Ep. 149 - Kanye West Voice Of Reason
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
187.36383
Summary
Kanye West said that the only slavery in America 400 years ago was mental imprisonment, and a bunch of ignorant people proved his point. We ll explain that in an age of sexless boy scouts, senseless Democrats, and Californians banning Christian books, a frequently incoherent rap artist named Kanye Omari West would be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.
Transcript
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Kanye West said in an interview that the only slavery in America 400 years on is mental imprisonment,
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voluntary mental imprisonment, at which point a bunch of ignorant people proved his point on Twitter and elsewhere.
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Who knew that in an age of sexless Boy Scouts, senseless Democrats, and Californians banning Christian books,
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a frequently incoherent rap artist named Kanye Omari West would be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.
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Who knew? Then, on this day in history, the demise of James Edgar Comey, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I mean,
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J. Edgar Hoover, ends five decades of anti-constitutional overreach at the FBI.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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I should clarify, by the way, because sexless Boy Scouts is a general and confusing term.
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I, too, was a sexless Boy Scout, but I'm talking about sexless, meaning having neither gender or no specific gender,
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not the way in which I was a sexless Boy Scout. Sad.
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Also, are we ever going to do a show again that isn't just about Kanye West?
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This seems like, this is going to be the new show. Kanye is the new covfefe.
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Kanyefe, I don't know. We have a lot to talk about today, and I, it's, the thing that Kanye said
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has caused universal condemnation. Everyone is screaming and wailing and gnashing their teeth.
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What he said is completely right. We'll get to that in a second. Before we get to that,
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we have to talk about toys. We have to talk about toys. So, we get to talk about this toy.
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This toy is so cool, man. I, it makes me upset that I am an adult. Many things make me upset that
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I'm an adult, like accountability and having to pay bills and taxes and all that, but this,
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more than any of them, Little Bits. Little Bits is the coolest toy ever. That's it. It's the
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coolest toy ever. If you have a kid or a niece or whatever, or even if you're 30, get it. It's the
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coolest toy ever. Little Bits is an award-winning platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks
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for creating inventions large and small. You know, we all had those building blocks when
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we were kids and various versions of them. This is just the insanely way cooler version
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of all of that. You can get the complete droid kit. That's what they sent to me when we onboarded
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them. This thing, I was walking through the office because I thought, oh, that's good.
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I'll send it to my nephew. I'll send it to my, you know, my nephew will really like this.
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And hordes of 30-year-old Daily Wire employees are trying to take my toy from me. They're trying
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to take a toy from my little nephew. It's really, really cool. He loves it. He was so excited when
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I called and told him I was sending this to him. You can work it on a mobile device. So there's six
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bits, 20 droid parts, three sticker sheets. There's a free app. You can go to drive mode, force mode,
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self-navigation, all these authentic sounds from the Star Wars movies, 22 missions in the app,
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customizable droids. You can give them personality and kids learn to code. So you can code while you're
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doing it. It requires a smart device. It's very cool to control from your app. That is why my
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nephew loves Little Bits and loves this droid kit. Get yours right now. Get $10 off a droid inventor
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kit. Go get it. Seriously. You always need a gift for some kid for Christmas or whatever. This is the
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K-N-O-W-L-E-S for $10 off a droid inventor kit. It's really, really cool.
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You know what else is really cool? Kanye West keeps saying true things. He keeps saying, this guy,
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I'm not a huge Kanye West fan. Now I am, but I've never, it's not like I listen to Kanye West all the
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time. I think he has a couple songs that are pretty good. I think he was hugely important for hip hop.
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I think he made hip hop much, much better because he actually does have a brilliant musical ear,
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a great ear for how music should go, even if I don't like his own music. And even if he's great
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for hip hop, even if he's the best thing that ever happened to hip hop, which he probably is,
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I don't like hip hop. Nevertheless, I really like what he's saying. He just came out and he said,
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before we even get to the slavery, that's the most controversial quote. He's been saying these great
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things over the last few days. He's been talking about Candace Owens. I actually tweeted out,
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someone said, you shouldn't like Candace Owens. She's only repeating Thomas Sowell quotes,
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the wonderful, great economist Thomas Sowell. And I said, well, even if that's all Candace is doing,
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and I don't agree with that, but even if that's all she's doing, Kanye West isn't going to tweet
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Thomas Sowell quotes. And that tweet did not age well because like two days later, Kanye West actually
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tweeted quotes from the famed 80 something year old economist, unbelievable political thinker,
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Thomas Sowell. So this is all great. The new one he sent out is, Kanye said that Barack Obama is like
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opioids for black people. Obama is opioids for black people. And this is a brilliant analogy. He said,
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Obama made us feel good, but it didn't fix any of the underlying problems. Basically,
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it didn't actually fix the symptoms. It made us feel really good, but it didn't do anything.
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A perfect analogy. It's very timely because the opioid crisis is happening. It's headline
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grabbing because it's so sensational and it's correct. The reasoning here is excellent.
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All of the problems that Barack Obama could have healed, there are racial problems. He could have
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healed the racial divide in America once and for all. He chose not to do that. He chose to stoke the
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flames of racial divide and to say that kids who had been beating up Hispanic neighborhood watch
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people were like his children. They looked like his children. They didn't look like Barack Obama.
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The premise of that is that all black people look alike. All black people don't look alike.
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They're individuals. Kanye West, I'm beginning to think this guy is smarter than people give him
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credit for. I'm not saying he's a great genius. I'll get to that at the end. I'm not saying he's
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playing 4D chess or something, but he clearly has an eye and an ear for something that is
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stronger than people give him credit for. He also tweeted out another analogy. He said,
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when the media masses and scholars talk about what started today, here's a title,
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the Overground Hell Road. People are using this to say, well, Kanye West doesn't know what he's
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talking about. He's saying these kind of incomprehensible things. He does this. He does say
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strange things. And just like any artist, he says strange things, but especially Kanye West,
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except it's a great analogy. The Overground Hell Road. First of all, what is he saying
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started today? Is he talking about where we are in America? Is he talking about all of the
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attacks that he's getting? What is he talking about? And you have the Underground Railroad. That's
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what he's alluding to. Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad, the system of getting slaves out of slavery and up
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to the free north. But this is overground. What is the Overground Hell Road? I think it's really
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important because it plays on a line. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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There are all of these good intentions that you hear, especially from the left. They say, oh, you know,
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we want to give black people this extra bit of money or this extra advantage in hiring or this extra
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advantage in admissions or this welfare program or this government program or this subsidy or this or this
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or this. And that safety net becomes a spiderweb and it keeps people entangled in it. The road to hell
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is paved with good intentions, but it's a road to hell anyway. And it's overground. It's out in the
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open. It's government policy. It's in the mainstream media. And what Kanye West is saying, the thread that
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has gone through all of his tweets and all of his interviews is, I just want to be free. I just want
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to be free. I want to have free thought. I want to have free speech. And all of these people,
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John Legend was texting him and saying, think of your fans. Think of your legacy. Don't say this.
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Don't think this. And he said, look, John, I love you. I appreciate what you're trying to do.
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But you're bringing up my fans and my legacy to shut me up and to say that I can't think this or I can't
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say this. And I'm not going to do it because I want to be free. That's a beautiful sentiment.
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That is a beautiful sentiment. And the analogy to the Underground Railroad is apt. And the pitfalls of good
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intentions, the allusions to hell and the sort of hellish civic culture that we have now, that is
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apt. Those are excellent analogies. So he goes on to talk about slavery. Well, let's just play the
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clip. You can hear Kanye say it himself. You hear about slavery for 400 years? For 400 years? That
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sounds like a choice. Like you was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all? This is the big one.
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This is the one people are saying, how dare you? Everyone is saying this. Conservatives are saying
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this. Lefties are saying this. This was the top trend on Twitter because the headline was Kanye West
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says that slavery was a choice. Except he didn't say that. Kanye West is saying that black slaves in
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America chose to be slaves and they chose to put themselves in bondage and come over on the middle
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passage and end up in the Americas. Except he didn't say that. And Kanye West, except he didn't say
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that. I don't know. Do I need to pull a gunk out of people's ears? When Kanye West said that, this was the
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reaction from just about everybody on Twitter and in reality.
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That's, I think that's a live stream because it's still happening. I feel like, how could you? By the way,
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Kanye West clarified what he said. Kanye West said verbatim, when you hear about slavery for 400 years,
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for 400 years, that sounds like a choice. Like you were there for 400 years and it's all of you all?
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Like we're mentally in prison. Slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. So prison, mental prison,
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is something that unites us as one race. Blacks and whites being one race, we're the human race.
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Beautiful. Absolutely correct. Absolutely spot on. Will.i.am, who I guess is some entertainer or
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something that I know nothing about. He said he was deeply hurt. He was so offended. He was so
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deeply hurt. Alleged comedian, Ty Barnett, another person I've never heard of, said Kanye West needs to
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shut the F up. He used more colorful language. He literally said, you have to shut up. That's,
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that's by the way, how you know that Kanye is in the right, is that everyone's telling him to shut up.
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Everybody's telling him to shut up. That's how you know he's in the right. Because when you're in the
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right, you don't need to shut other people up. You can let them make a fool for themselves. You say,
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you know, when, when, when you're in, in the right and someone else is saying crazy things and is in
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the wrong, the best strategy you have, the best tactic at your disposal is to just let them keep
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talking, right? But if you're in the wrong, or if you're trying to push a wrong agenda or an
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oppressive agenda, or you have your own nefarious plots and someone is speaking the truth, what you
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have to do is tell them to shut up. You got to keep them quiet. I will explain why historically
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and mathematically Kanye West is obviously correct. How everyone with even a passing knowledge of
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history or math knows that Kanye West is 100% correct about slavery. Before we get to that,
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Back to how absolutely accurate Kanye West is here. He said, again, I'd like to get this quote
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right. When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years, that sounds like a choice,
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like slavery goes to direct, uh, uh, like you were there for 400 years and it's all of you all
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like we're mentally in prison. 400 years, he said. That's the number, 400 years. So when did slavery,
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when did African slavery get introduced to the Americas? The Dutch introduced African slavery
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to the Americas in 1619. That was the first time. Now, uh, slavery had existed in the Americas long
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before that, since the dawn of time, uh, a lot of so-called indigenous peoples or native Americans
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or whatever the euphemism du jour is, the people who were here before the Europeans, they all enslaved
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one another. There was rampant slavery as there was throughout the entire world, especially outside
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of the West, but even at various times in the West in antiquity. Uh, now this was 1619 when the Dutch
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introduced African slavery to the Americas. Uh, one of the first legally recognized slave owners in
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America came just a few decades later in 1655. Ironically, it was a black man, a black man named
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Anthony Johnson. He was a black Angolan and the, in the caser suit, the, uh, Virginia recognized his
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right to own a slave. Now, 1619 was when the Dutch brought African slaves to America. Slavery was
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abolished in 1865, 246 years later. So that was the 13th amendment, the end of the civil war,
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246 years later, slavery was abolished. Now that, that is the largest count. If you include,
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go all the way back to the Dutch, not the English, not the American founding in the late 18th century,
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just the very first time by the largest count, black people were in, some black people were
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enslaved in America for 246 years. We know that slavery existed everywhere throughout history. And
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we know that only in the West was slavery abolished and it was abolished pretty quickly because of
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Christianity, 246 years, the entire history of the world, thousands and thousands of years,
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it existed in the modern West for 246 years and we abolished it. Now for 400 years of slavery to be
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true, as all these mawing, mooing, crewing, uh, people who were apparently lightly educated on Twitter
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and elsewhere and in the media are saying for 400 years of slavery to be true, slavery would have
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had to continue 153 years after it did after 1865, which would take us to 2019, which is one year
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in the future. So not only would slavery have to have persisted in the United States as a matter of
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law from 1865 to the present, that not only would there have to be rampant legal slavery in America
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today, it would have to continue until, uh, next year. And we would count that we would have to be
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living in the future for that to be true. So if you think that you have been enslaved for 400 years
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in America, that is a choice. That's an absurdity. That's not true. It is a mental prison. That's a
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mental prison that you live in. Kanye explained all of this. He said, quote, the reason why I brought
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up the 400 years point is because we can't be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need
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free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought. It was just an idea. And what did
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you get for that free thought, Kanye? You got piled on by a bunch of people who can't even do basic
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math. They can't even do basic math. That if black people were enslaved legally in America for 400
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years, we would be living in the future and the civil war would never have happened. Oh, 150 years ago.
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This, he makes this great point. He said, the reason I brought this up, one is to exercise my free
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thought and to show you all what happens when you dare to exercise free thought. To quote Clarence
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Thomas, when someone deigns to think for himself and not kowtow to an old racist order. He said that
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in his famous high-tech lynching defense. But also, we can't be enslaved for another 400 years. What he's
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saying is, this is a mental prison. This is a choice and it will persist. If you don't think for
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yourself, if you don't take off the shackles off of your mind, this will go on forever. There will
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be no end to that slavery. Only you can undo that slavery. There's a really good slave narrative.
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Kanye West got me thinking about slave narratives. And there's a really wonderful one called
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself, by Harriet Jacobs. It's the best slave
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narrative I've ever read. And it's really eloquently written. She writes, Harriet Jacob writes,
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quote, I would 10,000 times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of
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Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America. The felon's home in a penitentiary
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is preferable. He may repent and turn away from the error of his ways and so find peace. But it is
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not so with a favorite slave. She is not allowed to have any pride of character. It is deemed a crime
00:19:02.080
in her to wish to be virtuous. This explains how insidious slavery is. This explains why the West
00:19:09.060
got rid of it. Why the West's Christian culture and the culture that came from Christianity forced it
00:19:14.480
very quickly, almost immediately, to do away with slavery throughout its territories. Because slavery
00:19:21.080
isn't about material things or luxury or money. A lot of people today who are race hustlers want to say
00:19:26.900
the effects of slavery, the heritage of slavery is poverty or not nice living conditions or whatever.
00:19:35.720
Very few people are poor for a long time in America. It's almost impossible to be poor for a long
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time in America. If you're poor in America, you still have television and microwaves and it's pretty
00:19:45.060
nice unless you have a drug habit or a mental illness or something like that and can't exercise
00:19:51.180
liberty. It's a pretty luxurious life. We live in a materially wealthy culture. That isn't the
00:19:58.360
problem. It is true. A lot of times you'll hear people say slaves in certain parts of the South in
00:20:04.940
America had it better than poor people in Europe. And that's both true and false. It is materially
00:20:12.640
true. If you think of slavery just in material terms, that is true. And you hear people write about
00:20:18.220
this in slave narratives that actually slaves had better material conditions than poor people in
00:20:22.440
Europe. But it isn't true. They didn't have it better because they were deprived of something
00:20:26.500
essential, much more important than luxury, which is liberty. They were deprived of liberty. And I'd
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rather be a poor guy with nothing and free than a very wealthy slave. We all would do that.
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Jacobs is alluding to how slavery harms even the slave owners by depriving even the slave owners of
00:20:46.020
virtue. She understands something that so many geniuses in the West don't understand today.
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It's a point that Andrew Klavan talks about a lot, which is that our primary motivations are not
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money. Our primary motivations aren't sex, like all of the new atheists tell you, all of the
00:21:02.120
guru types. They say, oh, we're really driven by sex. We're really driven by money. We're really
00:21:06.900
driven by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No. What we're driven by is a need for virtue,
00:21:11.540
a need to be virtuous and to use our liberty to shape ourselves, to do the good. And in this slave
00:21:17.980
narrative, she identifies it perfectly. The slave can't be virtuous. It's a crime for the slave to
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be virtuous because there's no freedom. And slavery is so insidious because it deprives the slave master
00:21:29.160
of virtue. Because he is partaking of this horrible ripping away of liberty, because he is denying liberty,
00:21:36.880
he himself cannot be virtuous. He cannot pursue the virtue. He's stuck in this awful, peculiar
00:21:42.260
institution. She quotes, in this slave narrative, she quotes Byron, the poet, Lord Byron, and says,
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each is tortured in his separate hell. These are separate hells, but they're equally torturous.
00:21:55.060
That is what Kanye is identifying. He's identifying this central problem, ironically, better than
00:22:00.760
virtually anybody else. The central problem of liberty. The liberty here to pursue virtue. This
00:22:07.340
isn't about money. This isn't about keeping yourself in the past. This isn't about even
00:22:12.760
historical ignorance. It's about liberty and virtue. And listen, I don't want to be accused of painting
00:22:18.480
too rosy a picture of Kanye here. He's making excellent points, and he's making very important
00:22:23.200
points, but I don't think he's playing 4D chess. This is what they're going to say. 4D chess was invented
00:22:27.980
by critics of Donald Trump, especially on the right, who said that his supporters thought he was the
00:22:34.080
greatest genius in the world. That isn't true. We don't think he's like the greatest strategic
00:22:38.060
genius ever in the whole world. We think he's good at the media, and he's a pretty smart fella who's
00:22:43.620
succeeded in some of the most competitive industries in the entire world and managed to get himself
00:22:48.220
elected president the first time he tried. We think he's a pretty smart fella. That's what I think
00:22:51.960
about Kanye West, but I don't think he's some great genius. Here's actually how I know,
00:22:56.620
because he tweeted out, he said, if this was 148 years ago, I would have been more like Harriet
00:23:01.640
or Nat. I would have been like Harriet Tubman or Nat Turner. Now, I wonder, why did he say 148 years
00:23:08.840
ago? 148 years ago was 1870, but that was after slavery ended. So what does it mean to be Harriet
00:23:14.680
Tubman after slavery is abolished? What does it mean to be Nat Turner after slavery is abolished
00:23:19.840
five years after the end of the Civil War? And then I just googled. I had a hunch. So I googled how long
00:23:24.360
ago did slavery end in America, and the first result says 148 years ago, but it's an article
00:23:29.760
from 2013. So I think that's it, right? I think that probably explains it. It's off the top of his
00:23:35.120
head. Kanye said, how long ago did slavery end? Okay, I'll use that number. And so I'm not saying
00:23:38.780
he's a Rhodes Scholar. I'm not saying he's this great political philosopher, but he's making
00:23:43.060
extraordinarily important points. And he has an important virtue, the courage to withstand the
00:23:49.820
leftist onslaught that he's currently getting from everybody. And it's not just on Twitter and
00:23:54.720
it's not just on TMZ or whatever stupid television shows he's going on. He's getting it in text
00:24:00.640
messages from friends of his and family and people who are saying you're mentally ill, you're a traitor,
00:24:06.720
you're this, you're that. And he's got this manliness. Harvey Mansfield writes about it, that even
00:24:12.580
a manly virtue is to be confident and to pursue the right as you see the right, even when you lack
00:24:20.320
perfect knowledge, even when you lack technical knowledge, even when you lack total detailed
00:24:25.660
knowledge. It's why Kanye West is similar to Donald Trump. It's why they share dragon energy, because
00:24:30.540
when Donald Trump entered the race, he certainly didn't possess a perfect knowledge of public policy
00:24:36.580
or a foreign policy. But he, he just knew what he thought. He knew his vision for the country.
00:24:44.760
He knew the motivating principles, the premises, and he followed them. And he wouldn't allow himself
00:24:49.080
to be intimidated by all these little technical soy boys who say, well, you didn't read this book.
00:24:54.320
No, they speak confidently and they're right. Even if Kanye West is off by a few years on the tweet,
00:25:01.360
the point he's making is right. And speaking of manliness, well, we got to burn through this. We got a
00:25:05.840
couple more stories we got to talk about. Speaking of manliness, the Boy Scouts are now the Girl Scouts,
00:25:09.760
which has come as a surprise to the Girl Scouts who are about to disappear. Is that confusing?
00:25:13.840
This, uh, we'd, I'd like to cut really quickly to Steven Tyler for comment.
00:25:25.340
That sums it up, I think. Yeah, that, that is what, uh, you know, this is the evidence of that manliness
00:25:34.540
because, uh, Steven Tyler, I don't know if he knows everything about this issue with the Boy Scouts,
00:25:39.460
but he can really cut to the core of what it is. The Boy Scouts are no longer the Boy Scouts.
00:25:43.540
They're now called the Scouts BSA. This, I just bring this topic up to show that leftist ideologies
00:25:50.340
are essentially about destruction. They're not about creating new things. They're about destroying
00:25:54.860
traditions. They're not about creating the Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts already existed.
00:25:59.360
Actually, what they're doing now is this pernicious ideology of saying that men and women are exactly
00:26:04.080
the same. That destroys the Girl Scouts, right? By, it doesn't create the new Scouts, it just
00:26:08.800
destroys them and makes it all this bland gray thing. And frankly, I'm surprised it took this long
00:26:13.580
because we live in a gender neutral society. We've lived in the gender neutral society increasingly
00:26:19.060
for a long time now. I'm surprised the Boy Scouts even managed to continue to exist. And this
00:26:24.400
gets to the point, even conservatives will say, oh, who cares about the bathrooms?
00:26:29.080
Who cares about if men can use the women's room or if there's a law that says men have to be able
00:26:33.900
to use the women's room? Who cares about redefining marriage? Who cares about it? We all have gay
00:26:38.940
friends. We want them to be happy. Who cares about redefining the central relationship in human nature?
00:26:47.160
Who cares about it? So marriage for all of history meant the union of husbands and wives.
00:26:51.780
And now it means, you know, it includes monogamous people of the same sex, but only two of them,
00:26:59.060
for some reason, not three. And who cares? It's what's the deal? It's look, this is not a debate
00:27:04.760
about rights. This is about the abuse of language. I just did a Prager video on this and the Boy Scouts
00:27:10.100
proved me right. You can trace the demise of the Boy Scouts to the success of the gender neutral
00:27:14.960
society. The words contain whole premises. And when you control the language, you control the culture.
00:27:21.340
The founding mission of the Boy Scouts in 1910 was to teach boys patriotism, courage, self-reliance,
00:27:28.180
and kindred values. Courage, self-reliance. But the gender neutral society says that virtues
00:27:34.900
manifest in exactly the same ways they do for men as they do for women. So in the old days,
00:27:40.320
in the old days before like five minutes ago, we used to say, well, courage for men and courage for
00:27:45.440
women can look quite different. So to have an unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy that you didn't
00:27:52.700
expect, and then to carry that child to term, and then to raise that child sometimes on your own,
00:27:58.080
that's unfathomable courage. That is profound courage. That's a courage that only women have
00:28:05.140
access to. Men can't do that. Men can't do that courage. Now, slaying entire armies of Philistines
00:28:11.580
with the jawbone of an axe, that's a more manly courage. You don't expect women to do that because
00:28:16.200
they're not as physically strong. So acts of physical courage tend to be reserved for men.
00:28:22.400
Women just can't do that. If they compete with men in acts of physical courage, they're going to lose.
00:28:28.280
But the gender neutral society says, no, it has to be the same. It has to be the same.
00:28:31.800
So the Boy Scouts of America, the current participation rate is 2.3 million. That's down
00:28:38.120
from 2.6 million in 2013, which is down from 4 million in the peak years of the past.
00:28:45.360
But I'm surprised it took this long. The Boy Scouts of America doesn't make any sense in the
00:28:49.680
gender neutral society. Why would you have Boy Scouts if there's no difference between boys and
00:28:54.100
girls? That's what we're taught. That's what I was taught in public school. I was taught there's no
00:28:58.520
difference, but never hit a girl. But there's no difference between boys and girls. All the
00:29:02.360
differences are superficial and meaningless, but you should hold the door and pay the check.
00:29:06.160
You say, well, hold on. I don't understand. How do those things, how can that possibly be true?
00:29:10.660
The genders, the biological sexes are entirely identical. They're interchangeable. They're
00:29:15.260
indiscernible. But also there are these different rules that you have to follow. You say, well,
00:29:19.680
maybe the sexes are complementary. We know with the language here, the language changes the culture.
00:29:26.540
We started using gender neutral language. We started abusing language. That changes the
00:29:32.080
culture and the culture changes the institutions. And this might take years to happen. It might
00:29:36.440
take decades to happen, as it has in this case. But ultimately, the institution of the Boy Scouts
00:29:40.840
will be changed as well. And this even changes political institutions and government institutions.
00:29:46.220
You see this. David French wrote a wonderful article at National Review about how California,
00:29:50.500
New Long California, would ban certain Christian books. There's a new California law,
00:29:55.700
AB 2943, which would ban certain Christian books. The bill declares, quote, sexual orientation
00:30:02.080
change efforts are to be, quote, an unlawful business practice. Sexual orientation change efforts.
00:30:12.560
Now, that's like, you know, if sweet little Elisa wants to change my sexual behavior and say,
00:30:19.160
Michael, stop it. Don't stop it. Don't go. You know, then that, I guess that would be a change
00:30:23.300
effort, wouldn't it? I don't know. What is a sexual orientation change effort? That is such a broad
00:30:28.340
phrase. And as is business practice, it's so broad that it could ban books. The bill applies to services
00:30:33.920
and goods. It bans, quote, the sale or release of goods or services that would attempt to change
00:30:39.760
sexual orientation. It also bans advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation
00:30:46.220
change efforts with an individual. So if you tell someone that their sexual behavior maybe should
00:30:51.680
change, if you even just suggest that to a person, if you advertise that, that would be against the
00:30:56.200
law. The left wants to pretend that we're talking about electro, electrocution therapy or something
00:31:02.240
here. Like there's a wide epidemic of electrocuting gays in America, which I don't, have any of you
00:31:07.460
ever seen that? Have you ever heard of that or known someone that that's happened to? Because I
00:31:10.900
haven't. And I know a lot of gay people, you know, I'm from New York and I live in LA and I went to Yale
00:31:15.500
where it's one in four maybe more. And these days it's one in three maybe me. Who knows? I haven't,
00:31:20.060
you don't know everything about me. But on, but, but now we're talking about something that could
00:31:25.720
include books. We're talking about something that even could include books. This is a huge
00:31:30.280
overreach. They'll probably have to rewrite the law now because everyone's denying that that's the
00:31:34.140
case. But this is what happens. You control the language and you have these mental prisons. It's
00:31:39.360
exactly as Kanye West is alluding to. There is a hopeful note I'll leave you on before I say goodbye to
00:31:44.100
Facebook and YouTube. You can't stump Trump. You can't stump Trump. Now we have leaked interview
00:31:50.580
questions apparently from the Mueller investigation into Trump. They're leaking all of this. Mueller
00:31:54.980
wants to subpoena Trump apparently. Democrats who are running on the nothing burger Russia narrative
00:32:01.240
in the words of Van Jones have bankrupted Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign aide. They've bankrupted
00:32:08.100
him. Caputo has had to sell his house, jeopardize his kid's education because he's had $125,000
00:32:13.820
in legal fees. All because as he points out, Democrats lost an election. So they decided
00:32:19.440
to bankrupt this guy. CNN has had Stormy Daniels as a lawyer on 59 times in two months. CNN,
00:32:24.980
you know, CNN is absurd. It has really, I see it sometimes at the airport now and it's become
00:32:28.960
insane. The CNN headline today that went to all the iPhones, you would see it in Apple news
00:32:33.860
was Mike Pence did a dumb thing in Arizona yesterday. That was the headline. That's CNN facts
00:32:41.440
first. CNN facts. There's a facts, but I'm a banana. I don't forget what their advertisement
00:32:47.580
was. That's it. Mike Pence did a dumb thing. And the dumb thing was that they compliment,
00:32:51.120
he complimented a politician CNN doesn't like. That's the, that's breaking news. Facebook
00:32:55.920
is admitting to censoring conservatives. Mark Zuckerberg admitted to a new system on Tuesday.
00:33:00.060
It will rank news sites by trust, which explains why all the right leaning pages have seen all
00:33:05.060
of their engagement drop to nothing. And yet, despite all of that, Donald Trump's daily approval
00:33:10.300
rating is 49%. All of that, they are doing everything they can to destroy this guy. And
00:33:16.580
yet half the country, exactly half the country approves of him. It's perfectly divided. 49%
00:33:22.600
approve, 49% disapprove. Voter confidence in the U.S. winning the war on terror is the highest
00:33:28.600
it's been since we killed Osama bin Laden. Voters still support President Trump's temporary
00:33:33.280
ban on immigrants from dangerous countries. Despite the constant negative press, covfefe
00:33:37.540
abounds. This is a really wonderful thing. I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
00:33:41.800
We've got a great this day in history where I talk about James Edgar Comey and the politicization
00:33:46.220
of the FBI. So you're going to want to stick around for that. But if you're on Facebook and
00:33:50.720
YouTube, I'm sorry, folks, you've got to go over to dailywire.com. We've got really exciting
00:33:55.260
news. This Sunday, we're going to have the Ben Shapiro show Sunday special debut. This is going
00:33:59.980
to be a new long form interview show with Ben. He's going to have the best and brightest political
00:34:05.220
and thought leading voices in America. Come on the show. The first guest is Jordan B. Peterson.
00:34:11.420
It's going to be really good. Do not miss it. And if you're a Ben Shapiro show subscriber,
00:34:16.140
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you're a Ben Shapiro show subscriber already, it will just pop up in
00:34:20.640
your feed. So you'll get to see that right there. It's going to be really cool. So check it out this
00:34:24.180
Sunday. Also, Daily Wire is on Apple News now. So if you don't want to just read Mike Pence does a
00:34:29.960
dumb thing, now you can also get the Daily Wire to counterbalance all the fake news from CNN.
00:34:35.940
Plus, sign up, folks, because what do you get? You get me, the Andrew Klavan show,
00:34:39.600
the Ben Shapiro show. You get all of those extra perks and you get to ask questions in
00:34:43.680
the conversation. The next one stars little old me. So make sure you sign up before then.
00:34:48.520
You can have your questions answered in the order that they come in. It's going to be a lot of fun.
00:34:57.740
Oh, it's still warm because you can serve the leftist tears hot or cold in this tumbler.
00:35:03.820
Oh, the Kanye vintage is just, it's just magnificent. The aroma, when it, first of all, the first notes
00:35:11.940
are flavors of angry hip-hop stars and CNN commentators and everybody else on Twitter.
00:35:19.080
But then when you, when you get it on the palate, you get how horrified the leftists are at truth.
00:35:26.500
So you get everything all, make sure you get, this is the only FDA approved vessel
00:35:30.280
to drink the salty and delicious leftist tears hot or cold. I'm having mine hot right now
00:35:34.460
because I'm feeling a little saucy today. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back to talk
00:35:38.380
about James Edgar Comey, Hoover, James, J. Edgar Hoover. That's a Freudian slip, the Hoover and the
00:35:54.480
Comey. That Freudian slip is where you say one thing, but me and your mother, I keep, I don't know
00:35:57.980
why I keep doing it with Hoover and Comey. On this day in history in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover died
00:36:05.040
after five decades running the FBI. Now we talk today, we talk about the FBI as this central
00:36:13.280
American institution. If you criticize the FBI, oh, what are you, you're attacking America. The FBI
00:36:18.120
was created in 1908. Hoover took over 16 years later. He ran the thing for five decades.
00:36:25.000
This ties in with today's theme, by the way. When the FBI was first founded, the first task of the FBI
00:36:30.360
in those days was to investigate and shut down whorehouses in the enforcement of the White Slave
00:36:35.460
Traffic Act. Basically, there was what we would call sex trafficking today. And it was one of its
00:36:41.380
first assignments was to shut that down. Hoover took over in 1924 and he turned this pretty inefficient
00:36:46.920
agency into an extremely powerful crime fighting organization. So Hoover gets a lot of flack. I will
00:36:52.700
defend J. Edgar Hoover at the beginning and then I'll attack him at the end. There was great stuff in the
00:36:57.640
early years of Hoover. Do not believe the fake news. He curtailed the massive influence of the FBI
00:37:03.260
or of the FBI, of the KKK, another Freudian slip, of the KKK that was growing in the 1920s. He shut
00:37:09.960
that down. He investigated grisly Indian murders. He apprehended or killed very notorious criminals who
00:37:17.020
had been on the run. John Dillinger, Babyface Nelson, Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, all those names that
00:37:23.340
you think of as cartoon characters basically. He caught them. As early as the 1920s, the FBI started
00:37:29.840
wiretapping people to enforce prohibition. This is when things started to get a little dicey. But it was
00:37:34.640
hugely effective. They were able to do a lot against organized crime. Now the FBI also, because they had
00:37:41.480
all this information on people, they started compiling lists of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans in the run-up
00:37:48.160
to World War II. They said if we went to war with the Axis, we might have to put these people in
00:37:52.140
detention camps. Let's just get their names here just in case. Just in case. Okay. That's fine. And
00:37:56.980
we know that that happened to a lot of Japanese Americans. They were put into detention camps
00:38:01.700
as questions of their loyalty were raised in World War II. Now J. Edgar Hoover, he fought the Cold War
00:38:08.760
very effectively after the Second World War. He had a lot of information. He was very good at his job.
00:38:13.480
And he fought the Cold War effectively. What he and agents under him did was basically great stuff
00:38:19.500
during that time. They went after communists and they went after radical leftists. And they did it
00:38:23.500
pretty effectively. They deserve a lot of credit. Broadly speaking, I really like the guy. I really
00:38:29.500
like what he was able to accomplish during his tenure, especially in the Cold War. But this is the big
00:38:36.580
but. From the very beginning, the FBI itself was just unacceptably powerful. It is unacceptably powerful.
00:38:42.780
From the very beginning, the FBI could spy on any American that it wants to. It could create lists
00:38:48.840
for internment camps. It could tap phones. And the line about this was that J. Edgar Hoover served for
00:38:56.780
five decades because everybody was afraid of him. Some of his biographers recently have said,
00:39:01.220
oh, that's not true. That's a legend. That, no way. We know it's true because the presidents
00:39:05.520
themselves said it. Richard Nixon was recorded in 1971 saying that he wouldn't fire Hoover because he
00:39:12.660
feared what Hoover would do to him. If you can spy on every American, if you can tap their phones,
00:39:17.320
you're going to get dirt on everybody. That's an insurance policy. President Truman said this too.
00:39:22.100
Truman said, quote, we want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction.
00:39:28.640
They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye
00:39:34.660
to take over. And all congressmen and senators are afraid of him. And he did that. He would find out
00:39:40.660
generally people who serve their whole lives in Congress or the Senate or whatever. They're pretty
00:39:47.240
depraved people. They're pretty hollowed out from within. And you know, all those guys in DC have
00:39:52.540
some weird sex scandal or something in their past. And so what J. Edgar Hoover would do is he'd find
00:39:58.280
out about that and that was blackmail and he'd have it over them and they would never fire Hoover.
00:40:02.100
Now we hear from a lot of lefties and we hear from Trump critics on the, on the right,
00:40:06.040
how great the FBI is, how Trump is attacking the FBI. The FBI is beyond criticism. They are
00:40:12.560
objective public servants there. And look, there are a lot of great people at the FBI. Totally.
00:40:17.800
There are a lot of great FBI directors. There are a lot of great agents, especially a lot of great
00:40:21.260
agents. How dare you? How dare you? We're criticizing the FBI as an institution. Hoover himself was a
00:40:28.480
great FBI director, but the nature of the agency means that it requires constant,
00:40:33.160
unrelenting vigilance. By nature, the FBI wants to exceed its constitutional boundaries. It's right
00:40:40.020
there. Look at all of the power it has in its jobs and its wiretapping and its investigations.
00:40:44.640
It has basically unchecked power. We're seeing this now. We're seeing this in the attempted coup of
00:40:51.920
certain bureaucrats to try to undo a presidential election because it didn't turn out the way they
00:40:56.280
wanted it to turn out. And, and the FBI has to be reined in. We see this in the text messages
00:41:01.200
between, we see this in the text messages that alluded to that totally corrupt FBI agent, Andy
00:41:07.820
McCabe, deputy director. We, we see it alluded to in Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, those, those
00:41:15.200
jilted lover text messages where they talk about how they need to undo the election, how they don't
00:41:20.380
want Trump to win and they, they want an insurance policy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Bill
00:41:24.860
Crystal, who for a long time has been a conservative thought leader said in a tweet, in a horrifying
00:41:30.500
tweet between the deep state and the Trump state, I choose the deep state, meaning the bureaucracy,
00:41:35.600
meaning the unaccountable agencies between the deep state and the Trump state. I want both.
00:41:40.100
I want to have both of those. I do want an effective national security apparatus and I want it to
00:41:46.360
respect the American people and our constitution. If we can't have both, you have to side with the
00:41:52.240
constitution. You have to side with the elected people. If we don't have that, what is the FBI
00:41:57.920
protecting? Nothing, nothing at all. It is, people have had their perceptions of this warped, especially
00:42:05.060
in DC, especially in the swampland where they are letting the tail wag the dog. They're putting the
00:42:10.620
cart before the horse. What other analogies can I come up with? They are prioritizing the agent of this
00:42:17.280
wonderful republic of ours over the republic itself. Not a good idea. We can't be sentimental
00:42:22.660
about this. The left wants us to be sentimental. Trump's critics want us to say, oh, the glorious
00:42:28.060
agencies. How much I love bureaucratic agencies. Give me my old bureaucratic agencies. No, they're
00:42:35.300
good. They serve a purpose. They do good work sometimes. A lot of the time they do good work.
00:42:39.620
And when they don't, we got to rein them in. That's the way it is. You got to look at this with
00:42:42.840
cold, clear eyes and free yourself to quote Mr. West, the great political philosopher,
00:42:49.560
Kanye West. Free yourself from a mental prison. It'll be very nice. Okay, that's our show today.
00:42:54.800
Get your mailbag questions in so I can free you from more mental prisons on Thursday. In the
00:43:00.000
meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.
00:43:02.720
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production. Executive producer,
00:43:12.720
Jeremy Boring. Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Our technical
00:43:18.300
producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup is
00:43:24.740
by Jesua Olvera. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.
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