or whether you're talking about parking tickets, all laws are referring to the moral law.
00:24:36.000When we pass laws, we make moral arguments as to why we need certain laws.
00:24:40.000A law against murder is obviously referring to the moral prohibition on committing murder.
00:24:53.000The left knows that this is inevitable.
00:24:55.000And the right used to know this until very, very recently.
00:24:59.000And then the right, particularly the ones on the right who like to lose with dignity, you know, those types, they don't ever seem to have very much dignity, but they always talk about it.
00:25:09.000We need to lose in this wonderful manner.
00:25:11.000You know, I think that they're afraid of winning.
00:25:14.000I think they're afraid of the moral risk of actually having to govern.
00:25:18.000I think that they are cowardly and craven.
00:25:20.000And I think that they don't recognize not only is courage a virtue, but it is the prerequisite for all of the other virtues.
00:25:27.000If you don't have courage, you're not really going to have any.
00:26:28.000Our whole constitution is written as a document to be slow and deliberate and protecting of natural rights in the state of nature.
00:26:37.000Therefore, when you start talking about using power, immediately a fire alarm will go off in many conservatives' heads saying, What if that power will be used against me?
00:26:51.000Walk us through that because that is going to be your stopping point that you're going to hear say, no, no, no, no, those people are going to be used then as shock troops.
00:26:59.000If you shut up Robin DiAngelo, they're going to shut up me.
00:27:03.000Walk us, help us wrestle through that, Michael.
00:27:06.000Well, I think you have to begin before that hypothetical, which is what if this power is used against me?
00:27:14.000And I think you need to ask the simple question: wait a second, is this power currently being used against me?
00:27:43.000Mitch McConnell made this point the other day when he was talking about the woke corporations.
00:27:48.000He said that today, woke corporations are working in many ways as a sort of parallel government.
00:27:54.000And Republicans have aided them along.
00:27:56.000They have, for at least a couple of decades now, shilled for usually multinational corporations that hate our guts.
00:28:04.000And we have given them so much political power that is in many ways less accountable to the American people than government power.
00:28:11.000I mean, I believe that these corporations crossed the Rubicon on January 7th and January 8th of this year when about three oligarchs in Silicon Valley, hipster Rasputin among them, Jack Dorsey, censored the duly elected sitting president of the United States.
00:28:28.000No matter what you think happened in the 2020 election, on January 7th, that man was the duly elected sitting president and a handful of billionaires who have never appeared on a ballot, who are totally unaccountable to the people, kicked him out of our public square.
00:28:41.000And they do control the flow of information around the internet.
00:28:46.000They are effectively controlling our politics.
00:28:49.000I don't think there is anything conservative about allowing them to do that.
00:28:53.000And I don't think that we are defending against tyranny when we refuse to bring those woke oligarchs into line.
00:29:00.000So, but do you understand the argument you're going to get, which is this bridge that conservatives are afraid to cross, which is we can't use power, we can't use power, we can't use power.
00:29:13.000Mao, Stalin, Mussolini, bad things happen when we use power.
00:29:18.000And their gut instinct is not totally wrong.
00:29:24.000What sort of path is there to say that political power and policy can actually create an incentive structure that will protect freedom and prevent tyranny?
00:29:36.000And I think, can you help explain that?
00:29:39.000Yes, I think that one of the aspects of this fear that if conservatives ever use political power, and this is, by the way, this is a relatively recent phenomenon that we've been cowardly and afraid to use the legitimate and just power that the people give us.
00:29:53.000But I think it comes from that problem of argumentation where we say, you know, Adolf Hitler drank a glass of water, as did my political opponent, therefore my political opponent is like Hitler.
00:30:03.000You know, yes, Hitler and Mao and Stalin used political power.
00:30:06.000Washington, Adams, and Jefferson also used political power.
00:30:10.000Millard Fillmore used political power, for goodness sakes.
00:30:12.000That's just the description of the job.
00:30:13.000Millard Fillmore installed indoor plumbing in the White House.
00:30:16.000It's an unknown fact about Millard Fillmore.
00:30:19.000And it's a very important use of political power.
00:30:21.000You've got to fix the plumbing in your house and in our country, in our political system.
00:30:26.000And so that's what I'm advocating here.
00:30:29.000You know, here's one way I suppose I can make people feel better about it, because I think what a lot of people mistakenly believe is that being able to say and do whatever you want is somehow the American free speech tradition.
00:30:42.000That's only been true for the past, say, 20 or 30 years.
00:30:47.000Do you really believe that right now you have less freedom to say whatever you want to say than you did in, say, the Adams administration in the 1790s?
00:31:31.000The real difference, I think, is that talking about conservatives taking the bait, our founding fathers were very clear that liberty is extraordinarily important.
00:32:18.000Now, true liberty, of course, is not the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
00:32:23.000True liberty is the right to do what you ought to do.
00:32:25.000This is why we have liberal education, to tamp down our base passions, tamp down our vices, cultivate our virtues, which are habits, and have what John Adams told us was the prerequisite of constitutional government, a moral and religious people.
00:32:39.000And now, my modest suggestion that maybe when we craft our politics, we think about the difference between true and false and right and wrong.
00:32:47.000If I'm an authoritarian, if I'm illiberal or fascistic for suggesting that, my goodness, what would they say about John Adams?
00:32:54.000What would they say about Washington or even Jefferson?
00:32:57.000Surely those guys are to the right of Mussolini.
00:32:59.000So what you're getting at here is very important.
00:33:18.000I said this at a speech at our turning point USA Young Women's Leadership Summit about marijuana and the whole world lost its mind because I said something that is a very conventional argument that if you do marijuana, you're going to be a slave to marijuana.
00:33:33.000I quickly corrected it for media matters.
00:33:35.000Literally, I said, okay, media matters.
00:33:42.000And that's the argument that you're making.
00:33:43.000Can you reinforce something, though, which is this new kind of secular humanistic force in the conservative movement, where when I grew up in the movement in 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, there was an abundance of literature that I read and consumed, and almost no literature that was presented to me framing liberty as being able to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, however you want to do it,
00:34:13.000as long as it doesn't harm someone else.
00:35:42.000It was a very incoherent kind of conservatism.
00:35:46.000And by the way, I have some sympathy here.
00:35:49.000The Buckley coalition, the Frank Meyer Coalition, sometimes called fusionism during the Cold War, it's come under fire because it didn't achieve every single wonderful thing conservatives have ever wanted.
00:36:01.000But it did achieve quite a lot, actually.
00:36:02.000I mean, it did lead to the end of the Soviet Union.
00:36:05.000It did give us some victories on some important matters.
00:36:08.000And crucially, what it did was it brought together disparate factions of the right.
00:36:12.000The traditional conservatives, the libertarians, the Warhawk Democrats.
00:36:17.000Now you might add, later on, you would add on to the neoconservatives.
00:36:20.000You would add onto them the populists now.
00:36:24.000All sorts of factions always fighting together.
00:36:26.000And this worked out relatively well for the Cold War.
00:36:29.000After the fall of the Berlin Wall, what joins us together?
00:36:33.000You know, Russell Kirk predicted this whole thing.
00:36:54.000I would encourage people to rediscover writers like Russell Kirk, to rediscover writers like James Burnham, to rediscover writers like Whitaker Chambers, you know, and of course, and many, many, many others, because we have been given a very shallow and ridiculous point of view for the last 20 years.
00:37:13.000That is, I think it's very silly and incoherent, but just as a practical political matter, it has led to the absolute obliteration of our culture and the conservative movement.
00:37:24.000It has led conservatives not to stand for anything.
00:37:27.000You know, we want a big tent in the sense that we want more people to vote for us.
00:37:31.000But just like countries, political movements need to have boundaries.
00:37:35.000Otherwise, they are not a political movement at all.
00:37:38.000And a lot of people are seeing this now with transgenderism or critical race theory, where we say, hey, if we don't stand up against transing the kids, for goodness sakes, we're really not going to stand up for anything.
00:37:51.000I've also noticed, I think there's a generational divide here.
00:37:54.000I find that another mistake of conservatives is that boomer conservatives often believe that the way to reach the youths is to peddle licentiousness, to say, hey, we'll let you smoke pot.
00:38:08.000Hey, we'll let you sleep with whoever you want.
00:38:10.000Hey, we'll let you mutilate your body.
00:38:36.000And I think any conservative movement that will be successful needs to speak to that.
00:38:40.000So since we only have a couple minutes remaining, I'll go over time if you can, Michael, but you're very important, and you have a very important book.
00:39:23.000How does one discover those things and then properly govern themselves after that?
00:39:29.000Okay, I've got, this is probably going to be the most controversial statement that I'm going to make on the entire book tour.
00:39:36.000Because you've got the radical squishes who are saying we can never know what's good or true or anything, and we've just got to trans the kids.
00:39:42.000Then you've got people who are quite in the opposite direction who are saying we need basically a firm establishment of the church in this country, you know, with very specific ecclesiology and the like.
00:39:56.000I am taking the, I think, the most radical approach of all.
00:40:00.000The way that we can know some idea of the good and the true and the beautiful in politics is through prudence.
00:40:13.000And something that Edmund Burke talked at great length about.
00:40:16.000You're not allowed to talk about prudence these days because everybody is some kooky ideologue who wants to fit their entire political program on a five-point plan on a napkin or something.
00:40:24.000But prudence is actually a really good thing.
00:40:26.000My argument here for recovering some semblance of the American free speech tradition is not that we need to spell it all out right now and I need to give you my entire grand theory of everything.
00:40:37.000I'm saying one place to begin is not in the abstract pie in the sky, but to look at the actual free speech tradition as it has really existed in America.
00:40:49.000And I know we're not allowed to do this either.
00:40:51.000Learn from the past and learn from our forebears who gave us this country and see where things may have gone a little wrong and try to fix them modestly but courageously and confidently and with a real purpose because you and I have a purpose.
00:41:14.000And I think in order to preserve our country, we need to get our heads out of the clouds and really dig into this real place because America is a real place with a real tradition.
00:41:24.000Not an abstraction and it is not something in the clouds.
00:41:29.000Got to get into what we see empirically and govern ourselves appropriately.
00:41:34.000Prudence, otherwise known as practical judgment, is how we should govern ourselves.
00:41:38.000Russell Kirk wrote extensively about that.
00:41:41.000And the three-tied knot we must preserve, right, Michael?
00:41:43.000What came before us and what is here and what is yet to come?
00:41:46.000As Edmund Burke famously wrote, the three-tied knot is what is most important.
00:41:50.000This book is called Speechless by Michael Knowles.
00:42:26.000But I also have hope in the American people, our continued grasp to some degree on common sense and our ability to stop these leftists and chase them out of town on a rail if we can only summon the courage to do it.
00:42:39.000At every turn, I hear a conservative when they are encountering critical race theory at their school board.
00:42:44.000The school board says, I thought you stood for free speech, and they don't know how to handle it.
00:42:49.000And if they don't know, if they don't know the tradition of virtue and what is good, then all of a sudden they will get blown over by them holding our own book of rules against us.