The Michael Knowles Show - April 30, 2024


Ep. 1479 - Aliens Will Be Found In A Few Years


Episode Stats

Length

47 minutes

Words per Minute

172.03601

Word Count

8,197

Sentence Count

609

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

26


Summary

A report from the left-wing journal Politico accuses the far-right of trying to kill off the population by encouraging fewer and fewer people to have kids. Michael Knowles explains why this is a bad idea and why we should all be trying to have as many babies as possible.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The libs have attacked lots of normal things in recent years. Among them, in no particular order,
00:00:07.060 the definition of marriage, the American flag, separate bathrooms for boys and girls, monogamy,
00:00:12.340 statues of national heroes, and plastic straws, among many others. Well, it's time to add
00:00:18.560 at least one more normal thing to the list of things the libs hate, and it is perhaps the
00:00:24.580 most normal thing of all. Birds do it, bees do it, even sentimental trees do it. That is,
00:00:31.120 drumroll please, reproducing, having kids. Establishment journal Politico now has a report
00:00:41.380 on the far-right's campaign to explode the population. Fertility is now right-wing.
00:00:50.660 Fecundity is fascism. Until now, if you didn't want your family and country to die,
00:00:57.800 literally to die, you would be most accurately described as normal, which today, of course,
00:01:05.100 makes you a far-right extremist. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:08.740 Welcome back to the show. Joe Biden has moved ahead with banning TikTok, and some conservatives
00:01:33.160 are celebrating. I think they are misunderstanding the situation. I think this is a big win for Biden
00:01:41.080 if this goes through. We'll get to why in a moment. First, though, here at The Daily Wire,
00:01:46.040 we are big fans of entertainment content that is not trying to push a woke agenda into your living
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00:02:04.960 the many myths that helped to create the legend of Davy Crockett. The story begins in 1815 when
00:02:10.220 Crockett's wife falls deathly ill, leaving his young children to survive on their own. The American
00:02:16.120 legend must fight his way back to them across the many perils found in the savage lands of the wild
00:02:21.420 frontier. This film examines the complex 200-year history of European settlers and Native Americans
00:02:26.800 living side by side as neighbors, long before Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.
00:02:31.660 It stands in direct opposition to the genocidal colonization story that Hollywood loves to tell,
00:02:37.080 instead exposing the truth that these two groups traded with each other, intermarried,
00:02:41.300 and yes, sometimes fought, as humans do. The Ballad of Davy Crockett is in select theaters and
00:02:45.480 available to buy or rent everywhere you buy movies. If you want to support films that are decent,
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00:02:55.520 and go check out The Ballad of Davy Crockett.
00:02:58.760 This is about as close to the heart of the left's agenda as I can imagine.
00:03:05.860 The attack on having children. Sometimes the libs, they play around the edges
00:03:13.060 and they try to degrade or damage the culture in this way or in that way.
00:03:18.260 Or they suggest that people, I don't know, postpone marriage or they use, I don't know,
00:03:25.040 they give up their cultural patrimony or they denigrate their forebears. But this is what it
00:03:32.480 really comes down to. They're saying, hey, don't have another generation. Kill your culture. Kill your
00:03:38.020 family and then kill all your families and then there won't be any culture anymore because there
00:03:43.580 won't be any more people to carry on that culture. And then when we suggest, hey, maybe people ought
00:03:49.200 to have kids. Maybe that's like a normal good thing. They say that this is a far right campaign
00:03:54.600 to explode the population. So just a few little corrections here. Explode the population.
00:03:59.200 The population has been dying since 1971 in the United States and really more broadly through
00:04:06.580 the West. We have had a dying population since 1971. We are not replacing ourselves.
00:04:13.840 So when conservatives suggest, hey, maybe we ought to have at least 2.1 children each and maybe even
00:04:20.460 three or who knows, maybe even four. Wouldn't that be so crazy? We're not suggesting that we explode the
00:04:26.640 population. We're suggesting that we try not to die. That's it. Now, I guess if I were the editor
00:04:33.480 of this piece, I would correct that and say the far right's campaign to try not to have an imminent
00:04:39.980 social death, complete collapse and extinction. Next part, though relatively small as conferences go,
00:04:48.540 NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S.
00:04:55.140 birth birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative
00:05:01.000 circles. The natalist movement used to be called being normal and being attracted to the opposite
00:05:05.960 sex and getting married and having children. That's now this is a really kind of an amazing
00:05:10.680 movement. You know, I think I'm also in addition to the natalist movement, I'm going to launch the
00:05:16.140 air breathing movement and the water drinking movement. Just these crazy movements, you know,
00:05:22.000 where we just do things that every single person on earth did naturally until we all lost our minds
00:05:30.040 and perverted all of our desires about five minutes ago. It's gaining momentum lately in
00:05:36.420 conservative circles where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising
00:05:40.740 immigration. Hold on. That's not an accident that those things converge. The explicit argument that
00:05:48.540 the mass migration advocates make for mass migration is that we don't have enough Americans to sustain our
00:05:54.620 economy. So there are again, this is not an implicit argument. We're not reading the tea leaves here.
00:05:59.600 The overt logic that that the pro mass migration people are using to justify their policy,
00:06:07.400 which the vast majority of Americans don't like, is that if we do not have mass migration because we
00:06:14.240 don't have kids anymore, our economy will collapse. So if you want to fix mass migration, even according
00:06:21.280 to the mass migration advocates, you've got to start having more kids. That's not some crazy right-wing
00:06:25.940 conspiracy theory. We are just repeating what the libs have been telling us for decades. This movement
00:06:33.200 counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban among its
00:06:38.640 proponents. So in Hungary, Hungary is pretty much the only country in the West that has in any way
00:06:46.420 turned its birth rate collapse around. And it's still not above replacement, but it's ticked up a
00:06:50.920 little bit since Hungary instituted the family policy, which says if you have more than three kids,
00:06:54.980 you don't pay taxes. It's a great policy, and I think we should have it here in the United States
00:06:58.080 too. That's what makes Viktor Orban a proponent of the pronatalist movement. Okay, he's also the only
00:07:06.760 prime minister in the West who has done anything to improve the birth rate problem. So maybe he's
00:07:13.660 not a kooky fringe figure. Maybe we ought to emulate him. Natalism, however, here's the rub. Natalism is
00:07:21.240 often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims. For many in the room,
00:07:26.700 the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.
00:07:35.640 Yeah, yeah. If you promote a thing, usually it follows that you want the culture to be more
00:07:46.000 supportive of that thing. As though here's the nefarious underbelly of the having kids movement,
00:07:54.440 the nefarious underbelly. It's not really just about having kids. It's also about having a culture
00:08:00.000 where people have more kids. Uh-huh. Right. That is, that follows. That follows. This conference might
00:08:12.740 look like something new, a case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven
00:08:16.760 forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. So
00:08:21.860 it's not just the typical old conservatives, you know, stodgy people saying, hey, you know,
00:08:27.080 God tells us be fruitful and multiply, so you got to do that. Let's go have more kids. There's also
00:08:31.380 something that looks a little bit new going on here. It's a critique of capitalism. And that part is
00:08:38.360 true. It's not a left-wing conference, obviously. It's a conservative conference, but there are plenty
00:08:43.540 of conservative and right-wing critiques of capitalism. Let's not forget, modern market capitalism
00:08:49.880 is a product of liberalism, right? Of, uh, comes, comes about after the Enlightenment, then you, after,
00:09:00.040 after that, after you have a widespread adoption of a more liberal economics in the wake of Adam Smith and
00:09:07.100 the wealth of nations, then you get industrialization. Now, if you listen to Klaus Schwab
00:09:12.540 in the World Economic Forum, we're in the fourth industrial revolution. So the first one is mechanization.
00:09:17.320 The second one is the production line and, uh, uh, electrification. The third one is, uh, computing
00:09:24.200 and the internet. The fourth one now, we're all going to like plug our brain stems into the matrix
00:09:28.280 and have an internet in everything. There's probably going to be an internet in my left is yours
00:09:32.040 tumbler soon. Uh, that creates problems. And, and it's not just critiques from the left, the Marxists
00:09:38.280 and the socialists who are critiquing capitalism, but it's, it's conservatives too. It's just a major
00:09:43.480 disruption. And of course, conservatives are going to have some questions about this and maybe raise
00:09:48.620 some objections because I don't know if you ever attended a Republican party function in the nineties
00:09:54.720 or two thousands or even the 20 teens, but you would hear two things in every Republican party speech.
00:10:00.760 You'd hear two things. You'd hear about how we need to defend traditional family values and our
00:10:06.460 great American way of life and conserve our culture. And then in the very next breath,
00:10:11.500 you would hear these Republicans say, and that's why we need massive creative destruction and no
00:10:15.480 guardrails whatsoever and huge innovation. That's going to upend everything and make us all a lot more
00:10:21.020 money and tick up GDP. And you think, well, you know, I like material prosperity as much as the next
00:10:26.760 guy and I don't want to be left behind and beaten by China or another geopolitical adversary, but
00:10:31.500 don't you see, conserve our culture, protect our social order, massive creative destruction,
00:10:37.500 don't have guardrails for anything. Those two goals are in conflict. And there are, there are
00:10:43.660 problems with the modern market economy in part because it doesn't even operate so much like a market.
00:10:49.360 It's this kind of weird managerial hodgepodge of some of the worst aspects of left-wing and right-wing
00:10:57.720 economics. That's one problem with it. You started to see the birthright problem begin really long
00:11:04.520 before 1971. It really does begin with industrialization. So I even think of the poem by
00:11:10.760 William Blake, Jerusalem, you know, and did these feet in ancient time walk upon England's
00:11:14.520 mountains green, pastures green. I'm getting some of the words wrong, but there's a famous line in it,
00:11:18.980 which is, and was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic mills? The dark satanic mills
00:11:27.220 are referring to the mills of industrialization. That's a deeply conservative critique. And it does
00:11:34.200 because as everyone's going into the factories, there's just less opportunity and less impetus for
00:11:39.560 people to have really big families. And that's a problem. It's a problem because even if you don't like
00:11:43.480 kids, even if you don't want to have kids, if no one has kids anymore and we have a below
00:11:48.140 replacement birth rate, our civilization's just going to die. And we're going to slow down the
00:11:52.800 death a little bit by importing migrants in huge numbers from all around the world that are going to
00:11:59.700 cause all sorts of social unrest and are going to, especially if they don't assimilate, which no one
00:12:05.380 does anymore, they're going to crack up the cultural cohesion that we have. So even if you don't
00:12:11.020 want kids, it creates a major, major problem. And then finally we hear, this conference suggests
00:12:17.020 there's a simple way around the problem of majority rule, breeding a new majority, one that looks and
00:12:21.460 sounds just like them. Okay. That's kind of a funny joke. I remember in my early days in working on
00:12:26.160 political campaigns, Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels had one of these funny lines. He said,
00:12:30.620 listen, kids, I'd recommend to you that we beat the libs of the ballot box, but also get married and
00:12:36.180 have a lot of kids. We can either out-argue the liberals or we can out-breed the liberals. The
00:12:40.380 latter is much more fun. And it's a funny line. I use the line too sometimes, but it's about more
00:12:46.140 than that. It's not just about the liberals not having kids and the conservatives having kids and
00:12:52.160 then boom, there you go. First of all, sometimes kids rebel against their parents. And the way that
00:12:55.640 kids rebel against their parents is because culture matters. The society in which we live is going to
00:13:00.880 shape how we think about things, how we view the world and how we view ourselves. So part of creating
00:13:06.420 a culture of life and a culture, not only that is opposed to abortion, but a culture that is
00:13:10.680 encouraging of marriage and family and having lots of kids and being normal. Part of that that's so
00:13:16.740 important is it changes the very attitudes. It changes the way we think of human beings and society.
00:13:24.340 Governor Kristi Noem is in a lot of hot water because she killed her farm dog. And some people feel
00:13:30.840 very strongly about this. Of course, people love their dogs and their puppies. So they're going to
00:13:36.300 have an emotional reaction to that. And I totally get it. And it's just, that's always the way things
00:13:41.860 are. Dog is man's best friend. What's bizarre about that though right now is that we're living in a time
00:13:49.480 in which politicians will, you know, rend their garments and clutch their pearls over a woman putting
00:13:56.540 down a farm dog, but they will brag about how they've killed their own babies through abortion.
00:14:02.640 They will gleefully support abortion up until the third and frankly, fourth trimester, if we're
00:14:08.760 talking about the Virginia governor, Ralph Northam and some other Democrats as well. What's really weird
00:14:15.740 about people shedding all these tears over Kristi Noem's poor pooch is not that they love their dogs.
00:14:21.440 It's that we live in a society that mistakes dogs for children, that walks dogs around in little
00:14:27.600 strollers. Not joking. I know people who have done it. Even Pope Francis, the Holy Father, who's
00:14:32.640 considered kind of a liberal Pope, he has said this is really anti-human. We have, I see bumper stickers
00:14:37.420 on cards, proud dog mom, proud, proud dog grandmother. This is very sad because dogs are nice and
00:14:46.220 everything, but they're dogs. They're not people. And as we come to worship nature, we denigrate
00:14:55.700 civilization. As we come to worship animals and other creatures that don't have a rational soul,
00:15:01.540 we, it seems, make an idol out of them and we denigrate our own humanity. The pronatal movement,
00:15:09.880 it's called being normal, folks. We could use a lot more of it. There's so much more to say. First,
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00:16:36.220 to 98, 98, 98. That is Knowles to 98, 98, 98. Speaking of the future, big announcement.
00:16:44.180 It's an announcement of an announcement. Headline, the announcement that we found alien life
00:16:51.400 could be just a couple years away. Spoiler alert, no, it won't. It won't be. It won't be because we
00:17:02.900 won't find it. It's not there. It's something that the libs are really, really obsessed with,
00:17:11.840 but it's not there. According to one of these scientists, here's the argument for why we could
00:17:19.700 just be a few years away from the announcement that we've found life elsewhere in the universe.
00:17:24.280 If life is everywhere, it can be in that system, the system that we've just identified.
00:17:31.860 It may be that we need to observe a hundred systems before we find life, or a thousand,
00:17:37.720 but it could also be that we just need to observe one system. If that's the case,
00:17:42.700 the announcement that we're not alone could be just a couple of years from now. Okay.
00:17:45.360 The problem with her argument is that first premise. If life is everywhere,
00:17:51.940 why do you think that life is everywhere? Well, you know, it's just probability.
00:17:59.000 Okay. Why do you think it's probability? Well, because life arose here on earth.
00:18:04.980 So why wouldn't it arise elsewhere in the universe? It's a big old universe, isn't it? Why wouldn't it
00:18:09.460 arise elsewhere? That's just probability. Okay. Well, in order to ascertain the probability of
00:18:15.560 something, you need to know anything about how that thing came to be. And implicit in all of these
00:18:23.640 arguments is that life just arose kind of randomly. It's just a natural thing that happened. And it's
00:18:30.320 kind of, it just is a thing that happened. And we certainly have no idea how it happened.
00:18:34.900 There was an old thesis that there was a kind of primordial hot soup of molecules and elements
00:18:42.160 banging around. And then at some point they just banged around enough that, you know, the super
00:18:47.220 molecule got up and started dancing around. But there's no evidence that that's true. It's just,
00:18:52.240 you know, fantasy and fiction, scientific fiction to fill in gaps that they have no idea how to fill in
00:19:00.700 based on any kind of evidence. So we have no idea as a scientific matter of physical,
00:19:08.500 empirical observation. We have no idea how life began. Now, I have a pretty good idea of how life
00:19:12.660 began. I think that in the beginning was the word, the logos, the divine logic of the universe.
00:19:19.580 And the word was with God and the word was God. And I think that God made this like the sky,
00:19:28.340 you know, and the water and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. And then he formed man out
00:19:35.880 of clay and then he breathed into man. And then there was man, you know, and then, but it's not
00:19:41.000 good for man to be alone because man's a social creature and a coupling creature. So God like
00:19:46.360 ripped out one of man's ribs and then made a woman for him. And I, and I, there are going to be a lot
00:19:52.260 of people listening to this who say, oh, here we go. Here we go. Here's some crazy religious explanation.
00:19:57.220 I'm, I'm just saying that explanation, which modern scientific secular people scoff at
00:20:06.900 is much more persuasive. And there is much more evidence for it than any other explanation we've
00:20:14.900 ever heard for the origin of life. The best alternative explanation they've got is the primordial
00:20:20.880 soup of random molecules bumping into each other until they form a turtle or something.
00:20:24.840 And there's just no, there's not, they don't even, there's not even an explanation as to how that
00:20:28.840 happened. So you might, you might be unsatisfied with this beautiful, evocative allegorical,
00:20:37.740 I suppose, you know, explanation of how life begins. And you might be, you might find it an obstacle to
00:20:45.040 say, well, I want to know the literal explanation, but don't forget, there's no such thing as a merely
00:20:49.220 literal thing because literal refers to letters and letters are signs and symbols. I'm not trying
00:20:54.360 to be cute about this. I'm saying there is nothing that is merely physical in the world. There's
00:21:00.940 nothing that is without meaning. We are, we are in a, because the world is intelligible and because
00:21:06.600 we have intellect that can perceive the intelligibility of the world, because we can
00:21:11.000 communicate, because you can understand the words that I'm saying right now, which are just symbols
00:21:14.360 that are coming out of my mouth. There's symbols of, there's symbols of symbols actually, because
00:21:18.480 I'm creating a sound based on a word, which is in my head. And you can understand what that means.
00:21:24.280 We are acknowledging that there is meaning in the world. And so we, we hear an allegorical
00:21:30.080 description of how the world begins and we get hung up on whether it's literal or not.
00:21:36.240 I don't even know what literal is, but you know what I do know, you know, I'm pretty confident in
00:21:40.340 that we will not find out that ET is living on planet Zebulon 7 in just a few years. I think
00:21:46.300 the libs are going to keep waiting for this because it's part of the liberal mythology. And
00:21:51.040 they're, they're the same as the kind of cultists who are always waiting for the end of the world.
00:21:55.060 And it's going to happen on this specific date in six months, then it doesn't happen. And they
00:21:58.300 wait for the next one. The other crazy thing about it is I can't help but notice that the libs are
00:22:04.700 really interested in all other life, all life everywhere, potentially in the cosmos,
00:22:09.720 except for human life. We're interested if we found one little tiny bacterium on planet Zebulon
00:22:16.140 7, it would be the biggest banner news. They would, they would just go crazy. But if a mother becomes
00:22:23.120 pregnant with a beautiful human child, we would deny that that was life. And we would encourage
00:22:27.560 that in our liberal culture, we would encourage that mother to kill that baby. If we, if we find a
00:22:32.980 little Delta smelt hiding out in a little pond somewhere, you know that the government is going to
00:22:37.880 send in the Marines to stop a developer from, from building a building on that property,
00:22:42.540 because we have to protect the sweet little Delta smelt. The life is so precious. There's going to
00:22:46.680 be some, some special type of berry that grows there and we're gonna have to shut down all
00:22:50.520 development. But a human being, that's the one, the one animal that, that, that we don't care about
00:22:56.200 at all, that we're trying to diminish, that we mock people for wanting to produce more of them.
00:22:59.700 We say they're crazy pro-natalist far-right maniacs. We, we push contraception in the
00:23:05.240 culture. We push abortion in the culture. We push euthanasia. We're killing old people in any,
00:23:09.740 any way to, to, to prevent there from being more humans, humans who are the highest of the created
00:23:15.720 things in this, in this cosmos of ours. We have rational souls. We can talk about these things.
00:23:21.200 We can reason abstractly. We can, we, that's why we're tried for crimes is because we have a
00:23:26.480 conception of justice. The, the, the little Delta smelt can't do that. And yet, oddly enough,
00:23:33.680 the one animal we don't want any more of, at least as far as, as the liberals are concerned,
00:23:40.280 is human beings. Now, ladies and gents, you know what I want more of? Judged by Matt Walsh.
00:23:46.300 A new episode premieres tonight, eight Eastern on Daily Wire Plus. Judge Matt Walsh is not merely
00:23:50.860 playing a part. He's defining it. What does that mean? I don't even know what that means.
00:23:55.520 Clad in a robe that commands the room and wielding a gavel that lays down the law. Matt Walsh brings
00:23:59.900 his trademark wit and ironclad logic to the pettiest of squabbles, proving that no dispute
00:24:04.960 is too trivial for a dose of common sense. Remember, the courtroom is Judge Walsh's domain,
00:24:09.800 but entry is exclusive to Daily Wire Plus members. So make the wise decision. Get your membership now
00:24:15.180 at dailywireplus.com and witness the gavel of justice in action tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern with an
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00:24:27.100 Speaking of a dearth of intelligent life, cops, happily, are clearing the weirdo protesters off
00:24:34.380 of our campuses and out of our parks. Here is one clip of a rather surprised protester who never
00:24:42.620 thought that the cops would actually do their job. You're hurting me!
00:24:48.960 You're hurting me!
00:24:50.000 A little toddler.
00:24:50.960 Help! Help! Help! Help!
00:24:55.620 You're hurting me!
00:24:56.520 You're hurting me!
00:24:58.560 Stop it just dropping you. This is when I say like, hey, buddy.
00:25:01.760 This is my little toddler. Hey, buddy, it's time to go to bed.
00:25:04.480 I don't want to go to bed. It's time to go to bed.
00:25:06.680 Buddy drops to the ground. I say, I'll just pick you up.
00:25:08.900 Oh, what? You can pick me up. And by the way, my toddler screams and cries a lot less than that
00:25:13.480 college student. A little darker in some places. Not only are these pro-Palestine liberation
00:25:20.320 protesters camping out on the sidewalk and the street and the quads, they're also donning
00:25:26.920 keffias and prohibiting Jewish students from entering campus.
00:25:31.480 You guys have closed the entrance. We are UCLA students. I have my ID right here. I'm being
00:25:36.940 blocked off, not by the security guard, but by you two. You three. Oh, look, they're making
00:25:41.560 their burger. Well, I'm going this way. Excuse me. This is what they do. Everybody, look at this.
00:25:45.460 Look at this. I'm a UCLA student. I deserve to go here. We pay tuition. This is our school
00:25:50.680 and they're not letting me walk in. My class is over there. I want to use that entrance.
00:25:55.360 Well, I can't take it. Will you let me go in? This could be over in a second. Just let me
00:25:59.220 and my friends go in to class. Then you can move. Will you move? Okay, we're going. We're
00:26:10.780 going. I'm going in. I don't, I have my hands up. I'm not hurting them.
00:26:17.160 They don't really, they don't really garner a lot of sympathy, do they? The keffias around their face
00:26:23.320 looking like jihadis doesn't really make me want to support these people as they're blocking a
00:26:29.240 Jewish student from getting on campus. Now, we're viewing these protests as though this were about
00:26:36.140 Israel, Palestine, the Gaza war. We're viewing these protests as though it were about Muslims versus
00:26:42.260 Jews or something. And I guess there's an aspect of that. But I've been around a lot of college
00:26:47.380 campuses for a long time. And these are the very same people. They are the same people who block
00:26:53.560 the entrance of conservatives who want to go to a lecture, often lectures that I'm giving on campus.
00:26:59.020 It's the same ones who are just standing there quietly, masks on, not moving. It's all the same
00:27:05.660 tactics. It's all the same people. I remember back when I was in college, there was an Occupy,
00:27:11.180 Occupy Wall Street style protest on campus. And a bunch of these vagrants and indigents,
00:27:17.380 drug addicts and bums and anarchists decided to pitch a bunch of gross tents on the green,
00:27:24.020 the big green outside of campus. And they turned it into a tent city. A poor woman got raped there
00:27:28.300 because it was a bunch of these ne'er-do-wells and criminals. And the cops didn't have the political
00:27:32.820 backing and the politicians didn't have the courage to go arrest them as they ought to be arrested.
00:27:37.640 And I remember at the time of the Occupy protests, Rudy Giuliani had a beautiful quote about the whole
00:27:43.680 thing. He said, I had a rule as mayor of New York. I had a rule and I enforced it as best I could and
00:27:51.680 pretty effectively. The rule was you're not allowed to sleep on the streets. Sleeping on the streets
00:27:57.280 is a dysfunctional act. It harms the person. It harms society. It leads to unsanitary conditions that
00:28:05.820 affect public health. That's my thought on it. You want to know my thought on these protests?
00:28:10.060 My thought on these protests has basically nothing to do with the state of Israel or the status of
00:28:17.580 the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza or the West Bank or the expression of the American youth protest culture
00:28:28.040 or it has really nothing to do with any of that. My position on this stuff is that sleeping on the
00:28:34.520 street is a dysfunctional act that harms the individual and society. Going around screaming
00:28:40.900 all sorts of obscenities, wearing keffias, it's dysfunctional. It's not civilized. It's not in
00:28:48.340 keeping with the American tradition, the American free speech tradition, the American tradition of just
00:28:53.140 how we comport ourselves in what's supposed to be a normal, good country. Get rid of it. Get rid of it.
00:28:59.500 I'm sick of it. J.D. Vance, a very wise senator who actually was at my college. He was in the law
00:29:07.000 school. I was in the undergrad. When I believe exactly when those Occupy protests were going on.
00:29:11.980 So he saw the same thing I did firsthand. Maybe it radicalized him like it did to me.
00:29:15.920 He had a similar and correct take on the whole situation, which we will get to in one second.
00:29:22.260 First, though, you got to subscribe to the Michael Knowles YouTube channel. Smash the subscribe
00:29:26.320 button. Ring, ding, ding-a-ling it. Hit that bell. And that way you will get all of the latest videos.
00:29:34.020 You got the kid at UCLA. He's not allowed to get on campus. You got student demonstrators at
00:29:39.600 Columbia. They've been shutting down Morningside Heights for well over a week now. And the university
00:29:44.120 keeps saying, all right, this is it. This is the ultimatum. You protesters have to go away. And then
00:29:49.380 what? They don't go away. And then the university caves. Now Jewish students aren't even showing up to
00:29:53.560 class because they fear for their safety. Fair enough. You got wackos with keffias screaming about
00:29:57.940 river to the sea. We're going to get rid of all the Jews, whatever. And so I get why they're not going
00:30:02.500 to class. And the university is just so pathetic. They're so cowardly. So J.D. Vance, Senator Vance
00:30:08.000 from Ohio comes out and he says, my view on the campus protests is very simple. I don't care what
00:30:12.100 your cause is, whether you're pro or anti-Israel or anything else. You don't get to turn our public
00:30:15.900 places into a garbage dump. No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them.
00:30:20.660 I agree. I would go a little further than Senator Vance. I do care what your cause is. I favor a
00:30:29.180 broad array of topics that we can debate in keeping with the American tradition.
00:30:37.320 But to quote William F. Buckley Jr., back in the good old days, based Buckley, when he described
00:30:43.000 himself as an epistemological optimist, I do think there are certain things that we can exclude.
00:30:47.120 For instance, if one were to go out and burn the American flag, I favor the traditional
00:30:54.740 jurisprudence on this question before recent decades when the Supreme Court said there is
00:31:02.040 some First Amendment right to burn the flag. For the vast majority of American history,
00:31:05.620 no such right was ever recognized. And there were plenty of statutes against flag burning
00:31:09.500 because it's a totally incoherent act. To use a word from GK Chesterton, it's like the thought
00:31:17.060 that stops thought, which is the only thought that ought to be stopped. Because one would be invoking
00:31:23.060 one's bedrock American rights to burn the symbol of the country. And because we live in a world that's
00:31:32.340 very symbolic and we recognize that signs and symbols really matter, as we've been talking about
00:31:36.180 all show today, the flag is a symbol of the whole country. That's why when the flag drops on the
00:31:41.820 ground, if you're raised right, you're going to go pick that flag up. You're not going to let the
00:31:45.100 flag touch the ground. You're not going to let the flag become dirty. You're not going to leave the
00:31:48.460 flag out in a rainstorm. Why not? It's just a piece of fabric, right? No one really, it's just, who cares?
00:31:55.160 Because of what the flag symbolizes. And so it is an incoherent act. That's why there are special,
00:31:59.980 there were special laws and regulations about what we could do with the flag before we blew this up
00:32:06.740 because the conservatives stupidly, I think, adopted the left's disingenuous embrace of free
00:32:12.920 speech. The libs are going to accuse conservatives of hypocrisy on free speech when conservatives come
00:32:19.720 out and say, we need to stop these protesters. And they're going to say the only reason why
00:32:23.100 conservatives are moving to stop these protests now is because conservatives fanatically support the
00:32:28.100 state of Israel. And it's true, there is a disproportionate and extreme support for the
00:32:31.660 state of Israel on the American right, much more so than on the American left, which is now dominated
00:32:35.980 by its Hamas faction. That's true. And they'll say, where were these conservatives when the BLM
00:32:41.300 protests were happening? Why weren't they shutting down those protests? I happily would have, and I
00:32:45.940 advocated for that at the time. Many conservatives did, and there were the squish conservatives like Mitt
00:32:50.220 Romney who were marching in the streets with those people. But there are going to be some
00:32:56.080 conservatives who have articulated the principle that we need just to be able to say whatever you
00:33:00.560 want, whenever you want to say it, that's American free speech. And those people are going to be
00:33:04.140 hypocrites when it comes to these protests. But that ain't me, baby. That has not been my position.
00:33:09.680 In fact, I wrote a whole book called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, about how that
00:33:13.540 is, thank you, that is not what free speech has traditionally meant in America. It's not conservative.
00:33:18.640 It's not particularly good. We always need limits. All societies are defined by taboos and standards
00:33:23.820 and norms. And so I hate to see the chaos and disorder in our country and the injustice that
00:33:29.360 these kinds of demonstrations are leading to. But I have to tell you, I feel a little bit vindicated
00:33:33.660 because when I wrote my book, whenever it was, three, four years ago now, my view was a fringe view
00:33:40.300 on the right. At that time, all these conservatives were presenting themselves as free speech absolutists.
00:33:45.700 And I said, guys, that's not historical. That's totally crazy. It's not philosophically coherent.
00:33:50.300 It's not conservative. You guys are taking a short-term win here, but it's going to come
00:33:54.620 back to bite you. And it is coming back to bite them now. But now, I'm happy to say conservatives
00:33:59.940 are coming back around to realizing, hey, we live in a society. We're allowed to have standards and
00:34:04.060 norms. And as J.D., I think ahead of the curve for a lot of Republican politicians says,
00:34:10.340 you don't get to turn our public places into a garbage dump. No civilization should tolerate this.
00:34:16.720 I totally agree. And I'm glad many other people are agreeing with us now, too.
00:34:21.540 Now, speaking of protests, did you know that Joe Biden was arrested at a civil rights protest?
00:34:30.700 Allegedly?
00:34:31.840 And I looked at my mom. I said, honey, you haven't said anything. She said, Joey, let me,
00:34:35.520 remember, true story. She said, remember when they were desegregating Linfield,
00:34:39.840 the neighborhood, it was, you know, 70 homes, build a suburbia. And I told you, and there was
00:34:47.300 a black family moving in, and there was people who were down there protesting. I told you not to
00:34:52.080 go down there, and you went down. Remember that? And you came, you got arrested, be standing on the
00:34:57.000 porch with a black family.
00:34:58.940 Right.
00:34:59.320 And they brought you back, the police. And I said, yeah, mom, I remember that.
00:35:02.340 Yeah, yeah, mom, I remember that. Joe, Joey, do you remember when you were the greatest hero
00:35:10.080 of the 1960s and 70s? Do you remember when Martin Luther King walked up to you and he said,
00:35:16.400 Joe, I have a dream that one day you'll be the president because you're the greatest, coolest,
00:35:22.180 most handsome guy ever, Joe, and all black people should vote for you. And you know what, Joe?
00:35:27.740 If black people don't vote for you, they ain't black. You remember, Joey,
00:35:31.220 when Dr. King said that to you? I do remember that, mom.
00:35:35.900 Well, I don't remember that. And not even the liberal journalists remember that.
00:35:40.300 CNN, of all places, coming out, fact-checking this claim.
00:35:44.800 Fact-check, Biden repeats his claim that he got arrested defending civil rights. There is still
00:35:49.500 no evidence for it. There is no evidence for that, just as there's no evidence that Joe Biden
00:35:55.420 never got his license to drive a Mack truck, just as there's no evidence of a lot of things
00:36:01.100 that Joe Biden says. The real irony, the hilarious irony to Joe Biden now presenting himself as the
00:36:10.600 deputy to Martin Luther King, if not as soon as it's going to be Malcolm X, that Joe Biden,
00:36:16.420 this great civil rights icon, is that Joe Biden began his political career as, shall we say,
00:36:23.900 a skeptic of some of the civil rights movement? Joe Biden's own vice president, Kamala Harris,
00:36:30.880 made this her chief attack when she was running for president against Joe Biden in 2020. She said
00:36:36.200 there was this policy of busing from where you would bus black kids all the way across town or
00:36:40.500 across the county to the rich white schools. And no one really liked this policy, especially not the
00:36:48.780 rich white liberals who had their schools being taken over by the poor black kids from the inner
00:36:53.760 city. And all those rich white liberals really could talk a good game on civil rights until it
00:36:57.280 affected them. And then they hated the policy. But actually, even a lot of black people who were
00:37:01.380 being bused didn't like the policy. It was generally unpopular. It was a big hobby horse of the left,
00:37:07.080 though. Biden opposed it. Biden famously opposed it. And his own vice president said,
00:37:12.760 one of those girls who was getting bused was a young Kamala Harris, Joe. And you dirty,
00:37:17.900 rotten racist, you oppose that. Joe Biden famously said, unless we do something about this,
00:37:23.220 talking about busing, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle
00:37:29.040 with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We've got to make some
00:37:34.280 move on this, meaning we got to stop the busing. That is an actual quote from Joe Biden from September
00:37:40.660 27th, 1977. It is in the records of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said that, unless we do
00:37:48.700 something about all this civil rights stuff, my kids are going to grow up in a racial jungle.
00:37:54.020 Okay. And now all of a sudden, he's best buddies with, I don't know, MLK and Nelson Mandela and
00:38:02.600 Malcolm X. I don't know. So sad. It's especially sad for Biden because it means he's never stood for
00:38:11.620 anything. He was for the crime bill before he was against the crime bill. He was against busing
00:38:16.920 before he was for busing. He was for the defense of marriage before he was for the abolition of
00:38:22.820 marriage. He was this, that. He doesn't believe anything, which means he has no legacy. His legacy
00:38:29.900 will be that maybe he'll get a post office named after him. I guess he'll get a presidential library,
00:38:34.020 but he has no legacy because despite rising to the highest office in the land, he's never
00:38:39.240 accomplished anything because he doesn't believe anything. So he never had anything to accomplish.
00:38:44.100 So it's a real warning for everyone out there who is compromising on their beliefs and their
00:38:49.560 integrity just in the pursuit of power or prestige or a new position. You can get the power and you get
00:38:54.740 the prestige in the new position, but if you don't wield it for any purpose, it is as though
00:38:59.740 you never had it. It's totally pointless as has been Joe Biden's political career.
00:39:06.420 My favorite comment yesterday is from Mr. Drew One who says,
00:39:09.460 Kristi Noem might not get picked for VP, but after that dog story, she's the obvious choice to run the
00:39:13.240 ATF. That's true. Maybe dog catcher. Maybe dog catcher. I don't just, do we have a federal dog
00:39:19.240 catcher? I don't know. Speaking of Joe Biden's presidency, Bill Barr just gave a masterclass
00:39:28.460 for critics of President Trump, for everyone really, on how to handle the 2024 presidential
00:39:38.900 race. I'm going to have to sing his praises even more. Bill Barr just gave a masterclass
00:39:44.680 for American citizens on how to view politics full stop.
00:39:51.360 In response to you saying you'd vote for the Republican ticket. Wow. Former AG Bill Barr,
00:39:56.680 who let a lot of great people down by not investigating voter fraud in our country,
00:40:00.920 has just endorsed me for president despite the fact that I called him weak, slow-moving,
00:40:06.100 lethargic, gutless, and lazy. Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted
00:40:11.540 endorsement, I am removing the word lethargic from my statement. Thank you, Bill.
00:40:16.720 Yeah. Classic Trump. What's the question? What's your response?
00:40:26.340 My response? Well, I mean, obviously, what I said was that I'm very disappointed that this
00:40:31.420 country is stuck with this choice between two people. I don't think either of them
00:40:35.540 should be president of the United States. But given that binary choice, I feel I have to
00:40:42.160 choose Trump. But he's mocking you. So? It's not about me.
00:40:49.420 I love that. I love that last line. Caitlin Collins, CNN, she thinks she's got Bill. She's
00:40:56.360 going to embarrass him. Because Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general, comes out, and he'd been very
00:41:01.140 critical of Trump, but he says, well, yeah, I endorse him. It's between him and Biden, so I endorse him.
00:41:05.840 And Trump, you know, twists the knife. He's making fun of Barr, even as he's thanking him for the
00:41:12.040 endorsement. And Bill Barr laughs it off. He says, yeah, of course, it's Trump. What do you expect of
00:41:15.460 Trump? He says, but he's mocking you. He's making fun of you. Aren't you going to endorse Biden now?
00:41:22.060 He goes, huh? Oh, no. It's not about me. It's not about me. There are a lot of people,
00:41:28.400 and I get it. I sympathize. People who have personal beef with Donald Trump,
00:41:34.880 who now say, I can't vote for Donald Trump because I have personal beef. I get it. I sympathize.
00:41:41.000 But that is not the magnanimous thing. That is not what someone great of soul would do,
00:41:47.720 would think of in this situation. Because it's a binary choice, as Bill Barr says.
00:41:53.080 And you might not like Trump. You might lament that this is the binary choice that we have.
00:42:00.940 But it is the choice that we have. Same thing happened in 2016. And there was a
00:42:05.560 Never Trump movement, and I thought that was wrong. And I was obviously not a part of the
00:42:09.300 Never Trump movement. Even though at that time, I didn't realize how great a president Trump would
00:42:13.000 be. So I had trepidations. I thought, I don't know. He's a New York billionaire. He's paled around
00:42:16.340 with Democrats. I don't know if he's going to be a good president. But I said, but it's a binary choice.
00:42:20.380 And so whatever your trepidations, even if you got personal beef like Bill Barr,
00:42:25.200 it's not about that. It's not about me. It's about the country. He goes on.
00:42:31.360 I think that, I've said this all along, if faced with a choice between two people,
00:42:38.420 neither of which I think should be president, I feel it's my duty to pick the person who I think
00:42:42.880 would do the least damage to the country. And I think Trump would do less damage than Biden.
00:42:47.860 And I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy, I think the real threat to democracy
00:42:52.840 is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.
00:42:57.920 Perfect.
00:42:59.040 One, every Republican who says, I'm not going to vote for Trump,
00:43:02.020 whether because, I don't know, because you liked Haley or DeSantis or whoever,
00:43:09.340 and now I'm not going to vote for Trump. Okay. Well, look, if you're a liberal,
00:43:15.680 if you're just a liberal, like Liz Cheney or something, okay, you're a liberal, you vote for
00:43:19.680 Biden, you like liberalism. But if you're not, if you say you're a conservative, if you really believe
00:43:25.280 what Bill Barr just said, that the real threat comes from the progressive movement, it comes from
00:43:31.200 the left, it comes from the liberals. That's the real threat to our democracy, our form of government,
00:43:38.320 our constitution, all the rest of it. Then you got to vote for Trump.
00:43:44.640 You got to vote for Trump or you're a narcissist. Or ironically, you are the thing you accuse Trump
00:43:51.300 of being. Or you are self-interested and you're not thinking of the common good and you're not
00:43:56.320 thinking of it. Or I know, I know it's hard for a lot of people. Trump just is this stumbling block
00:44:01.420 for a lot of people. I like him. Maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker and I just get some of
00:44:07.340 his quirks a little bit more and I get more of a kick out of it. But I know some people find the
00:44:12.120 man odious. And for all these reasons, they accuse him of being a narcissist. They accuse him of all
00:44:16.580 that stuff. But if you allow your petty objections to him to impel you to advance the progressive
00:44:24.640 movement that you supposedly, in principle, oppose, you are guilty of the things you're accusing him
00:44:32.080 of. Far more obviously guilty than he would be. Bill Barr gets it, man. Bill, he's a very smart guy.
00:44:39.160 It's not about Bill Barr. It's not even about Donald Trump. He's the figure. He's the character. He's the
00:44:46.200 protagonist of the narrative. But it's about the country. That's what the elections are about.
00:44:53.760 And that's how this guy managed to win the presidency in the first place.
00:45:01.240 And most people, in some way, are on his side, even if they don't like him personally.
00:45:07.200 They recognize this guy's being railroaded and it's about a lot more than him.
00:45:11.040 Four criminal indictments. First time we've ever done that to a former president.
00:45:15.160 It's over totally bogus nonsense to the current leader of the Republican Party.
00:45:20.380 What percentage of voters do you think believe he's going to get a fair trial?
00:45:25.620 This is a CNN, speaking of CNN, this is a CNN poll.
00:45:29.660 Most voters doubt that he's going to get a fair trial in New York. Only 44% have confidence that
00:45:34.660 Trump will be judged by a jury that can reach a, quote, fair verdict. 56% were skeptical that a fair
00:45:43.720 outcome is in the cards. Only 13% said that Trump is being treated the same as other criminal defendants.
00:45:50.440 And what's interesting is 34% say he's being treated too harshly. Another 34% say he's being
00:45:54.540 treated too leniently. So it is exactly split. 19% said they had not heard enough to say. 0% had no
00:46:01.240 opinion. And that's the key number here. Of course, this is why, this is one of the main reasons why we
00:46:07.820 have not previously prosecuted former presidents, even when they deserved it. This is why we have
00:46:13.080 not previously prosecuted leaders of the opposition, even when they deserved it. Because
00:46:18.040 no former president, no current leader of the opposition can possibly have an impartial jury,
00:46:25.100 can possibly have a fair trial. Everyone has an opinion on them. It's their job to make sure that
00:46:30.140 everybody has an opinion on them. And that is reflected in the polls. And it is why the criminal
00:46:36.320 prosecution of a former president leader of the opposition poses a unique threat to democracy.
00:46:44.100 How ironic. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member.
00:46:48.580 Use code NOLS, K-N-W-L-A-S, at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
00:46:52.920 We'll be right back.
00:47:08.840 Thank you.