The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 416 - Comedy Is Canceled

00:00:00.000 The cancel culture claims another scalp. The media are mostly to blame, but we delve deeper

00:00:05.440 to a much more disturbing truth. The media give us exactly what we want. Then the left ratchets

00:00:12.380 up the rhetoric on climate change. We examine why the new environmental militarism is doomed to fail.

00:00:18.340 And finally, Andrew Yang learns that his vote buying scheme might not be totally legal. Who

00:00:24.540 would have thought that? All that and more. I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles

00:00:27.740 Show. They got another one. The cancel culture got another one. This is a guy, Shane Gillis,

00:00:40.520 I think his name is pronounced, who you've probably never even heard of. Shane Gillis was just brought

00:00:46.320 on to Saturday Night Live, gets this big new gig, and he's gone. And they take it away and it's all

00:00:51.220 over. We knew this would happen. This was the inevitable consequence of two or three days ago

00:00:56.540 when Shane Gillis first came into the cancel culture crosshairs. Now it has happened. He gets

00:01:03.880 brought into Saturday Night Live, then he loses Saturday Night Live. And this is how he responds.

00:01:07.780 He tweets out,

00:01:08.380 I'm a comedian who is funny enough to get SNL. That can't be taken away. Of course, I wanted an

00:01:14.160 opportunity to prove myself at SNL, but I understand it would be too much of a distraction. I respect the

00:01:20.820 decision they made. I'm honestly grateful for the opportunity. I was always a mad TV guy anyway.

00:01:27.340 Just funny. That's obviously very gracious, a witty way to end it. He has this little joke about

00:01:33.240 how he prefers the rival comedy sketch show, mad TV. Really, it's the only decent option he had.

00:01:41.040 He could either make a big deal about it and complain and whine, but that wouldn't be a good

00:01:44.320 look. And nobody knows who he is anyway, so it wouldn't reflect well on him. Anybody who still

00:01:48.720 likes SNL, you know, all 10 people in the audience are going to prefer SNL to this random guy. So he

00:01:54.060 made the correct choice. He made the best option that was in front of him. But this is wrong. This is

00:01:59.600 outrageous, and this is wrong. Show business is very hard. All of it. Acting, writing, directing,

00:02:08.600 all of it. All of it is very difficult to get work of any kind in show business. Comedy is probably the

00:02:15.960 hardest of all. It's the hardest of all to make it in. It's not hard to get these little gigs,

00:02:20.240 but you get a few gigs in comedy, you get paid peanuts, and pretty much you're guaranteed to die

00:02:25.240 in obscurity unless something magical happens, which is you could get picked up maybe for a role

00:02:31.360 in a sitcom. Maybe you get a role in a movie or something, but those are really hard. Or you get

00:02:36.480 the pinnacle of the comedy jobs, which is Saturday Night Live. And then maybe from there, like Jimmy

00:02:44.380 Fallon, you go from Saturday Night Live to having your own late night talk show or something. But

00:02:48.360 there are one or two of those jobs. Saturday Night Live is it. That's the gig. This guy made it.

00:02:53.680 Against all odds, he makes it to the top of the comedy pack. And then the swarm came in and took

00:02:59.840 away every single thing from him because of jokes he made a year or more ago that were just jokes.

00:03:07.120 And he's a comedian telling jokes, and now it's all gone. This is exactly what Dave Chappelle predicted

00:03:12.440 in his own Netflix comedy special a few weeks ago. He said, this cancel culture comes out and

00:03:19.360 they say, hey, you, if you've ever done anything wrong, anything that's not even wrong, just something

00:03:24.020 I object to, we're going to take away every single thing you have. Here's Dave Chappelle.

00:03:28.980 The next one's a little harder. I want to see if you can guess who it is I'm doing an impression of.

00:03:34.640 All right, let me get into character. You got to guess who it is though. Okay, here it goes.

00:03:38.800 Duh. Hey. Duh. If you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I'm going

00:03:46.480 to try to take everything away from you. And I don't care what I find out. It could be today,

00:03:50.660 tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now, if I find out you're fucking, duh, finished. 0.96

00:03:57.580 Who's that? That's you. That's what the audience sounds like to me.

00:04:08.800 That's why I don't be coming out doing comedy all the time because y'all is the worst motherfuckers I've 1.00

00:04:16.400 ever tried to entertain in my fucking life. That clip, it's made the rounds. People have loved it.

00:04:25.100 Conservatives, obviously, who hate cancel culture, but a lot of liberals, a lot of just comedians,

00:04:29.140 a lot of regular people love that clip. But that clip is so much wiser, so much wiser even than people

00:04:36.460 give it credit for. What is interesting about this whole saga with Shane Gillis, a guy that I

00:04:40.900 don't know anything about, don't really care about, don't care about SNL, never watch it.

00:04:45.340 What's interesting is not that it happened. This is happening all the time. What's interesting is how

00:04:50.340 it happened because the strangest aspect of cancel culture is it just seems to happen. It doesn't

00:04:57.820 seem like it's one person or one group or just this person is controlling all of it. It's this swarm

00:05:03.660 that comes in and it feels as though we are powerless to stop it. But that is not exactly

00:05:09.640 the case. And there's a lot of insight in Chappelle's diagnosis. We'll get to that in a second. We'll get

00:05:14.500 to who's really behind cancel culture. But first, if you have bought a timeshare, you probably know

00:05:20.100 the pitch, right? It's a great investment. It's a legacy for your kids. You can stay whenever you want,

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00:05:31.680 It's a total scam. The ugly truth is that with a timeshare, you can never tell how much it's really

00:05:36.300 going to cost or when it's going to end. And a lot of owners who are trying to sell their timeshares

00:05:41.360 online find out the hard way that it's not an investment. Not only is it not a good investment,

00:05:46.160 it's not an investment because they can't get a single dollar for it. And on top of that,

00:05:51.060 when you factor in the rising annual maintenance costs and assessment fees and whatever other fees

00:05:56.100 you're going to get, buying a timeshare is like giving the timeshare company a blank check for

00:06:01.800 life. Even when you die, even when you are dead and gone, your family will get stuck with that

00:06:08.220 burden. So stop the insanity today. There is a way out. I have family members who have been stuck in

00:06:13.600 timeshares. It can be brutal. Right now, go to ICancelTimeshare.com. Tell them that I sent you.

00:06:21.140 The Wesley Financial Group guarantees they will legally get you out of your timeshare,

00:06:25.980 out of the contract permanently, or you pay nothing. To get your free information kit telling

00:06:30.940 you all about how it works, go to ICancelTimeshare.com. That is ICancelTimeshare.com. Go there now. You

00:06:38.060 don't want to pay a dollar more to those scam artists than is necessary. ICancelTimeshare.com will

00:06:43.720 help get you out or you pay nothing. So what's interesting about this cancel culture is the question of

00:06:50.580 who is behind it. It's the swarm. It's the Twitter mob. It's the crazy, angry mob.

00:06:56.980 So what happens is the swarm comes and then the object of the swarm's ire loses their job. How does

00:07:01.880 it happen? Who is to blame? Specifically, journalists, quote unquote journalists. They are. I'm not going to

00:07:08.060 say it's just everybody and everyone is all to blame. No, it is very practically the journalists,

00:07:13.900 so-called, and the mainstream media who are driving this. Because journalists, from your one independent

00:07:21.800 reporter on Twitter all the way up to the New York Times, they are not reporting newsworthy stories.

00:07:27.880 They are simply dredging up character assassination. And all you have to do is look at yesterday's news

00:07:33.520 cycle. The New York Times ran front page, big cover story, completely unsubstantiated allegations.

00:07:39.980 They hid evidence that was exculpatory. They hid the fact that the people alleging crimes against

00:07:47.240 Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, weren't actually alleging anything. It was people alleging

00:07:52.200 crimes about people who were alleging things who didn't actually allege them. It was bogus

00:07:56.360 character assassination. That's the New York Times, the gray lady, all the news that's fit to print. 0.58

00:08:01.120 Same thing is true of the Washington Post. Same thing is true throughout the mainstream media,

00:08:04.680 all the way down to so-called independent journalists or independent outlets. So it is

00:08:10.940 those guys. They are doing worse right now. It wasn't always this way. It's been better before.

00:08:16.220 Just remember, when FDR was president, the journalists didn't report on the fact that FDR

00:08:21.340 was bound to a wheelchair. The president of the United States, cameras on him all the time. A lot of

00:08:26.700 people didn't know he was in a wheelchair. The journalists didn't report on FDR as mistresses.

00:08:32.000 They didn't report on JFK's mistresses. They didn't report on LBJ's mistresses. Now those guys

00:08:37.160 all have two things in common. One, they are simply known by three letters, an acronym, and two,

00:08:43.440 they're all Democrats. So maybe that has something to do with it. But regardless,

00:08:47.280 it was a time when journalists exhibited discretion. You know, frankly, all those mistresses were certainly

00:08:54.640 more newsworthy than this cancel culture. Some guy sent three tweets 10 years ago, and now you got to

00:09:00.080 ruin his life. This is being driven by the journalists. They deserve our scorn. When Trump

00:09:05.820 goes out and says they're the enemy of the people, he's half right. He's also half wrong.

00:09:13.600 Why is that? Because what are the journalists responding to? They're responding to you and me.

00:09:18.780 We'll get to that in a second. First, how did this happen? The way that this cancel culture thing

00:09:22.700 occurred with Shane Gillis is, first, an independent journalist, which means a guy with a Twitter

00:09:27.900 account named Seth Simons, came out, dredged up a bunch of old clips of the comedian telling jokes,

00:09:34.760 and then framed it in a way that this was supposed to be some horrible offense. And then Saturday Night

00:09:40.520 Live and NBC ran scared and fired the guy they just hired. The New York Times picked up this story,

00:09:45.860 those scum sucking bottom feeders at the New York Times. They blew the whole story up and the guy loses 0.98

00:09:49.940 his job. What did they find? Here's what they found. Here's what they found. Apparently a year or two

00:09:55.500 ago, the comedian, Shane Gillis, the comedian, I'll note, made some jokes. Here is one joke about

00:10:02.080 going to Chinatown. It's a dishonest food, dude. There's nothing, there's nothing to it. It's 1.00

00:10:07.220 shitty meat, a chemical they made up to fuck your body up, and noodles, neuters. The neuters are 1.00

00:10:14.940 cheapest thing in the world. Chemical. Sick. Worst meat you can find. We got in there and we sat down

00:10:22.400 and baby girl was like, I'm so excited for neuters. And I was like, yo, chill, chill, chill. But we had

00:10:28.420 and the translation between you and the waiter. Yeah. It's just such a hassle. It's like, can you,

00:10:33.220 I'm pointing at it. Like this is the. Well, that's why I put number like 57.

00:10:38.720 The joke is that Chinese people have different accents from English speaking people.

00:10:44.560 That's the joke. It's and it's true. It's like the most obvious joke in the world. I'm not saying

00:10:48.980 it's a good joke. It's but it's an obvious joke. It's a completely harmless joke. The joke is that

00:10:53.460 stereotypically East Asians mix up the L and the R sounds in English. So he says neuters instead of 0.88

00:11:01.540 noodles. But that's true. That is true. Those two letters do get confused. Absolutely harmless joke.

00:11:08.060 Less offensive than making a joke about Irish people drinking. I mean, so obvious. It's a joke 0.99

00:11:13.180 about language. He should lose his job for that. As he says, yeah, I go to Chinatown and sometimes the

00:11:19.580 people speak with funny accents. They do. That, yeah, that's right. Of course, that's what happens.

00:11:24.160 Here's Seth Simon's next example of Shane Gillis's terrible, awful racism from the same podcast,

00:11:31.020 from the same conversation about Chinese restaurants. It's all, it's, it's funny too,

00:11:35.220 because that's more annoying than, uh, any other minority playing music at a restaurant loud on their

00:11:41.760 phone. Do you think an Asian trying to learn English bothers me more than someone listening to 1.00

00:11:46.800 like Lil Uzi Vert while I'm trying to eat dinner? That's hilarious. Yeah. Nice racism. 0.99

00:11:52.160 That's nice racism. That's good racism. I love to be racist. It's basically the stereotype of white

00:11:57.340 people that we walk around all day and are like, yeah, that's what happens. But it's funny too,

00:12:03.120 that like you were over there, it'd be the, they'd be the white people being like, uh, shut up.

00:12:07.700 Now what's incredible, what's incredible about this clip. And actually, I guess the last clip too,

00:12:12.880 is not only are the jokes, not an example of racism, whatever that means anymore,

00:12:18.660 because racism has been defined down to nothing by the left. They're actually jokes about racism.

00:12:25.120 The, the object of the joke is the racism. In the first clip, he says neuters and he uses this sort

00:12:32.000 of stereotypical and ostensibly offensive pronunciation. And then he says, that was a good

00:12:36.040 racism. He's admitting, he's saying that was racist. What I said, I shouldn't say that. That's bad to say

00:12:41.160 that. And then in the second clip, I mean, even he says to his girlfriend, cause she said the word

00:12:46.920 neuters and he said, Oh, stop it. Stop it. Chill. Be cool. Because he knows you're not supposed to

00:12:51.900 say that. And the joke is that incongruity, how you're supposed to behave and how you're actually

00:12:56.140 behaving. And they talk about it in the second clip. They say, yeah, this is sort of what, what ethnic

00:13:01.640 minorities must imagine white people are doing all the time complaining about minorities. But I guess

00:13:05.580 if we were in China and we were speaking the way that we speak, they would probably say the same

00:13:10.520 things about us. So that is a joke about race, specifically a joke about racism. He's got to

00:13:18.660 lose his job for that. Of course he does because Seth Simons, this random Twitter account wants to

00:13:24.520 ruin someone's life. He wakes up in the morning and he says, well, I'm going to ruin someone's life

00:13:27.660 today. I don't, I don't know what's going on in my life, but I've got such an empty pit in my own

00:13:33.200 life, in my own soul that I'm going to fill that today by destroying somebody's life. And so he pulls

00:13:37.920 together, pulls the whole narrative together that this comedian Shane Gillis, I guess hates

00:13:42.940 Chinese people or something by finding a different Chinese joke from a different podcast that he told.

00:13:48.320 The podcast has a bunch of guys on it and Shane has the audacity to joke that the Chinese have a lot

00:13:54.680 of abortions. Here's the joke. Shout out to, uh, NYC grappling club,

00:13:59.100 NYC grappling club, grappling club, NYC.com. They've been hooking me up. You're speaking like

00:14:03.120 him now. Thank you. Grappling club. Thank you. Thank you. You have taught me many valuable

00:14:09.380 lessons, not just about fighting, but the mental game as well. I can't tell if you mean Asian or 1.00

00:14:13.860 handicapped. Oh, both. Lewis is, uh, Lewis is training. I have not seen a Asian handicapped 1.00

00:14:20.140 person. Asian, Asian. Can't tell. They put them down early. That was the joke. Did you catch the 1.00

00:14:24.980 joke at the end? So they're, they're all telling the same joke about the L's and the R's, which 1.00

00:14:28.260 every comedian and virtually everyone else has told at some point. And then someone says, I can't tell

00:14:33.440 if you're handicapped or Chinese. The joke being, I can't tell if you are speaking English poorly 0.99

00:14:40.960 because it's not your first language or if you're speaking English poorly because you have mental

00:14:44.940 deficiency. Isn't it really funny to explain jokes? And then it, they say, well, I've never seen a

00:14:50.780 handicapped Chinese person. They put them down earlier than that. This is a dark joke, very dark 1.00

00:14:55.780 humor. Specifically, it's a joke about abortion. It is a joke playing on a fact that is obviously true, 0.94

00:15:03.500 which is that China very famously had a policy of compulsory abortion for over 35 years. And that

00:15:09.640 policy was called the one child policy. The joke is they kill their babies as a government policy,

00:15:16.380 which is true. It doesn't make it nice. It doesn't make it a nice fact about life, but it is true.

00:15:21.380 And what comedy does is it subverts all these sorts of awful things like coercive government or like

00:15:27.980 mandatory abortion or like cultural mores. That's what it is doing. Now the crowning achievement of 0.99

00:15:36.400 this guy's career, this comedian, Shane Gillis ruined, it's gone. You can't have it because of

00:15:41.600 some jerk named Seth Simons. And Seth Simons is indeed a very bad man who did a very bad thing who

00:15:47.440 should apologize and seek forgiveness. But it is not just his fault and it's not just the journalist's

00:15:53.460 fault. There is another group of people very much at fault here who should seriously take a look inside

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00:17:46.740 So this guy, Seth Simons, this critic who got Shane Gillis' job taken away, is a jerk. He's a huge jerk.

00:17:52.500 The journalists who do this generally are huge jerks. Not just their fault. H.L. Mencken said,

00:17:57.640 democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and that they deserve to get it good and

00:18:02.740 hard. And that's it. Look, journalism is increasingly driven by clicks. It's also subscriptions. You know,

00:18:10.360 we have subscribers, but largely, mostly clicks. And so journalists, again, increasingly in many ways,

00:18:19.160 give the audience what they want. It's not like you just have the regular subscribers and you've

00:18:26.300 got them and you've got their trust and you keep it going around like in the old days. I mean,

00:18:30.240 you were going down to individual clicks at this point. That's how you make money through online ad

00:18:34.520 sales. And so the journalists give the audiences what they want in the immediate moment, how they

00:18:40.060 can monetize every last penny out of their content. And audiences want this trash. They do. They want it.

00:18:49.160 They want the thrill of cheap drama. Increasingly, they want a replacement for the virtue lacking in

00:18:56.920 their own lives. They want something to fill the God-shaped holes in their heart. And in our sick

00:19:01.520 culture, that takes the shape of vindictiveness and politics. You just want the drama. You know,

00:19:08.220 the silver lining here for Shane Gillis is that absolutely nobody has watched Saturday Night Live

00:19:12.840 since Bill Murray left, or at least since Norm Macdonald left. And so I'm not sorry for Shane

00:19:19.040 Gillis in particular. You know, he'll probably go on and have a fine career. I am sorry though for us.

00:19:25.040 I'm sorry for us. I'm sorry we live in this culture. We are living in a colder, less funny,

00:19:30.440 less humane society today because of cancel culture. And look, it's so easy to condemn cancel culture.

00:19:36.500 It's so easy to, because it's ugly. It's so ugly. We all know it's ugly. But why do we have cancel

00:19:42.780 culture? We have it. We have that culture because we live in a colder, less funny, less humane society.

00:19:50.420 Grace is the only thing that prevents life from being miserable. Life can be miserable. It can't,

00:19:56.780 I don't think it's miserable. I have a great time. I am as joyful as I've ever been. I really have a good,

00:20:03.760 because of grace. Not because I think I deserve something and I'm so proud and I'm going to go

00:20:09.180 get that guy and I'm going to ruin his life and I'm going to take that guy's career away and then

00:20:12.880 I'm going to go home at night and feel really good about myself. No. Grace. Grace is the only thing

00:20:17.220 that prevents life from being so miserable. The quality of mercy. It's wonderful. We pray for it

00:20:22.500 and we give it out to others. That's what the Lord's prayer is. Forgive us our sins as we forgive

00:20:27.480 those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts. Forgive us our trespasses. Please,

00:20:33.180 please forgive us. And we will forgive others in the same way. And we are losing the sense of grace

00:20:38.780 more and more each day. We're celebrating pride. We're celebrating entitlement. We're growing the

00:20:44.340 entitlement state. We're turning to a culture of pride and entitlement away from one of grace and

00:20:49.980 humility. This, this actually has a big lesson for conservatives. There is a lesson beyond the

00:20:56.920 unfortunate aspect of cancel culture beyond the graceless society. The lesson for conservatives

00:21:03.400 is this. Shane Gillis lost out because he was playing the mainstream game. He was trying to win

00:21:08.620 the approval of the mainstream culture, go on the mainstream comedy show, keep everything mainstream

00:21:13.160 with the mainstream advertisers and the mainstream television network. If you seek the approval of the

00:21:18.900 mainstream popular culture, you are suspended so precariously like a spider held over a burning fire

00:21:26.200 to use the imagery of sinners in the hands of an angry God. If you don't care about the approval of

00:21:34.560 the mainstream popular culture, if you mock that mainstream pop culture, that bizarre, perverse pop

00:21:41.320 culture, if you hold it in disdain, then it can't hurt you. They can't come get you. They can't get me.

00:21:49.180 They can get Shane Gillis because he's playing their game. They can't get me. They can't get Drew.

00:21:53.760 They can't get Ben. If you just say, no, I don't want it, they can't get you. You know,

00:22:02.320 the reason I even mentioned me and Drew and Ben in this and Matt Walsh is that those ghouls over at

00:22:08.980 the leftist media operative organizations like Media Matters and a couple of others,

00:22:13.120 they could have power over us, but only if we give it to them. They actually have no power over us.

00:22:20.460 Why? Because we just make fun of them. They only have power if they make you flinch. They only have

00:22:26.140 power if they make you blink. They only have power if you grant their ridiculous premises. 0.66

00:22:32.460 But if you don't, if Shane Gillis, I mean, he was in trouble because he was already trying to get his

00:22:38.360 way into the mainstream. But if Saturday Night Live or some other comedy program just turned to

00:22:43.000 that awful little independent journalist and said, yeah, you know what? I don't care what you have 1.00

00:22:48.300 to say. Get out of here. I mean, even he made some joke about Andrew Yang, this comedian Shane

00:22:54.440 Gillis. And Andrew Yang said, yeah, that's fine. We'll sit down and talk, but you know, whatever.

00:22:57.680 You shouldn't lose his job. That's grace. That's forgiveness. That's, that's nice.

00:23:01.880 What is this awful Twitter person, this cancel culture person, what right does he have to get

00:23:10.160 Shane Gillis to lose his job? Because this awful Twitter person is offended on behalf of other

00:23:15.560 people, on behalf of Andrew Yang, on behalf of Chinese Americans? No, you can't be offended on

00:23:20.720 behalf of somebody. Just tell them, make fun of them. Say, who cares? The lesson for the conservatives

00:23:25.060 here is don't do it. Do not seek the approval of the New York Times. Do not seek the forgiveness

00:23:30.780 of Media Matters. I mean, Media Matters, they're a bunch of degenerates. They're absolutely disgusting

00:23:35.140 people who hold disgusting views and live a disgusting life where their whole life is just

00:23:40.700 trying to ruin the careers of others because they don't have any arguments to answer the arguments of

00:23:45.240 their political opponents. They deserve pity in a certain sense. I don't care. I'm not going to try

00:23:50.780 to destroy their lives, but they have no credibility. This, this Twitter guy who spends all his days

00:23:56.400 trying to ruin people's careers, you don't owe him an answer. You don't owe him an answer on

00:24:00.600 anything. That's how we got to look at the left. That's how we got to look at that mainstream

00:24:05.320 culture. They're never going to like you. They're not. They're simply going to try to destroy you.

00:24:11.600 And you've got to get that through your head. And then, only then, can you start building up a decent

00:24:16.420 culture yourself. Now, the hysteria is not just on cancel culture. It's not just all the way up.

00:24:24.520 They're turning up the dials and amping up the rhetoric on everything, all the way up to and

00:24:28.780 including climate change. They're amping up their rhetoric. They're using bellicose language.

00:24:33.420 They're talking about climate change like it's World War II, not just AOC saying it, but other

00:24:38.140 people as well. We'll see why, because there's nothing new under the sun and the left doesn't

00:24:42.500 know anything about history. So they don't realize they are just repeating the same old tired tropes

00:24:47.700 of past leftists. We'll get to that in a second. We'll see why it's an old idea. We'll see why there's

00:24:53.100 nothing new under the sun in the Andrew Yang campaign. He thinks he's got a novel idea to

00:24:57.620 pay voters. It's the oldest idea under the sun. We'll get to all of that in a second. But first,

00:25:02.380 you've got to go to dailywire.com. $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership. What do you get?

00:25:06.820 You get me. You get the Andrew Klavan show. You get the Ben Shapiro show. You get the Matt

00:25:10.200 Walsh show. You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday. You get to ask questions

00:25:14.900 backstage. You get another kingdom. You get everything. And you get, most importantly,

00:25:19.520 the leftist tears tumbler, which is the only environmental catastrophe that you really

00:25:23.740 have to fear. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:25:37.340 The left is totally amping up its rhetoric on climate change. That's the old euphemism. Now

00:25:43.660 they're calling it something different. And it's no accident. You know, we went from, in the 70s,

00:25:47.720 global cooling to then in the 80s and 90s, global warming to then in the 2000s, climate change to

00:25:54.400 then in the 20 teens, climate crisis. Now they're calling it climate catastrophe. That's what they're

00:25:59.280 saying on presidential town halls on CNN. So a major environmental activist, Jonathan Safran Foer,

00:26:06.480 who is also a novelist, he was on MSNBC and he openly invoked the imagery of World War II in the

00:26:13.620 Battle Against the Sun Monster, climate change, climate catastrophe, to describe how we need to

00:26:19.100 mobilize and unite to fight this awful foe. Here he is. Acting on one's values can feel really good.

00:26:26.000 You know, it can feel inspiring. No, I'm with you. I agree with you. I think we probably shouldn't use

00:26:29.960 the word sacrifice in this context because if you don't act on your values, you don't feel good.

00:26:35.020 And the consequence could be the wrecking of the earth. Absolutely. And there's a good model for this

00:26:39.220 in World War II, the home front efforts that regular Americans made regardless of their political

00:26:44.960 leanings or their socioeconomic backgrounds. Driving at 35 miles per hour, we had a 94% income tax,

00:26:51.800 highest rate income tax. We had rations on foods. And in a really wonderful fireside chat that I could

00:26:57.220 never imagine our president giving, but FDR gave at the time, he said, look, not all of us have the

00:27:02.840 privilege of fighting on the other side of the ocean against the enemy. Not all of us have the privilege

00:27:06.700 of producing munitions, but we can all participate on the home front. And when we look back at the

00:27:12.780 changes that we've made during this period, after we have saved our free way of life, sacrifice is not

00:27:17.940 the word we're going to use. And I think it's the same thing here. When we look back or when our kids...

00:27:22.140 It's a contribution.

00:27:24.160 So this is it. This is World War II. Here we are. And he's not the first one to do this. Just a few months ago,

00:27:29.980 AOC, the future of the Democratic Party, according to Tom Perez, the head of the DNC,

00:27:34.860 compared climate change to World War II as well. Here she is in a talk with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

00:27:40.300 I think that the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people and, you know,

00:27:47.700 Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like, the world is going to

00:27:54.340 end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. And your biggest issue is...

00:27:59.420 Your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it? And like, this is the war. This is our World

00:28:09.120 War II.

00:28:10.400 This is it. This is our world. This is like our World War II, you know, like it's just like what

00:28:15.480 it is. They think this is a novel idea. They think this is a new strategy. Joshua Safran,

00:28:21.100 or Jonathan Safran Foer and AOC. They think this is a new idea. This is what we're going to do.

00:28:25.280 We're going to compare our domestic policy agenda to a war. And that way we'll get all 1.00

00:28:30.700 this unity. It's not a new idea. It's an old idea and it's a very bad idea. And it's

00:28:34.760 certainly doomed to fail because it's never actually worked. This idea of comparing your

00:28:40.300 domestic policy agenda to a war goes all the way back to an essay by the philosopher and

00:28:45.560 psychologist William James. And the essay is called The Moral Equivalent of War. It's worth reading.

00:28:50.780 The essay addresses how to sustain the political unity and civic virtue characteristic of war

00:28:57.060 during times of peace. So the idea is, you've heard this before, why can't America be as

00:29:02.560 united as they were, as we all were after 9-11? Why can't America go back to being so united

00:29:08.440 like we were during World War II? How do we get that back? So the theory is that you get that back

00:29:15.800 by injecting regular old domestic politics with a heavy dose of militarism. And this idea has been

00:29:23.020 embraced by a whole slew of people, but especially by modernists and leftists for over a century. So

00:29:29.800 Mussolini did this. He did this very directly. This isn't some kind of crazy conspiracy theory here.

00:29:34.680 He gave a speech called the Battle of the Grains speech in which he explicitly invoked William James,

00:29:39.300 in which he invoked this essay, The Moral Equivalent of War. LBJ did this in our own country in the

00:29:45.100 War on Poverty. Richard Nixon did this, who, by the way, Richard Nixon pre-left on his domestic

00:29:50.240 policy. He did this with his War on Drugs. He declared the War on Drugs. Jimmy Carter did this.

00:29:55.500 He gave actually a speech called The Moral Equivalent of War, which was directly based on

00:29:59.380 the William James essay. And he did that on the energy crisis. We need to rally and unite and

00:30:03.860 get all of our civic virtue back to address the energy crisis just like we would in war.

00:30:08.540 And conservatives tend to make fun of this kind of language because it's hysterical and

00:30:13.420 ridiculous. To hear AOC compare recycling and using those stupid paper straws instead of plastic

00:30:19.540 straws, to compare that to landing on the beaches in Normandy is a little ridiculous. This is not a

00:30:24.480 World War II. This is us inventing problems because we're too decadent and luxurious. So we make fun of

00:30:29.560 it. You know, Ronald Reagan joked, he said, we fought a war on poverty and poverty won, which is true.

00:30:35.560 We fought a war on poverty, made things worse. We ended up spending a ton of money, didn't make

00:30:39.380 anything better. And in many ways it harmed the people that it was intended to help.

00:30:44.880 What does it mean about the language of war? Everybody uses war as a matter of rhetoric. I

00:30:49.820 mean, we use war as a synonym for civil battle or fights or debates. Obviously we talk about the

00:30:54.660 culture war. That's very different. That's a figure of speech to refer to some debate with the hyperbolic

00:31:02.000 and heightened language of war. That is a figure of speech. The culture war, when we use that phrase,

00:31:06.960 describes political divisions in the country. What the left does with their war rhetoric is

00:31:12.900 actually the opposite. They're not trying to talk about divisions in the country. They want to

00:31:17.760 fabricate an actual equivalent to war so that the whole country is unified behind certain radical

00:31:24.340 domestic policies. That is not going to work in the long run. Why not? Because there is no actual

00:31:33.020 equivalent of war. Drinking your plastic straws is not like landing on the beaches of Normandy. It's

00:31:39.300 not the same. We know that the sun monster is not as big a threat as Al-Qaeda terrorists who knocked 0.80

00:31:45.280 down our buildings and killed 3,000 Americans. We know that the sun monster and the temperature

00:31:50.580 increasing possibly, possibly by one degree over a hundred years isn't the same as the Nazis invading,

00:31:58.180 isn't the same as the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. It's just not the same. We all know that.

00:32:05.040 And even if it were though, think about this. They're calling for the moral equivalent of war.

00:32:10.420 They've been calling to use this World War II militaristic language for a long time now.

00:32:15.400 Even if there were a way to do it, if you are the one who's really eager for war and to create the 0.59

00:32:21.480 sense of war and the sacrifice of war and the feeling of war, if you are encouraging war,

00:32:26.440 you're probably on the wrong side of that equation, aren't you? You're probably on the wrong side of

00:32:30.840 that question. Maybe you've got to rethink that. If you're saying, we need to be, we need to feel

00:32:35.300 like we're in a war all the time. Maybe what you're selling isn't what we need as a society.

00:32:40.840 I'm not eager for war. I like peace. Peace is really nice. It's so ironic that the left accuses

00:32:45.880 the right of being warmongers because we like a big, strong military. But we want a big, strong

00:32:50.520 military because the only way you can have peace is to be prepared for war. You have peace through

00:32:54.720 strength. A strong military is a good deterrent for war. Whereas a weak military is welcoming a war.

00:33:03.060 It's encouraging a war. It's daring your opponents and your enemies to come attack you. So they call

00:33:09.300 us warmongers because we want peace. Whereas they pretend that they want peace and all they ever do

00:33:14.060 is clamor for war and the feeling of war. Bad idea. And they're doing it around climate change

00:33:19.220 because this is the sort of central religious issue for the left. In the fall of the Soviet Union,

00:33:24.780 after the advance of secularism, what took the place of communism and socialism in the

00:33:31.300 left-wing religious imagination, what took the place of traditional religion, Christianity,

00:33:36.740 is environmentalism increasingly. And so I think that the war language is really weak for them,

00:33:43.500 but the religious language is really good. And we just found out New York City, I'm broadcasting

00:33:47.620 from New York right now. They announced that 1.1 million public school students are allowed to

00:33:53.760 skip class without penalty to join the global youth climate strikes on Friday. This is being reported by

00:34:00.340 a lot of people, including the New York Times. 1.1 million public school kids get the day off

00:34:05.720 to go to a climate change rally. Now, people are shocked by this. I'm not shocked at all. I think this

00:34:14.640 makes perfect sense. The New York City school kids get off for Christmas. They get off for Hanukkah. 0.75

00:34:19.440 They get off for the Christian holidays and the Jewish holidays. Of course, they should get off for the 0.99

00:34:23.140 leftist holidays because leftism is a much more popular religion in New York City, at least among the

00:34:28.980 elites and the people making these decisions, as Christianity or Judaism or anything else.

00:34:34.820 It's a religious holiday. It's not a protest. This climate change rally is not a political protest.

00:34:40.120 The rally is being organized by the government. It's being organized by the mayor's office and by

00:34:45.080 the public schools. So who are they protesting? They're not protesting anybody. What they are doing

00:34:50.000 is putting on a religious ritual where they're taking off from school and they're going out and

00:34:56.120 they're doing oblations and they're trying to stave off the sun monster and to appease the weather gods

00:35:01.640 and to signal their virtue and to signal to everyone around them that they are good and moral and upright

00:35:07.720 in religious people, even in a world that laughs at actual religion. It makes perfect sense to me.

00:35:13.900 That is going to be more successful for the left in the long term. It's too bad because everybody's

00:35:19.240 got to serve somebody. And so what I would rather the left do is actually come back to real religion

00:35:22.940 and worship God. But I don't know that that's going to happen anytime soon absent a miracle.

00:35:27.680 So instead what they're going to do is get more and more pulled into the religion of leftism,

00:35:32.720 the religion of climate change. Totally unfalsifiable. It's sad too that they need to

00:35:40.460 exploit kids this way. Look, I'm pretty conservative. I mean, I was born basically

00:35:44.740 smoking a cigar and campaigning for like Bob Dole in my first grade classroom. But if you told me that

00:35:50.520 I could get a day off from school to go out there and wear a hippie bandana and protest the sun monster,

00:35:55.600 sign me up, man. You just met your biggest environmental activist in the world. I'll even drink through

00:36:00.380 paper straws that day if it got me off of school. And so I bet a lot of kids are going to take them

00:36:04.700 up on this opportunity. That's pathetic though. I mean, that is a sign of true demagogues to have to

00:36:10.660 exploit children this way. The left does it all the time. Doesn't make it any less pathetic, but it's 1.00

00:36:15.380 an old idea and it's going to be fairly effective. Conservatives need to find a way to fight back and

00:36:22.340 you're not going to fight back on just little political points. Andrew Breitbart was right.

00:36:26.700 Politics is down from culture. Culture is down from religion. We need to speak.

00:36:30.380 In as compelling a religious way as the left is doing with their false religion and their false

00:36:34.900 religion of materialism. Now, speaking of old ideas that people are pretending are new again,

00:36:40.360 Andrew Yang, Andrew Yang, the wackiest candidate, Andrew Yang came out and offered people a thousand

00:36:49.740 dollars. If they donate to his campaign, they have a chance of winning a thousand dollars a month for

00:36:54.060 a year to show them how great his universal basic income plan is. Here's Andrew Yang at the

00:37:00.220 debate promising the plan. My campaign will now give a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for an

00:37:05.840 entire year to 10 American families. Someone watching this at home right now. If you believe

00:37:11.700 that you can solve your own problems better than any politician, go to yang2020.com and tell us how

00:37:16.940 $1,000 a month will help you do just that. This is how we will get our country working for us again,

00:37:23.160 the American people. What's amazing is after Yang said this, Pete Buttigieg was on the stage and he sort of

00:37:29.000 laughed and he said, it's original. That's an original plan. It's not an original plan. What

00:37:34.260 Yang is saying is, Hey, if you support me, I'll give you money. Hey, can you, can I buy your vote?

00:37:40.020 That's not a new plan. That's the oldest plan in politics. That has been a plan in politics since

00:37:44.660 the first caveman was running for mayor of the cave city. And it looks like it may be illegal.

00:37:50.700 I was wondering when I watched the debate, I thought there's no way this is legal. How are you allowed to

00:37:54.600 take campaign donations and then just give it away to bribe people to vote for you? So now,

00:37:59.360 because the Yang campaign has said that they've checked with lawyers and it's totally kosher and

00:38:04.140 it's absolutely fine. There is now a former FEC lawyer who is a top litigator with the non-profit

00:38:10.540 campaign legal center. His name is Adav Nody. He's saying, not looking so good. Direct quote to CNN.

00:38:16.620 Although it's hard to say with 100% certainty until we know the details of the payouts,

00:38:21.620 on its face, Yang's proposal to use campaign money to help pay the day-to-day expenses of

00:38:27.340 selected people appears to violate the law. Yeah. Gee, you don't say. He says the fact that

00:38:32.440 the payments happen to be consistent with Yang's campaign platform is irrelevant. An anti-tax

00:38:39.140 candidate couldn't use campaign money to pay people's taxes and a pro-income candidate can't

00:38:45.400 use campaign money to give people cash. Of course not. And this is my big issue with

00:38:51.460 Andrew Yang. He seems like a perfectly nice guy, I guess. His campaign is the wrongest campaign in

00:38:58.040 the entire democratic field. And there are some wackos. You've got the furry, you've got Liawatha, 0.99

00:39:03.640 you've got Joe Biden beating up old corn pops with a six foot long metal chain. You've got a lot of

00:39:10.180 weirdos. You've got Bernie Sanders singing shirtless in the Soviet Union during his honeymoon. I mean,

00:39:14.940 you've got some wacky people in there. And yet Andrew Yang, who has mostly ironically,

00:39:20.200 but somewhat earnestly attracted the support of some conservatives. He is still the wrongest

00:39:25.220 candidate in the whole race because what he's essentially doing is bribing people. He's corrupting

00:39:30.700 the system in a way that the founders of our country really feared, which is that he's purchasing

00:39:36.220 votes. He's trying to bribe the people with their own money. He's trying to turn the government into a

00:39:42.040 slush fund for people. And not just that. It's not even just the money because there's always

00:39:46.140 corruption in government. He's undermining the dignity of the person, human dignity, by saying

00:39:52.640 he's predicting that automation is going to destroy all the jobs. I don't think there's really

00:39:58.640 evidence for that. We're at the lowest unemployment, record low unemployment right now. So that doesn't

00:40:04.440 even really ring true as a prediction. But let's say the prediction were true. Let's say some great

00:40:09.940 advancement happens with artificial intelligence. And all of a sudden, you've got very high unemployment

00:40:14.100 rates. Andrew Yank says the answer is to basically bribe people, bribe them to go away. Here's some

00:40:19.720 money. Go play video games or do drugs or kill yourself, whatever you got to do. But just don't

00:40:24.180 bother me because we're going to be over here in Silicon Valley making a lot of money. That is not

00:40:28.360 a serious answer. The charitable read of that is that he's simply naive and uninterested in people.

00:40:35.340 The more cynical read or perhaps the more realistic read, depending on how you look at the guy,

00:40:40.020 is that he just wants to live his own life, to help the elites, to help the go-getters,

00:40:48.660 to help the people at the top. And he doesn't want the hoi polloi and the proletarians to come out 0.92

00:40:54.080 and overthrow this system. I mean, it's everything wrong with modern capitalism or neoliberalism.

00:41:00.800 Everything wrong about it is in this Yang campaign, right down to the unbelievably corrosive effects,

00:41:06.160 disrespectful effects of purchasing people's vote, perverting our democratic republic.

00:41:13.480 And getting back to the perversions of our democratic republic, it's not just happening

00:41:17.020 in the pop culture with cancel culture. It's not just happening in our government

00:41:20.920 with the democratic presidential campaign. It's happening in our academic institutions too.

00:41:26.420 And this is probably the biggest threat because the academy, the campus, is just a preview of what

00:41:32.500 your country is going to look like. So you look at the campuses, that's what your country is going

00:41:36.360 to look like in 20 years. It happened in the 60s. You had all this craziness on campus. Within 20

00:41:40.940 years, you had tenured radicals who were totally subverting the country. And that's what's happening

00:41:45.640 now. So I bring this up because I'm about to kick off my YAF tour, my Young America's Foundation

00:41:50.380 speaking tour. We just released the dates. It's starting up, I think, September 26th at USC.

00:41:55.960 And then we're going to Yale. We're going to GW. We're going to stop in Ohio and Kentucky and Georgia

00:42:00.300 and Florida. We'll be all over the place. You can check those dates on my Twitter page

00:42:04.180 and on Young America's Foundation. But last semester when I was giving a speech at Cal

00:42:08.880 State Los Angeles, YAF just discovered through leaked internal emails that it wasn't the students

00:42:15.540 who were so crazed with my speech and trying to get me canceled at the academy. It was the

00:42:21.540 faculty members. There was a faculty member, Carlos Tejada. This is what he said. He said that

00:42:26.300 I triggered him emotionally and physically. How did I trigger him physically? Couldn't

00:42:31.180 possibly tell you. He writes a letter to the whole faculty and staff. Dear faculty and staff

00:42:36.060 is a faculty member who was emotionally and physically triggered by last week's free speech

00:42:40.800 attack on our campus. Yada, yada, yada. He goes on and on. He's not a very good writer,

00:42:47.640 so he's very wordy. He says, how can we communicate to you who have been entrusted with the well-being

00:42:54.920 of our students? That this poses a threat to the mental well-being of many of our students,

00:42:59.860 staff, and faculty. That it violates their sense of safety on their campus. This is campus

00:43:05.060 cancel culture. This is cancel culture brought to institutions of higher learning, which is

00:43:10.920 terrible. If you cancel ideas in the university, then there is truly no reason for the university

00:43:18.000 to exist. And that's exactly what they want to do. I mean, this guy said it was an outright attack.

00:43:23.120 My speech. I gave a speech on how nations should have immigration laws. That was the whole speech.

00:43:28.440 He said it was an outright attack on the psyches and well-being of more than a few students, faculty,

00:43:33.380 and staff. An outright attack, and that's why it's got to be banned. That's why it's got to be

00:43:39.260 canceled. I nearly had to cancel class because of how shaken I am about seeing a build-the-wall

00:43:44.340 banner on our campus. If you are so mentally weak, like this professor Carlos Tejada obviously is,

00:43:49.440 that you cannot handle hearing an opposing view, much less the view that nations should have

00:43:55.700 immigration laws, which is the entire thesis of my talk. If you can't handle that, you shouldn't be 1.00

00:44:00.500 teaching. You should be canceled. You should have your job canceled. It's unbelievable because I'm

00:44:06.460 paying this guy's salary as an LA resident. They go on. There were so many more of these. They referred

00:44:11.740 to the Young America's Foundation as white supremacist. They referred to me as a racist and a racist

00:44:17.800 person. He said it's a blatantly racist message for saying that a nation should have immigration

00:44:22.700 laws. It goes on and on. I don't know. Obviously, this guy's not getting a lot of work done,

00:44:26.700 and the other professors who are with him aren't getting a whole lot of work done because they're

00:44:30.920 just spending all their time trying to get conservatives banned from campus, yelling at

00:44:34.860 the administration for not banning us. What it forces is the uncomfortable conclusion that we can't

00:44:42.200 just let this go and see where the chips fall. We have to cancel cancel culture, which is an act of

00:44:49.900 the will. It is a very specific act. How do we do this? GK Chesterton wrote about it pretty well. He

00:44:56.840 said, there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

00:45:03.180 You have to stop that. You can't just wait and hope it turns out for the best. You have to actively

00:45:07.600 cancel culture. You've got to cancel the cancelers, whether they're on college campuses, especially if

00:45:14.320 they're on college campuses, or whether they're in politics, or whether they're in the pop culture,

00:45:19.520 writing about and hiring people for television shows. You've got to cancel the cancelers. This

00:45:24.340 problem won't fix itself on its own. We've got to do it. That's going to take some moral clarity,

00:45:29.820 some cultural clarity, and some political will. Unfortunately, we're lacking in a lot of that

00:45:34.360 these days, but that is the only way that we're going to fix the culture. That's our show. Come

00:45:37.780 back tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. See you then.

00:45:46.680 If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.

00:45:51.960 And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends

00:45:56.300 to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

00:46:01.880 Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,

00:46:07.240 The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.

00:46:09.740 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.

00:46:14.380 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer

00:46:19.240 is Mathis Glover. And our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Assistant director, Pavel Wydowski.

00:46:25.740 Edited by Danny D'Amico. Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:46:31.340 And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:46:36.520 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

00:46:39.200 Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:46:42.540 Cancel culture. It doesn't just destroy people's dreams, people's lives. It's an offense against

00:46:48.100 everything that makes this country great. That's what it's supposed to be.

00:46:51.620 What the left really wants to cancel is America. We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:46:55.900 I'm Andrew Klavan.

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The Michael Knowles Show - September 17, 2019

Ep. 416 - Comedy Is Canceled

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