The Charlie Kirk Show - The Conservative Case for Censorship—A Provocative Conversation with Michael Knowles

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:01.000 Today, my exclusive conversation with Michael Knowles.

00:00:04.000 It's provocative.

00:00:05.000 It is going to make you think deeply about what's happening in our country and when it comes to the regulation of speech.

00:00:13.000 Should we become the censors?

00:00:15.000 Michael Knowles says yes.

00:00:17.000 I play along and ask some fun and lighthearted questions.

00:00:21.000 It 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.

00:00:32.000 But it definitely, in my opinion, is one of the most important conversations I've had recently, which is, should there be limitations on speech?

00:00:40.000 Should we shut down Drag Queen's Story Hour, for example?

00:00:45.000 A very important conversation brought to you advertiser-free.

00:00:48.000 If you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:52.000 That's charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:55.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:58.000 And if you want to come to our Turning Point USA Summit in Tampa, Florida, go to tpusa.com slash SAS, tpusa.com slash SAS.

00:01:08.000 Michael Knowles is here.

00:01:10.000 Buckle up.

00:01:11.000 Here we go.

00:01:12.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:14.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:16.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:19.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:22.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:23.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:24.000 His 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.

00:01:33.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:42.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:44.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:45.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:46.000 With us today is a national treasure.

00:01:48.000 I believe it so firmly, I wrote it on the back of his book.

00:01:53.000 Michael Knows, His Excellency, Your Majesty, the Wizard of Nashville, His Excellency, Your Majesty, a friend of mine, the Wizard of Nashville, Michael Knowles.

00:02:03.000 Michael, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:05.000 Thank you, Charlie, but I was hoping for a more flattering introduction.

00:02:08.000 I mean, thank you.

00:02:09.000 It's nice to be here, but come on, can't you give me a compliment or two?

00:02:12.000 Yeah, you know, I seek to underwhelm.

00:02:16.000 That is the ethos of the Charlie Kirk Show program.

00:02:20.000 You have a new book of which I am obligated to plug many times because it's a good book and you wrote it.

00:02:26.000 And also I wrote a blurb for it called Speechless.

00:02:29.000 And it's very interesting and very important.

00:02:31.000 I want to make sure I get the byline right, Controlling Words and Controlling Minds by Michael Knowles.

00:02:37.000 You guys can all get a copy and it's very important.

00:02:39.000 I'm going to just read a little bit of a blurb, then I'm going to let you take it from there.

00:02:43.000 The culture war is over and the culture is lost, writes Michael Knowles.

00:02:47.000 The left's assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the founders and Western civilization has succeeded.

00:02:53.000 You can no longer keep your social media account or your job and acknowledge truths such as Washington, Jefferson, and Columbus were great men.

00:03:00.000 Schools and libraries not coach children in sexual deviance. 0.63

00:03:03.000 Men don't have uteruses are truths you cannot say.

00:03:07.000 How do we get this point?

00:03:08.000 Michael Knowles navigates us through that.

00:03:10.000 Is the culture war really over, Michael?

00:03:13.000 I think, Charlie, the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you've got a problem.

00:03:18.000 And the problem is we've lost.

00:03:21.000 We've lost everything.

00:03:23.000 We've conserved nothing.

00:03:25.000 We have not even conserved the ladies' bathroom.

00:03:29.000 Okay, I hate to bring you down like this, but I think that's the first step.

00:03:33.000 You're a motivational speaker.

00:03:34.000 I know it, Michael.

00:03:35.000 So yes, a demotivational speaker.

00:03:38.000 That's exactly right.

00:03:39.000 The issue here, we've known about political correctness.

00:03:42.000 Now we call it wokeism or cancel culture.

00:03:44.000 It's all the same thing, right?

00:03:46.000 Part of the phenomenon is they change all the words.

00:03:48.000 So that's what it goes by now.

00:03:50.000 We've known about it for about 30 years.

00:03:53.000 It actually goes back further.

00:03:54.000 It's about 100 years old.

00:03:55.000 I explore the history of that at some length in this book.

00:03:59.000 But there's this problem, which is we have been fighting against PC for a long time, for basically our entire lives.

00:04:07.000 We have been winning a fair number of elections during that period of time.

00:04:12.000 And yet, would you say the country today is more conservative than it was 30 years ago?

00:04:16.000 Do you think that we have won the cultural or political battles or no?

00:04:21.000 I think not.

00:04:22.000 No, but I have to play Devil's Advocate because it's more fun.

00:04:26.000 There's a couple things that we've done okay with.

00:04:29.000 In certain states, they've relaxed their firearm laws.

00:04:32.000 We are winning lawsuits in that direction.

00:04:34.000 The country's becoming more pro-life.

00:04:37.000 We're seeing students and parents show up to school board meetings.

00:04:41.000 Is that all just kind of small little victories in the kind of massive hurricane of the left?

00:04:48.000 Yes.

00:04:50.000 They are small victories in the massive hurricane, but they actually do give us quite a glimmer of hope.

00:04:55.000 In particular, those parents who are showing up to the school board meetings.

00:04:58.000 To me, that is the great hope.

00:05:00.000 And actually, one of the Mac daddies of political correctness, going back to the 1920s, an Italian communist who you're talking about Gramsci.

00:05:08.000 Yes.

00:05:09.000 Gramsci is sort of the architect, though there were many architects of political correctness.

00:05:15.000 And Gramsci said that a revolution cannot succeed if the radicals do not have some hold on the common sense.

00:05:22.000 He kept going back to this idea of the common sense.

00:05:24.000 You know, the Marxists and the Marxist ideological heirs wanted to totally remake society and free the oppressed masses.

00:05:33.000 But the problem they kept running into is that the oppressed masses didn't like them very much.

00:05:38.000 The oppressed masses actually liked their own countries and their own communities and their own way of life.

00:05:43.000 So 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.

00:05:59.000 And 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.

00:06:16.000 And they're sneering at these parents and they're saying, you don't know what critical race theory is. 0.97

00:06:21.000 You're a deplorable, irredeemable, bitter clinger, right?

00:06:25.000 And that's further separating what I think is the bulk of common sense American people from these elites. 0.98

00:06:30.000 That's a very good thing.

00:06:31.000 And 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.

00:06:53.000 They're not making arguments from convenience.

00:06:56.000 They're not making arguments from efficiency like ordering tax cuts.

00:07:00.000 Yes, they're not making utilitarian arguments.

00:07:02.000 They're making arguments from justice.

00:07:05.000 It is simply wrong to kill babies in the womb.

00:07:08.000 And what we hear from the squishes in the Republican Party is that we've got to stop making those arguments.

00:07:14.000 That alienates people and we need to have a big tent and win the moderates or whatever.

00:07:20.000 Not true at all.

00:07:22.000 The only arguments that people really are stirred up by are cultural and moral arguments.

00:07:28.000 And 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.

00:07:37.000 We need to set a standard and enforce that standard, something that conservatives have not done for decades.

00:07:43.000 Letters from Prison is some of the most important writings I encourage every conservative to read.

00:07:48.000 Antonio Gramsci, who basically articulated cultural Marxism and said, we need more than an economic revolution.

00:07:54.000 We need a cultural one as well.

00:07:56.000 So, Michael, you just said something very interesting.

00:07:59.000 In force, the debate happening right now in the conservative movement is a debate around political power.

00:08:05.000 And this is the one, and we diagnose it on our program, and so do you.

00:08:10.000 And there's robust disagreement about this: what are you willing to do to change the trajectory?

00:08:17.000 Now, we as conservatives don't like political power.

00:08:19.000 Usually, we don't really know what to do with it.

00:08:22.000 But what you're saying right now is that we should have a renewed enthusiasm for using political power.

00:08:27.000 Is that what you're saying?

00:08:28.000 I am absolutely saying that.

00:08:31.000 I 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.

00:08:47.000 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:08:48.000 That's what politics is.

00:08:50.000 And furthermore, I think this is the trap that political correctness lays.

00:08:55.000 It's a subtle trap.

00:08:56.000 It's a clever trap.

00:08:58.000 So, I have great sympathy for the conservatives who have fallen for it.

00:09:01.000 But 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.

00:09:11.000 What I mean by that is, on the one hand, you got the squishes. 0.54

00:09:14.000 They're obviously going to advance the left's agenda because they just give in to the new politically correct standard, right?

00:09:19.000 They just call Bruce Jenner a she and they pretend that babies aren't babies or whatever. 0.70

00:09:23.000 You know, they just kind of go along with it. 0.79

00:09:25.000 But then there's this other group.

00:09:27.000 They're the more stalwart conservatives.

00:09:29.000 They're the ones they might say, I'm a free speech absolutist.

00:09:32.000 I'm not going along with your censorship. 0.59

00:09:34.000 I'm not going along with your new crazy standard leftists. 0.79

00:09:37.000 But here's the trap.

00:09:40.000 By 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.

00:09:50.000 What these stalwart conservatives are doing is abandoning standards altogether.

00:09:56.000 And the problem here is that the entire point of political correctness is to destroy the traditional standards.

00:10:02.000 Karl Marx famously called for the ruthless criticism of all that exists.

00:10:06.000 You get the critical theorists in the 30s.

00:10:08.000 You get critical race theory now.

00:10:09.000 You 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.

00:10:18.000 So 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.

00:10:29.000 So this is an important question I'm about to ask.

00:10:32.000 I'm going to preface it slightly.

00:10:34.000 Your book is called Speechless, which is about controlling words and controlling minds.

00:10:38.000 You just criticize the free speech absolutists.

00:10:42.000 And one of the arguments you make is that shutting people up is not a good thing.

00:10:48.000 That's a surface argument.

00:10:50.000 What you're really, that's not really what you're saying, though.

00:10:52.000 What you're saying is that we should shut certain people up if they are.

00:10:55.000 I most certainly am, yeah.

00:10:57.000 So this is a new thing.

00:11:00.000 And I'm mostly in agreement, but it takes a lot of nuance and time.

00:11:05.000 So you could do it uninterrupted and you can go however you want.

00:11:09.000 Because 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? 0.66

00:11:19.000 Should 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? 0.53

00:11:31.000 That would be, is that cancel culture, Michael?

00:11:33.000 Is that us being the censors?

00:11:35.000 Should we embrace our censorship?

00:11:37.000 We most certainly should.

00:11:39.000 I know that this is a radical statement.

00:11:41.000 I make it explicitly in the conclusion of my book.

00:11:45.000 In order to save free speech, conservatives must embrace just and prudent censorship.

00:11:53.000 This is not a break from the American free speech tradition.

00:11:56.000 This is actually a recovery of the American free speech tradition.

00:12:00.000 From the very beginning of our country, whole swaths of speech have been off limits.

00:12:04.000 Fraud, obviously, direct threats, fighting words, sedition, obscenity.

00:12:10.000 We still have many obscenity laws on the books.

00:12:13.000 In the 1990s, the Republican House and the Democrat Senate with a Democrat president passed two major obscenity laws.

00:12:21.000 The Communications Decency Act, which is now at the center of a lot of fights over big tech, because that includes the famous Section 230.

00:12:28.000 Also, the Child Online Protection Act, both of which were aimed to censor obscenity on the internet.

00:12:33.000 About a dozen years ago, we put a pornographer in prison, in federal prison, just for obscenity.

00:12:40.000 It's not like he had kiddie porn. 0.77

00:12:41.000 It's not like he was raping people. 0.98

00:12:44.000 Just for putting out prurient, disgusting content, he went to prison.

00:12:49.000 And this has been true throughout the history of the United States.

00:12:51.000 What 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.

00:12:59.000 I totally agree with you.

00:13:01.000 I 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.

00:13:12.000 It's not.

00:13:12.000 It'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.

00:13:22.000 In the 1950s, we had cancel culture.

00:13:25.000 We canceled communists.

00:13:27.000 It was awesome.

00:13:28.000 I strongly recommend it.

00:13:30.000 I wish we would do it again.

00:13:31.000 In the 50s, if you were a communist, you'd get canceled.

00:13:34.000 Today, if you're an anti-communist, you get canceled.

00:13:37.000 All societies have standards.

00:13:38.000 All societies have taboos.

00:13:40.000 The United States has had many, many taboos.

00:13:42.000 And the left, in order to destroy them in the 1960s, pretended that it was the great defender of free speech absolutism.

00:13:49.000 Well, what happened then?

00:13:50.000 What did they do?

00:13:51.000 They installed a new radical standard in its place, and we got played.

00:13:55.000 That's the simplest way to put it.

00:13:57.000 So what would you say then, Michael, to Nicole Hanna-Jones, that writes speechless, controlling words and controlling minds?

00:14:03.000 How far right-wingers have shut down people that are trying to espouse a different opinion?

00:14:09.000 What 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.

00:14:18.000 Do they have a moral right to that argument?

00:14:20.000 Or 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?

00:14:30.000 Are you making an argument, Michael, that our government should reflect objective standards?

00:14:36.000 You know, Charlie, I think that was a little bit of a leading question.

00:14:39.000 But as a matter of fact, I think you're intuition.

00:14:41.000 We're not in a courtroom.

00:14:43.000 I pray.

00:14:46.000 Your intuition is absolutely right.

00:14:48.000 And actually, I think the Nicole Hannah Jones example is good, and I talk about her quite a lot in the book. 0.53

00:14:54.000 But 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.

00:15:04.000 And you have some putative conservatives who will go out and say verbatim that Drag Queen Story Hour is one of the blessings of liberty.

00:15:13.000 If you can't hear that, that's James Madison rolling over in his grave at that very thought.

00:15:18.000 But I want to give that group of moderate or liberal Republicans their due.

00:15:24.000 What they're saying is that if we ban Drag Queen Story Hour, why?

00:15:29.000 Then the left might tell us that we can't go to church on Sunday.

00:15:33.000 Yeah, they've never done that.

00:15:34.000 They've never done that, like for an entire year or something.

00:15:37.000 And in some places, they're still doing it.

00:15:39.000 So yes, as you point out, the practical side, it's ridiculous to begin with.

00:15:42.000 But 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.

00:15:54.000 If you really believe that we cannot make a distinction between drag queen story hour and church on Sunday, that's fine.

00:16:02.000 If you don't think you're capable of making that moral judgment, that's fine.

00:16:05.000 But 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.

00:16:26.000 That's what the process of making laws is in a democratic republic such as ours.

00:16:31.000 If we can't do that, if we're just throwing our hands up in the air, that's fine.

00:16:35.000 But 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.

00:16:42.000 So 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.

00:16:52.000 More speech is always better.

00:16:55.000 We must embrace any ideas at all times.

00:16:57.000 And the way that we're going to get rid of them is to have a counter-demonstration.

00:17:01.000 Why is this wrong, Michael?

00:17:03.000 Or why is this a little bit flawed or overly simplistic?

00:17:06.000 Why 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.

00:17:21.000 Isn't that the solution, Michael?

00:17:22.000 Isn't more speech the solution?

00:17:25.000 And why are you acting like a fascist?

00:17:27.000 Well, I know.

00:17:28.000 What are they going to call me? 0.82

00:17:29.000 They're going to call me a theocratic, fascist, illiberal, authoritarian.

00:17:33.000 It'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.

00:17:43.000 Well, Milton had a very interesting intellectual pedigree, but he was a strong defender of free speech.

00:17:43.000 Yes.

00:17:50.000 He wrote Areo Pagita, which is this great defense of it.

00:17:53.000 And yet both of those guys pointed out that we needed to censor some people because they would undermine the entire order.

00:18:01.000 So if I'm illiberal, I am still far more liberal than the father of liberalism.

00:18:05.000 I just want to point that out for my detractors.

00:18:08.000 The reason that the marketplace of ideas rhetoric falls a little flat in certain instances is because, one, someone sets the rules of the marketplace.

00:18:19.000 Marketplaces are finite entities.

00:18:22.000 And not every institution is a marketplace of ideas.

00:18:26.000 This is something that conservatives used to understand.

00:18:29.000 It'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.

00:18:41.000 William F. Buckley Jr. launched the post-war conservative movement.

00:18:45.000 This is the founder of National Review.

00:18:47.000 This is as mainstream a conservative as ever there was.

00:18:51.000 He launched it with a book called God and Man at Yale.

00:18:54.000 The subtitle was The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.

00:18:58.000 In that book, he called it a hoax.

00:19:00.000 He 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.

00:19:10.000 Yale has a mission.

00:19:12.000 The educational enterprise is one of indoctrination, right?

00:19:16.000 Education and indoctrination mean the same thing.

00:19:19.000 If 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.

00:19:26.000 You're going to punish that student if the student writes two plus two equals five on his paper.

00:19:30.000 And so you are going to have to discern between truth and falsehood, goodness and wickedness.

00:19:35.000 And The notion that this is an open marketplace of ideas only ever seems to cut in one direction.

00:19:43.000 This is never used to say, permit the teaching of the Bible in schools.

00:19:47.000 The 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.

00:19:55.000 You'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.

00:20:06.000 So do you think that conservatives embrace small L liberalism, the utopian belief of the exchange of these ideas? 0.77

00:20:14.000 Do 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? 0.65

00:20:24.000 Do you think we've been played?

00:20:26.000 I most certainly do think we've been played.

00:20:28.000 And the colorful way you put it, Charlie, is absolutely right.

00:20:32.000 But I think it's worth a little caveat here.

00:20:35.000 I mean, because I agree with everything you've said.

00:20:38.000 I'm just asking questions here, Michael, by the way.

00:20:40.000 Yeah, so I'm sorry.

00:20:41.000 I agree with the questions you're asking.

00:20:44.000 But the caveat is this.

00:20:46.000 What the squishes refer to as liberalism today or classical liberalism, I think would be unrecognizable to many of the classical liberals.

00:20:58.000 To use a popular phrase, like John Locke was way more based than anyone is giving him credit for.

00:21:05.000 In the letter concerning toleration, John Locke says that we need to shut up atheists. 0.91

00:21:09.000 Okay. 0.73

00:21:10.000 And so, and by the way, in Milton's area of Pagitica, Milton says that we need to censor Catholics.

00:21:15.000 I'm glad that we have since gotten rid of that particular censorship. 0.72

00:21:20.000 But, you know, I say this even as a mackerel-snapping papist.

00:21:23.000 The 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.

00:21:34.000 And to bring it back to the present day, that's what you're seeing here.

00:21:38.000 I am not advocating that we throw people in the gulags for mentioning unpopular ideas.

00:21:43.000 What I am saying, though, is that every culture must have standards.

00:21:47.000 We must agree on a few basic things, at least in the rules of engagement, at least in the language that we're speaking.

00:21:53.000 And 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.

00:22:01.000 Do we say he, she, they, them, zero?

00:22:05.000 I mean, even the most basic elements of our language, we are not able to agree upon.

00:22:09.000 And in a self-governing republic, speech is politics.

00:22:12.000 Politics is speech.

00:22:13.000 We persuade one another and we make laws.

00:22:15.000 We are speaking beings, yes.

00:22:18.000 To use Aristotle's observation, this is what makes us human, is our speech.

00:22:23.000 So 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.

00:22:43.000 And unfortunately, they're so clever at it, we haven't even noticed that they've been doing it. 0.53

00:22:48.000 So I totally agree.

00:22:52.000 And 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.

00:23:06.000 So I had a conversation with a very unimpressive person recently.

00:23:09.000 I'm not going to say that person's name, who said, how dare you?

00:23:13.000 It was a private conversation.

00:23:14.000 Or how do I know what's best for you?

00:23:17.000 You might, I know it's best for me and for me, it's Christianity and going to church and all that.

00:23:22.000 But for you, it might be social degeneracy.

00:23:25.000 Are you trying to impose a certain viewpoint?

00:23:29.000 Are you trying to use force, Michael?

00:23:31.000 Because don't we as conservatives don't like force?

00:23:34.000 We are scared of force.

00:23:36.000 So, are you trying to say that you can run government better?

00:23:40.000 Charlie, are you accusing me of attempting to legislate morality?

00:23:45.000 I am absolutely asking the question of whether or not you're trying to legislate morality. 0.81

00:23:51.000 Are you a fascist?

00:23:53.000 Well, I will then absolutely answer in the affirmative, not on the fascism part, though I talk about fascism in this book.

00:23:59.000 A bundle of sticks is what it means.

00:24:01.000 But anyway, that's a different thing.

00:24:02.000 It really does.

00:24:03.000 I will answer in the affirmative, yes.

00:24:06.000 Not only am I advocating that we legislate morality, I'm actually just making the simple observation that all laws legislate morality.

00:24:17.000 That line about you can't legislate morality. 0.99

00:24:19.000 I think that may be one of the stupidest lines in our entire discourse. 0.99

00:24:24.000 It doesn't mean anything. 0.99

00:24:25.000 All 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.

00:24:36.000 When we pass laws, we make moral arguments as to why we need certain laws.

00:24:40.000 A law against murder is obviously referring to the moral prohibition on committing murder.

00:24:47.000 And this is true throughout our law.

00:24:49.000 So, yes, we have to do it.

00:24:52.000 The left knows this.

00:24:53.000 The left knows that this is inevitable.

00:24:55.000 And the right used to know this until very, very recently.

00:24:59.000 And 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.

00:25:09.000 We need to lose in this wonderful manner.

00:25:11.000 You know, I think that they're afraid of winning.

00:25:14.000 I think they're afraid of the moral risk of actually having to govern. 0.99

00:25:18.000 I think that they are cowardly and craven. 0.92

00:25:20.000 And I think that they don't recognize not only is courage a virtue, but it is the prerequisite for all of the other virtues. 0.96

00:25:27.000 If you don't have courage, you're not really going to have any.

00:25:30.000 That's your Aristotle again.

00:25:32.000 Let me think about this.

00:25:35.000 Aristotle Ethics, book three, I think that is.

00:25:38.000 Courage is the ninth chapter before friendship, happiness, and contemplation.

00:25:43.000 So, and I learned that by not going to college.

00:25:45.000 You have note cards.

00:25:46.000 Hold on.

00:25:47.000 How are you pulling up all these Aristotle quotes?

00:25:49.000 That's very impressive.

00:25:50.000 Power shows the men, Aristotle said, Politics book two.

00:25:54.000 So let me ask you a question here.

00:25:56.000 Conservatives are going to be a little bit uneasy with some of the things you're saying.

00:26:03.000 And I want to walk through this because I used to be there too.

00:26:05.000 I know exactly where you're coming from.

00:26:07.000 And you're also being intentionally provocative, which is delicious and awesome.

00:26:10.000 It's actually the way you move the Overton window.

00:26:11.000 No, it's great because I know you well enough.

00:26:13.000 I get the whole, I get the whole thing.

00:26:14.000 It's really good.

00:26:15.000 But let me walk through this and then I want you to respond.

00:26:18.000 Conservatives are afraid of tyranny.

00:26:20.000 It's programmed in our DNA.

00:26:22.000 We don't like tyranny, nor should we.

00:26:25.000 We think tyranny is evil.

00:26:26.000 Autocracy is evil.

00:26:28.000 Our whole constitution is written as a document to be slow and deliberate and protecting of natural rights in the state of nature.

00:26:37.000 Therefore, 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?

00:26:51.000 Walk 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.

00:26:59.000 If you shut up Robin DiAngelo, they're going to shut up me.

00:27:03.000 Walk us, help us wrestle through that, Michael.

00:27:06.000 Well, I think you have to begin before that hypothetical, which is what if this power is used against me?

00:27:14.000 And I think you need to ask the simple question: wait a second, is this power currently being used against me?

00:27:19.000 And of course it is.

00:27:20.000 And of course, there are many kinds of tyranny.

00:27:23.000 The conservative movement of the 1950s through the late 1980s was very laser-focused on the evils of big government.

00:27:32.000 And there are many evils of big government.

00:27:34.000 I'm a strong opponent of an unbounded, unlimited government. 0.89

00:27:38.000 And this is in particular because of the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

00:27:42.000 But there are many kinds of tyranny.

00:27:43.000 Mitch McConnell made this point the other day when he was talking about the woke corporations.

00:27:48.000 He said that today, woke corporations are working in many ways as a sort of parallel government.

00:27:54.000 And Republicans have aided them along.

00:27:56.000 They have, for at least a couple of decades now, shilled for usually multinational corporations that hate our guts.

00:28:04.000 And we have given them so much political power that is in many ways less accountable to the American people than government power.

00:28:11.000 I 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.

00:28:28.000 No 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.

00:28:41.000 And they do control the flow of information around the internet.

00:28:44.000 The internet is the public square.

00:28:46.000 They are effectively controlling our politics.

00:28:49.000 I don't think there is anything conservative about allowing them to do that.

00:28:53.000 And I don't think that we are defending against tyranny when we refuse to bring those woke oligarchs into line.

00:29:00.000 So, 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.

00:29:13.000 Mao, Stalin, Mussolini, bad things happen when we use power.

00:29:18.000 And their gut instinct is not totally wrong.

00:29:22.000 But what assurances can you give?

00:29:24.000 What 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?

00:29:36.000 And I think, can you help explain that?

00:29:39.000 Yes, 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.

00:29:53.000 But 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.

00:30:03.000 You know, yes, Hitler and Mao and Stalin used political power.

00:30:06.000 Washington, Adams, and Jefferson also used political power.

00:30:10.000 Millard Fillmore used political power, for goodness sakes.

00:30:12.000 That's just the description of the job.

00:30:13.000 Millard Fillmore installed indoor plumbing in the White House.

00:30:16.000 It's an unknown fact about Millard Fillmore.

00:30:19.000 And it's a very important use of political power.

00:30:21.000 You've got to fix the plumbing in your house and in our country, in our political system.

00:30:26.000 And so that's what I'm advocating here.

00:30:29.000 You 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.

00:30:41.000 That is not.

00:30:42.000 It's not true.

00:30:42.000 That's only been true for the past, say, 20 or 30 years.

00:30:47.000 Do 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?

00:30:59.000 I don't think so.

00:31:00.000 I think in some ways you are less free to say certain things, but in many ways, you're more free to say certain things.

00:31:07.000 You're more free to say things today than you were 20 years ago on television, for instance.

00:31:12.000 George Carlin famously had the seven words you can't say on TV.

00:31:15.000 Today, you basically can't turn on a TV without hearing all seven of those words, right?

00:31:20.000 In many ways, we're free to say vulgar things, profane things, licentious things, but true liberty is what I think has been abrogated.

00:31:28.000 And this is the distinction here.

00:31:31.000 The real difference, I think, is that talking about conservatives taking the bait, our founding fathers were very clear that liberty is extraordinarily important.

00:31:41.000 It's instrumental, by the way.

00:31:42.000 It's not an end in and of itself.

00:31:44.000 Justice is the end of government, according to Madison.

00:31:46.000 The Constitution is put forward to secure the blessings of liberty.

00:31:50.000 So liberty is an instrument.

00:31:51.000 They love liberty, ordered liberty.

00:31:53.000 But liberty should not be abused to licentiousness.

00:31:57.000 And I guess the difference is this.

00:31:59.000 Licentiousness is the freedom of the heroin addict, who isn't he the freest guy in the world?

00:32:04.000 You know, he's just shooting up all day long as long as he's got a couple bucks in his pocket.

00:32:08.000 He's free, right?

00:32:09.000 And that's why we need to legalize drugs so he can be more free.

00:32:12.000 No. 0.88

00:32:12.000 No, I think we all know that the heroin addict is a slave. 0.88

00:32:15.000 He's the least free person on earth.

00:32:18.000 Now, true liberty, of course, is not the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it.

00:32:23.000 True liberty is the right to do what you ought to do.

00:32:25.000 This 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.

00:32:39.000 And now, my modest suggestion that maybe when we craft our politics, we think about the difference between true and false and right and wrong.

00:32:47.000 If I'm an authoritarian, if I'm illiberal or fascistic for suggesting that, my goodness, what would they say about John Adams?

00:32:54.000 What would they say about Washington or even Jefferson? 0.83

00:32:57.000 Surely those guys are to the right of Mussolini. 0.53

00:32:59.000 So what you're getting at here is very important.

00:33:01.000 And I will only make one adjustment.

00:33:03.000 We have to stop saying that doing drugs is any form of freedom.

00:33:07.000 Capacity or the ability is not freedom.

00:33:10.000 Liberty is the pursuit of virtue.

00:33:12.000 So if you have the capacity to do something, it's not the liberty to do it.

00:33:16.000 And you're right.

00:33:17.000 It's about what you ought to do.

00:33:18.000 I 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.

00:33:33.000 I quickly corrected it for media matters.

00:33:35.000 Literally, I said, okay, media matters.

00:33:37.000 I don't mean slave.

00:33:38.000 I mean you're going to be bonded to that thing.

00:33:40.000 And everyone lost their mind.

00:33:42.000 And that's the argument that you're making.

00:33:43.000 Can 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,

00:34:13.000 as long as it doesn't harm someone else.

00:34:15.000 This self-sovereignty liberty.

00:34:17.000 If I want to do drugs, I do drugs.

00:34:19.000 If I want to drink, I can drink.

00:34:21.000 Don't get in my wallet and don't get in my bedroom.

00:34:24.000 Don't get in my syringe and don't get in my blunt.

00:34:27.000 Is that liberty, Michael?

00:34:30.000 That is most certainly not liberty, Charlie.

00:34:32.000 And I think your comments on the sin spinach are very apt. 0.75

00:34:34.000 You know, the old devil's lettuce, the old Peruvian parsley.

00:34:37.000 I think it's not the height of liberty.

00:34:40.000 Of course not.

00:34:40.000 Now, why is it?

00:34:41.000 Your observation is totally right about the conservative movement.

00:34:45.000 In the early 20 teens for the 2000s, yes, you had this creeping idea.

00:34:50.000 Sometimes we call it libertarianism.

00:34:53.000 Sometimes we call it neoconservatism. 1.00

00:34:56.000 I think, frankly, neither of those terms really does justice to how stupid these arguments were. 0.99

00:35:04.000 Because basically, what we were told was that you should be able to just do whatever you want to your body, abuse yourself in any way. 0.99

00:35:12.000 You should be able to sexually, obviously, do whatever you want. 0.98

00:35:14.000 You should be able to mutilate yourself. 1.00

00:35:15.000 That's what they're telling us now with the transgender movement. 1.00

00:35:18.000 So there's that argument on the personal domestic aspect. 0.97

00:35:23.000 And then the flip side of that was we just also need to bomb the Middle East, that that is a core tenet of conservatism. 0.97

00:35:29.000 Edmund Burke famously said, the age of chivalry is gone and we need to go back to bombing the Middle East.

00:35:34.000 No, I don't think he ever said that.

00:35:35.000 No, that was not in the reflections on the French Revolution.

00:35:38.000 Burke and Pitt wrote no such things.

00:35:41.000 No such thing.

00:35:42.000 It was a very incoherent kind of conservatism.

00:35:46.000 And by the way, I have some sympathy here.

00:35:49.000 The 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.

00:36:01.000 But it did achieve quite a lot, actually.

00:36:02.000 I mean, it did lead to the end of the Soviet Union.

00:36:05.000 It did give us some victories on some important matters.

00:36:08.000 And crucially, what it did was it brought together disparate factions of the right.

00:36:12.000 The traditional conservatives, the libertarians, the Warhawk Democrats.

00:36:17.000 Now you might add, later on, you would add on to the neoconservatives.

00:36:20.000 You would add onto them the populists now.

00:36:24.000 All sorts of factions always fighting together.

00:36:26.000 And this worked out relatively well for the Cold War.

00:36:29.000 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, what joins us together?

00:36:33.000 You know, Russell Kirk predicted this whole thing.

00:36:37.000 He did.

00:36:37.000 Russell Kirk, one of the great.

00:36:40.000 Yeah, from Burke to Elliott.

00:36:41.000 I love Russell Kirk.

00:36:42.000 Yeah, a little biased because he has a great last name.

00:36:44.000 I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

00:36:45.000 Go ahead.

00:36:45.000 That's true.

00:36:46.000 I forgot.

00:36:46.000 Yes, your long-lost relative, Russell.

00:36:49.000 Kirks have done wonderful things for this country.

00:36:52.000 Thank you.

00:36:54.000 I 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.

00:37:13.000 That 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.

00:37:24.000 It has led conservatives not to stand for anything.

00:37:27.000 You know, we want a big tent in the sense that we want more people to vote for us.

00:37:31.000 But just like countries, political movements need to have boundaries.

00:37:35.000 Otherwise, they are not a political movement at all. 0.75

00:37:38.000 And 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.

00:37:51.000 I've also noticed, I think there's a generational divide here. 0.74

00:37:54.000 I 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. 0.65

00:38:08.000 Hey, we'll let you sleep with whoever you want. 0.99

00:38:10.000 Hey, we'll let you mutilate your body. 1.00

00:38:11.000 Hey, this, that, and the other thing. 0.98

00:38:13.000 I just think it's BS.

00:38:14.000 It's not true.

00:38:15.000 I know a lot of older conservatives, and I speak to, as you do, a ton of younger conservatives.

00:38:22.000 Younger conservatives are not waking up in a cold sweat thinking about marginal tax cuts and occupational licensing reform.

00:38:29.000 They are waking up thinking about our culture, things that actually matter.

00:38:34.000 What is human nature?

00:38:35.000 What are we conserving?

00:38:36.000 And I think any conservative movement that will be successful needs to speak to that.

00:38:40.000 So 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.

00:38:46.000 Very, very big guy.

00:38:48.000 Yeah.

00:38:49.000 So, this is the biggest topic of all.

00:38:52.000 Here's what your whole book is really about.

00:38:54.000 And here I'm telling you a book I haven't read, but I did review you.

00:38:58.000 I reviewed you, not the book.

00:38:59.000 So that's a very important thing.

00:39:01.000 So, is this.

00:39:04.000 Your whole book is centered on we must know the good, we must identify it, and we must preserve it.

00:39:12.000 So, Michael, what is the good?

00:39:15.000 Is it objective or subjective?

00:39:17.000 How do people get to know that something is true or false or right or wrong?

00:39:21.000 Those are your words.

00:39:23.000 How does one discover those things and then properly govern themselves after that?

00:39:29.000 Okay, I've got, this is probably going to be the most controversial statement that I'm going to make on the entire book tour.

00:39:36.000 Because 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.

00:39:42.000 Then 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.

00:39:56.000 I am taking the, I think, the most radical approach of all.

00:40:00.000 The way that we can know some idea of the good and the true and the beautiful in politics is through prudence.

00:40:09.000 Ah, that's another Aristotelian word.

00:40:12.000 It is.

00:40:13.000 And something that Edmund Burke talked at great length about.

00:40:16.000 You'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.

00:40:24.000 But prudence is actually a really good thing.

00:40:26.000 My 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.

00:40:36.000 I'm not doing that.

00:40:37.000 I'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.

00:40:49.000 And I know we're not allowed to do this either.

00:40:51.000 Learn 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.

00:41:08.000 Our country has a purpose.

00:41:10.000 There is a purpose to things because there is reason to the universe.

00:41:13.000 We can know it.

00:41:14.000 And 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.

00:41:24.000 Not an abstraction and it is not something in the clouds.

00:41:29.000 Got to get into what we see empirically and govern ourselves appropriately.

00:41:34.000 Prudence, otherwise known as practical judgment, is how we should govern ourselves.

00:41:38.000 Russell Kirk wrote extensively about that.

00:41:41.000 And the three-tied knot we must preserve, right, Michael?

00:41:43.000 What came before us and what is here and what is yet to come?

00:41:46.000 As Edmund Burke famously wrote, the three-tied knot is what is most important.

00:41:50.000 This book is called Speechless by Michael Knowles.

00:41:54.000 It is terrific.

00:41:56.000 And I suppose I have one more question as we just wrap this all up together.

00:42:00.000 Are you optimistic or pessimistic that we can shut up the other side?

00:42:06.000 You know, Charlie, pessimism and optimism, as my friend Father George Rutler points out, they're two sides of the same coin.

00:42:11.000 The conservative pessimist says things can't get any worse.

00:42:14.000 The conservative optimist says, oh, yes, they can.

00:42:17.000 But I have real hope.

00:42:18.000 Hope is a fact.

00:42:19.000 It's a theological virtue.

00:42:20.000 Obviously, this has a religious foundation.

00:42:23.000 I have hope in that my Redeemer lives.

00:42:24.000 I know the way the story ends.

00:42:26.000 But 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.

00:42:39.000 At every turn, I hear a conservative when they are encountering critical race theory at their school board.

00:42:44.000 The school board says, I thought you stood for free speech, and they don't know how to handle it.

00:42:49.000 And 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.

00:43:02.000 Liberty is pursuing virtue.

00:43:05.000 It's not being able to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it.

00:43:07.000 Speechless by Michael Knowles.

00:43:10.000 I thought this was just going to be a general indictment of cancel culture, but no.

00:43:14.000 Instead, Michael Knowles wants to do the canceling.

00:43:17.000 And oh boy, is that going to get some clicks.

00:43:19.000 Buy the book if you agree or disagree and send us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:43:24.000 Michael, thanks so much.

00:43:26.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:43:29.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:43:30.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:43:33.000 And if you want to join us in Tampa, Florida, go to tpusa.com/slash SAS.

00:43:37.000 God bless you guys.

00:43:39.000 Speak to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 03, 2021

The Conservative Case for Censorship—A Provocative Conversation with Michael Knowles

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