The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 Kanye West said in an interview that the only slavery in America 400 years on is mental imprisonment,

00:00:07.580 voluntary mental imprisonment, at which point a bunch of ignorant people proved his point on Twitter and elsewhere.

00:00:14.300 Kanye is entirely correct. We will explain.

00:00:17.340 Who knew that in an age of sexless Boy Scouts, senseless Democrats, and Californians banning Christian books,

00:00:23.360 a frequently incoherent rap artist named Kanye Omari West would be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.

00:00:30.840 Who knew? Then, on this day in history, the demise of James Edgar Comey, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I mean,

00:00:36.740 J. Edgar Hoover, ends five decades of anti-constitutional overreach at the FBI.

00:00:42.960 I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:45.060 I should clarify, by the way, because sexless Boy Scouts is a general and confusing term.

00:00:58.980 I, too, was a sexless Boy Scout, but I'm talking about sexless, meaning having neither gender or no specific gender,

00:01:06.980 not the way in which I was a sexless Boy Scout. Sad.

00:01:10.300 Also, are we ever going to do a show again that isn't just about Kanye West?

00:01:15.060 This seems like, this is going to be the new show. Kanye is the new covfefe.

00:01:20.680 Kanyefe, I don't know. We have a lot to talk about today, and I, it's, the thing that Kanye said

00:01:26.940 has caused universal condemnation. Everyone is screaming and wailing and gnashing their teeth.

00:01:33.460 What he said is completely right. We'll get to that in a second. Before we get to that,

00:01:37.280 we have to talk about toys. We have to talk about toys. So, we get to talk about this toy.

00:01:42.740 This toy is so cool, man. I, it makes me upset that I am an adult. Many things make me upset that

00:01:48.560 I'm an adult, like accountability and having to pay bills and taxes and all that, but this,

00:01:53.340 more than any of them, Little Bits. Little Bits is the coolest toy ever. That's it. It's the

00:01:58.560 coolest toy ever. If you have a kid or a niece or whatever, or even if you're 30, get it. It's the

00:02:03.840 coolest toy ever. Little Bits is an award-winning platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks

00:02:08.600 for creating inventions large and small. You know, we all had those building blocks when

00:02:13.440 we were kids and various versions of them. This is just the insanely way cooler version

00:02:18.580 of all of that. You can get the complete droid kit. That's what they sent to me when we onboarded

00:02:24.780 them. This thing, I was walking through the office because I thought, oh, that's good.

00:02:28.300 I'll send it to my nephew. I'll send it to my, you know, my nephew will really like this.

00:02:32.180 And hordes of 30-year-old Daily Wire employees are trying to take my toy from me. They're trying

00:02:38.120 to take a toy from my little nephew. It's really, really cool. He loves it. He was so excited when

00:02:43.820 I called and told him I was sending this to him. You can work it on a mobile device. So there's six

00:02:48.520 bits, 20 droid parts, three sticker sheets. There's a free app. You can go to drive mode, force mode,

00:02:53.820 self-navigation, all these authentic sounds from the Star Wars movies, 22 missions in the app,

00:02:58.480 customizable droids. You can give them personality and kids learn to code. So you can code while you're

00:03:03.640 doing it. It requires a smart device. It's very cool to control from your app. That is why my

00:03:09.260 nephew loves Little Bits and loves this droid kit. Get yours right now. Get $10 off a droid inventor

00:03:15.600 kit. Go get it. Seriously. You always need a gift for some kid for Christmas or whatever. This is the

00:03:20.300 one. Get it now and you'll save 10 bucks. Littlebits.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Get the Toy Association's

00:03:26.540 2018 Toy of the Year for your kids and Inspire Invention. Littlebits.com slash Knowles,

00:03:32.860 K-N-O-W-L-E-S for $10 off a droid inventor kit. It's really, really cool.

00:03:38.400 You know what else is really cool? Kanye West keeps saying true things. He keeps saying, this guy,

00:03:44.380 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

00:03:48.820 time. I think he has a couple songs that are pretty good. I think he was hugely important for hip hop.

00:03:53.380 I think he made hip hop much, much better because he actually does have a brilliant musical ear,

00:03:59.580 a great ear for how music should go, even if I don't like his own music. And even if he's great

00:04:05.740 for hip hop, even if he's the best thing that ever happened to hip hop, which he probably is,

00:04:09.400 I don't like hip hop. Nevertheless, I really like what he's saying. He just came out and he said,

00:04:14.080 before we even get to the slavery, that's the most controversial quote. He's been saying these great

00:04:18.840 things over the last few days. He's been talking about Candace Owens. I actually tweeted out,

00:04:23.560 someone said, you shouldn't like Candace Owens. She's only repeating Thomas Sowell quotes,

00:04:28.160 the wonderful, great economist Thomas Sowell. And I said, well, even if that's all Candace is doing,

00:04:33.480 and I don't agree with that, but even if that's all she's doing, Kanye West isn't going to tweet

00:04:37.400 Thomas Sowell quotes. And that tweet did not age well because like two days later, Kanye West actually

00:04:44.040 tweeted quotes from the famed 80 something year old economist, unbelievable political thinker,

00:04:49.980 Thomas Sowell. So this is all great. The new one he sent out is, Kanye said that Barack Obama is like

00:04:56.640 opioids for black people. Obama is opioids for black people. And this is a brilliant analogy. He said,

00:05:05.220 Obama made us feel good, but it didn't fix any of the underlying problems. Basically,

00:05:09.860 it didn't actually fix the symptoms. It made us feel really good, but it didn't do anything.

00:05:15.420 A perfect analogy. It's very timely because the opioid crisis is happening. It's headline

00:05:21.220 grabbing because it's so sensational and it's correct. The reasoning here is excellent.

00:05:27.340 All of the problems that Barack Obama could have healed, there are racial problems. He could have

00:05:31.600 healed the racial divide in America once and for all. He chose not to do that. He chose to stoke the

00:05:36.860 flames of racial divide and to say that kids who had been beating up Hispanic neighborhood watch

00:05:45.200 people were like his children. They looked like his children. They didn't look like Barack Obama.

00:05:50.420 The premise of that is that all black people look alike. All black people don't look alike.

00:05:53.880 They're individuals. Kanye West, I'm beginning to think this guy is smarter than people give him

00:06:00.400 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

00:06:04.800 playing 4D chess or something, but he clearly has an eye and an ear for something that is

00:06:09.800 stronger than people give him credit for. He also tweeted out another analogy. He said,

00:06:15.920 when the media masses and scholars talk about what started today, here's a title,

00:06:21.660 the Overground Hell Road. People are using this to say, well, Kanye West doesn't know what he's

00:06:28.700 talking about. He's saying these kind of incomprehensible things. He does this. He does say

00:06:34.000 strange things. And just like any artist, he says strange things, but especially Kanye West,

00:06:39.900 except it's a great analogy. The Overground Hell Road. First of all, what is he saying

00:06:43.900 started today? Is he talking about where we are in America? Is he talking about all of the

00:06:51.540 attacks that he's getting? What is he talking about? And you have the Underground Railroad. That's

00:06:56.500 what he's alluding to. Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad, the system of getting slaves out of slavery and up

00:07:03.080 to the free north. But this is overground. What is the Overground Hell Road? I think it's really

00:07:08.300 important because it plays on a line. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

00:07:13.020 There are all of these good intentions that you hear, especially from the left. They say, oh, you know,

00:07:18.740 we want to give black people this extra bit of money or this extra advantage in hiring or this extra

00:07:25.200 advantage in admissions or this welfare program or this government program or this subsidy or this or this

00:07:30.420 or this. And that safety net becomes a spiderweb and it keeps people entangled in it. The road to hell

00:07:35.920 is paved with good intentions, but it's a road to hell anyway. And it's overground. It's out in the

00:07:41.440 open. It's government policy. It's in the mainstream media. And what Kanye West is saying, the thread that

00:07:47.360 has gone through all of his tweets and all of his interviews is, I just want to be free. I just want

00:07:52.860 to be free. I want to have free thought. I want to have free speech. And all of these people,

00:07:59.000 John Legend was texting him and saying, think of your fans. Think of your legacy. Don't say this.

00:08:04.500 Don't think this. And he said, look, John, I love you. I appreciate what you're trying to do.

00:08:09.640 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

00:08:14.540 say this. And I'm not going to do it because I want to be free. That's a beautiful sentiment.

00:08:18.620 That is a beautiful sentiment. And the analogy to the Underground Railroad is apt. And the pitfalls of good

00:08:23.920 intentions, the allusions to hell and the sort of hellish civic culture that we have now, that is

00:08:29.620 apt. Those are excellent analogies. So he goes on to talk about slavery. Well, let's just play the

00:08:36.320 clip. You can hear Kanye say it himself. You hear about slavery for 400 years? For 400 years? That

00:08:41.980 sounds like a choice. Like you was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all? This is the big one.

00:08:49.460 This is the one people are saying, how dare you? Everyone is saying this. Conservatives are saying

00:08:54.740 this. Lefties are saying this. This was the top trend on Twitter because the headline was Kanye West

00:09:00.760 says that slavery was a choice. Except he didn't say that. Kanye West is saying that black slaves in

00:09:08.240 America chose to be slaves and they chose to put themselves in bondage and come over on the middle

00:09:12.880 passage and end up in the Americas. Except he didn't say that. And Kanye West, except he didn't say

00:09:18.140 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

00:09:25.480 reaction from just about everybody on Twitter and in reality.

00:09:38.240 That's, I think that's a live stream because it's still happening. I feel like, how could you? By the way,

00:09:44.120 Kanye West clarified what he said. Kanye West said verbatim, when you hear about slavery for 400 years,

00:09:51.280 for 400 years, that sounds like a choice. Like you were there for 400 years and it's all of you all?

00:09:57.960 Like we're mentally in prison. Slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. So prison, mental prison,

00:10:06.000 is something that unites us as one race. Blacks and whites being one race, we're the human race.

00:10:11.520 Beautiful. Absolutely correct. Absolutely spot on. Will.i.am, who I guess is some entertainer or

00:10:19.580 something that I know nothing about. He said he was deeply hurt. He was so offended. He was so

00:10:23.640 deeply hurt. Alleged comedian, Ty Barnett, another person I've never heard of, said Kanye West needs to

00:10:29.780 shut the F up. He used more colorful language. He literally said, you have to shut up. That's,

00:10:36.720 that's by the way, how you know that Kanye is in the right, is that everyone's telling him to shut up.

00:10:41.500 Everybody's telling him to shut up. That's how you know he's in the right. Because when you're in the

00:10:45.460 right, you don't need to shut other people up. You can let them make a fool for themselves. You say,

00:10:50.400 you know, when, when, when you're in, in the right and someone else is saying crazy things and is in

00:10:55.200 the wrong, the best strategy you have, the best tactic at your disposal is to just let them keep

00:10:59.900 talking, right? But if you're in the wrong, or if you're trying to push a wrong agenda or an

00:11:05.340 oppressive agenda, or you have your own nefarious plots and someone is speaking the truth, what you

00:11:11.000 have to do is tell them to shut up. You got to keep them quiet. I will explain why historically

00:11:16.100 and mathematically Kanye West is obviously correct. How everyone with even a passing knowledge of

00:11:21.620 history or math knows that Kanye West is 100% correct about slavery. Before we get to that,

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00:13:57.340 Back to how absolutely accurate Kanye West is here. He said, again, I'd like to get this quote

00:14:04.300 right. When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years, that sounds like a choice,

00:14:09.200 like slavery goes to direct, uh, uh, like you were there for 400 years and it's all of you all

00:14:14.240 like we're mentally in prison. 400 years, he said. That's the number, 400 years. So when did slavery,

00:14:22.340 when did African slavery get introduced to the Americas? The Dutch introduced African slavery

00:14:27.560 to the Americas in 1619. That was the first time. Now, uh, slavery had existed in the Americas long

00:14:34.640 before that, since the dawn of time, uh, a lot of so-called indigenous peoples or native Americans

00:14:40.960 or whatever the euphemism du jour is, the people who were here before the Europeans, they all enslaved

00:14:46.100 one another. There was rampant slavery as there was throughout the entire world, especially outside

00:14:50.820 of the West, but even at various times in the West in antiquity. Uh, now this was 1619 when the Dutch

00:14:57.100 introduced African slavery to the Americas. Uh, one of the first legally recognized slave owners in

00:15:02.700 America came just a few decades later in 1655. Ironically, it was a black man, a black man named

00:15:08.660 Anthony Johnson. He was a black Angolan and the, in the caser suit, the, uh, Virginia recognized his

00:15:15.280 right to own a slave. Now, 1619 was when the Dutch brought African slaves to America. Slavery was

00:15:22.520 abolished in 1865, 246 years later. So that was the 13th amendment, the end of the civil war,

00:15:28.340 246 years later, slavery was abolished. Now that, that is the largest count. If you include,

00:15:35.000 go all the way back to the Dutch, not the English, not the American founding in the late 18th century,

00:15:40.460 just the very first time by the largest count, black people were in, some black people were

00:15:46.200 enslaved in America for 246 years. We know that slavery existed everywhere throughout history. And

00:15:52.800 we know that only in the West was slavery abolished and it was abolished pretty quickly because of

00:15:57.980 Christianity, 246 years, the entire history of the world, thousands and thousands of years,

00:16:04.880 it existed in the modern West for 246 years and we abolished it. Now for 400 years of slavery to be

00:16:11.460 true, as all these mawing, mooing, crewing, uh, people who were apparently lightly educated on Twitter

00:16:19.140 and elsewhere and in the media are saying for 400 years of slavery to be true, slavery would have

00:16:23.980 had to continue 153 years after it did after 1865, which would take us to 2019, which is one year

00:16:31.880 in the future. So not only would slavery have to have persisted in the United States as a matter of

00:16:37.120 law from 1865 to the present, that not only would there have to be rampant legal slavery in America

00:16:42.780 today, it would have to continue until, uh, next year. And we would count that we would have to be

00:16:48.240 living in the future for that to be true. So if you think that you have been enslaved for 400 years

00:16:54.020 in America, that is a choice. That's an absurdity. That's not true. It is a mental prison. That's a

00:17:01.160 mental prison that you live in. Kanye explained all of this. He said, quote, the reason why I brought

00:17:07.100 up the 400 years point is because we can't be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need

00:17:13.340 free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought. It was just an idea. And what did

00:17:19.020 you get for that free thought, Kanye? You got piled on by a bunch of people who can't even do basic

00:17:23.380 math. They can't even do basic math. That if black people were enslaved legally in America for 400

00:17:27.980 years, we would be living in the future and the civil war would never have happened. Oh, 150 years ago.

00:17:34.140 This, he makes this great point. He said, the reason I brought this up, one is to exercise my free

00:17:39.520 thought and to show you all what happens when you dare to exercise free thought. To quote Clarence

00:17:45.000 Thomas, when someone deigns to think for himself and not kowtow to an old racist order. He said that

00:17:55.380 in his famous high-tech lynching defense. But also, we can't be enslaved for another 400 years. What he's

00:18:03.160 saying is, this is a mental prison. This is a choice and it will persist. If you don't think for

00:18:08.180 yourself, if you don't take off the shackles off of your mind, this will go on forever. There will

00:18:13.700 be no end to that slavery. Only you can undo that slavery. There's a really good slave narrative.

00:18:20.300 Kanye West got me thinking about slave narratives. And there's a really wonderful one called

00:18:24.620 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself, by Harriet Jacobs. It's the best slave

00:18:31.500 narrative I've ever read. And it's really eloquently written. She writes, Harriet Jacob writes,

00:18:37.460 quote, I would 10,000 times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of

00:18:43.860 Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America. The felon's home in a penitentiary

00:18:49.900 is preferable. He may repent and turn away from the error of his ways and so find peace. But it is

00:18:56.040 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

00:19:40.460 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

00:20:32.020 rather be a poor guy with nothing and free than a very wealthy slave. We all would do that.

00:20:40.180 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.

00:20:51.320 It's a point that Andrew Klavan talks about a lot, which is that our primary motivations are not

00:20:56.160 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

00:21:23.400 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,

00:21:48.740 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.

00:25:24.440 Yeah, that sums it up.

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.

00:34:52.840 None of that matters.

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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Ep. 149 - Kanye West Voice Of Reason

Summary

Transcript