Ep. 362 - “Queer” Is Not A Bad Word
Summary
The mainstream media and big tech are now equating the word queer with the N-word. We will explain why there is no comparison between the two terms. Then The New York Times publishes the most defamatory, fact-free piece in the Gray Lady s long and sordid history.
Transcript
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Is queer a bad word? The mainstream media and big tech are now equating the word queer
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with the n-word. We will explain why there is no comparison between the two terms.
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Then the New York Times publishes the most defamatory fact-free piece in the gray lady's
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long and sordid history. We will pick it apart point by point. A radical feminist admits abortion
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is murder. A 13-year-old pro-life activist gets booed for saying abortion is murder.
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And President Trump wins big with Mexico. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles
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Show. So much to get to today. We've got to talk about all those awful, terrible bigots
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that the New York Times wrote about. Those awful bigots like Dave Rubin or Phil DeFranco or Milton
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Friedman. We will also analyze the left's new campaign to censor conservatives. But first,
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I have got to start off the show today with a quick point that is probably going to get this
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episode kicked off of YouTube and maybe get me arrested and thrown in jail by the left-wing
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speech police, but that is the problem itself, so I will just say it. Queer is not a bad word.
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It's not. It's a perfectly fine word. It's a word that's been around for a very long time,
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and it's perfectly fine. The left right now is trying to equate the word queer with the N-word,
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and this is absolutely absurd, so it's absurd for a few reasons. The first and most obvious is that I
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can say the word queer. I can't say the N-word. When I'm referring to the N-word, I have to say
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the N-word, so right off the bat we see these are not exactly similar circumstances. Now, the
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mainstream media are trying to change that right now. I've noticed in the last few days news networks
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are bleeping the word queer because the left's campaign to get this word banned is working, but
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they are not similar at all. Another reason that the word queer is not like the N-word is that the
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word queer is a very old word. It has very broad meaning far beyond the narrow application to gay
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people. The word queer is 500 years old. It means strange or odd. The reason that it is used to
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describe gay people is because gay people have sexual practices that are strange or odd. Just by
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definition, they are not like most people's sexual practices, like 97 or 98 percent of the population.
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If people are doing something that only 2 or 3 percent of the population are doing, by definition,
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that's a little unusual, at least. That's where the word queer comes from. Now, in recent years,
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the word queer has been used to refer to gay people with both a positive connotation and a negative
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connotation. This is also like the word gay, by the way. Even when we say gay people, the word gay has
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only been used to refer to gay people for the last 50 years. And what does gay mean? Gay means happy.
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That's what it meant. Now the word almost exclusively is referring to people who are homosexual.
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Queer has a lot of usages for a very long time. The n-word does not. The n-word is only a slur for
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black people. We don't even really know the history of the n-word or the etymology of it.
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Some people erroneously think that it derives from the word negro. It doesn't. There's no evidence of
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that. Or they think it derives from the word niggardly. It does not. They're also not related.
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Now, presumably it does derive from words that, or it is at least related to words that are associated
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with blackness. So negro, noir, niger, Nigeria, there's country Nigeria. It at least probably has
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some relation to those words, but we don't really know where it derives from. We do know that the n-word,
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hard r, itself is only used for centuries as a negative slur for black people.
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The word queer has a zillion applications. It's a generic word. Another reason why queer is not
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like the n-word is that queer is used by gay people themselves to refer to themselves. If the word queer
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is a hateful slur, then the acronym LGBTQ is also a hateful slur. The Q stands for queer.
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It also now, in later years, it's also been used to refer to questioning. Like you don't know if you're
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gay or straight or whatever, but the Q still stands for queer. Now, one argument against this is they'll
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say, well, the left will observe black people have taken the n-word and reappropriated it for
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themselves. So in the same way, gay people are reappropriating the word queer. Again, this
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argument totally breaks down because it's not just gay people who are using the word queer for
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themselves or some derivation. Like you don't have the hard R. They'll just say queer or something in
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rap songs. No, that's not how it works. Everybody refers to gay people as queer. Politicians who are
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gay or straight or whatever all refer to the LGBTQ community. Corporations refer to the LGBTQ community.
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The government refers to the LGBTQ community. So it's not just that it's a term that only I can use,
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but you can't use it. And that's our word. No, it's used by everybody. Now, could you imagine a
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politician referring to the N-word community? Could you imagine a government office saying, listen,
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we just want to welcome all of the N-word community here. You'd have a riot. You'd have riots in the
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streets. How about in academia? The word queer is used regularly in scholarship. There's a famous book
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called Queering Elementary Education. Could you imagine a book called N-Wording Elementary Education?
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Probably would not be allowed on Amazon for very long, but you can get queering elementary education
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on Amazon. Academic journals regularly refer to queer times or queering. Could you imagine
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N-word times or N-Wording? There are whole academic departments at universities around this country
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called queer studies. Now, it's true. There are similarly disciplines called African-American
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studies or Africana studies or black studies. There are no departments called N-word studies.
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Something tells me there would be some lawsuits against that university if they had those departments.
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There's no comparison whatsoever. The left, however, is insisting that there is one. They're trying to
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get this word banned. They're trying to not get it banned from the left using it. The left is still
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allowed to use it on television or on YouTube or in the popular culture. It's just conservatives who are no
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longer allowed to use it, which is obviously absurd. Now we're saying that the only way that you can
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ascertain if someone is publicly allowed to use a word is if you can predict and read their minds and
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understand the motivations that they have and their thoughts about all of these various sexual
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questions. Then we can determine who's allowed to use the word queer and who's not. That's crazy.
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But let's just say, I'll take it even further. Let's say for a second that the word queer did
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primarily have a negative connotation. It doesn't. We just had pride parade yesterday. Queer word
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everywhere. LGBTQ. It's on every building. It's on every business. So it does not primarily have a
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negative connotation. But let's say that it did. What that means then is that what the leftist censors
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want is for us as a society to no longer be able to come to our own moral conclusions about certain
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sexual acts. What that means is that now you can't go on YouTube and say, I approve of certain sexual
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acts, but I disapprove of other sexual acts. I have a view of sexual morality that says you can do this
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and that, but you can't do this and that. What this means is that now on YouTube, if a priest or a
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rabbi or an imam went on and made a YouTube video in which they expressed their orthodox views about
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sexual morality, their views that have been held for at least 1400, if not 2000 or more years,
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that would be hate speech. That would be banned. They would be deplatformed. They would be kicked
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off of YouTube. And if the left gets their way, they would be banned from polite society
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for expressing the orthodox and traditional views of every major world religion.
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Anybody who holds orthodox views in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, any of these things,
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what the left wants to censor you from polite society. You can't say that. Well, some people
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say, okay, what if the, the, the priest and the rabbi and the imam, they can go on YouTube,
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they can discuss their certainly terrible views of sexual morality, but they have to do it in a
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respectful way. How can they do that? If someone's going to go on YouTube and say, I think you're going
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to go to hell if you keep doing this thing. Is that respect? That's not respectful. What if a rabbi
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goes on YouTube and he quotes Leviticus, major book of the Bible, which refers to homosexual acts as an
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abomination, regardless of your views of sex or gay sex or whatever, do you think that a rabbi
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should be banned from YouTube for reading the Bible? That is the conclusion of what they are trying to do.
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This is radical. What they're, what they're trying to do, it's, this is what they always do. They have this
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radical idea that now, if you quote a book from the Bible, or if you disagree with the very, very recent
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modern leftist orthodoxy about sexual morality, if you disagree with, with what has only become a mainstream
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view in the last 10 years or so, that you are radical, you're crazy, you're radicalized. That's what the left is
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saying. But that idea that they're saying is itself a totally radical idea. You're saying that even
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Barack Obama's view of sexuality while he was president, which said that marriage is between a
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man and a woman, even that view is radical, bigoted, hateful, should be deplatformed, shouldn't be allowed
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in polite society. That is the true radicalism. And what the left always does, because they project and
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they invert reality, is the left is saying, no, no, you who hold the views that everyone has held for
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the entire history of civilization, you are really the radical one. It's a complete lie. The New York
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Times shows this explicitly in the most dishonest, ridiculous, I mean, actually funny article that they
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have published in my lifetime. They published it over the weekend. It was the main story in the New York
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Times homepage. This obviously took a long time to put together. It's called The Making of a YouTube
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Radical. And they're using it in conjunction with Fox.com and in conjunction with YouTube and Google
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It is fabulous and you're going to love it. This New York Times article, the most dishonest
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tripe, I don't know that there was an honest word in the article. It's called The Making of a
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YouTube Radical by Kevin Roos, a fake journalist. I'm just going to pick it apart point by point. I
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can't even give you just the broad overview. Every paragraph is a lie. So it starts out on the,
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it was on mobile, it was on the website, lots of photos and it was all of these awful people,
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these radicals. Do you know who the radicals were? Ben Shapiro, probably the most mainstream
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conservative voice in the country. Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Dave Rubin, who is amiable to a fault.
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Dave Rubin's whole show is he has people who have different points of view on and then they discuss
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them. Dave Rubin radically presenting both sides and taking the center of an argument.
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Do you know who else? Phil DeFranco. I don't even think that guy's conservative.
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And then do you, this is my favorite one of all these pictures, because they mix them in with people
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who are maybe a little racist, maybe a little bigoted, maybe you've never heard of,
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really extreme. And then in the middle of it is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, probably the
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most famous economist of the 20th century. He's just a guy who supports free markets and free
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economics. And he's like a grandfatherly figure who won a Nobel prize in economics. This is Milton
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Friedman. This is radical, according to the New York Times. Look at this lead pencil. There's not a
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single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The
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wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of
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Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel,
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it took iron ore. This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed graphite.
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I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America.
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This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree
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isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the
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British government. This brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea where it came from, or the
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yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines, or the glue that holds it together. Literally
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thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. Okay, David Duke. All right, Richard Spencer,
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calm down with your description of how different peoples around the world can cooperate in free
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markets to produce goods at a relatively low price for consumers around the world. All right,
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calm down there. Mr. Adolf, gosh, that's a radical, according to the New York Times. That was my
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favorite one. All of them were ridiculous, but that was my favorite one. How does it begin?
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You see the makings of a YouTube radical. Story begins with all these pictures. You scroll through,
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and it says, Caleb Kane was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube.
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You scroll up. Soon he was pulled into a far right universe, watching thousands of videos filled
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with conspiracy theories, misogyny, and racism. Yeah, that's how I would describe Milton Friedman.
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Conspiracy theories, misogyny, and racism. Because he talked about the color of the pencil. I guess
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that's racist. Then the final, the final line, I was brainwashed. And here you see the point of the
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article. From the very beginning, what the New York Times is trying to tell you, what the whole left is
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trying to tell you, is that we don't really have any choice. We don't really have free will. We don't
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really have the ability to watch whatever we want on the internet. See, that's what the internet does.
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It lets you watch whatever you want. It's not like the old mainstream media that keeps people out.
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They're gatekeepers. No, on the internet, you can see whatever you want. Their thesis is, no, you can't.
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You really have no choice. You're just brainwashed. You're brainwashed by yourself.
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You have brainwashed yourself with YouTube helping you along. It's not about free will. It's all about
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the all-powerful algorithm. Capital A. This is essential to the leftist argument that YouTube
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has to censor conservatives. They say it's not about the viewers. It's not even about the content
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creators on YouTube. Carlos Maza from Vox.com was saying that. He said, look, of course I want
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Steven Crowder censored. But it's not really about Steven Crowder. It's about the algorithm.
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It's all of it. So they're trying to get YouTube to do this, the work of leftists to censor their
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opponents. So the author of this, this guy, Kevin Roos, what do we know about him? Well,
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we found out through a simple Twitter search, he's friends with Carlos Maza. At least he knows him.
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They've interacted before months and months ago. He had tweeted out something about how he'd been
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working for a long time, for months on an article. Carlos Maza thanked him in February for all the work
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that he's done. And then Kevin Roos liked the Carlos Maza tweet. These guys know each other.
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They're interacting with one another online. Then they open up this story. I mean, the timing is a
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little suspect too. Carlos Maza from Vox.com launches his crusade on conservatives to get them
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kicked off of YouTube on May 30th, two days before Pride Month. Then, not three, four days later,
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a little longer, I guess a week later, the New York Times publishes this major piece. This piece took
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a lot longer than a week to produce. Obviously, there was some communication going on here as
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YouTube is ramping it up. This is an all-on assault, not just at the beginning of Pride Month,
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but more importantly, at the beginning of the 2012-20 election cycle. So the New York Times piece
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begins. The common thread found in many of these stories of radicalization on YouTube and its
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recommendation algorithm, the software that determines which videos appear on users' homepages
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and inside the up-next sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for
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more than 70% of all time spent on the site. Because what does the algorithm do? It recommends
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similar videos. This makes perfect sense. If you're watching a video of Milton Friedman, maybe you want to
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watch another video of Milton Friedman. I'm sure, well, now they've probably changed it, but I'm sure if
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you're watching a video of this show, it'll probably recommend some other stuff that I've done. Why?
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Because you're obviously interested in what I'm doing, and so you want to see more of it. Or maybe
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similar things. I mean, that's just natural. And they're saying, this is terrible. So this is the
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setup. What YouTube is doing is they need to change the algorithm to suppress the right-wing material
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before 2020, before we get another Republican election. I mean, that's, I think, the long game of all of
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this. The piece goes on. They're talking about this kid, this kid, Caleb Kane, who says he was,
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he was radicalized, right-wing radical because of YouTube. And this took place over the series of
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three years, 2016, 2017, into 2018. And he just became more and more right-wing and, and he became
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a total radical. So what did he do? Well, this is what the New York Times says. If alienation was one
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ingredient in Mr. Kane's radicalization and persuasive partisans like Stefan Molyneux,
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a YouTube creator, were another. The third was a series of product decisions YouTube made
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starting back in 2012. In March of that year, YouTube's engineers made an update to the site's
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recommendations algorithm. For years, the algorithm had been programmed to maximize views by showing
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users videos they were likely to click on. So they're saying this is some nefarious thing.
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No, what is really happening is YouTube is giving people more of what they want to see.
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Should YouTube be giving people stuff that they don't want to see? Should it be like you go to a
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restaurant and you say, I really like clam chowder. And they say, oh, perfect. Here's a taco bowl.
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I'm sure you'll say, no, but I really like this clam chowder. Say, well, yeah, but you can't,
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you can't have any more of that. You have to have a, no, of course, businesses want to cater
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to what you want. I mean, they want the customer to be happy. The customer is always right.
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New York Times goes on. By the night of November 8th, 2016, this is my favorite paragraph in the
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whole thing. Mr. Cain's transformation was complete. He spent much of the night watching
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clips of Ms. Clinton's supporters crying after the election was called in Mr. Trump's favor.
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His YouTube viewing history shows that at 1.41 a.m., just before bed, he turned on a live stream
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hosted by Stephen Crowder with the title, Trump wins. So on election night, this kid, this radical,
00:22:28.420
he started out, he was kind of a moderate liberal guy. On election night, he was watching videos
00:22:33.420
titled Trump wins on the night that Trump won. That's the, that's the big, that's the radicalization
00:22:41.500
is that on a night when most of America voted in Donald Trump, he was celebrating that the guy who
00:22:48.500
won the presidency won the presidency because he was watching videos about it. He might not even
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have been celebrating it. He was just watching videos about it. Still doesn't seem very radical,
00:22:57.840
does it? No, of course not. It's all just this, this ambience. It's all the pictures, the graphics.
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So the word is radical in the title. So what actually happened to this guy? What the New York
00:23:10.020
Times, as always, like 20 paragraphs in, they give away the whole story and they show that actually
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what they're saying happened is the opposite of what actually happened. We'll get to that in a
00:23:18.840
second. But first, speaking of great stories, code names, deception, gadgets. This might seem
00:23:25.360
like something out of the movies, but these are just some of the essential components of being a
00:23:29.680
spy. We got a lot of spies around in the world. Attorney General Barr was talking about this the
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other day. Every country has spies and most spies are ordinary forgettable people, which makes them
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all the more dangerous. What does it really take to be a spy? Every week, the Parcast original
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espionage tells the stories of the world's most incredible undercover missions and how these
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impersonate, exploit, and infiltrate the most confidential places in the world. You are going
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to be fascinated by the story of FBI official Mark Felt. Does that name ring a bell? Maybe not.
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Mark Felt was the anonymous FBI informant who went by the name Deep Throat. He gave the crucial
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There are episodes on British codebreaker Alan Turing as well as triple agent Henry Derricore.
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Am I pronouncing that correctly? They're out right now. It's really, really cool because we all have
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movies. Search for and subscribe to Espionage wherever you listen to podcasts. Search Espionage or visit
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parkast.com slash espionage to listen now. So you're reading this New York Times story and you think
00:24:43.700
the guy doesn't sound very radical at all. So far the story is just about a guy who finds some right-wing
00:24:50.080
videos on YouTube and he watches them, right? So does it get any more radical than that? Are we going to
00:24:55.720
actually get what the New York Times is promising? Well, listen to what they write. One channel run by
00:25:02.560
Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with
00:25:07.980
titles like Refugee Invasion is European Suicide. Others posted clips of interviews with white
00:25:14.300
supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke. Mr. Kane never bought into the far right's most extreme
00:25:21.220
views like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate, he said. Still, far right ideology
00:25:27.800
bled into his daily life. He began referring to himself as a trad con, a traditional conservative
00:25:34.380
committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman and he fought with
00:25:41.460
his liberal friends. By the way, that last part isn't, that isn't even true. He disagreed with his
00:25:47.580
liberal friends. He didn't fight with them. What are they saying actually happened? They're saying on the
00:25:52.920
right-wing YouTube, there are people who are vicious, vile, racist, neo-Nazis. Caleb Kane never
00:26:00.700
listened to any of them or really believed them at all, but they exist. Well, I thought the article
00:26:05.640
was about the making of a radical. You said this was about the making of a YouTube radical, and then
00:26:10.160
you explain, you describe some views that actually are radical right before you say that the kid never
00:26:15.220
believed any of them. The most radical thing that this kid did, according to the New York Times'
00:26:21.180
own reporting, is he referred to himself as a traditional conservative. That's it, guys. That's
00:26:28.520
it. When they use the term, the alt-right on the left, when they use that term, they're just talking
00:26:34.960
about you and me. They're just talking about anybody who believes that the genders are different.
00:26:40.380
That's what they said. They said, he started to believe in gender norms. Oh, he believes that men and
00:26:45.340
women are different. Okay. And then he disagreed with his liberal friends. Oh, the guy who has
00:26:53.860
conservative viewpoints disagreed with people who have different viewpoints. Okay. And this is the
00:26:58.920
most shocking thing of all. He dated a Christian girl. He dated a Christian girl. That's, that's the
00:27:06.420
radicalization. Is that a guy in 2019 in America dated a Christian girl and called himself a
00:27:13.960
conservative. That's it. That's the most extreme thing in the whole article. I don't know how many,
00:27:20.260
and this is a very long article. Do you see what they do? They say, look at all these awful people,
00:27:25.840
David Duke, Richard Spencer, probably Adolf Hitler himself. Yeah, this guy had never listened to any of
00:27:32.200
them, but, but they're there. And then he dated a Christian girl. Now that's what makes him radical.
00:27:38.020
So it goes on. He says, in 2018, nearly four years after Mr. Kane had begun watching right-wing
00:27:46.300
YouTube videos, a new kind of video began appearing in his recommendations. These videos were made by
00:27:51.860
left-wing creators. Okay. So it starts in 2016. He's watching right-wing videos. And then a couple
00:27:58.220
years later, he starts watching left-wing videos. Now, why did the left-wing video pop
00:28:02.120
up? I guess maybe they changed the algorithm or he was just searching for titles that brought up
00:28:06.980
some left-wing videos and he started watching them. Maybe the videos kind of looked a little
00:28:10.680
similar to the right-wing videos. And then he became a left-winger. Notice how they take all the human
00:28:17.160
agency out of it. It's not that in 2016, he started watching right-wing videos and he started to think of
00:28:23.460
himself as more conservative. And then in 2018, he started to watch more left-wing videos. And then he
00:28:28.420
started to think of himself as more liberal. That's not what happened because he's not allowed
00:28:32.900
to have any thought. People don't have any agency or free will. What really happened is the algorithm,
00:28:38.000
the secret, all-powerful algorithm was controlling him and brainwashing him and moving his mind.
00:28:44.220
That's obviously not how human beings work. That's not how knowledge works. And then,
00:28:49.720
then they say, they're quoting Caleb Kane now, the kid. I just kept watching more and more of that
00:28:55.600
content, sympathizing and empathizing with the left-wing creator and also seeing that, wow,
00:29:01.820
she really knows what she's talking about, Mr. Kane said. There is nothing newsworthy about this at all.
00:29:10.240
What that guy just said is, I took in some information and thought about it and it changed
00:29:15.300
my mind. And then I took in other information and then I changed my mind again.
00:29:18.180
There is nothing newsworthy about changing your mind. People do that all the time.
00:29:25.140
And then they talk about his new life. So I guess they say he's been radicalized and then I guess
00:29:28.860
he's come out of the radicalization. We've never seen any radicalization in the whole article,
00:29:32.440
but that's what they say. Then at the end, they say,
00:29:35.400
what is most surprising about Mr. Kane's new life, his new left-wing life, on the surface is how similar
00:29:41.580
it feels to the old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of
00:29:47.400
his favorite creators. It is still difficult at times to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops
00:29:53.100
and his personality begins. No, it's not. It's not difficult to decide that. You have no respect
00:30:01.280
for this guy, obviously, and you have no respect for anyone else, New York Times. So you think that
00:30:05.940
they don't have any brains in their head, that they're just robots, zombies being controlled by
00:30:10.780
YouTube. But it's not difficult to figure out where someone's personality ends and where YouTube
00:30:16.120
begins. What they think and say and do is their personality and the videos they watch are the
00:30:21.140
videos they watch or the books that they read. We all learn from what we see and what we hear and
00:30:28.760
what we observe. So this, they're saying YouTube is special and different because there are videos
00:30:33.120
and you can learn things from videos. Okay, what if he read a book? Let's say he read a book from
00:30:39.020
Milton Friedman, for instance. Let's say he read a book on Friedman's economics and then he thought,
00:30:43.740
I agree with this Milton Friedman guy. I think he's got good economic views. Would you say that
00:30:47.740
books are now the path to radicalization, the library, the making of a library radical? No,
00:30:55.340
of course not. We learn. That's what we do. The New York Times is pretending that the YouTube
00:30:59.980
algorithm is the first magical device ever to influence how people think. Everything influences
00:31:05.500
how we think. Conversations influence how we think. Observations, movies, events, critical thinking.
00:31:11.000
It's not the algorithm either. It's not, it's not the order of the books on the bookshelf in the
00:31:17.400
library. It's the content. That's what changes how we think. Content is thought-provoking and this,
00:31:23.720
the last paragraph of this stupid article gives away the whole game. They write,
00:31:29.000
they're quoting Caleb Cain here, YouTube is the place to put out a message, he said, but I've learned
00:31:35.400
now that you can't go to YouTube and think that you're getting some kind of education because you're not.
00:31:41.000
What? What are you getting then? What if you watch a college lecture on YouTube? You're not getting
00:31:49.140
an education. What if you learn something that you didn't know before? You're not getting an
00:31:53.300
education. What if sweet little Elisa does this all the time? You go on YouTube and you look up a new
00:31:56.920
recipe, how to make some new meal, and then you learn how to make it and then you cook it. That's a,
00:32:02.280
that's an education. What if you look up some academic question? Obviously you're getting an
00:32:08.480
education, but this is what the left has to do. They're saying this is not about education.
00:32:14.140
It's only about entertainment. See, this is critical to the argument that YouTube should
00:32:18.420
censor conservatives because even the left, if these guys were really being honest and they said
00:32:23.820
we want to censor ideas that we disagree with because we can't refute them with argument, even
00:32:27.880
the left probably doesn't want to say that they want to do that. They at least pretend to oppose
00:32:34.080
academic censorship, censorship in the name of ideas. So what the left has to do is pretend that
00:32:38.980
YouTube is just sort of entertainment. They have to pretend that it's just sort of right-wingers
00:32:43.860
being provocateurs. They always use this term to refer to right-wingers, provocateurs or radicals or
00:32:49.340
fringe or whatever. Because what they, what they need to say is that right-wing commentators and
00:32:54.960
speakers, they're not dealing in ideas. They're not engaging in arguments. They are, they're just
00:33:00.140
interested in shock value. And there is nothing new about this argument. This argument, which the
00:33:05.300
New York Times thinks is brand new, Carlos Maza, YouTube, they all think it's brand new.
00:33:10.420
They've been making this for 50 years. We'll tell you what the argument is in a second.
00:33:14.600
But first, I have got to go to dailywire.com. Get off of YouTube. We're probably already off of
00:33:20.140
YouTube because I use the word queer. So we're probably already off there anyway. Go to Daily Wire,
00:33:24.340
10 bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show,
00:33:27.960
you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Walsh show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag.
00:33:31.720
That's coming up on Thursday. You get to ask questions backstage. You get another kingdom and
00:33:35.820
you get Leftist Tears Tumblr. Mmm, that's good. Mmm. Oh, that's radical. That is, that's totally rad,
00:33:44.320
dude. That's a totally radical drink today out of the Leftist Tears Tumblr. Go get yours before you
00:33:57.960
In 1969, a major leftist intellectual, Lionel Trilling, made the argument, quote,
00:34:07.320
liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition in the United States.
00:34:15.060
As if to say, there's no reason to engage with these conservative ideas. Get, get them off of
00:34:20.420
YouTube. Get them out, get them out of the public square. He even said it more directly. He said
00:34:25.200
that conservatives don't express themselves in ideas, but in, quote, irritable mental gestures
00:34:32.200
which seek to resemble ideas. He said that in 1969. How many decades later, they say the same thing.
00:34:42.040
They say, oh, these people talking on, on YouTube, these are not, these people are not dealing in
00:34:48.340
ideas. They're just, they kind of resemble ideas, but they're not. They're wicked. They're awful.
00:34:52.380
They're dangerous. We have to get rid of them. They've been using this argument for half a century
00:34:56.480
to silence conservatives. They're going to use it for half a century more. Ironically, this is the
00:35:00.460
best part of the New York Times article, the stupid article. The arguments that they present
00:35:06.580
undercut the thesis of the article. The thesis of the article is that this guy was radicalized to
00:35:13.240
become a right-wing radical. He started out left-wing, then he became right-wing.
00:35:17.480
Actually, though, this guy's own YouTube searches, which he gave to the New York Times to write this
00:35:24.460
article, show exactly the opposite. He started out watching far right-wing videos, and then he ended
00:35:30.380
up watching left-wing videos. If he was radicalized in any direction, he was radicalized to the left.
00:35:36.380
This is, the New York Times admits this. They say he started out watching far-right videos by people
00:35:41.100
like Stéphane Molyneux in 2016. Who is Stéphane Molyneux? He's a libertarian guy. He is an extreme
00:35:47.340
libertarian. He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist. So, yeah, he does have extreme viewpoints.
00:35:54.160
Started out in 2016. Then he moved on to the intellectual... Well, first, then he moved on to
00:35:58.840
Crowder. So, Crowder, a more mainstream figure than Stéphane Molyneux. Then he moves on to the
00:36:04.160
intellectual dark web, specifically people like Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. So, he's moving... Dave
00:36:09.060
Rubin is a liberal. I mean, he's a self-described liberal. He's a centrist guy. Joe Rogan is sort
00:36:13.720
of center-left guy. So, he's moving to the left, and then he lands on left-wing videos by 2018.
00:36:20.720
So, I mean, we say this all the time with the left. The left gets everything exactly backwards.
00:36:25.520
They're saying the guy was radicalized to the right. He actually was radicalized to the left. All of the
00:36:30.840
movement of his searches goes to the left. And, of course, there aren't really any radicals in the
00:36:36.900
whole bunch. Ben Shapiro, Phil DeFranco, Milton Friedman, no radicals at all. Also, he was never
00:36:43.060
radicalized. They say that he rejected Nazism. They admit that in the article. He didn't do anything.
00:36:50.780
He didn't believe anything out of the ordinary. The most extreme thing he believed is that he was a
00:36:54.480
traditional conservative. It is not only a worthless article because, first of all, it conveys
00:37:02.120
nothing newsworthy. It lies about its thesis, and it defames virtually everybody that it mentions.
00:37:10.160
It is wholly without merit except that it will be used to advance the left-wing agenda to censor
00:37:16.180
conservatives. One of the great things about YouTube that accidentally this article sort of shows is that
00:37:21.820
you can see both sides of an argument for now. I mean, as we are speaking right now, YouTube is
00:37:28.260
getting rid of that. They are stopping you from seeing both sides of the argument. But this was
00:37:31.980
one of the advantages of YouTube is you could just see, kind of get all sorts of ideas and then form
00:37:36.580
your own conclusion. And this became pretty apparent over the weekend. There was a video of an abortion
00:37:43.160
supporter, and she was this radical feminist named Sophie Lewis, and she put out a video explaining
00:37:49.040
the logical arguments, the extreme arguments, but the logical arguments for abortion.
00:37:54.060
In the past, the strategies that our side has tended to use have included a kind of seeding of ground
00:38:04.160
to our enemies. We tend to say that abortion is indeed very bad, but, or we say, luckily,
00:38:14.780
it's not killing. Luckily, it's just a health care right. We have very little to lose at the moment
00:38:21.380
when it comes to abortion, and I'm interested in winning radically. And I wonder if we could think
00:38:27.840
about defending abortion as a right to stop doing gestational work. Abortion is, in my opinion,
00:38:36.040
and I recognize how controversial this is, a form of killing. It is a form of killing that we need to
00:38:47.980
be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.
00:38:57.540
I got to give her a lot of credit. This is a totally honest argument. Thank you for making
00:39:03.960
the honest argument, Sophie Lewis, because that's it. It's obviously a form of killing. And the
00:39:08.840
argument for abortion is that you should, you can justify that killing because the comfort of the
00:39:15.680
mother is more important than the life of the baby. That's, that's the argument. And so it is
00:39:19.440
killing. It is a human life. It is an individual human life, and you're going to do it. And if you
00:39:23.680
want abortion, you have to accept that, and you have to say it's worth killing human life. And
00:39:28.140
she's so good at this, actually, she takes the argument to its logical conclusion, which is that
00:39:32.420
it's not just about when life begins, but if you accept that argument for killing babies based on
00:39:37.020
your own personal or social preferences, then you should be able to kill people at the end of their
00:39:41.820
lives as well. And she makes that argument in the same breath. I see the forms of making and
00:39:47.160
unmaking each other as sort of continuous processes. The other end of the spectrum is
00:39:55.980
the process of learning how to die well and hold each other and let each other go at the end of
00:40:01.800
our lives as well as at the beginning. Die well, let each other die well, let go, which is obviously
00:40:08.500
referring to as euthanasia, so-called, assisted suicide, death with dignity, they call it, where you
00:40:14.460
kill old people, and you let old people kill themselves. And as a society, you create a lot
00:40:20.260
of incentives for old people to kill themselves. But sure, if you agree with the argument for
00:40:24.400
abortion, that human life does not have some intrinsic value, then of course you would agree
00:40:29.960
with the argument for assisted suicide at the end of your life. She makes that honest argument.
00:40:34.100
You could go to YouTube, watch that argument, and then you could watch another argument. There
00:40:38.680
was a girl, an amazing girl, Addison Woosley, 13 years old, went up at the Raleigh City Council and
00:40:46.420
made an impassioned and utterly coherent argument against abortion.
00:40:51.620
I'm here to ask you to make abortion illegal at Raleigh. Abortion should be illegal because it's
00:40:56.360
murder. The definition of murder is the killing of one human being by another without justification
00:41:01.620
and often with intended balance. When mothers choose to slaughter their innocent babies, they
00:41:06.360
already have fingerprints, noses, they can recognize their mom's voice, they can hiccup, and their heart
00:41:11.660
is beating. On ultrasounds, the baby tries to move away from the disturbing instruments they use to kill
00:41:17.060
the baby. The baby's not open to why it is being killed. These babies are alive. They feel being killed. It hurts them
00:41:24.700
and there's nothing they can do about it. There's no way around it. Abortion is murder. So why is it
00:41:30.460
if an infant is destroyed before birth, there's no problem? But until after birth, it's considered a
00:41:35.500
brutal murder. These babies aren't its or fetuses. They are human beings and they deserve to get the
00:41:41.320
same human rights as any other person. Beautiful argument. Brilliant argument. I'm often uncomfortable
00:41:47.540
with very young political activists because they don't really know much of what they're talking about
00:41:52.600
and they sound like when David Hogg opens his mouth, he's always totally incoherent talking about gun
00:41:57.640
control. She's making a coherent argument. Even if you disagree with the argument, by the way, she's
00:42:03.100
making, or you reject the premises or whatever, she's making a very articulate, very impassioned,
00:42:08.560
obviously, very coherent argument. And the people in that room were very disrespectful to her when she
00:42:14.360
takes that argument to its logical conclusion. Some people say that abortion should be the mom's choice.
00:42:20.140
It's her body. But what about the baby's choice? The baby's body is the mom's body.
00:42:25.180
Abortion reminds me of slavery. I always said that abortion is going to talk to me and they can do
00:42:31.220
whatever they want. That's how long to say about their babies. My hope is that in a few years,
00:42:36.260
we'll look back at abortion and think, that was so cruel. I can't believe he did that. Just tell
00:42:40.780
we all look back at slavery. The question is, who will you be? The slave owner? The man down in the
00:42:46.100
white's only side on the water fountain? Rosa Parks or Abraham Lincoln? Who are you going to be? Make a
00:42:51.740
choice. My choice is made. I'm here today standing up for what's right. I'm here today speaking for
00:42:57.100
those who can't speak for themselves. Are you choosing to be like the plantation worker
00:43:01.080
flogging a little black child? Or are you going to be protesting? No! Don! Don! Don! Don! Hold me a
00:43:09.600
dog! No! She can't talk about plantation workers! Don! Don! Don! Don! Don! Don! Don! That is a powerful
00:43:19.460
video. That's a powerful segment. She makes the argument. It's like slavery. And we will be judged
00:43:26.120
by our future generations. And who will you be? Will you be the plantation owner? The guy whipping
00:43:31.660
the slave? Or will you be on the side of justice? And the, you know, ironically, or I guess maybe not
00:43:38.140
ironically, maybe we should expect this. The 13-year-old girl who's standing up for moral
00:43:42.180
clarity is behaving like an adult. And all those so-called adults in the room screaming like
00:43:46.680
children, you're a baby. No, screaming. We can't hear this. We can't. No, trying to drown her out. This is
00:43:52.180
what YouTube is doing. This is what the left is doing. This is what the mainstream media
00:43:56.080
are doing. What they're trying to do is stop you from seeing both sides. That was what YouTube
00:44:03.420
did. All YouTube ever did, the great achievement of YouTube, was present both sides. Because there
00:44:08.740
weren't gatekeepers in the early days. And so you couldn't shut up the conservatives. And people
00:44:13.840
were presented with both sides. And guess what? They found the conservative arguments pretty
00:44:18.260
compelling. If you saw those two arguments, the pro-abortion woman and that 13-year-old little
00:44:22.800
girl, a fairly famous radical feminist, and a 13-year-old little girl, totally obscure.
00:44:29.700
They both presented their arguments for abortion. Which are you going to find more compelling?
00:44:33.280
Obviously, it's that little girls. And it's why YouTube and the New York Times and Vox.com
00:44:38.020
and the whole mainstream media have to be like those shouting idiots in the rally city council hall,
00:44:44.140
trying to scream them down, trying to censor them, trying to shut them up. They can't let you hear
00:44:48.280
both sides. Because if you do, you will side with the right. Uppercase R and lowercase R.
00:44:54.280
Wish we could get to the Trump-Mexico deal because it was absolutely fabulous. I'll give
00:44:59.200
you a little preview so that we can get to it tomorrow and how the mainstream media are totally
00:45:03.820
lying about this. But the little preview is this was an unmitigated win for Donald Trump after
00:45:10.180
negotiating, after threatening tariffs, after we heard the trade war was going to destroy the
00:45:15.180
global economy. President Trump reached a deal. Mexico made major concessions to fight illegal
00:45:21.520
immigration on their own southern border. It is a total win. It totally vindicates the use of tariff
00:45:26.900
threats in negotiations. It vindicates the use of tariff threats as the U.S. deals with China,
00:45:32.220
which is a much more important negotiation. And the mainstream media are furious about it. We'll try
00:45:36.760
to get to that tomorrow to explain how the mainstream media are trying to spin it and why it just
00:45:40.980
ain't so. So tune in for that. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles
00:45:45.260
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner. Executive
00:45:55.760
producer, Jeremy Boring. Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover. And
00:46:01.760
our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Danny D'Amico. Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
00:46:07.420
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
00:46:11.520
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
00:46:16.360
Today on The Matt Wall Show, we're going to talk about the left's increasingly disturbing and grotesque
00:46:21.200
efforts to normalize pedophilia. We are headed to a very dark place in this culture, and I think we
00:46:28.100
need to discuss it. Also, a Democratic presidential candidate reaches the most extreme levels of pandering
00:46:34.240
imaginable. And a feminist presents what I think is the only honest argument for abortion that you
00:46:41.180
will ever hear. So we'll talk about that today as well on The Matt Wall Show.