The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1327 - My Unpopular Opinion： Rights Can Be Temporarily Suspended

00:00:00.000 On Friday, two days after a tragic road rage shooting in Albuquerque,

00:00:05.220 anti-gun New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham exploited the incident to issue an emergency

00:00:11.020 declaration curtailing the exercise of the Second Amendment by suspending concealed carry

00:00:16.800 in Albuquerque for 30 days, which is, of course, a very bad thing. And here's her reasoning.

00:00:23.340 You took an oath to the Constitution. Isn't it unconstitutional to say you cannot exercise your

00:00:30.940 carry license? With one exception, and that is if there's an emergency, and I've declared an

00:00:38.440 emergency for a temporary amount of time, I can invoke additional powers. No constitutional right,

00:00:45.920 in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute. There are restrictions on free speech.

00:00:52.520 There are restrictions on my freedoms. In this emergency, this 11-year-old and all these

00:00:59.160 parents who have lost all these children, they deserve my attention to have the debate about

00:01:06.280 whether or not in an emergency we can create a safer environment. Because what about their

00:01:12.000 constitutional rights? I took an oath to uphold those too. And if we ignore this growing problem

00:01:18.680 without being bold, I've said to every other New Mexican, your rights are subrogated to theirs. 1.00

00:01:26.040 And they are not, in my view.

00:01:28.620 Wait a minute, though. You're talking about crimes. There are already laws against the crimes,

00:01:33.480 so how are there...

00:01:34.520 I got it. But again, if I'm unsafe, who's standing up for that right? If this climate is so out of

00:01:44.280 control, somebody should do something. I'm doing as much as I know to do.

00:01:51.660 Madam Governor, do you really think that criminals are gonna hear this message and not carry a gun

00:01:56.700 in Albuquerque, on the streets, for 30 days?

00:02:00.840 No. But here's what I do think. It's a pretty resounding message.

00:02:06.140 To the lawful gun owners. So we all agree, very bad. This power grab is extremely dangerous.

00:02:15.260 But, here's the but. What's even more dangerous, this is the but that got me in trouble on Twitter

00:02:21.540 over the weekend. What's even more dangerous is that the governor of New Mexico actually has a point.

00:02:28.400 And the longer conservatives refuse to acknowledge this fact, the longer we're going to keep getting

00:02:33.700 rolled by these liberal power grabs, which will only continue to increase in frequency,

00:02:39.860 severity, and injustice, if all the conservatives can muster to stop them is ahistorical whining about

00:02:46.560 abstract rights, which do little more than make us feel good and righteous all the way to the gulag.

00:02:53.880 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:03:03.700 COVID's happening again. You want to talk about emergency powers being invoked unjustly. COVID is

00:03:21.600 happening again. High schools are canceling their football games because of COVID. This after the

00:03:26.240 mask rules in California, in Atlanta, in New Jersey. This after the White House telling you to get the

00:03:32.100 vaccine, they're just doing it again. And they're doing it because of the election. We'll get to that

00:03:35.100 in just a moment. First, though, a related story, I guess. I got in so much trouble on Twitter over the

00:03:42.600 weekend for saying something that is just obviously true. Here's what I said. I don't want to

00:03:50.660 misquote myself by even one syllable. I said, unpopular opinion. Civil leaders do, in fact,

00:03:59.920 have emergency authority to suspend temporarily many legal rights. That's true. And my point being

00:04:09.920 that the New Mexico governor is wrong in particular here. One, because as that reporter pointed out,

00:04:17.740 the criminals aren't going to stop carrying their guns because of this emergency declaration. Two,

00:04:23.100 because the people of New Mexico, the law-abiding people of New Mexico, actually need a gun

00:04:29.740 more than ever. They need to be able to carry a gun more than ever because of the insane amount of

00:04:33.400 crime in Albuquerque. And three, because the incident that took place in the road rage,

00:04:37.440 though tragic, does not constitute an emergency. So that's the reason why what she did is wrong.

00:04:41.820 But she's only wrong in particular. She's not wrong in principle. And conservatives,

00:04:46.660 oddly enough, seem to be misunderstanding this. But the point I was making, that civil leaders

00:04:52.520 have emergency authority temporarily to suspend rights, that is not a particularly controversial

00:04:59.300 point of view. I mean, I guess it is now, but it has never been controversial throughout all of

00:05:04.640 American history, throughout all of the political history of the entire West, on either side of the

00:05:10.700 aisle or any of the different political participants in our country. The basic principle has often been

00:05:17.420 articulated in America as, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. In other words, all legal rights

00:05:27.180 are important. The law is very important, up to and including the Constitution. But when the whole of

00:05:32.540 the law is threatened, then a rigorous, meticulous adherence to the letter of every single individual

00:05:38.860 aspect of the law is actually going to undermine the law because you could lose the whole law and the

00:05:43.200 whole political order to anarchy or to, I don't know, an insurrection or an invasion.

00:05:47.420 I guess those would be the extreme cases where I think everybody has to grant my point.

00:05:51.760 If the United States were suddenly invaded, well, I guess we are being invaded. If the United States

00:05:56.480 were being more obviously invaded and there were a major insurrection, not some Midwestern

00:06:02.740 grannies at the Capitol, but an actual insurrection, would martial law, for instance, be called for?

00:06:10.500 Yes, of course. Would you rather throw away your whole system of law because you're going to

00:06:17.120 uphold every single little statute everywhere or no? Would you take care of the problem and then

00:06:22.540 bring back the law? I think we all agree if martial law is a thing that exists and has been

00:06:28.700 exercised a number of times in American history by some presidents who we like, some presidents who

00:06:32.300 we don't like, then the principle holds true. You wouldn't want to give away the whole of the law.

00:06:38.460 A good piece of evidence that my view is not so crazy is that Ted Lieu, who's one of the most lib

00:06:46.700 frustrating members of Congress out there, tweeted out, he said, this order from the governor of New

00:06:53.200 Mexico violates the constitution. No state in the union can suspend the federal constitution. 0.98

00:06:57.920 There's no such thing as a state public health emergency, except to the US constitution,

00:07:02.120 exception to the US constitution. So Ted Lieu's saying, no, no, no, we have to always rigorously

00:07:05.600 follow the letter of the law. I guess Ted Lieu now supports concealed carry. That's great.

00:07:09.920 I don't, I didn't think he did, but I guess he says that he does now. David Hogg, who's that

00:07:13.700 like 12 year old, I think now he's like 30, but he started out when he was 12. David Hogg is this

00:07:18.520 anti-gun campaigner. He says, I support gun safety. There's no such thing as a state public health

00:07:22.460 emergency exception to the US constitution. So the fact that two huge libs are on one side of the issue 1.00

00:07:31.040 and I, a conservative are on the other side of the issue. Some people took this to mean that the

00:07:35.820 world has gone crazy. And can you believe it? Even David Hogg, even Ted Lieu. No, they're,

00:07:40.320 they hold this view because they are liberals, because they're extreme liberals. And I hold this

00:07:46.020 view because I am a conservative. This view though has been held by conservatives, by liberals, by

00:07:50.460 everyone going back. Thomas Jefferson probably said it most clearly. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1807,

00:07:55.960 on great occasions, every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict

00:08:01.200 line of the law. When the public preservation requires it, his motives will be his justification.

00:08:06.400 That's a pretty strong statement. His motives will be his justification. There are extreme cases where

00:08:10.980 the laws become inadequate to their own preservation and where the universal recourse is a dictator or

00:08:15.920 martial law. So lest there be any confusion as to how far Thomas Jefferson, who is probably our most

00:08:21.440 open-minded, classically liberal founding father. He said, no, at certain points, if the whole of the

00:08:27.740 law is threatened, if the whole of the nation is threatened, then you've got to take care of the

00:08:30.920 emergency and then go back to the law. Jefferson went on further. A strict observance of the written

00:08:35.400 laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of

00:08:39.680 necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country, when in danger, are of a higher obligation.

00:08:44.100 To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself.

00:08:48.620 This is almost exactly what I just said. With life, liberty, property, and all those who are

00:08:52.440 enjoying them with us, thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. And Jefferson finally says,

00:08:58.620 the line of discrimination. Because some people are going to say, well, how do you know when it's

00:09:01.720 really emergency? How do you know this won't be exploited? Jefferson addresses this. He says,

00:09:06.660 the line of discrimination between cases may be difficult, but the good officer is bound to draw it

00:09:11.840 at his own peril and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.

00:09:16.800 Wasn't just Jefferson. Hamilton and Madison made similar points in The Federalist. John Adams

00:09:25.540 exercised a, not quite a suspension of the law, but a strong circumscription of the law in the Alien

00:09:34.700 and Sedition Acts, a strong curtailing or limiting of the First Amendment. You saw, obviously,

00:09:41.740 Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Generally, we like Adams. I think most people like Abraham

00:09:47.700 Lincoln. It's been used by bad presidents, too, Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. But it's

00:09:52.420 been used a lot. We've had martial law declared in the United States on a number of occasions because

00:09:57.220 of war. In the case of the city of New Orleans during the Battle of New Orleans, we've had it

00:10:01.040 declared during natural disasters. Great Chicago Fire, 1871. There are some other ones. 1906 San

00:10:09.060 Francisco earthquake, Omaha race riot, 1920 Lexington riots. So where does this idea come from? It goes

00:10:15.660 back even earlier than Thomas Jefferson. It goes back to this notion that the welfare of the people,

00:10:22.280 the good of the people, is the highest law. Salus Populi Suprema Lex. This is a law that comes from

00:10:29.740 Cicero in ancient Rome, Cicero on the laws. But it was re-articulated by none other than John Locke,

00:10:35.560 the father of liberalism, classical liberalism, a man who was fairly influential, though his influence

00:10:42.440 has been exaggerated, but fairly influential in the American Revolution. He wrote this as the epigraph

00:10:46.360 to his second treatise on government. This is John Locke's most famous book. He said that this is a

00:10:52.240 fundamental rule for government, but that is the highest point of the law. Some people point out,

00:10:56.820 they say, well, Michael, where in the Constitution does it say that there's an exception to this?

00:11:01.740 First of all, it's alluded to in at least two parts of the Constitution, but even let's go beyond

00:11:07.920 that for a second. If the exception were included within the text of the statute, the law, or the

00:11:13.200 Constitution, it would not constitute a true exception. We're talking about something at a higher level

00:11:19.720 than the mere text. That's what Jefferson's talking about. That's what John Locke is talking about

00:11:23.560 here. That's what Cicero is talking about. And in fact, this principle has been upheld by the Supreme

00:11:28.960 Court, or at least articulated by the Supreme Court, on at least two occasions explicitly. In 1949 and

00:11:35.280 1963, Supreme Court decisions explicitly said the Constitution is not a suicide pact. So why do I bring

00:11:42.140 it up? Because I said at the beginning, I'm not bringing it up to justify the New Mexico governor's

00:11:47.100 actions. I said, in the case of what she's done, this is wrong. But it's wrong for different reasons

00:11:53.740 than we conservatives are saying. And I think the reason that Ted Lieu and David Hogg are on one side

00:12:02.760 of this argument and I'm on the other is not because the world has gone crazy, but it's because the

00:12:07.960 liberals don't want conservatives to recognize this point, that when the whole of the law is threatened,

00:12:13.300 it is not only our right, but it is our responsibility to, in certain narrow extreme

00:12:19.980 cases, go beyond the mere letter of the law to save the whole of it. The most perspicacious response

00:12:26.940 to my, I thought, basically uncontroversial point on Twitter was that they said, wow, it was a liberal

00:12:34.480 who said it. The liberal said, this New Mexico governor's decision was so moronic because it's

00:12:39.740 going to empower conservatives to begin to exercise this line of thinking. And I think that's the

00:12:45.120 point. We conservatives traditionally have always been pretty practical, you know, pretty grounded

00:12:52.860 in reality, pretty focused on tradition and history and how the law actually works. In the last few

00:12:57.140 decades, we've gotten very ideological. We've taken a ton of bait from the liberals. And so now we speak

00:13:02.820 in these abstract rights almost exclusively and in a way that's a historical and in a way that is not

00:13:10.000 very effective because we can whine and scream. And we say, this is hypocrisy that what she's doing, 0.99

00:13:15.500 this is unconstitutional. This isn't right. We have our rights. And that's going to be the epitaph

00:13:21.000 on the gravestone of conservatism. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine if we did this.

00:13:26.200 Well, no, she, in principle, her point is right. And we should fight her on the particulars. This

00:13:32.500 is not an emergency. This is not going to help anything. We should fight her in court. I don't 0.65

00:13:37.180 think this thing is going to hold up. And then we should also exercise the correct principle that she

00:13:43.500 is here exercising. In what case would you say we would do that? Well, I mentioned earlier that an

00:13:51.320 invasion would be a good example of a time when we could go a little beyond the ordinary operation

00:13:58.860 of the law because an invasion threatens our entire political order. It threatens the whole of the law.

00:14:05.620 Unfortunately, we have not been able to stop the invasion on our southern border because every time,

00:14:09.660 even Donald Trump, who was really relatively strong on this, when he would try, all of a sudden,

00:14:16.260 the mechanisms of the bureaucracy and the supposed meaning of the strict letter of the law

00:14:21.000 said, no, you can't stop an invasion of foreigners into your country. Now, Trump managed to get around

00:14:25.640 this one time. And you know how he did it? By curtailing and suspending the ordinary operation

00:14:30.200 of the law through Title 42. He said, okay, the libs are going to declare an emergency with COVID.

00:14:34.600 I'm going to use that emergency with COVID to greatly reduce the flow of illegal immigrants into the 1.00

00:14:39.380 country. Very important. And then the Biden administration runs and they say, we're going to get rid of that

00:14:44.240 Title 42. Perhaps if conservatives would stop believing a bunch of hogwash about American history,

00:14:54.180 I mean, the notion that so many conservatives didn't understand that the Constitution is not

00:14:58.120 a suicide pact tells me that even on the right, forget about the people on the left who are very

00:15:03.280 confused about American history. Even many people on the right believe a whole lot of things about

00:15:07.980 American history and government and political philosophy that just aren't true.

00:15:11.800 A lot of us believe fairy tales that were invented in the middle of the 20th century

00:15:16.060 about America as a fundamentally liberal democracy. And America, there are no complications to any of

00:15:24.220 our abstract rights or anything like that. That's just not true. And it has really hampered our ability

00:15:30.640 to wield political power effectively. This woman knows how to wield political power. Now, I think she's 1.00

00:15:37.120 gone too far. I think she's wrong in the particulars. I think this is going to, I don't think she'll be

00:15:40.700 able to extend this after 30 days. She might not even be able to make it the full 30 days. And even

00:15:44.740 if she does, it'll be litigated in court. And it's a one aspect of a hotly debated part of the

00:15:51.740 Second Amendment. I don't think this is going to be the end of the world for New Mexico. It's a stupid

00:15:57.440 decision, but it's not going to be the end of the world. But the principle that she's articulating,

00:16:01.140 if we were to accept it, would perhaps allow us to get around the very unjust wielding of the strict

00:16:10.080 letter of the law on legitimate national emergencies. I'll leave my point at that.

00:16:17.580 One thing we can also do to strengthen our country, pray, which is why you got to check out

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00:17:32.360 slash Knowles. Try three months for free. Halo.com slash Knowles. They're going to invoke national

00:17:38.720 emergencies. This was the craziest response to my tweet, is that someone said, Michael, how could you

00:17:49.000 still believe that civil leaders have emergency authority after the experience of COVID?

00:17:57.140 To which I said, that's proving my point. They did wield that emergency authority during COVID,

00:18:02.500 and they're doing it again. And they're doing it again. They're wrong on the particulars,

00:18:06.540 but they're right in the principle. That's how they're getting away with it. And you're seeing it.

00:18:11.180 They're bringing it back. Two California high schools just canceled their football games because of

00:18:14.560 COVID. Esparto High School, which is located west of Sacramento, canceled its football game,

00:18:20.840 which was scheduled on last Friday. Because six players caught COVID, allegedly. Santa Paula High

00:18:29.520 School, north of LA, canceled its Friday football game also against La Cañada High School.

00:18:35.600 He has up 20 positive COVID cases on the football and cheerleading teams. It's happening again.

00:18:44.560 And so the question for us is either we can whine and complain and say, you know, actually in 1792,

00:18:53.680 the founding fathers didn't believe, the framers didn't believe that these local people would have

00:18:59.340 this authority, which by the way, isn't even true. The founding fathers and the framers thought that

00:19:04.000 and exercised those rules even then. Actually, probably more audaciously than we do today,

00:19:10.340 than even the Fauci's of the world are doing today. 0.94

00:19:12.060 So we can make that argument and it's not going to get us anywhere. Or we can go on offense and we

00:19:17.300 can engage in the substantive debate and we can win. We do have an example of this. The example of

00:19:22.700 this is Ron DeSantis in Florida. Ron DeSantis has given a very good roadmap of how to do this,

00:19:28.880 which is he's not just going to say, look, we don't care what the students learn, only that they

00:19:38.500 learn. You know, we don't care what they think, just how they think. No, no, no. Ron DeSantis goes

00:19:42.000 into schools and he says, hey, we're going to set standards. We're going to ban books from school.

00:19:45.120 We're going to ban certain stupid fake lessons. We're going to set the curriculum and we're going

00:19:49.640 to set on the question of COVID. We're going to set the mode by which we're going to live

00:19:54.500 with this COVID virus. We are not going to start canceling things. We're not going to shut down

00:19:59.100 businesses. There are going to be some Floridians, some liberals who claim that it's their right as a

00:20:05.360 matter of public health for businesses and churches to be shut down. Yeah, we're not going to do that.

00:20:09.400 We're setting the rules. COVID is not dangerous enough. You have plenty of ways to avoid being

00:20:13.860 out in public if you don't want to be around COVID, but we are not going to allow some minority 1.00

00:20:20.700 of ideologues to upend our entire way of life here in Florida. This ties in with what we were

00:20:27.200 talking about last week, this bestselling Italian book that got its author and Italian general fired

00:20:34.340 because it was politically incorrect that had to be self-published, even though it's a huge

00:20:37.680 bestseller. The book talked about the dictatorship of minorities. We're not just talking about 0.90

00:20:44.440 religious minorities or sexual minorities or racial minorities, but minorities as a concept

00:20:51.400 and ideological minorities who upend all of our culture. We, unfortunately, conservatives in the 0.99

00:20:57.200 name of some hyper-individualism, some embrace of liberalism for some reason, and a liberalism that

00:21:05.900 doesn't even define our country and our civilization. We say, okay, let them do it. You do you. I'll do me.

00:21:11.680 We have no rights to any kind of collective or community standards. No. DeSantis said no way, okay?

00:21:20.380 And he's been pretty successful because of that. That might be a way forward. And when you want to

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00:22:36.560 slash Knowles to learn more. Speaking of the election,

00:22:40.060 got some spicy stuff. Is this going to get me kicked off YouTube? This isn't weird sex stuff,

00:22:45.640 so it shouldn't get us kicked off YouTube, but this isn't the explanation of fundamental truths

00:22:51.860 about anthropology. So I don't think this should get us kicked off YouTube, but it is about the 2020

00:22:56.960 election. John Eastman was one of Donald Trump's lawyers. John Eastman, I know that Trump had some

00:23:03.600 eccentric lawyers on his team in certain places. John Eastman is a very serious man. This is a very

00:23:08.780 serious legal scholar. He was the dean of Chapman Law School. He's associated with the Claremont

00:23:15.600 Institute. He is a wonderful guy, and he believes that the 2020 election was stolen. And that is why

00:23:24.380 he proposed various legal and political strategies to stop what he believed was the Democrats from

00:23:33.400 stealing the election. So we've always heard since 2020, no, there's no evidence that the election was

00:23:37.800 stolen. They never made their claims in court. Part of the reason that the Trump team never was able

00:23:43.860 to make the claims in court is because courts wouldn't hear the cases. Courts didn't want any

00:23:48.980 part of this. I remember Justice Scalia making this point after the 2000 election, which was another

00:23:55.260 contested election. People didn't go to jail for that one, but that's because it was the Democrats

00:23:59.420 contesting the election. Antonin Scalia said, you want to blame the Supreme Court for deciding Bush v.

00:24:04.040 Gore. We didn't want to decide Bush v. Gore. No, we didn't want that case. You forced that case on us. 0.64

00:24:10.480 We would have been happy to stay out of it. So the courts wanted to stay out of it too. We are now

00:24:14.060 finally getting some information though about the 2020 election, some of the arguments for how it was

00:24:19.380 stolen because John Eastman is on trial. And so what did John Eastman do? In the trial on Friday,

00:24:26.520 he had Michael Gableman, who's a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, testify in this California

00:24:35.760 state bar about a legislative audit that he held of the 2020 election. And this investigative report

00:24:43.960 that the former Supreme Court justice presented to the Wisconsin State Assembly showed irregularities,

00:24:50.420 including drop boxes, absentee ballots. And he concluded that the legislature could decertify

00:24:57.520 the election conclusions. So the judge in this case, who's overseeing John Eastman's

00:25:05.680 trial about whether or not he'll be disbarred, the judge doesn't want Gableman to be making these claims.

00:25:13.220 So the judge in the case is telling the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, no, you're not allowed to talk

00:25:18.020 about the widely held view that the assembly speaker, Robin Voss in Wisconsin, didn't want,

00:25:23.480 quote, a real investigation into the election and granted limited funds for the effort. The judge in

00:25:29.340 this case, Roland, struck that part of the testimony. Gableman then responded to the judge in this case

00:25:34.860 and said, do the rules of civil procedure, do the rules of evidence apply in this court? What do you

00:25:39.540 mean I'm not allowed to present evidence? I thought that's the whole reason I'm here in the court.

00:25:42.680 The judge ordered a five-minute recess and said, you know, basically, hey, defense,

00:25:48.120 you got to get your witness in line here. What else did the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice find?

00:25:53.440 Found that Zuckbuck's, Mark Zuckerberg's money, where Mark Zuckerberg said, I'm going to spend a ton

00:25:57.400 of money to prevent Trump from being reelected. Zuckbuck's contracts required cities to follow

00:26:02.100 instructions provided by this shady left-wing organization called the Center for Tech and Civil

00:26:06.920 Life, which the justice believed was a violation of law because it was a private entity telling

00:26:12.640 the government what to do. Now, the Center for Tech and Civil Life, who's it funded by?

00:26:18.840 It's funded by the Skoll Foundation, Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, New Venture Fund,

00:26:23.500 Hopewell Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund. These are all left-wing organizations. The CTCL was allowed

00:26:29.780 to see voters who had requested ballots but had not returned ballots. So it gave this left-wing

00:26:35.380 organization a complete view over what was going on in real time in the election. This is something

00:26:41.080 that no other group, no other political group would have been able to have, that the conservatives

00:26:45.820 certainly wouldn't have been able to have. The CTCL employees were embedded in clerk's offices.

00:26:51.460 They were essentially running the elections. And Gableman said that votes were illegally cast

00:26:56.060 because the drop boxes in which those votes were cast were violating the law because they weren't near

00:27:01.700 the clerk's offices. They weren't near the clerk's offices because the CTCL, this left-wing group,

00:27:06.660 dictated where the boxes went in violation of the law. So those were not validly cast ballots.

00:27:11.960 That's just one example. Then the Racine County Sheriff referred charges to the county DA regarding

00:27:18.460 election officials who were breaking the law. DA said she wouldn't bring the charges. She said she

00:27:23.300 didn't have enough resources to bring the charges. Completely BS excuse. Gableman then said he looked

00:27:27.940 into the electronic voting machines and had serious concerns about them. This is what he said.

00:27:32.760 I don't want to be slapped with any lawsuits here. Defamation BS left-wing operations. I'm just

00:27:38.780 reporting to you what the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice said and testified in the court on

00:27:44.920 Friday. So this is just news. Don't shoot the messenger. He said that voting machines,

00:27:50.020 Dominion was the main one, but then also ESS and Hart were, quote, the opposite of cooperative and,

00:27:54.840 quote, hindered my ability to get to the truth of whether there is fraud in the machines

00:27:59.040 and fought us every step of the way with lawsuits to stop the team from finding out if they had

00:28:04.560 safeguards. Pretty strange behavior, wouldn't you say, for an election that was totally on the up and

00:28:10.160 up. And Gableman said he found very concerning pieces of information, but nothing he could

00:28:17.220 totally put together or say without any shadow of a doubt. But things like Wi-Fi connections to the

00:28:21.880 internet, how the machine counted the ballots by taking images and converting it into mathematical

00:28:26.680 formulae so that you'd end up with things like fractional votes, just a lot of issues. And then you have

00:28:31.640 just the broader statistical issue. Trump won 18 out of 19 bellwether counties in 2020. We think that the

00:28:39.880 election is determined across the entire nation. It's not. It's determined by a handful of counties that in

00:28:46.380 recent decades have decided which party, which candidate is going to win the election. In 2020, 18 out of the

00:28:53.980 19 counties that typically would decide the election went for Trump. One of them went for Biden.

00:29:01.120 Yet Biden wins the election. Kind of weird. Now, you know, I hate to say I told you so. I think among

00:29:06.480 conservatives in the media, I have been one of the more open and suggestive voices when it comes to

00:29:15.000 whether or not the 2020 election was stolen. And the evidence presented at the disbarment trial for

00:29:22.380 John Eastman would seem to back this up. But still, it's up in the air. We'll see how the

00:29:26.700 testimony goes. And even at this point, it doesn't really matter because Joe Biden was able to take

00:29:30.940 power and wield that power effectively. But it does get back to the point that we were raising about

00:29:36.020 emergency powers and whether the constant adherence to the strict letter of the law is really in service

00:29:42.680 of the law most broadly, which the liberals are currently arguing it is. The conservatives

00:29:48.920 traditionally have observed that obviously it is not. One of the objections that people made to my

00:29:56.260 point was, well, where in the Constitution is this exception? Well, where in the case law is this

00:30:01.180 exception? And I've pointed to parts of the Constitution and I've pointed to parts of the

00:30:04.020 case law. But even beyond that, I guess my response as pertains to the 2020 election and the 2024 election

00:30:10.520 is, where in the Constitution do you find the compromise of 1877? This is something you may

00:30:20.740 or may not have learned about in high school history class. Compromise of 1877 was you had the

00:30:26.320 presidential election in 1876. You had the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes. You had the Democrat, Sam

00:30:32.520 Tilden, and they couldn't decide who won the election because there were some allegations of

00:30:40.380 voter fraud. There were competing slates of electors. It was a very similar situation to what happened in

00:30:47.020 2020. So similar, in fact, that Senator Ted Cruz in 2020 suggested the creation of an electoral commission

00:30:53.640 to decide that election as took place and to decide whether or not to certify the electors' votes.

00:31:00.100 As took place in 1877. And the reason it was controversial when Senator Cruz said it,

00:31:07.580 the reason it was controversial in 1877 is it's nowhere in the Constitution. Nowhere in the

00:31:12.940 Constitution, nowhere in Article 2 does it say that the way to solve a contested presidential election

00:31:17.860 is to set up this random commission with people from different parts of the government to kind of

00:31:22.600 vote on whether or not the ballots should be certified. And what happened in this compromise of 1877,

00:31:28.820 which wasn't written down anywhere, by the way, the compromise of 1877 was kind of a handshake deal

00:31:33.320 in a back room with probably a lot of smoke going around, was that the Democrats would agree to give

00:31:39.160 the election to Republican Rutherford Hayes if the Republicans agreed to pull troops out of the South

00:31:43.740 and stop Reconstruction and let the Democrats run the South. That was the deal. Nowhere in the 0.75

00:31:49.880 Constitution. And you might say, well, that's a rotten deal. It's unconstitutional. It's a violation of

00:31:54.140 rights. But then my question is, what was the alternative? What was the constitutional alternative?

00:32:00.820 There wasn't one. It was a constitutional crisis. It was a national emergency. And when the strict

00:32:09.380 adherence to the letter of law is insufficient to solve those crises, when therefore the whole of

00:32:15.080 the law is threatened by those crises, people need to get a little bit creative. That's what happened

00:32:20.800 then. And it's nearly what happened in 2020. The Democrats just had enough power that it didn't

00:32:25.440 really matter. But folks, the reason I bring all of this up, I think I've made it clear as day. I

00:32:31.720 don't, I'm not talking about the New Mexico lady. I'm as strong a defender of gun rights as possible.

00:32:35.560 I think she's going to lose as she should. We are hurtling toward a 2024 presidential election

00:32:42.360 at a time when neither party believes in the integrity of our electoral process,

00:32:48.220 at a time when there are still lots of questions about whether or not our electoral system has been

00:32:52.840 so weakened by the laws and illegal procedures that the libs put into effect just a few years ago.

00:33:01.340 And by the way, they're doing it again already by trying to bring back the exact same excuse

00:33:06.320 of COVID. We can deny this. We can keep our head in the sand and then the Democrats can steal the

00:33:13.140 election and then we can complain about it. Or we can get a little proactive here and recognize that

00:33:18.860 we are facing a fairly significant likelihood of yet another constitutional crisis. And we're going

00:33:27.180 to need a game plan for how to deal with that. Or once again, the epitaph on the headstone of

00:33:32.980 conservatism is going to be, well, here lies conservatism. Imagine if the shoe were on the other

00:33:39.380 foot. Imagine if the roles were reversed. I don't think it is fully appreciated how far beyond the

00:33:47.760 law the libs are willing to go here. There's a report that just came out. The Georgia grand jury

00:33:53.560 that indicted Trump and his lawyers and I don't know, like his cook, not really his cook, but just

00:33:57.380 so many people who were even vaguely associated with Trump. Georgia wanted to indict more people.

00:34:02.180 Georgia wanted to invite sitting U.S. senators. The grand jury recommended charging 21 people

00:34:08.600 who were ultimately not charged. There were already, what, 19 people charged,

00:34:12.020 Trump and 18 co-defendants. They wanted another 21. They wanted to indict former Georgia Senator

00:34:18.720 David Perdue. Wanted to indict former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler. Wanted to indict sitting

00:34:25.140 U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. And I know some people don't like Lindsey Graham, so they probably want 1.00

00:34:30.000 Lindsey. But I kind of actually get a kick out of Lindsey Graham. And in any case, no good argument for 0.99

00:34:34.660 this random county in Georgia to indict a sitting U.S. Senator from South Carolina. Completely insane.

00:34:39.700 They wanted to indict former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. And then Fannie Willis,

00:34:45.860 the prosecutor here, didn't. She only indicted 19 people, including the former president of the

00:34:51.440 United States and the leader of the opposition. Wow, that's moderation from the left. Yeah, we're not

00:34:56.380 going to start indicting senators from other states in this random county. Yeah, we're not going. We're only

00:35:01.140 going to indict the leader of the opposition and anyone who's even vaguely associated with him.

00:35:05.300 Folks, we are in pretty much uncharted territory here. The whole thing, the indictments totally

00:35:14.400 uncharted. The former president running for a non-consecutive second term, that's only happened

00:35:20.720 one other time in American history. The complete upending of our election rules based on this virus,

00:35:28.360 that's fairly unprecedented. There is no script to follow here, okay? And a myopic insistence on,

00:35:40.300 well, just show me exactly where in the strict letter of the, there is, we're, we're writing the

00:35:46.040 script right now. Sorry, let me rephrase that. The script is being written right now as to how these

00:35:51.240 elections are going to take place. The script is being written right now as to how power is actually

00:35:55.580 going to be wielded in the United States. We are not writing it because we're living in a fantasy

00:36:01.520 world. The left is writing it. And so long as we don't accept political reality, basic historical

00:36:07.940 facts of, of politics, basic philosophical truths of politics, and just the news of what's going on

00:36:14.860 right now, the longer that we don't accept that, the less likely we will be to have a share in that

00:36:21.220 power in the future. Now, you know, folks, Convicting a Murderer, the first true crime

00:36:25.300 docuseries ever released by Daily Wire Plus, premiered this weekend. It got over 7 million

00:36:30.060 views and a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are raving about Convicting a Murderer,

00:36:34.680 calling it, quote, one of the best documentaries of 2023, saying that Candace, quote, delivers

00:36:38.840 everything that you could want from a docuseries in the first three episodes if you have not begun

00:36:43.300 the series. Episodes one through three are available on Daily Wire Plus right now. Episode four is

00:36:47.300 releasing this Thursday. You are going to see yet another missing piece of the puzzle revealed.

00:36:51.800 Do not wait. Head on over to dailywireplus.com slash watch to start the series. If you're not a

00:36:57.200 member, go to dailywireplus.com slash subscribe to join today. My favorite comment on Friday is from

00:37:05.180 ASMR Conservative, who says, I actually appreciate the ADL. They had a lot of conservative pundits on

00:37:12.900 their watch list, so I figured I'd check them out. Here I am now. Thank you. I know this is how I feel

00:37:19.900 about the ADL to some degree. I mean, the ADL is pretty bad in that they call people Nazis if they

00:37:26.880 don't just totally kowtow to the radical left-wing demands of the ADL, and they're trying to take down

00:37:32.900 Twitter. So I think they're particularly a threat right now, and Elon is right to sue them for

00:37:37.400 defamation. It's very funny. Some of the others are pretty bad, too. Right-wing watch, people

00:37:42.820 for the American way is pretty, people for the American way, the most ridiculously named organization

00:37:47.600 in American history. They're pretty bad. Media Matters is pretty bad. I just, my holdup there

00:37:56.340 is the same point that you've just made, which is, I really hope Elon doesn't kick off Media Matters

00:38:02.320 or sue them. They have been my loyal publicists for years at this point, what, seven, eight years at

00:38:07.980 this point. I don't want to get new publicists. I really appreciate them. They watch the show every

00:38:12.600 day they're watching right now. So it's true. Sometimes these guys, the libs, are so wrong-headed.

00:38:18.320 They think they're going to kill us, and they only make us stronger. All right, speaking of elections,

00:38:26.040 Nancy Pelosi, who is, by my last count, 584 years old, she is running for re-election. Nancy tweeted out, 0.67

00:38:34.460 quote, now more than ever, our city needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our

00:38:40.040 country. Yeah, we need drug-addled bums defecating on the street from sea to shining sea. That's what 1.00

00:38:46.900 we need. We need two cars in every garage and a syringe in every pot. We need San Francisco values

00:38:53.820 in America. Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there. It's a rainbow

00:38:58.420 flag, by the way. It's not the red, white, and blue. They got rid of that one, but the rainbow flag is

00:39:01.940 still there. With liberty and justice for all, that's why I'm running for re-election and respectfully

00:39:06.940 ask for your vote, Nancy. And now look, especially depending on what happens in 2024, it's going to

00:39:12.600 be very dangerous for Nancy Pelosi to be in office because she remembers the compromise of 1877.

00:39:18.200 So she's going to be able to wield power very effectively. I don't mind that she's running for 1.00

00:39:23.480 re-election. It's not good. It's bad. But I kind of get a kick out of some of these old-timers who have 1.00

00:39:27.900 been, these women of a certain age and some of the old-timer male politicians who have been around

00:39:33.140 forever, Bernie, all of them, they're going to hold on as long as they can. The people are allowing

00:39:37.900 them to hold on. Okay, that's just how politics works. However, I will say, the longer the geriatric 0.90

00:39:45.520 politicians hang on, the more massive the political sea change is going to be once they inevitably have

00:39:54.080 to leave office because the old Grim Reaper finally shows up. That's just a fact. They can hold on

00:40:02.260 in both parties. Nancy Pelosi can hold on. Mitch McConnell can hold on. Joe Biden can hold on.

00:40:06.880 They can hold on. We had what? We had a boomer president in Bill Clinton, boomer president in

00:40:16.100 George Bush. I thought a boomer, I thought a Gen X president in Barack Obama. Some Gen Xers have

00:40:22.640 written into me screaming and said, Michael, how dare you associate him with us? Obama is technically a

00:40:28.020 boomer. Okay, so fine, count him as a boomer. Then another boomer president with Donald Trump,

00:40:32.380 it's four boomer presidents. And then Joe Biden, who's the silent generation, who's before the baby

00:40:38.680 boomers. So these guys have held on to power for an extraordinarily long period of time.

00:40:42.720 And all that means is that the next generation that comes up is going to be that much more removed,

00:40:51.720 is going to differ that much more from the views of that previous generation. But there's no stopping

00:40:56.980 change forever. It will have to happen. Time rolls on. History rolls on. You look right now at Hungary, 1.00

00:41:02.080 a government that a lot of American conservatives quite admire because it's the only country that's

00:41:06.380 been able to turn around its birth rate problem, the only country that's been able to stop mass 0.98

00:41:10.940 migration, the only country that's been able to re-beautify its cities. It's the only country where 1.00

00:41:15.800 the cities are getting more beautiful, not uglier. And part of the reason they've been able to do that

00:41:20.940 is the government is quite young in Hungary. It's a vibrant young government that's not just stuck

00:41:26.640 with the old platitudes of the 1980s, but is applying eternal principles to the new circumstances

00:41:32.280 that confront us. That's going to happen here eventually. It's going to have to when that grip

00:41:38.080 of power runs out. And this is why I would encourage conservatives not just to recite the same platitudes

00:41:44.300 that you learned in 1982, platitudes which may or may not have even been true then.

00:41:50.640 Politics often boils down to talking points, and talking points are always wrong because they

00:41:54.480 are always oversimplified. They never tell the whole story. Sometimes they outright lie.

00:41:59.260 If we just keep rehearsing the same old script that we learned in 1982, we're going to keep on

00:42:03.240 losing, just like we have since 1982, almost without exception. Or we can use our imagination,

00:42:08.800 we can dig into history, we can dig into philosophy, and we can imagine. We can think about what the

00:42:13.280 future looks like and bring that to effect. Speaking of geriatric politicians, Joe Biden

00:42:19.320 is slumping among non-white voters, which is a big problem because the Democrats rely on a total lock

00:42:27.320 on racial minorities. So if they lose the racial minorities, especially black voters, they could

00:42:32.360 lose basically every election. This is according to CNN and SSRS, shows Trump is up one over Biden.

00:42:39.980 Um, so for the people who say Trump can't win, you know, again, that was disproved by history because

00:42:45.680 Trump did win in 2016. And maybe, who knows, who knows what happened in 2020. Uh, Biden is hitting

00:42:51.340 his targets among whites. So Biden is matching 43, 44% of decided major, major party white voters that he

00:42:59.000 won last time. But he's, he's losing some non-white support, meaning that he's not, he's not behind on

00:43:07.260 non-white voters. He's still massively ahead on non-white voters. He's just not as far ahead as he was

00:43:12.180 last time. So Joe Biden still wins 58 to 34 among non-white voters, according to Nate Cohn of the

00:43:18.460 New York Times. But because he's lost some ground, this could, could be a big problem for him. Uh, Trump,

00:43:25.260 for instance, got 29% of the Hispanic vote, uh, in 2016. That was compared to Romney's 27% of the vote. So

00:43:32.500 this is very funny that Trump, who called Mexicans rapists and murderers, was able to do better

00:43:36.900 among Hispanics than milquetoast, nice, nice sounding Mitt Romney. It really upended a lot of

00:43:41.340 the chattering classes, you know, establishments, uh, anti-Trump rhetoric in 2016. But still 29 versus

00:43:47.280 27, it's not, it's not a lot. It's, it's fine. And, and Trump does better among non-white voters

00:43:54.040 than most Republicans. He got 8% of the black vote compared to 6% that Mitt Romney got. Okay, that's fine. 0.99

00:44:00.640 But this also highlights the political importance of immigration. For whatever reason,

00:44:05.540 Republicans just don't do that well with non-white voters. That is why the Democrats are flooding the 0.98

00:44:12.940 country with illegal aliens, because they are, by and large, almost entirely non-white immigrants.

00:44:19.680 And they're not doing it because they care about the Venezuelans or the Hondurans or the poor people

00:44:23.520 crossing the border, paying off the cartels to be smuggled and raped and trafficked and sometimes

00:44:27.740 killed along the way. They're just doing it because it swells their numbers. And it swells their numbers

00:44:31.800 in a whole lot of ways. It swells their numbers in Congress because congressional apportionment,

00:44:35.820 the number of districts that, that a state will get, is based on total population, not based on

00:44:40.700 citizens. So you flood the country with illegal aliens millions and millions of years, that's going to 0.99

00:44:44.720 increase, especially in Democrat places like California, it's going to increase their

00:44:49.600 representation. It's going to increase their, their representation in the electoral college. It's going to

00:44:55.200 increase their proportion of the voters. It's got, it's, it's helping them. This is not something

00:45:00.360 where we can say, well, in 30 years, hopefully we'll just pass a law and, you know, the Hispanics 1.00

00:45:04.740 are conservatives. They just don't know it yet. Some of them are, and it actually varies by nationality.

00:45:09.060 Cubans tend to be much more Republican than say voters from, I don't know, Venezuela, say, or Guatemala,

00:45:17.100 and the children of these immigrants and the grandchildren of these immigrants. But by and large,

00:45:20.800 they're still anti-conservative. They still go for the Democrats. This is an emergency because,

00:45:25.680 well, we can be chattering about the precise application of the rule of the law and whether

00:45:29.200 Title 42 is acceptable or not. Should we really arrest these poor people fleeing the persecution 1.00

00:45:34.040 of what? They're seeking persecution by signing up with the cartels. While we're, while we're debating

00:45:40.660 that, the country is being radically transformed as an intentional program by the Democrats to swell

00:45:45.420 their numbers and to, to make the Republicans a permanent minority. Forget about racial minorities, 0.81

00:45:49.640 cultural minorities, religious minorities. It just, as an electoral matter, that's what the

00:45:54.020 Democrats are after here. Are we just going to let that happen or are we going to, are we going to

00:45:58.160 get creative in how to enforce the law? At the very least, the highest sense of the law in spirit.

00:46:03.940 The rest of the show continues now, folks. It's Music Monday. You don't want to miss it.

00:46:07.680 Become a member and use code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

00:46:19.640 You don't want to miss it. I don't want to miss it.

00:46:34.540 You don't want to miss it.

The Michael Knowles Show - September 11, 2023

Ep. 1327 - My Unpopular Opinion： Rights Can Be Temporarily Suspended

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