Ep. 448 - The Iron Curtain Between Left and Right
Summary
Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, destroying Soviet communism and vindicating the conservative Reagan revolution. But that great victory for freedom created a big problem for the conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and the religious right, who made up the post-war conservative movement.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Did you know that over 85% of grass-fed beef sold in U.S. grocery stores is imported?
00:00:05.260
That's why I buy all my meat from GoodRanchers.com instead.
00:00:08.900
Good Ranchers products are 100% born, raised, and harvested right here in the USA from local family farms.
00:00:14.600
Plus, there's no antibiotics ever, no added hormones, and no seed oils.
00:00:21.280
Best of all, Good Ranchers delivers straight to your door for added convenience.
00:00:24.760
So lock in a secure supply of American meat today.
00:00:26.980
Subscribe now at GoodRanchers.com and get free meat for life and $40 off with code DAILYWIRE.
00:00:32.420
That's $40 off and free meat for life with code DAILYWIRE.
00:00:37.760
30 years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, destroying Soviet communism and vindicating the conservative Reagan revolution.
00:00:45.620
But that great victory for freedom created a big problem for the conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, religious right,
00:00:52.240
everybody who made up the post-war conservative movement.
00:00:59.360
Then, Elizabeth Warren picks up an endorsement from the backbone of our democracy, she says.
00:01:06.300
The good guys get a win in the war on Christmas, and leftists try to save a convicted murderer and rapist from execution.
00:01:14.940
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:16.620
The Berlin Wall fell down 30 years ago, almost to the day.
00:01:29.140
The Berlin Wall existed, stood from 1961 up until November 9th, 1989.
00:01:38.580
I've noticed a lot of people haven't really been commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was the most significant moment in most people's lifetime, most people who were alive today.
00:01:50.140
I guess I was alive today, but I was still in the womb.
00:01:54.700
I was just like a completely dead, inorganic clump of cells or something.
00:02:03.320
It was an event that was inaugurated by Winston Churchill.
00:02:09.600
He announced this metaphorical Iron Curtain much earlier, in 1946, at Westminster College in Missouri, in America.
00:02:21.960
And in this speech, we see the very beginning of what we would have called the modern conservative movement.
00:02:27.960
Ladies and gentlemen, this is no time for generality.
00:02:34.800
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.
00:02:45.780
Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future.
00:02:54.840
From Stettine, in the Baltic, to Trieste, in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
00:03:04.620
Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
00:03:12.520
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.
00:03:34.420
Well, I think, actually, a lot of people, when they think of that speech, one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century,
00:03:40.500
they think of it as referring explicitly to the Berlin Wall, because the Berlin Wall was such an image of communist oppression.
00:03:47.700
But the Berlin Wall wasn't built for 15 years until after that speech.
00:03:52.500
The Iron Curtain was this sphere of Soviet influence.
00:03:55.060
Actually, the phrase Iron Curtain wasn't Churchill's own phrase.
00:03:58.940
He borrowed it from Joseph Goebbels, from the Nazi Joseph Goebbels,
00:04:03.440
who had, I think, was the first person to describe Soviet influence as an Iron Curtain.
00:04:13.060
And it was very bizarre for Americans to hear this, because we had been told throughout the whole war that the Soviet Union was our friend.
00:04:22.420
And now we hear that he's imprisoning half the world behind an Iron Curtain.
00:04:27.340
What this did, what the Iron Curtain did, the end of the Second World War and the advance of Soviet communism,
00:04:34.420
was it forged what would have been called the conservative movement.
00:04:38.600
And we are now in a moment where we're trying to figure out what the conservative movement means.
00:04:45.700
Fusionism was developed by William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review and Frank Meyer, an editor at National Review.
00:04:53.280
And fusionism made perfect sense during the Cold War.
00:04:58.300
What fusionism did is it brought together libertarians and traditionalists and the religious right and social conservatives,
00:05:06.060
brought all these people together with a common enemy, Soviet communism.
00:05:11.040
Now, what did the libertarians have to say about the Soviet Union?
00:05:16.220
Libertarians and the classical liberals hated communism because it was collectivistic.
00:05:22.620
So you had this kind of individualist economics versus collectivist economics.
00:05:27.240
Then why would the traditionalists and the religious right and social conservatives hate the Soviet Union?
00:05:34.880
So you had theism, Christian civilization versus the atheist Soviet Union.
00:05:41.400
And therefore, the libertarians, the economic individualists, and the social conservatives and the traditionalists come together in this fusionist body brought together mostly by Bill Buckley.
00:05:53.660
Secondly, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, those groups did not have much in common.
00:06:00.480
What was amazing about the fall of the Berlin Wall is it basically vindicated the whole fusionist coalition because it worked.
00:06:09.680
We had been told since the early 20th century from the New York Times and the Evening Post and all these leftists that the Soviet Union was the future.
00:06:18.840
I mean, they said, I've seen the future and it works.
00:06:22.140
That was Lincoln Steffens, the journalist, referring to Soviet communism.
00:06:26.460
And then Bill Buckley famously said, a conservative stands athwart history yelling stop because you might have the future, you might have seen the future in the Soviet Union, but we're going to stop it.
00:06:38.900
I mean, the huge advance of conservatism in America brought to the pinnacle under Ronald Reagan, who was probably the only man in America who knew that the Berlin Wall was going to come a-tumbling down.
00:06:49.480
I spoke to Peter Robinson, who's the host of Uncommon Knowledge on the Hoover Institution and who wrote the famous tear-down-this-wall speech.
00:07:07.480
Well, Mr. Gorbachev, because he knew that communism was doomed.
00:07:12.720
And while all the smart people in suits and ties in America said we had to come to some sort of understanding with those slave masters in the Soviet Union, Reagan said absolutely not.
00:07:21.780
And that fusionist conservative coalition ultimately won.
00:07:25.460
I think it was Charles Krauthammer who said the most shocking event of his life was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
00:07:30.200
And it was shocking to a very many people, but not to Ronald Reagan, because he knew that that thing was going to tumble down.
00:07:37.160
And yet, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conservative coalition had no reason to stay together anymore, which brings us to where we're going now, because we're in a fraught moment for the conservative worldview.
00:07:50.960
Speaking of fraught moments and dangers, let's thank our friends over at ExpressVPN.
00:07:55.920
Let me give you an idea on how many people want to steal your data, how vulnerable your data are.
00:08:01.580
Recently, over 100 million people had their personal information stolen in a major data breach.
00:08:08.180
That means social security numbers, means contact info, credit scores, all of that.
00:08:15.960
There is a very good chance that you were affected by this.
00:08:18.600
These kinds of attacks are getting more frequent and more severe, which is why I highly recommend and feel so comfortable using ExpressVPN.
00:08:27.440
You can't control how big corporations are going to mishandle your data, but you can protect yourself.
00:08:35.140
ExpressVPN is an app for your computer and phone that encrypts and secures your data.
00:08:39.920
If a breach can happen to Capital One, it can happen to you, okay?
00:08:43.480
I know you think that you're immune because, you know, you took an HTML class in the 90s, but you're not, okay?
00:08:49.800
If they can get into Capital One, they can get into your computer, too.
00:08:52.860
I would say never, ever, ever go online without ExpressVPN.
00:08:58.480
That's if you care about your privacy and your safety, okay?
00:09:05.320
It costs less than seven bucks a month, which is nothing.
00:09:08.540
ExpressVPN is the number one rated VPN provider by TechRadar, CNET, The Verge, countless others.
00:09:15.840
If you are listening to this program, chances are you check out some pretty weird stuff on the internet, all right?
00:09:21.640
Talking about that incognito window, some pretty weird stuff.
00:09:35.040
I mean, you could really have some serious consequences.
00:09:37.660
Use my special link, expressvpn.com slash Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L.
00:09:42.480
Right now, you can arm yourself with an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.
00:09:49.660
Expressvpn.com slash Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L, for an extra three months free.
00:09:54.980
So the Berlin Wall falls, great victory of conservatism, and now the question is, what does it mean to be a conservative?
00:10:14.320
He's one of the greatest men in recent American history.
00:10:17.040
It's not coming back because communism is no longer seen to pose an existential threat.
00:10:21.380
I mean, you see this all around you anecdotally, and you see it in polls.
00:10:26.460
There was a poll from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
00:10:31.820
It showed that communism is viewed favorably by more than one in three millennials.
00:10:37.020
And millennials are people now who are late 20s, early 30s.
00:10:43.340
Only 57% of Gen Z, that's the generation after us,
00:10:48.020
and only 62% of millennials believe that China is a communist country and not a democratic country.
00:10:57.780
You know, I meet a lot of the Zoomers, a lot of Gen Z when I go to my speeches, and they're great.
00:11:04.620
But those are just the ones that show up and tune in to conservative speeches on college campuses.
00:11:10.140
The majority of them, the trend is not looking great.
00:11:13.480
Now, if you've got these kind of numbers, I mean, even if you look at still with millennials,
00:11:20.900
57% of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto does.
00:11:34.760
Let's compare to 94% of the World War II generation believes that the Declaration of Independence
00:11:39.700
is a better way to protect freedom than the Communist Manifesto, which is just obviously true.
00:11:51.220
K through 12, and then into college, and so many millennials are going to college, getting saddled with debt,
00:12:00.420
and they're being indoctrinated into hating their own country and to unlearning their own history.
00:12:05.580
An ISI study, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found that, and this was an older study from 2007,
00:12:12.040
found that at elite colleges in the country, graduating seniors knew less about their government
00:12:17.380
and their history and their politics than incoming freshmen.
00:12:20.520
They were actually becoming more ignorant during college.
00:12:25.780
Part of it is the ignorance comes from the fact that these millennials and Gen Z
00:12:34.900
I was in the womb when the Berlin Wall fell down, and I'm a millennial.
00:12:47.080
I mean, they just haven't seen, certainly they haven't seen the historical problems of communism.
00:12:54.420
So they just didn't see it, and naturally it's not going to be at the top of their mind.
00:12:57.760
Those are two reasons, and we can blame that on the left,
00:13:02.120
and we can blame that on specifically a failure of education to teach people their own history
00:13:07.260
and to teach people their own civics and political philosophy.
00:13:12.980
The third problem is the tougher one to grapple with,
00:13:19.980
And conservatives, if we want to address this challenge,
00:13:22.600
we need to be able to see reality for what it is.
00:13:30.560
There are many, many failings of what we would call the kind of capitalism of the 1980s.
00:13:38.520
It's still a hell of a lot better than socialism.
00:13:40.800
I mean, I'm not saying we need to go over to AOC.
00:13:45.800
But there have been problems caused by a very specific type of political philosophy
00:13:51.540
and economic philosophy that we've embraced more or less as a consensus.
00:13:56.540
We're told, we're told that we've never had it so good.
00:14:07.940
However, anxiety, stress, depression, suicidality are all through the roof.
00:14:15.740
Among teenagers, suicide is up 70% in recent years.
00:14:28.040
Now, what the left and the socialists and AOC would say is,
00:14:31.360
see, our economic system is hopelessly rotten and we've got to overhaul it
00:14:36.960
and steal everybody's wealth and then that'll make us all happier.
00:14:39.480
Of course, that's not going to make us happy at all.
00:14:41.080
Well, money can't buy happiness, which is a lesson that the left and the socialists haven't learned.
00:14:48.620
And so the problem of our politics and our culture is very likely not exactly economic.
00:14:55.040
If everything's so good, if we've never had it any better than this,
00:15:15.500
This is a cultural problem that the right has failed to address in large part, I think,
00:15:23.620
because we so prioritize the hyper-individualism that was used successfully to defeat Soviet communism.
00:15:34.520
In 1950, do you know what the median age was for getting married?
00:15:39.880
In 1950, the median age to get married for a man, 22 years old.
00:15:47.240
That was when you could expect to get married in 1950 if you were a man.
00:15:54.960
In 2010, the median age to get married for a man, 28 years old.
00:16:02.880
The median age to get married for a woman, 26 years old.
00:16:11.380
And the numbers can't just be accounted for with something simple like college attendance rates.
00:16:17.440
They partake in real political and cultural problems that the right is debating right now.
00:16:22.500
First, I've got to thank our friends at Bowlin Branch because I am not single.
00:16:30.080
And I want to make sure that my little honey has the finest sheets in the world.
00:16:33.280
Everything Bowlin Branch makes from bedding to blankets is made from pure 100% organic cotton.
00:16:38.780
That means that they start out super soft and they get even softer over time.
00:16:43.640
Buying directly from them, no middleman, you are essentially paying wholesale prices.
00:16:47.100
You know, sweet little Elisa, my wife, is pretty easygoing.
00:16:54.760
The one place that she likes to be fancy is on hotels.
00:16:58.700
Me, I could sleep at some rat-infested, you know, cockroach-ridden place off the side of the highway.
00:17:04.760
Sweet little Elisa has very fine taste in hotels.
00:17:06.740
So, I love that I can give her five-star hotel quality sheets on our own bed, especially because I don't have to pay that much for them.
00:17:15.600
I learned luxury sheets can cost up to $1,000 in the store.
00:17:18.600
Bowlin Branch sheets are only a couple hundred bucks.
00:17:23.640
Everyone who tries Bowlin Branch sheets loves them.
00:17:29.240
That's why they have thousands of five-star reviews.
00:17:34.560
I mean, I've slept on cheap sheets for most of my life.
00:17:41.700
And if you spend, the average person spends a third of their life sleeping.
00:17:44.780
If you're me, it's like closer to two-thirds of your life.
00:17:50.040
If you don't love them, send them back for a refund.
00:17:55.900
To get started right now, I'm going to give you a little gift.
00:17:59.560
This is my gift to you to help solve the loneliness crisis in America.
00:18:03.180
To make sure that you can try to come together and have a good, respectable life on good, nice sheets.
00:18:09.600
That's what I'm giving you at BowlinBranch.com.
00:18:14.380
BowlinBranch.com for $50 off your first set of sheets.
00:18:25.180
So, people, even as things materially are so great, are anxious, stressed, depressed, lonely.
00:18:39.380
And when you ask people why they're not getting married, whether it's on a survey or just anecdotally,
00:18:43.160
because I talk to a lot of young people, especially on college campuses,
00:18:46.320
they'll tell you the reason they're not getting married is they're saddled with debt.
00:18:51.120
You know, in 1940, I think it was about 5% of Americans graduated from a four-year college.
00:18:56.900
Now, 60% of high school graduates anticipate, expect to go to a four-year college.
00:19:01.820
Many of them are not going to graduate, but that's a huge increase.
00:19:05.480
Do all of those people need to go and get a liberal education?
00:19:11.300
For many of them, they won't get a liberal education anyway.
00:19:16.320
They'll put themselves in a much worse position than they could be.
00:19:23.720
I want to pay off my debt before I get married.
00:19:25.760
Other people will say that they don't want to get married just yet because
00:19:29.540
they were raised without a vision of a transcendent moral order.
00:19:35.020
I mean, we all grew up in this kind of environment.
00:19:37.340
And so you grow up and you say, why would I get married when I can just hook up all the time
00:19:41.700
and go to bars and be single and have fun and do whatever I want and not be accountable to anybody?
00:19:47.340
The secret of this is marriage is much more satisfying and gratifying.
00:19:53.640
You just have to experience it before you believe it.
00:19:56.080
I know that because people told me that and I didn't believe it at all either.
00:20:00.440
I mean, that's the dirty little trick of the temptation of staying single
00:20:02.920
and just satisfying your own desires and appetites and not being accountable.
00:20:07.240
But for a whole generation or now two generations that was raised without any real solid sense of a moral order,
00:20:14.220
they're just not going to feel any compulsion to do it.
00:20:20.680
That's the me, me, me society that we're living in, particularly exacerbated by social media
00:20:25.940
and the fact that we're all the little celebrity in our own heads.
00:20:37.900
This is a consequence of a hyper-individualism unbridled from any moral order.
00:20:45.620
This is a consequence of allying with people who don't share our values,
00:20:51.900
though they might be good partners to attack the Soviet Union with.
00:20:59.020
What is the effect of this hyper-individualism removed from the transcendent moral order?
00:21:04.260
What is the effect of the so-called fiscal conservative social liberal,
00:21:08.520
meaning libertarian individualist on economic issues and derelict on social issues?
00:21:15.760
Something that I refer to as greedy leftism, as greedy Democrats.
00:21:20.160
One effect of that is right now, in cities around the country, and I think especially in Los Angeles,
00:21:27.800
some young people are paying $800 a month to live in cages.
00:21:40.060
And there's actually a silver lining to this story.
00:21:43.760
In any case, people are paying $800 a month to live in what amounts basically to cages,
00:21:50.520
to pods, in a response to a political consensus that no longer makes much sense.
00:21:56.680
There is a community for young people in cities across the country now called Upstart.
00:22:02.380
It's for young artists and people who aren't making a whole lot of money,
00:22:07.140
Now, what people used to do is, you know, go in with some friends and live in apartments with a lot of roommates.
00:22:15.380
My two very good buddies of mine and I lived in this very tiny apartment.
00:22:20.440
I think my bedroom was about 70 square feet with no windows, and one wall was fake.
00:22:25.640
But, you know, at least they were kind of pals of mine, and we just all decided to go live together.
00:22:29.060
Now, what people are doing is they're just renting their own individual pods.
00:22:36.160
Like, you climb up into a little box, and that's where you sleep.
00:22:39.660
Each room contains up to six capsules, which the people who live there describe as cozy.
00:22:46.700
And it's a single bed, a bar for hanging clothes, a few compartments for shoes and other items, and an air vent.
00:22:54.680
And it's still, you're still paying about $800 a month for this.
00:22:59.060
Is that the vision of life that we want to live in?
00:23:03.360
I mean, that is a dystopian horror movie version of what a hyper-individualistic, isolating society is going to look like,
00:23:14.020
where you all just pay a lot of money, and you climb up, and you live in your pod,
00:23:17.940
and you check into your pod at night like you're a kind of bug or an animal or something.
00:23:22.000
Then you get out and go work for the man again tomorrow.
00:23:27.380
And this also tells us something about the political problem.
00:23:30.500
Upstart has the good central location, modern building, and it's got a gym and dance classes and a recording studio and an arts workshop and cleaning and laundry.
00:23:39.340
And one of the rules here is that men and women have to sleep apart, and they're not allowed to get frisky with one another.
00:23:50.860
One description of this is that on taco night, you get 50 people who all live in these little individual pods,
00:23:57.940
and they'll come together in one of the four building complexes, communal areas.
00:24:02.680
So the downside of it is you've got this hyper-individualistic kind of dystopian lifestyle.
00:24:09.540
But the upside is trying to reclaim a sense of normality or a sense of a normal order in all of this.
00:24:20.860
In one sense, you're living as isolated as you possibly could be.
00:24:23.540
In another, you've got 50 sort of roommates that maybe you can make friends with.
00:24:27.080
In the one sense, you're extracting yourself from all of your humanity.
00:24:31.300
On the other, you're trying to regain some kind of traditional moral rules because you're not allowed to get frisky in the pods.
00:24:39.540
You're not allowed to completely become an animal.
00:24:44.660
That is something that I think if you asked a thousand people on the street, 999 of them would say,
00:24:52.400
People, even if you're living in Manhattan and your apartments are maybe indistinguishable
00:24:56.920
from that pod, at least there you've got your own apartment.
00:25:00.300
People should have their own apartment, their own house, their own space.
00:25:04.140
They should not live like they're animals or like they're robots.
00:25:08.540
And this hyper-individualistic, all that matters is squeezing, pinching every single penny,
00:25:14.100
no connections to family, no connections to community.
00:25:21.380
And a conservatism that is going to make sense in the future is going to be one
00:25:30.420
The worst product of this political confusion of our times is what we would call identity politics.
00:25:37.960
And I want to be really specific about that term because in a certain sense,
00:25:41.680
all politics is identity politics in the sense that politics is about you and me living together
00:25:48.540
That's politics comes from the polis, the city-state.
00:25:53.520
Now, this kind of works well when identity is rooted in unity,
00:26:01.280
when identity is rooted in subjects of real significance,
00:26:04.360
in shared culture and customs and love of country and ultimately in God.
00:26:10.320
This kind of system becomes absolutely barbaric
00:26:14.400
when the identity politics is rooted in difference,
00:26:17.880
which is really what we mean by identity politics,
00:26:24.440
not a reasonable exchange of ideas and a decision of how to live together in a community.
00:26:29.980
That system creates discord when identity is viewed merely through differences.
00:26:35.960
And the left has gone in this direction for a very long time, for about a century.
00:26:47.840
And it's always ugly and it's always very stupid.
00:26:51.300
Nowhere has this been better exemplified than in Elizabeth Warren latest campaign endorsement announcement
00:27:06.400
but it's women spelled with an X instead of an E,
00:27:11.480
We will get to that endorsement in just a second.
00:27:14.220
We will get to her silly response to that endorsement.
00:27:18.420
We will get to this kind of mindless politics and maybe try to plot a way out of it.
00:27:23.940
We will get to an orangutan who has been declared a person in Florida,
00:27:30.340
And we will get to death row inmate Rodney Reed,
00:27:33.040
who some people are defending because they have no sense of justice.
00:27:36.400
We'll get to all of that and even a little update from the war on Christmas.
00:27:39.780
But first, I've got to say goodbye to our friends at Facebook and YouTube.
00:27:44.200
Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership.
00:27:51.480
You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday.
00:27:55.680
You get Another Kingdom, the third and final and best season.
00:28:09.240
That is just the sheer harmony and unity of a love of country
00:28:12.380
that you can really taste best through Leftist Tears.
00:28:38.080
Trump can pack his bags and she can start measuring the drapes
00:28:41.120
because Liz Warren has received the endorsement of what she describes as
00:28:50.460
A group with 3,000 Twitter followers called Black Womokson 4.
00:28:59.400
Despite pervasive attacks on our communities, our identities, and our lives,
00:29:07.720
Black trans and cis women, femmes, gender non-conforming, and non-binary folk
00:29:13.320
remain at the forefront of each and every social movement to hold this country accountable.
00:29:20.120
We are progressive Black leaders who are not impressed by political theater.
00:29:24.500
We know that big things happen when Black women come together
00:29:28.540
and take our own space in the political process.
00:29:31.900
And though no one person could hold all our aspirations in the hopes for a president,
00:29:37.020
there is one leader who we believe will work with us.
00:29:40.680
Just before we go on and finish, was that last person in a hostage video?
00:29:46.220
The way, at least the first couple performances,
00:29:49.080
although absolutely absurd, ridiculous identity politics,
00:29:55.080
That third one looked like she was being held hostage,
00:29:58.960
We believe that the most inspiring beep, boop, beep, beep, boop.
00:30:03.920
So the endorsement goes on to explain why Liz Warren is the choice.
00:30:13.620
She has a track record of taking on the predatory policies that harm our communities.
00:30:23.320
And we hope to encourage others, especially Black women and gender non-conforming folks,
00:30:48.720
It's not a lot of followers in terms of political accounts.
00:30:54.360
this group has the absolute audacity to pretend to speak for all black women and some black men,
00:31:01.760
because they're saying trans women, which is really just men,
00:31:04.640
and gender non-conforming people, whatever that means.
00:31:10.400
by a conservative estimate, you're talking about 19 million Americans.
00:31:15.860
And you've got a Twitter account of 3,000 people claiming to speak for them,
00:31:20.180
And Elizabeth Warren was happy to take it and go along with the pretense.
00:31:23.320
By the way, Elizabeth Warren has very, very little black support.
00:31:26.800
When you just look at the polling numbers, she's not doing that well.
00:31:30.960
But Joe Biden has much, much higher levels of black support.
00:31:35.400
So Elizabeth Warren goes to this one identity politics group,
00:31:39.100
and they say, oh, no, the black women actually were for Elizabeth Warren.
00:31:42.580
And she plays along with it, because it's politically advantageous to her.
00:31:52.560
Black, trans, and cis women, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people
00:32:04.980
I'm committed to fighting alongside you for the big structural change our country needs.
00:32:11.300
Black, trans, and cis women, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people
00:32:17.220
You might be surprised to hear that if you're a, an Hispanic woman.
00:32:22.600
You're not the backbone of our democracy, according to Elizabeth Warren.
00:32:25.820
Hispanic women, nope, sorry, don't, I, what do they, they're less important to our democracy
00:32:30.940
than black, trans, and cis women, gender non-conforming, non-binary people, according to Elizabeth Warren.
00:32:44.120
Black men, according to Elizabeth Warren, less important to our democracy
00:32:48.620
than black, trans, and cis women, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people.
00:32:56.780
No, because if she thought that, she wouldn't be running for president.
00:33:00.340
She would instead vote for a black, trans, or cis woman, gender non-conforming, or non-binary people.
00:33:06.000
But, identity politics makes people lose their mind, especially on the left, but on the right wing, too.
00:33:12.680
Makes people lose their mind and say very silly and stupid things, such as this.
00:33:17.460
If, if Elizabeth Warren really believed this, the most important people to our democracy were black women,
00:33:22.820
she would drop out of the race and vote for Kamala Harris.
00:33:24.820
She obviously doesn't think that, because, obviously, one's skin color is not the most important aspect of their identity.
00:33:34.620
The, one's competency to be president of the United States is not determined by skin color.
00:33:43.240
And Elizabeth Warren knows that, even though she says she has high cheekbones and is therefore likely Native American.
00:33:47.400
I mean, she's been playing, this woman's been playing the most absurd side of identity politics her entire life.
00:33:54.100
This kind of mindless politics, racial politics especially, is making us all very stupid, and it's making us all very vacuous.
00:34:04.900
What it is doing is removing the contemplative and reasonable aspect from politics,
00:34:10.540
and it is just leaving us with interests and sentiment.
00:34:14.060
And, just basically, brutal people clubbing each other over the heads with their own irreconcilable interests,
00:34:22.240
and gussying it all up with sentiments, saccharine sentimentality, like the backbone of our democracy.
00:34:28.380
I mean, I guarantee you, if a Twitter group called Hispanic Women Four endorsed Elizabeth Warren,
00:34:34.320
she would say that they were the backbone of the democracy.
00:34:39.680
It leaves you with a politics that is incoherent and inhuman.
00:34:45.000
And speaking of an inhuman politics, you see this taking shape especially down in Florida.
00:34:50.560
In Florida, an orangutan named Sandra has now been declared a non-human person by a judge.
00:35:12.560
Talk about identity politics that I want to disavow and remove myself from.
00:35:16.140
This was a ruling based in 2015 that declared that Sandra the orangutan is not legally an animal,
00:35:23.140
but rather a non-human person entitled to some legal rights enjoyed by people and some better living conditions.
00:35:29.840
How on earth did this maniac judge come up with this ruling?
00:35:33.860
With that ruling, I wanted to tell society something new.
00:35:42.420
She just wanted to tell society something new, quote,
00:35:45.240
that animals are sentient beings and that the first right they have is our obligation to respect them.
00:35:50.740
So, I think maybe we need to certainly focus on the care of this Sandra the orangutan.
00:36:00.080
Maybe we need to get better care for this judge, too.
00:36:02.220
She seems to be in dire need of some extra care.
00:36:05.660
So, the orangutan remained at the zoo because they're not going to buy her a house.
00:36:11.540
And then the zoo closed in 2016 and now Sandra the orangutan is in Florida.
00:36:25.340
But it comes from an identity politics that doesn't understand our own identity.
00:36:30.220
We are not primarily to be identified by mad characteristics, including the color of our skin or our profession or our socioeconomic status.
00:36:50.980
The culture, our culture was crafted by Christianity.
00:36:53.680
Our civilization was crafted by Christianity and an understanding of God.
00:36:58.120
In the Old Testament, you see, when Moses asks to God,
00:37:17.560
When an individual or a community or a whole culture and civilization grounds their identity in the ultimate identity,
00:37:26.440
in God himself, that culture, that person, that civilization will see the world a little more clearly,
00:37:33.080
will be able to live in greater harmony, will understand himself and reality much, much better.
00:37:38.280
When society severs that understanding of the ultimate identity in God,
00:37:47.180
when society loses the understanding of I am that I am,
00:37:52.800
then that society is left with a pathetic question, which is, who am I?
00:37:58.100
Like a little child, like a little flower hippie child who leaves home and says,
00:38:03.220
I'm just going to go find myself and does a bunch of drugs or something.
00:38:09.180
And then you ground your identity in ultimately unsatisfying physical things,
00:38:15.520
including skin color or sex or sexual preferences or the amount of money that you have
00:38:22.520
or the job that you have or the neighborhood that you live in or your socioeconomic status
00:38:30.060
Politics grounded on those things will not be the kind of culture that we want to live in.
00:38:35.740
That will be the opposite of a heavenly politics, a politics that grounds our identity in God.
00:38:45.600
In fact, the nearest bit of hope I have on this is bizarrely in the questions being raised
00:38:54.640
I've long predicted that transgenderism would cause a lot of headaches for the left
00:38:58.580
because it pits so many of leftist ideas against one another.
00:39:06.220
It pits feminism, the idea that women are women.
00:39:08.880
There is such a category as women and they get to define womanhood for themselves,
00:39:11.940
against gender theory, which tells men that if they slap some lipstick on and wear a dress,
00:39:18.200
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense together.
00:39:19.920
What transgender ideology begins to ask is actually about the nature of the soul, right?
00:39:27.040
How I can look like a man but secretly be a woman because of some immaterial metaphysical soul
00:39:34.160
is really what they're trying to say, but they can't bring themselves to say it.
00:39:37.140
Now, of course, it's not possible for your soul and your body to be totally opposed to one another.
00:39:41.080
It's not possible for us to live in a society that says that our physical selves have nothing to do
00:39:49.080
I mean, that's actually, that was an idea that was tried a thousand years ago called Albigensianism
00:39:53.300
and we rejected it because it's completely lunatic.
00:39:56.260
But at least they're asking those questions that are shaking us out of this stale,
00:40:01.900
scientific, materialist, secular, individualistic, use whatever terms you want,
00:40:06.260
that stale political consensus that have obviously left people unsatisfied.
00:40:13.440
Actually, we can see it in the war on Christmas.
00:40:17.700
We'll get into it as the season gets a little closer.
00:40:19.660
There's also a war on Advent, which is waged by the people who are actually fighting the war on Christmas.
00:40:26.000
But what I will tell you is there was this whole slew of marketing materials that came in over the past 15 years,
00:40:33.720
really past 20 years, which was renaming Christmas trees into holiday trees,
00:40:38.420
which was taking the word Christmas out of television commercials and out of department stores
00:40:46.520
Lost any imagery that could be associated with Christmas and just became a regular, boring, lame, clinical red cup.
00:40:57.060
You're seeing at least the new Starbucks cups as merry coffee.
00:41:02.140
As far as I'm concerned, until Simeon is depicted on the coffee cup proclaiming the nunc dimittis before the baby Jesus,
00:41:08.280
then we still have a lot of work to do in the war on Christmas.
00:41:10.520
But nevertheless, I'll take the victories that we can get.
00:41:14.320
The culture is calling for something more specific.
00:41:17.960
The culture is calling for something more real, more tangible.
00:41:21.440
Not just this clinical and isolating, lowest common denominator, materialism or secularism.
00:41:30.860
It's leaving people depressed, anxious, living in little pods all by themselves, single, not getting married.
00:41:39.860
And all the left is offering is just another modernist solution.
00:41:44.380
It's just silly versions of Marxism and identity politics.
00:41:49.300
Some people on the right want to basically embrace those ideas.
00:41:52.860
I don't think that's going to do very much for us.
00:41:54.700
I think what we need to do is reclaim our culture.
00:41:58.220
And the way you reclaim the culture is you reclaim the foundation of that culture,
00:42:01.780
which is obviously related to cult, which is in the ultimate identity politics.
00:42:07.720
Before we get to that, but rather, before we're able to completely fix the culture,
00:42:13.820
we should also mention a little something about justice.
00:42:17.740
There is a big story related to criminal justice.
00:42:20.300
That is about the death row inmate, Rodney Reed.
00:42:23.520
Many pop culture stars are trying to get this death row inmate sprung from the slammer.
00:42:30.400
This includes Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, who I suspect at this point has an office in the West Wing.
00:42:35.740
I have to assume she seems to have so much influence
00:42:39.780
when it comes to criminal justice reform in this administration.
00:42:43.640
So they're trying to get this guy sprung from the slammer.
00:42:48.100
And there are so many questions about his guilt.
00:42:53.820
Rodney Reed was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites.
00:42:58.620
This was due in large part to overwhelming DNA evidence showing him or suggesting that he is guilty.
00:43:07.320
He's set to be executed by the state in less than two weeks on November 20th.
00:43:17.260
He claims he did not murder Stites, but was having a secret consensual affair with the then teenager.
00:43:23.640
And when her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, who was a white police officer, found out,
00:43:28.840
he killed his fiancé and framed this man, Reed.
00:43:34.640
The evidence determined that Stites was raped in many different ways and was also strangled to death.
00:43:46.880
DNA from this teenager's private parts matches the DNA of Reed.
00:43:58.120
His DNA was found everywhere that it would be found.
00:44:02.280
Initially, Reed denied even knowing the teenager when investigators asked him about this.
00:44:06.400
He said, I didn't know her, never met her, never talked to her, had no idea who she is.
00:44:11.940
Then he changed his tune when they found his DNA and said he had an affair with her, but it was consensual.
00:44:17.580
This was first matched up against other biological things that he left behind in a woman with an intellectual disability.
00:44:27.200
A woman named Caroline Rivas admitted to her caseworker that Reed, whom she had been dating, had also raped her.
00:44:34.020
Reed was also connected to the rapes of five other females, according to court documents, including a 12-year-old girl.
00:44:39.480
Now, Stites' fiancee at the time of the murder also doesn't seem like a terribly nice fella.
00:44:47.440
He went to prison and was released in 2018 after serving 10 years for kidnapping and alleged rape of a person in custody when he was a police officer in 2007.
00:44:57.300
And Arthur Snow, an inmate and one of the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood gang at the prison that Fennell was serving at,
00:45:03.240
signed an affidavit saying that Fennell had bragged to him about killing Stites.
00:45:10.560
Nobody seems like a terribly nice guy in this whole situation.
00:45:15.200
Now, of course, am I inclined to believe the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood?
00:45:21.500
So the Innocence Project, which tries to spring convicted death row inmates from the slammer,
00:45:27.300
is saying that a former sheriff's deputy also claimed that Fennell was glad that his wife or his fiancee was murdered.
00:45:38.280
Stites' family, the family of the victim, believes that Rodney Reed killed her.
00:45:44.520
This is not to say that we should dismiss claims of racial bias out of hand.
00:45:53.380
This is not to say that there aren't problems in the criminal justice system.
00:45:59.960
Any reasonable look at the evidence in this case makes this guy look guilty as sin beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:46:12.940
We're willing to give personhood rights to orangutans in Florida, but not personhood rights to little babies who are being born.
00:46:27.260
And Rihanna and, and Kim Kardashian are going to do as much as they can to spring this man, Rodney Reed, who's been connected to multiple rapes from the slammer.
00:46:37.260
And yet they would, I don't know about Kardashian or Rihanna personally, but the left would support the murder of a million babies a year.
00:46:53.740
I mean, the people who say that we're living in a rape culture are the same people who are saying we need to free this, this rapist, Rodney Reed, from prison.
00:47:02.780
This is the toxicity of identity politics that is only going to view this case through the lens of race rather than through the lens of evidence of an identity politics that won't even acknowledge the existence of babies.
00:47:14.960
But we'll acknowledge through sentiment and saccharine and no sort of evidence, they will try to pretend that an orangutan is a, is a human being or a person who's not a human being, whatever that means.
00:47:37.000
And the way that we're going to reclaim a coherent politics is not to bang even louder for less reasonable, frivolous identity.
00:47:47.780
It's going to ultimately root our politics in the ultimate identity, the divine logic of the universe.
00:48:05.140
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:48:10.400
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
00:48:15.760
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
00:48:20.380
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
00:48:27.880
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
00:48:36.580
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:48:41.920
Assistant director Pavel Wydowski, edited by Danny D'Amico.
00:48:52.480
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:48:57.560
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:49:00.660
American journalists have announced that they've entirely underestimated Donald Trump,
00:49:04.780
and everything they thought he was wrong about has in fact turned out great.
00:49:09.460
They move from one lie to another, forgetting each one as they go, and we'll show you how it works on The Andrew Klavan Show.