The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 353 - Are We Getting Stupider？

00:00:00.000 Movie starting, kiddo. Streaming service, $20. But mom, popcorn. Grocery bill, $120. Sorry,

00:00:08.100 your account has insufficient funds. Farber Debt Solutions, licensed insolvency trustees,

00:00:13.700 get the truth about debt. IQ scores are plummeting in the U.S. and throughout the West.

00:00:18.640 Meanwhile, at certain wealthy high schools, upwards of one in three students says a learning

00:00:23.880 disability means he needs to take extra time on the SAT. Congressional Democrats try to make

00:00:29.200 former pediatric neurosurgeon and current HUD secretary Ben Carson look like an idiot. 0.99

00:00:34.100 CNN's Alison Camerota accidentally makes Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris look like 1.00

00:00:39.340 an idiot. And hippies can now legally compost their dead in the state of Washington. We will ask the 1.00

00:00:46.020 question on everyone's mind, is everyone getting stupider? I'm Michael Knowles and this is The 0.98

00:00:50.160 Michael Knowles Show. The answer is yes, by the way. Everyone is getting stupider. That's it. That's

00:01:02.800 our show. Good night. See you tomorrow. We have a crisis of intelligence happening, not just in the

00:01:08.660 United States, but around the West. We will examine why that is happening and how we can try to fix it

00:01:14.920 before it's too late. But first, support for The Michael Knowles Show comes from our friends

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00:02:33.560 People are getting stupider in the U.S. and around the other developed nations. How do we know this? 0.99

00:02:40.740 Well, one, because we have eyes, so we open them and we can see it happening around us. We can measure

00:02:45.540 it to a certain degree as well. So for much of the 20th century, IQ, intelligence quotient,

00:02:52.480 scores were increasing. They were increasing throughout most of the world. And this bewildered

00:02:58.140 a lot of researchers because IQ, you would expect, would be static. IQ is just supposed to be inherited.

00:03:04.480 It's not, IQ doesn't measure the facts that you've learned throughout your life. IQ measures how smart you

00:03:10.020 are. So we were told that by the age of 10, people's IQ is set, it's static, you inherit it from your

00:03:14.940 parents. It actually turns out that environmental factors can play a role in your IQ. So over time,

00:03:22.440 the IQ of whole populations can increase. It's more than just hereditary. This rise is called the Flynn

00:03:29.560 effect. This was named after James Flynn, who was the first guy to bring this phenomenon to the

00:03:35.340 intention of a lot of psychologists. So this was going on for much of the 20th century. Everybody was getting

00:03:40.340 smarter. Now, fast forward to the 21st century, you're seeing the exact reverse phenomenon. People are getting

00:03:46.840 stupider. IQ scores are decreasing. And you don't need to take my word for it. Flynn himself admits this. 1.00

00:03:54.640 James Flynn admits the IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered. So in, it's, by the way, it's not just

00:04:02.780 reversing everywhere uniformly. It's reversing specifically in the most economically advanced

00:04:08.180 nations, the United States being at the top of that heap. So why is IQ declining? There have been

00:04:14.520 a few theories proposed, some of them more eugenicist and racist than others. One theory that is being

00:04:22.020 proposed is that people are getting stupider on average because stupid people are having more kids. 1.00

00:04:29.180 So this is, this was the plot actually to the 2006 Mike Judge comedy film, Idiocracy. The idea is that 1.00

00:04:36.720 smart people delay having children. They have fewer children and stupid people all have a bunch of kids 1.00

00:04:41.200 by the time they're 18. That's one theory. Another theory, and this one's even more eugenicist, is that 1.00

00:04:48.120 because of massive immigration over the last 30 years, you've got a bunch of people from the

00:04:55.240 undeveloped world coming into developed countries and therefore the average IQ is being reduced. So

00:05:02.120 the theory here is that you flood your country with stupid people and on average, your nation gets 1.00

00:05:06.820 stupider. Again, a little bit on the more racially provocative side. Turns out neither of those 1.00

00:05:12.500 theories are true. So a 2018 study came out of Norway that shot them down. It showed that IQ is not just

00:05:20.800 dropping across all of society uniformly. It's, or on average, it's dropping specifically within

00:05:28.520 individual families. So within, over the course of generations within the same family, IQ is dropping.

00:05:36.200 That takes out the possibility that it's just stupid people having more kids and it takes out the 0.99

00:05:40.500 possibility that you can blame immigrants from poor countries for the average intelligence going down. 0.99

00:05:46.200 So why is it really happening? One theory, the theory that seems to me pretty likely is the

00:05:53.900 internet. So now, because we have the sum total of human knowledge allegedly in our pockets, we don't

00:06:00.920 need to memorize anything. We don't need to really study anything. I remember, I was taught this in

00:06:06.180 school. I was taught, you don't really need to learn these facts and these historical dates and these

00:06:11.540 people who did certain things. You don't need to memorize that because you can just look it up when you

00:06:15.900 need it. You don't really need to figure out how to do advanced calculus or, or even basic arithmetic

00:06:23.880 because we have computers. You can just look it up. You don't need to memorize those things. And so the

00:06:30.100 end goal of this would be to say, just learn broad narratives. Just learn the kind of ideological

00:06:36.860 narratives that we tell you. And the thing is, you can't learn broad trends really, unless you have the

00:06:43.380 data that go into those trends. Otherwise you're just taking somebody's word for it. So for instance,

00:06:49.640 if I said, in the United States, race relations have improved over the last 150 years, 200 years,

00:06:58.320 you might say, oh, I don't believe you, Michael. I'd say, no, I can, I can prove it because in 1860,

00:07:04.760 we had slavery. In 1865, we had the abolition of slavery. Then we had Jim Crow, but then we got rid 0.66

00:07:12.960 of Jim Crow. And then we had, uh, segregation laws and we kept, uh, black people out of certain

00:07:19.220 neighborhoods. Then we got rid of those laws. Then we elected a black president in 2008. See,

00:07:23.760 I've got all these data points and I can see the trend. The races are coming together in the United

00:07:27.860 States. They'd say, okay. Now plenty of students could be told as they are in public schools all

00:07:34.180 around the country, that race relations haven't really improved. It's all a lie. Things are just 1.00

00:07:38.540 as bad today as they were a hundred years ago. And if you don't have all of those facts, you might have

00:07:43.220 the broad trend, but you wouldn't know if that's true. You'd be ignorant and you wouldn't even know 0.96

00:07:47.880 to look it up. You wouldn't even know to Google it because you, you don't know what you don't know. 1.00

00:07:53.520 Uh, Donald Rumsfeld, when he was secretary of defense 10 years ago, he said, there are known

00:07:58.740 knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. So there are things that you know, that you know,

00:08:03.960 that you know, then there are things that you know, that you don't know. For instance,

00:08:08.920 I don't know much about the reign of Charlemagne. I know that Charlemagne existed. I know he was an

00:08:16.260 historical figure. I just don't actually know the specifics. And then there are certain things

00:08:20.320 that you don't know that you don't know. Increasingly, that category is expanding.

00:08:26.760 And so I think that's a big part in why we're all getting stupider. There are other theories as well. 0.97

00:08:31.440 A bunch of left-wingers are blaming it on global warming. They're saying that because of global

00:08:35.580 warming, somehow food is getting less nutritious and it's killing our brains. And you know, the smog

00:08:42.260 and the sun monster. And of course, there's no evidence for any of this. Really, we, we don't know

00:08:46.940 for certain. We have a couple hunches and, but the effect does seem to be real. I really like this

00:08:53.660 story for a couple of reasons. One, because it does cut against the premise of progressivism.

00:09:00.820 What conservatives like to point out is that history doesn't go in a straight line. Sometimes

00:09:07.500 things get better. Sometimes things get worse. Sometimes things get better in one place, but worse

00:09:12.020 in another place. History is kind of like a big zigzag and the individual actions of men and

00:09:17.960 communities and nations really matter. And what the progressives want to say is old time bad,

00:09:24.860 modern time good. Old people, stupid, modern people, smart. That's what they like to tell us. So 1.00

00:09:31.960 this is why we scoff at our own history. We, why we want to rename the Thomas Jefferson dinners

00:09:37.540 because we say, Oh, that he's a bad old guy. He owns slaves. He's bad. We were good because we're

00:09:44.060 modern. We live in the, in the modern age, which is much better. So this obviously cuts against that

00:09:49.380 premise. We are not smarter than our forebears. At least our forebears 20 years ago, they had a higher

00:09:55.500 average intelligence than we do. The other reason I like this story is I don't put a whole lot of stock

00:09:59.840 in IQ. I do put stock into certain standardized tests like the SAT. The SAT is a standardized test

00:10:08.120 that tests something really specific, which is whether students are ready for college.

00:10:13.740 You get a score and that score reflects a student's readiness to go to college.

00:10:19.320 The graduate school tests, test that the LSAT tests your readiness for law school.

00:10:23.680 The GRE or readiness for graduate school. The IQ test isn't like that. The IQ test purports to test

00:10:31.300 the generalized, total, complete intelligence of somebody, which I don't really think you can do.

00:10:38.920 And I, I've, I know people with very high IQs. I know people with very low IQs and I don't see a

00:10:44.280 huge correlation between success. Some of the most successful people I know have significantly lower

00:10:49.500 IQs according to tests than, than people who have higher test scores and haven't done as well in

00:10:54.880 life. Now we are still getting stupider. And this is true, not just on these generalized tests. It's 0.99

00:11:01.300 true even on the specific tests like the SAT, speaking of which now at wealthy schools, huge numbers of

00:11:09.180 students are pretending to be learning disabled in order to get extra time on the SAT. We talked about 0.68

00:11:17.280 the SAT just the other day because the SAT is now adding an adversity score. So they're

00:11:22.340 unstandardizing the standardized test. They're now pretending not just to measure a student's verbal

00:11:28.280 skills or math skills, but also to measure the suffering that student has undergone. So the SAT

00:11:33.440 is in trouble to begin with. Now we find out students at wealthy schools are all pretending to have

00:11:38.500 learning disabilities to cheat, to get extra time on the test. At Scarsdale High School in New York,

00:11:43.680 which is right near where I grew up, one in five students at that school has a learning disability,

00:11:49.600 20%, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. I know a lot of kids from Scarsdale High

00:11:54.900 School. I had a college roommate from Scarsdale High School. 20% of those kids do not have learning

00:11:59.260 disabilities. At Weston High School in Connecticut, that number is one in four have a learning disability.

00:12:05.740 At Newton North High School outside of Boston, a very wealthy high school, one in three.

00:12:11.820 Does anybody really believe that 33% of students at these wealthy schools have learning disabilities?

00:12:21.700 No. It would explain the IQ question. It would explain why these numbers are getting jumbled,

00:12:26.720 but no, it's because they're cheating. But the very fact that they're cheating on these tests

00:12:31.340 reflects a cultural problem that does help to explain why we're getting stupider. We'll get to it in a 0.93

00:12:36.180 second and we'll get to stupid politicians. But first, what's one thing that is really stupid 1.00

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00:14:01.420 lender. So do we really think that a third of students at really rich high schools have learning

00:14:07.060 disabilities? No. These are obviously fake diagnoses that are caused by a few factors. One,

00:14:13.960 caused by a culture that values victimhood over accomplishment. The SAT used to be very simple.

00:14:20.980 You go into a room. There's a teacher. They time it. You have to finish the test in the amount of

00:14:25.240 time. You were always right up against the wall. It is a tough time limit. And you finish the test

00:14:30.860 and you're done. Very simple. Very standardized. Now, you have a culture that doesn't value that

00:14:37.700 real accomplishment nearly as much as it values victimhood. Ironically, victimhood has become a

00:14:43.840 privilege. If you can pass yourself off as a victim, as some aggrieved group, as someone with a

00:14:49.020 learning disability, even if you don't have one, then you get the privilege of extra time on the

00:14:54.140 test and you get to cheat and you get an unfair advantage over all of your classmates. So it's a

00:15:00.180 bad thing in our society that students would do this, that students would be willing to cheat

00:15:05.660 on these exams. But it's even worse that their parents are letting them do it. Their parents are

00:15:11.200 encouraging them. Kids are always going to cheat on tests. That's been true forever and it's always

00:15:16.540 going to be true. Parents and teachers are supposed to come in and say, no, you can't do that,

00:15:21.220 Johnny. You need to take the test. You need to study. You need to be able to take it in the right

00:15:25.440 amount of time. You don't have dyslexia, Johnny. You just don't want to study. And the parents aren't

00:15:31.020 doing that now. The parents are encouraging their kids to cheat. They're losing their scruples.

00:15:36.620 They're losing their moral foundation. And why? Because this is being caused by a culture

00:15:42.960 that values college degrees over education itself. Right? We talked yesterday about the

00:15:50.660 millennials. The millennials are doing awful on every measure. They're poor. They have a ton of

00:15:55.220 debt. They don't get married. They don't have kids. They don't have houses. The one area where

00:15:59.900 they're allegedly doing well is education because they all have a lot of fancy college degrees.

00:16:05.300 Except they don't know that much. When you actually test their intelligence, when you actually test

00:16:09.780 their knowledge, they score worse than other generations. We talk about all the time how 0.99

00:16:16.420 the left likes the appearance of the thing, but not the essence of the thing. They like the appearance,

00:16:22.680 but not the reality. So they want to eat vegan bacon. They want to drink decaf coffee. Very bad idea in

00:16:29.900 the long run. Because you can get a fancy degree, but if it doesn't actually reflect what you're learning,

00:16:37.480 that's going to hurt you and your society in the long term. According to MarketWatch,

00:16:41.980 nine out of 10 new jobs go to college graduates. Now, why is that? In part, it's because so many

00:16:49.180 more people are going to college. But does that really reflect a student's education? Does that

00:16:54.880 really reflect what a student knows? No. I mean, we've got a lot of studies of this. We know that

00:17:00.260 students are learning less than they have in the past. We know that in some cases, students are

00:17:04.340 graduating from college knowing less than they knew going into college. So as the educational value

00:17:11.180 of a college degree plummets, the social value of a college degree skyrockets. It's a credential

00:17:16.740 that allows you into a certain class. And that's being reflected in our whole society. We have become

00:17:24.920 a society that cheats on the test. It's not just these kids at a high school in Massachusetts or in

00:17:31.340 Scarsdale, New York. We as a society cheat on the test. We just get shuffled along from grade to grade

00:17:37.980 from year to year without actually doing the things that all of that shuffling used to signify.

00:17:45.880 When you graduated from high school, that used to mean something. Now it means much less.

00:17:52.120 And now actually we've gotten so stupid. We can't even recognize the difference between real 0.99

00:17:58.320 intelligence and bloviating. And this has never been clearer than in congressional testimony

00:18:04.940 yesterday. You had congressional Democrats interviewing Ben Carson, the current Secretary

00:18:14.240 of Housing and Urban Development, former presidential candidate, and former pediatric neurosurgeon,

00:18:19.380 one of the smartest guys in this entire country. Ben Carson was the first guy to separate

00:18:25.540 conjoined twins conjoined at the head. This guy is super duper sharp. And you've got these

00:18:32.860 congressional Democrats interviewing him. And the videos went all around the internet trying to

00:18:37.660 portray the Democrats as really smart and Ben Carson as an idiot. How did they do it? Because 1.00

00:18:42.320 the video was pretty effective. Here's how.

00:18:44.160 I'd also like you to get back to me if you don't mind to explain the disparity in REO rates. Do you know

00:18:50.920 what an REO is? An Oreo? R. No, not an Oreo. An R-E-O. R-E-O. Real estate? What's the O stand for?

00:19:01.840 E-organization? Owned. Real estate owned. That's what happens when a property goes to foreclosure.

00:19:07.200 We call it an R-E-O. Oh, good. You got him. You got him. First of all, I love Ben Carson's answer here.

00:19:15.480 They're trying to make fun of him for this answer, but he's obviously joking because she sets it up.

00:19:22.240 This is the classic example of a gotcha question. We're talking about housing and urban development.

00:19:27.620 She goes in and she finds this really specific jargony term and she doesn't ask him a question

00:19:33.460 about it. Notice the way she phrases it. She starts to say, I want to ask you about R-E-O's.

00:19:39.500 But then she doesn't ask him a question about R-E-O's. She just says, do you know what an R-E-O is?

00:19:44.160 Ben Carson. So thanks for coming here. Do you know what the capital of Thailand is? Go, go.

00:19:50.980 Haha, you don't. You're an idiot. Yeah. Yeah. Hello, Secretary Carson. Thank you so much for 1.00

00:19:56.700 being here. What number am I thinking of? Idiot. You can't even guess it, can you? She's asking him

00:20:01.800 to use, to define this jargon for her. The whole thing is set up to make him look ignorant and to 0.99

00:20:07.240 make him look stupid. And he is having none of it because Ben Carson is much, much more intelligent 1.00

00:20:13.420 than this woman, Katie Porter, Democrat Congresswoman. So she's there. He says,

00:20:19.380 do you know what an R-E-O is? Are you, you're asking me about R-E-O's during congressional

00:20:24.340 testimony? You want, no, not R-E-O's. R-E-O's. I don't know. It's some stupid jargon that has to

00:20:31.500 do with real estate. Well, yes, it does have to do with real estate. But do you, do you know what the 0.99

00:20:35.820 O is? She even presses him on that letter. No, why don't you tell me, tell me what the O is.

00:20:41.200 It's, it's owned. Haha. See, I've got you. How dumb you are. But who cares? Who cares what the term

00:20:49.100 is? What are you asking about? What, what is your question as it relates to housing and urban

00:20:54.580 development, as it relates to poor families in public housing, as it relates to the running of that

00:21:01.640 government agency. It's just a way for this woman to try to get on TV and to grandstand. 1.00

00:21:06.780 And it worked. But for the people who are going around trying to say that this is evidence that

00:21:11.780 she's really smart and Ben Carson is really stupid, you could do that to anybody about anything. 0.98

00:21:19.260 Just ask, even if it's in their own field, people are saying Ben Carson should have known 0.99

00:21:23.480 this acronym because he's the head of HUD. There are a zillion acronyms in the government.

00:21:28.920 There are a zillion jargony terms. I am certain that if I were interviewing Katie Porter and I

00:21:36.400 looked through enough house bills that have been passed just in this session, I could stump her on

00:21:42.780 some, some acronym. It doesn't tell you anything about the actual intelligence of the person. Her

00:21:50.720 colleague, Ayanna Pressley, tried to do the exact same thing to Carson. It was even more egregious when

00:21:56.020 she did it. Do you believe the substandard public housing conditions pose a risk to tenants' physical,

00:22:01.640 mental and emotional health? You already know the answer to that. Yes or no? You know the answer.

00:22:08.800 Yes or no? I know the answer. Do you know the answer? Yes or no? Reclaiming my time. You don't get

00:22:15.240 to do that. No. The time belongs to the gentle lady. Would you let your grandmother live in public 0.67

00:22:19.600 housing? You know very well. Would you let your grandmother live in public housing? Yes or no?

00:22:23.860 You know very well. Under your watch and at your helm, would you allow your grandmother to live in 0.98

00:22:27.560 public housing under these conditions? It would be very nice if you would stop.

00:22:33.780 I love Ben Carson so much because he is having none of it. She asks, look, Ben Carson has made very

00:22:42.300 clear that public housing is really awful and really dangerous and he wants to curtail it and stop it from

00:22:48.860 spreading. And why is this the case? Because he grew up in horrible conditions and he is so thankful.

00:22:56.500 He says that his mother, who had him when she was 13 or something, kept him out of public housing

00:23:02.980 because of how dangerous it was. So he says, you know the answer to that question. And she keeps pushing

00:23:09.480 and she's getting angry and Ben Carson remains super calm. And this, again, people make fun of him for

00:23:14.480 this. They say, why is Ben Carson so calm? He's sleepy. The reason is that Ben Carson wasn't always

00:23:20.500 calm. Ben Carson was a real tough guy. He was a maniac. When he was younger, he was getting into

00:23:26.380 fights, hitting people with baseball bats. He stabbed one of his friends when he was 14. This guy grew up

00:23:32.120 in horrific conditions. He writes about it. He says, this was in one of his memoirs. He says,

00:23:37.640 there was pretty horrendous violence, gangs, broken glass and boarded up windows and doors,

00:23:42.160 murders. I had two cousins who were killed. I remember as a nine-year-old sitting on the ghetto

00:23:47.800 stairs, looking to the building across the street out of which all the windows had been broken. And

00:23:53.300 there was a sunbeam shining through and it made me think about my future. And I remember thinking,

00:23:57.660 I probably won't make it to 25. That's what he grew up in. That guy knows something about public

00:24:05.740 housing. That guy knows something about poverty in America. That guy knows something about his job.

00:24:12.220 And he's highly intelligent. But these silly, frivolous congresswomen are trying to make him 0.99

00:24:21.040 look stupid. And people who are getting dumber by the day, overall in our society, can't tell the 1.00

00:24:28.400 difference. Ayanna Pressley is nobody. Her jobs before she became a congresswoman, 1.00

00:24:35.260 was she was a community organizer. So practically unemployed. And she was a model, 1.00

00:24:42.840 like model for photographs for Planned Parenthood. So that's what she did with her life. Ben Carson

00:24:49.440 fought his way out of the ghetto while his cousins were being killed and there were gangs all around

00:24:54.860 him. Fights his way out of the ghetto and goes on to, graduates from Yale. I think he went to Johns 0.89

00:25:00.380 Hopkins and then he becomes one of the leading neurosurgeons in the world. That guy, much more

00:25:08.460 intelligent. Also, by the way, even on the point of HUD, he's been a pretty good HUD secretary.

00:25:14.220 HUD probably shouldn't even exist as a department in the federal government. It was a product of the

00:25:19.620 great society. It was one of these LBJ poverty programs that has often hurt people that it intended 0.79

00:25:25.120 to help. And he's been pretty good there. First of all, the less he does at that department,

00:25:30.540 the better. And he has deregulated. He has cut various program budgets. He has empowered local

00:25:36.560 housing authorities, in particular, to impose more stringent work requirements on those who are

00:25:42.580 receiving government benefits. He's done a pretty good job there. If these people actually wanted to

00:25:48.300 ask him a question and learn something about what he's doing, do their oversight job in Congress,

00:25:55.040 they could have asked him a serious question about HUD. They didn't do that. They're just trying to

00:25:59.140 make him look stupid. And we are not even able to understand the difference between those things. 1.00

00:26:04.720 Now, there's another even better video of a politician accidentally looking stupid that was going 0.99

00:26:11.340 around CNN. We'll get to that in a second. Then we'll talk about how a presidential candidate for the 0.99

00:26:15.760 Democrats and the governor of Washington is allowing hippies to compost their dead. And I think come to 0.74

00:26:23.120 the final answer on why we're getting dimmer and dumber as a society. But first, you've got to go to

00:26:29.980 dailywire.com. Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew

00:26:34.820 Clavin show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Walsh show, you get to ask questions in the

00:26:38.980 mailbag, you get to ask questions backstage, you get another kingdom, and you get this.

00:26:48.040 Oh, that's good. That tastes like Oreos. That tastes, that's got that delicious Oreo taste as

00:26:53.280 the left screams and yells and cries. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:26:57.320 So you've got those videos of Ben Carson and you've got all of these people going around saying,

00:27:17.020 see, he shouldn't be in the government. See, he's stupid. See how much smarter the Democrats are. 1.00

00:27:20.900 There's another former presidential candidate who has explained why that is not a measure

00:27:27.320 of intelligence. And it's one of the all-time great presidential candidates,

00:27:31.440 Herman Cain, who put this very well in 2012. Are you ready for the gotcha questions? They're

00:27:36.340 coming from the media and others on foreign policy. Who's the president of Uzbekistan? You know,

00:27:40.660 all of this stuff. It's coming. And how are you dealing with that? I'm ready for the gotcha

00:27:45.800 questions. And they are already starting to come. And when they ask me, who's the president of you,

00:27:51.440 Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, I'm going to say, you know, I don't know. Do you know?

00:27:56.320 And then I'm going to say, how's that going to create one job?

00:28:00.480 I want to focus on the top priorities of this country. That's what leaders do.

00:28:04.820 Absolutely fabulous answer. By the way, Herman Cain, another very serious guy that everybody

00:28:09.360 tried to make fun of. Herman Cain was the CEO of a major pizza company,

00:28:13.180 and he was on the Federal Reserve Board, I think in Kansas City or something like that.

00:28:17.780 This is a very serious man. And he gives a good answer. Anybody can ask a gotcha question.

00:28:22.880 You can ask it of anybody, and you can always get your zing in, and you can always get a viral

00:28:26.820 video clip. That does not measure intelligence. There's another video, though, on the Democrat side

00:28:33.680 over at CNN, which it does, if it doesn't tell you something about this candidate's intelligence,

00:28:39.960 it does tell you something about her absolute failure to be able to run seriously as a presidential 1.00

00:28:46.640 candidate. CNN's Alison Camerata gave the opposite of a gotcha question to Kamala Harris. 1.00

00:28:53.600 If we're talking about REO and the chairman and president of who's Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, Stan,

00:28:58.840 if that's the gotcha question, this is the polar opposite of that. And yet, Kamala Harris couldn't 0.86

00:29:05.960 even answer a simple question about naming one song by her allegedly favorite musical artist.

00:29:14.080 We have a little fun kicker that we like to do with all of the presidential candidates that come

00:29:20.600 on today. It's called Candidate Mixtape. That was the musical sting for it. And we like to talk a lot

00:29:27.680 about music here on this program. So what is your favorite musical genre? Oh, I mean, I'm hip hop

00:29:38.020 and reggae and jazz. Those are some of my favorites. Okay. Do you have a favorite band or a favorite

00:29:46.120 musician? I'd say one of my favorites is Bob Marley. Good choice. You can't go wrong with that.

00:29:52.940 That's a crowd pleaser. On your mixtape, what would be like your favorite three songs?

00:29:59.940 Oh, okay. Let's see. Aretha Franklin, anything Aretha Franklin. I would say Bob Marley. And then,

00:30:12.920 um, I don't know. I love Cardi B. Okay. As she says. Um, those are great. Thank you for playing

00:30:24.480 along. Oh, gosh. First of all, Aretha Franklin is not a song. Bob Marley, also not a song. And

00:30:33.920 Cardi B, not a song. Those are people. They're people that Kamala Harris is obviously unfamiliar

00:30:39.720 with, and she's just saying she likes them to try to appeal to certain demographic groups.

00:30:44.720 This is so not a gotcha question that Kamala Harris launched her campaign. You'll remember this. Her 0.70

00:30:50.940 presidential campaign launched on a mood mix where she talked about all the songs she's listening to

00:30:56.640 and how they get her in the mood to run for president. And she named Aretha Franklin. She, 0.97

00:31:01.540 she said one of her favorite songs was Young, Gifted, and Black. And one thing throughout this whole

00:31:08.640 video throughout Kamala Harris's whole campaign is she's so clumsy about how she's trying to appeal 1.00

00:31:15.260 to identity politics. So she names that song Young, Gifted, and Black. And she said she always loved

00:31:19.740 listening to that song when she was young. And what she's obviously trying to tell you is that she was

00:31:23.640 young, gifted, and black. And so you're supposed to like that. She doesn't talk ever about her actual

00:31:29.380 career, which is as a prosecutor. She doesn't talk about that because that she thinks that will hurt

00:31:34.420 her in the Democrat primary. She talks ad nauseum about anything in her past that can be related

00:31:40.780 to race or sexual politics. So she's always talking about how she's of Jamaican descent. She's always

00:31:47.420 talking about how she loves traditionally ethnic musical genres. So she loves reggae. She loves this.

00:31:54.600 She loves that. But then when you push her just even one question in on what she likes about those

00:32:00.760 genres, she can't name a single song. When she gets that question, what are your favorite genres?

00:32:06.160 You can just see going through her mind, she goes, okay, what, which musical genres are going to most

00:32:10.860 appeal to racial and identity politics? Um, uh, uh, uh, uh, reggae. Okay. That's good. Hip hop. That's good.

00:32:19.300 Jazz. Uh, okay. Those are my answers. And you can see it on her face. You can hear it in her voice,

00:32:23.900 how awkward she feels saying those things. And then you can almost hear her say, please don't ask me

00:32:29.200 anything else. Alison Camerata asks, well, who are your favorite musicians? He goes, um, Bob Marley.

00:32:35.400 Yeah, I've, I've heard that name before. Bob Marley. He goes, okay, great. Name any Bob Marley song ever.

00:32:42.080 And she draws a blank. Say no woman, no cry. Say any, Bob Marley is a very popular musician,

00:32:50.100 but probably Kamala Harris doesn't listen to those musicians a lot. She says she likes hip hop. And then 0.75

00:32:57.760 she was asked, she said, well, when did you listen to hip hop? She said, oh, when I was in college,

00:33:01.220 I was always smoking joints and listening to Snoop Dogg and all the time. And then you Google that

00:33:07.300 for five seconds and you realize Snoop Dogg didn't release his debut song until years and years after

00:33:12.520 Kamala Harris graduated from college. It's just a lie. She's just probably, here's what Kamala Harris 0.63

00:33:18.060 listens to because she's a serious woman who is a powerhouse in politics and has had a serious career.

00:33:24.540 She probably doesn't listen to that much music. She's probably just a very busy lawyer who doesn't 1.00

00:33:29.920 sit around and listen to music. She's probably never smoked pot before. When she does listen to

00:33:35.480 music, she probably listens to Bach or Brahms or something because she's fairly educated and she

00:33:41.640 exists in very elite tiers of society where that's what people listen to. But she doesn't think she can

00:33:46.840 say that on TV. So she has to pretend that she's a member of the choom gang puffing away on blunts,

00:33:52.220 listening to Bob Marley or something. I am genuinely shocked at how bad that woman is 1.00

00:33:59.380 at running for president, but it's not the same as Ben Carson's video. Ben Carson was asked a gotcha

00:34:07.440 question. Kamala Harris was asked a total softball question that she had already talked about multiple 0.78

00:34:14.040 times. She couldn't do it. She couldn't fill it in. She, she wasn't being portrayed as stupid. She was

00:34:20.660 revealing herself at least as unprepared and bad at running for president. But I think that is not

00:34:27.720 the stupidest gaffe of any 2020 presidential candidate. That honor goes to Jay Inslee, the 0.99

00:34:33.540 governor of Washington. He's the presidential candidate whose logo looks like a CD-ROM from the

00:34:38.760 1990s. He gets the award because he just signed into law the nation's first bill that will allow

00:34:44.780 hippies to throw their dead in the backyard and let them rot. He signed the first bill to allow

00:34:51.020 people to compost their dead. It's called the recompose program. Get it? Like repose, but compost,

00:35:00.700 recompose. Recompose. This is in the hill. Recompose would be similar to a crematorium,

00:35:07.380 but it uses a longer and less carbon intensive means of organic reduction, commonly known as

00:35:14.040 composting. So what that means is it's similar to a crematorium in that it's something that happens

00:35:20.680 to dead bodies, but it's less carbon intensive, meaning they don't light the bodies on fire.

00:35:27.460 They just throw them in the backyard and let them rot. They go on. It says, the process uses wood chips,

00:35:33.420 straw, and other materials and takes about four weeks. It is similar to livestock composting,

00:35:38.680 which farmers use to turn animals into odorless soil.

00:35:46.020 Yikes. First of all, credit goes to Jay Inslee. We've talked a lot about how environmentalism is a

00:35:52.380 top issue in the 2020 Democrat primary. The Green New Deal has become the biggest issue. And if this

00:35:58.900 is turning into an environmentalist primary, Jay Inslee is really turning this up to 11.

00:36:04.820 Jay Inslee is throwing dead human bodies into the backyard and letting them compost like dead cows

00:36:11.020 for the environment or something. I mean, it's hard to beat that. So credit on him for turning the

00:36:17.200 wacko up to 11. This story in particular brings us right back to how we are all getting much stupider as 0.98

00:36:26.700 a civilization. This gets to one of the basic behaviors of civilized society. We bury our dead. 0.95

00:36:37.960 Why do we bury our dead? Before we start letting people throw granny into the backyard and let her 1.00

00:36:44.940 rot, why do we bury our dead? I think it's becoming popular in this culture to say we shouldn't bury our

00:36:52.040 dead. We can cremate them or we can throw them into the backyard or throw them out in the water or

00:36:56.500 something. Can you answer why we bury our dead? Because it's not just some social construct. It's

00:37:02.840 not just something we decided to do a few hundred years ago. Burial of the dead goes all the way back

00:37:10.080 to prehistory. The Neanderthals buried their dead. Non-human ancestral relatives buried their dead. This 0.74

00:37:18.640 has been around a long time. Why? On a cultural level, it's because we have a relationship with our

00:37:24.400 dead. More broadly, we have a relationship with our past. Leftist politicians want to erase the

00:37:30.280 relationship we have with our past. They want to tear down murals and monuments and statues and

00:37:35.380 rename buildings and rename towns. But we have a relationship to our past, not just our national

00:37:40.520 past, but our family past. We like to have a gravestone where we can go and visit the remains of our dead

00:37:46.860 relatives. We have that relationship. You go and you pray or you go and you remember. It brings you back

00:37:54.940 to a certain memory of your past. On a religious level, we bury our dead because, at least in

00:38:01.780 Christianity and in the Christian West, we expect the resurrection of the body. This is what Christians

00:38:08.380 say in the Nicene Creed. We look forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to

00:38:13.540 come. When Christ was crucified, he was put into a tomb, and then he was bodily resurrected. He

00:38:21.740 resurrected, not just in some spiritual sense, but physically as well. And so we bury our dead because

00:38:27.960 we look forward to not just life in heaven, but the resurrection of the body in the glorified body,

00:38:33.320 whatever that means. That's the religious reason. On an ethical and political level, why do we bury our

00:38:39.640 dead? Because we respect humanity. We respect human beings simply for being human beings.

00:38:46.920 We don't want animals gnawing at granny's body in the backyard. We don't want to feed old granny to 1.00

00:38:52.580 the coyotes. We respect human beings, even after death. This is why it's a crime to desecrate bodies,

00:39:01.340 to improperly handle dead bodies. We offer them a certain respect. Now, however, we are losing that

00:39:07.740 respect for humanity. We are literally killing our own children through abortion. We are killing

00:39:13.480 our elderly through assisted suicide, which they call euthanasia. But sometimes we're killing them 0.99

00:39:19.300 against their will. There was a big case in the Netherlands where a woman said, please don't kill

00:39:25.120 me. I don't want to drink the poison. And her family held her down and the doctor poured the poison

00:39:29.960 down her throat. We are killing our sick people who are ill, even if they're young, 0.99

00:39:37.360 through assisted suicide. We're killing those who have mental deficiencies through abortion. 1.00

00:39:42.640 We are losing respect for humanity as they are humans. One of the arguments for this law to 0.95

00:39:49.900 compost the dead was, well, we do it to cattle. Why shouldn't we do it to humans? In the old days,

00:39:56.300 we would have said, because humans matter more than cattle. Now, however, we don't say that. We say,

00:40:00.660 yeah, it's a good point. We're just animals. We're no different than a bug or a snail or a dog or a cow.

00:40:08.100 But those are the reasons that we bury our dead. We're obviously getting stupider. We can see it on 1.00

00:40:15.740 the tests. We can see it when Kamala Harris goes on CNN. We can see it in these stupid laws that are 0.99

00:40:21.900 being passed, like allowing us to have dogs eat granny. But as we get stupider, this is affecting 1.00

00:40:31.560 our politics. As we forget our past, it's getting worse. So we're getting stupider. It's that line 0.99

00:40:38.140 we keep talking about from Ernest Hemingway. He's describing bankruptcy. He says, how do you go

00:40:43.280 bankrupt gradually, then suddenly? How do you get stupider gradually, then suddenly? As you get stupider, 0.99

00:40:49.260 you get stupider. As you forget your past, you really start to forget your past. You discard even 1.00

00:40:55.980 more traditions more quickly. You sever that connection to your civilization even more greatly.

00:41:01.560 This is what the Make America Great Again slogan is all about. Make America Great Again. It's about a

00:41:07.160 real sense that we've lost something. It's a process that is speeding up and it does threaten our

00:41:14.520 civilization. I don't think we're all going to start walking around and become total nincompoops who

00:41:20.460 can't spell our own names. But we are socially becoming stupider as well. And before we go, just one 0.99

00:41:28.200 story that I guess offers a little bit of hope in this is it sums up this neglect of our past,

00:41:35.860 this forgetting of our past, and this hatred of our past. Steve Mnuchin over at Treasury just announced

00:41:41.140 that Harriet Tubman will not be going on the $20 bill. During the Obama administration,

00:41:47.000 they announced Harriet Tubman was going to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill.

00:41:52.980 And this was widely criticized, even among left-wingers. This was widely criticized because of the

00:42:00.220 popularity of the musical Hamilton. So young liberal people like Hamilton now. So they said, okay, we're not

00:42:06.120 going to replace Alexander Hamilton. We'll replace Andrew Jackson, that awful, terrible founder of the

00:42:11.980 Democrat Party. We're going to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman. And everyone said this was a

00:42:16.200 great idea. And Andrew Jackson, for most of our nation's history, has been considered a very, very

00:42:21.940 good president. And in recent years, he has been portrayed by the revisionist left as this genocidal

00:42:27.780 maniac. And he's been accused of crimes he didn't commit. And he has been smeared as saying things that he

00:42:35.260 never said. But the result of all of this rewriting of history has come out that people on both sides of

00:42:41.020 the aisle hate Andrew Jackson. And it's totally unfair. And I'm very glad that Harriet Tubman isn't

00:42:46.100 replacing him on the $20 bill. I like Harriet Tubman very much. I'm a huge fan of gun-toting Republicans. 0.99

00:42:52.360 But if they want to give her some denomination, they can give her a denomination. That's make a $3 bill 0.97

00:42:57.460 or something. But you shouldn't erase Andrew Jackson from history, which is what people are trying to do.

00:43:03.100 Andrew Jackson was pretty great. Andrew Jackson was a hero. He was literally a hero. He was the

00:43:08.880 hero of New Orleans in the War of 1812. So he's a military hero, saves the United States. He,

00:43:16.780 as president, threatened to invade South Carolina if South Carolina seceded. The first time South 0.99

00:43:23.040 Carolina wanted to secede from the Union was in 1828. He threatened to go in there, kept the Union

00:43:28.040 together. He settled a Most Favored Nation treaty with the British, which is pretty impressive,

00:43:32.640 since he's one of the toughest hombres fighting the British in the War of 1812. And then he comes in

00:43:39.860 and secures that Most Favored Nation treaty. He recognized the Republic of Texas. So he brings

00:43:44.760 the Texas closer to the United States. He did a lot of good things. He had a lot of accomplishments.

00:43:51.020 The question to ask when you want to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill is,

00:43:55.960 why did they put him on the $20 bill to begin with? What the revisionists will tell you is,

00:44:00.460 because America was a terrible, awful place in the past, and everyone was stupid, 1.00

00:44:04.480 and they really liked him because of how evil he was. That's not sufficient. You know that isn't true. 1.00

00:44:11.540 Andrew Jackson's vices, which are legitimate. I mean, he's an imperfect guy like everybody,

00:44:17.800 and great men tend to have great imperfections. His vices have been vastly exaggerated,

00:44:24.220 and his many, many virtues and accomplishments have been totally ignored by history. People aren't

00:44:29.420 learning it. We're severing our connection to the past, and we're getting dumber. The thing that he 0.99

00:44:33.180 gets dinged on all the time, and they say it's the reason we need to erase him from history,

00:44:37.420 is Indian removal, because he presided over the removal of some Indians from the southeast of the

00:44:45.040 United States. This whole period of Indian removal has been totally misrepresented. When you say

00:44:51.140 Andrew Jackson to a left-winger and a revisionist, the first thing they're going to say is the Trail

00:44:57.000 of Tears. Andrew Jackson, he caused the Trail of Tears on which the Indians were removed. He didn't.

00:45:05.120 He wasn't even president during the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears was enforced by his successor,

00:45:10.660 Martin Van Buren. As with everything in history, the true story is much more interesting and much more

00:45:17.980 complicated. The way that Indian removal happened was that the United States purchased tribal land

00:45:24.180 in exchange for land to the west that were outside of state borders. So you had this real political

00:45:31.200 problem, which is you had whole Indian nations inside relatively newly formed states in the

00:45:36.840 relatively newly formed United States. Did anybody really think that the United States was going to

00:45:42.020 develop and permit these relatively large nations, independent nations, to exist within their

00:45:47.760 boundaries? Of course not. That would not be able to happen. The United States could not develop that

00:45:52.840 way. If you were president, you would have removed the Indians too. You would have secured treaties to do 0.99

00:45:57.060 it, which is what he did. So the early treaties stipulated the tribes could either move west or surrender

00:46:03.060 their sovereignty and obey the state laws. So there was either or. One of the first tribes to move were the 0.85

00:46:10.960 Chickasaw. The Chickasaw moved with relatively little trouble. So they secure this treaty and the way

00:46:17.240 the Chickasaw moved is they got a sum of money and they were able to pay for much of their own

00:46:21.900 removal. So there was tragedy along the way, but relatively little, relatively little famine,

00:46:26.940 relatively little death. They quickly agreed. They agreed to favorable traditions. They did it. That was

00:46:34.120 an act of pretty brilliant diplomacy. Then the Choctaw were a little tougher because the chiefs 0.95

00:46:39.180 of that nation were bribed. They also came to a treaty, but at pretty unfavorable terms. They moved

00:46:45.580 during the winter of 1831, 1832. There was a lot more misery on that route. Then you get the Seminoles. 0.92

00:46:51.540 The Seminoles agreed to move. They signed a treaty, the Treaty of Paine's Landing, but then they refused

00:46:57.100 to move. Renegged on the treaty, this launched the Second Seminole War. This happened to other tribes 0.74

00:47:02.860 as well. In the case of the Cherokees, this is what people think that they remember in history.

00:47:10.180 That case made it to the Supreme Court and it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the line

00:47:16.460 that everybody remembers is after Chief Justice John Marshall made his decision, Andrew Jackson said,

00:47:23.340 John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it. This was seen as a tyrannical move

00:47:29.780 to steal power and upset the balance of powers in our government. The trouble with that line,

00:47:34.000 which everyone knows Andrew Jackson said, is he never said it. There is no evidence that he ever

00:47:38.420 said it. The line comes to us from Horace Greeley, who said that he heard it from another guy who said

00:47:44.340 that he heard it from Andrew Jackson. The way that we know Andrew Jackson almost certainly didn't say

00:47:48.680 that is there was nothing about the Supreme Court decision to enforce. So the sentence itself

00:47:56.460 doesn't make any sense. How did this play out? Eventually the Cherokees signed a treaty,

00:48:00.920 but then some rejected that treaty because they said that the chiefs who signed it were not

00:48:04.740 legitimate leaders of the tribe. And this led to the Trail of Tears in 1938, which I don't mean to

00:48:10.840 underplay it. The Trail of Tears was horrific. The particulars of lots of Indian removal was horrific.

00:48:17.740 However, again, that wasn't Andrew Jackson. Martin Van Buren was the president. Jackson didn't

00:48:25.380 preside over that. If you want to remove Martin Van Buren from the, oh yeah, he's not on any money.

00:48:29.800 Okay, fine, I guess. Van Buren was not a great president. But Andrew Jackson actually was a pretty

00:48:35.220 great figure in American history. And as the culture gets stupider, I think the key thing, 0.96

00:48:42.340 one of the key symptoms of it is we think we're getting smarter. We think we have fancy college 0.99

00:48:49.660 degrees. We think the millennials are the smartest, best educated generation ever.

00:48:55.380 This is a key among stupid people. Stupid people think they're smart. Smart people know that they're 1.00

00:49:01.460 not smart. Socrates famously said, all that I know is that I know nothing. That's a key. And so when

00:49:10.340 you, as this 2020 race goes on, as the political battle heats up, you're going to have a lot of

00:49:15.700 people trying to convince you of how smart they are. And the more they protest about it, I think the

00:49:20.100 clearer it is that those IQ scores are right. Those SAT scores are right. The culture, unfortunately,

00:49:25.380 getting dumber and dumber. That's our show. We got more to get to. We'll do it tomorrow. 1.00

00:49:29.160 Come on back. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.

00:49:55.380 Today on the Ben Shapiro Show. The left moves to embrace abortion as a moral good,

00:50:07.940 and they let the homeless run wild in major cities around the United States.

00:50:11.380 That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.

The Michael Knowles Show - May 22, 2019

Ep. 353 - Are We Getting Stupider？

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