The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 564 - Thomas Jefferson Gets Canceled

00:00:00.000 Thomas Jefferson is canceled. He's canceled. It was only a matter of time, but the man who wrote

00:00:06.020 the Declaration of Independence, one of the fathers of our country, he's canceled. A statue

00:00:10.260 of Thomas Jefferson that was erected outside of Thomas Jefferson High School was toppled in North

00:00:16.980 Portland, Oregon. It was then spray painted. One of the bits of spray paint said slave owner. There

00:00:23.160 were lots of signs and insulting things written all around it. Rioters knocked down two more statues

00:00:30.260 on the very same night. And I'm trying to remember, I'm thinking back to way, way back,

00:00:35.400 like maybe two years ago, if somebody could have predicted this.

00:00:39.780 George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner?

00:00:44.480 So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down, excuse me, are we going to

00:00:50.620 take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas

00:00:56.760 Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major

00:01:01.660 slave owner. Now we're going to take down his statue. So you know what? It's fine. You're changing

00:01:07.480 history. You're changing culture. He's right. You're changing history. You're changing culture.

00:01:12.340 And no one, including many, many conservatives, is willing to do a damn thing about it. And I have

00:01:19.040 a hunch why. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:29.560 Welcome back. Not just Thomas Jefferson who got knocked down. Basically anybody who was involved

00:01:35.180 in any way in the creation of this country is getting knocked down. And even some conservatives

00:01:40.140 are kind of okay with this. I'm not saying they're calling for the statues to come down,

00:01:46.060 but they're kind of okay with this. They're playing into the left-wing premises. I have

00:01:49.600 a hunch why. And I think the problem actually runs a lot deeper than anybody's talking about.

00:01:54.260 I think most of our modern political problems all tie in to the same central issue. Jefferson

00:02:01.660 goes down. Two other statues go down in Portland a couple nights ago. Columbus, Christopher Columbus.

00:02:09.280 You know they've been tearing down statues, beheading statues, vandalizing statues of Columbus

00:02:13.040 for years now. A Columbus statue is officially coming down. This is according not just to the

00:02:19.600 rioters, but to the school administration at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio.

00:02:27.600 I don't know if they thought through this all the way. If they're going to give in to the premise

00:02:31.880 here that Columbus is a really bad, terrible, racist, bigot, terrible guy, that they're going to take 0.99

00:02:37.140 the statue down, they're probably going to have to rename the school, right? Well, if they rename the 0.96

00:02:40.900 school, they're probably going to have to rename the town, right? You can't, you can't live in this

00:02:45.580 racist town named after a racist person. If they're going to rename the town, they're probably going

00:02:49.560 to have to rename the country, right? Columbia, you know, like Pablo Escobar, Columbia, they're

00:02:55.720 named after Christopher Columbus. Why aren't there popular uprisings in Columbia? We have to rename

00:03:00.980 the country because of the terrible history of this terrible, terrible man. This, this according to

00:03:06.280 the president of Columbus State Community College. The removal of the Christopher Columbus statue is

00:03:13.120 a symbolic gesture of our commitment to our college and in our community to continue and

00:03:17.220 accelerate the fight against systemic racism. Recent events, including the senseless deaths of

00:03:23.060 African-Americans and the resulting anguish across the nation, compelled us to act on a years-long

00:03:28.180 internal dialogue about the statue and the message it sends to our community. The message, namely,

00:03:33.660 that it's, that the place is named after Christopher Columbus. I mean, it's the, it's pretty simple

00:03:38.320 message, right? This inflection point will inform college policy and action both now and for years

00:03:43.620 to come. It will, you're right. It will inform college policy and probably town policy and probably

00:03:48.240 state policy and probably national policy as well. The most dispiriting part of this for me, but I think

00:03:53.980 also the most illuminating is that it's not just these liberals running colleges. It's not just the far

00:04:00.860 left rioters running Chaz and Chop and every riot around the country. Even some conservatives are

00:04:07.520 buying into this bogus premise. We'll get to that in one second. First, I got to thank our friends

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00:05:31.800 Really dispiriting here that pretty much everybody is going in on the statue toppling.

00:05:39.180 Most conservatives are not saying we actually need to pull down the statues or we actually need to

00:05:43.220 rename things. But what some conservatives are doing is granting the left's premise

00:05:49.360 promise that these people, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, actually were terrible

00:05:54.040 rotten people. And the reality is it's just not true. So there's a writer at the Washington

00:05:59.380 Examiner, Tiana Lowe, who, you know, I like watching her when she goes on cable news. I have

00:06:04.260 nothing against her personally. I don't, I don't mean to attack her. But she published a very bad

00:06:08.380 take, very incorrect take, which is titled, Christopher Columbus was pretty evil by the standards of his

00:06:14.640 own time. We've heard this. I've, I've read versions of this article many, many times,

00:06:19.780 specifically since 2006. That's when it's become especially popular. And the story runs something

00:06:25.200 like this. We think Christopher Columbus is a good guy, but actually there are accounts that came out

00:06:31.720 that say he was a monster. He was the tyrant of the West Indies. He was evil by the standards,

00:06:37.820 even of his own day. And everyone around him thought that he was a no good, terrible, rotten person. 0.98

00:06:42.220 Not true. All of those accounts rely on one defamatory letter written by Francisco de Bobadilla,

00:06:52.860 Columbus's chief political rival in the new world. To rely on this guy's account to give us the whole

00:07:00.940 picture of Columbus's life would be like relying on Hillary Clinton's biography of Donald Trump to tell

00:07:07.200 us everything about Donald Trump. Maybe there's a thing or two that's true in there, but the bias

00:07:13.120 is so overwhelming. The conflict of interest is so overwhelming that it's not a reliable source.

00:07:18.620 And they all, every one of these attacks on Columbus uses this one guy who had it out to get

00:07:23.820 him. And Columbus, by the way, was so offended by the account that Bobadilla wrote of him that he

00:07:28.880 actually turned down money from the crown to, to fight against this defamatory stuff. Okay. He spent,

00:07:36.180 he spent every moment practically until his dying day after this was written, trying to get this

00:07:42.440 written out of his, his record because he felt it was so untrue, so defamatory. And the crown,

00:07:48.720 by the way, the Spanish crown that set Columbus on the voyage and then picked Bobadilla to replace him,

00:07:54.200 the Spanish crown had a lot of interest in believing Bobadilla's account because then it

00:07:59.600 could withhold the full amount of money that they owed Christopher Columbus. There was a lot of

00:08:03.780 politics involved. The reality is Christopher Columbus is one of the greatest men who ever

00:08:08.920 walked the earth. Okay. Even on this issue of how he treated the natives compared to the Spaniards who 0.86

00:08:15.400 he traveled with, Columbus was relatively a pretty good guy who weighed in on their behalf, who adopted the

00:08:22.040 son of one of his native American friends who even, uh, Bartolome de las Casas, the first resident

00:08:27.720 bishop of the Americas, one of the great defenders of native Americans, probably the first great

00:08:31.940 defender of native Americans wrote of Columbus that he was a good guy. He was an admirer of Christopher

00:08:37.480 Columbus until the end of his life. On top of that, he was the greatest navigator of his age.

00:08:42.140 He was more or less self-taught. He was of relatively low birth. He married well, you know,

00:08:47.000 he moved up. He was relentless. He traveled all over the place. He lobbied Portugal to send him on

00:08:53.580 this quest around the world or to the, to the Indies. He lobbied Spain to do it. He, he read books

00:09:01.080 and books and books, worked every angle of the system, and then he made it to the new world using

00:09:05.220 nothing but dead reckoning. Okay. He, he didn't even have the most basic equipment as he was traveling.

00:09:11.900 He was dead reckoning and discovered this world that we now get to enjoy and from which we get to

00:09:16.980 spit on Columbus's memory. It's just unfortunate not to put too fine a point onto it.

00:09:25.360 Why are we doing this? Why are even conservatives buying some of these premises?

00:09:33.580 Maybe we shouldn't tear the statue down, but Columbus was a pretty bad guy.

00:09:37.140 Ah, he wasn't great. Ah, you know, Thomas Jefferson, he was a pretty bad guy. Ah, Robert E. Lee,

00:09:41.260 that guy, especially Robert E. Lee. I mean, he was a Southerner. He, he fought for the Confederacy.

00:09:47.020 Dag nabbit. That's the only thing they ever say about him. Why are some conservatives willing to

00:09:51.360 do this? Some people still don't get it. Some people think that this is just about only the

00:09:59.900 left or only the right, and they're totally different and totally different perspectives.

00:10:04.300 They think this is, we only have economic problems. They're totally different from cultural

00:10:08.840 problems. They're completely separate. They think that one odd feature of our culture today is we're not

00:10:14.860 replacing ourselves. No one's having any kids anymore, so our birth rate is below replacement.

00:10:19.220 They think that problem is totally disconnected to the fact that our nursing homes are overrun 1.00

00:10:23.260 and just got wrecked by coronavirus. Specifically in New York, that story came out with Andrew Cuomo

00:10:28.380 packing up the nursing homes. They think these are totally disconnected, that, that we're not

00:10:32.560 replacing ourselves. We're not having any kids, and we don't know what to do with our old people,

00:10:37.420 with our parents and our grandparents. Seems to me, they're not completely separate problems,

00:10:43.080 any of these things. Seems to me, all of these issues derive from the same central pathology of

00:10:50.160 modernity. Selfishness. I think it's simple. I think it's actually a simple answer. You don't need

00:10:55.560 some highfalutin political jargon here. I think it comes down to selfishness, okay? And you know that

00:11:00.660 we're a bit of a selfish culture now. We spend an entire month celebrating pride. Pride, the definition

00:11:06.960 of selfishness, right? And self, self-obsession. I think there's a, a real connection here.

00:11:14.860 A, a culture that does not value its inheritance, whether it's a financial, you know, money inheritance,

00:11:21.760 or whether it's a cultural inheritance, is going to squander that, and it's not going to pass anything

00:11:28.400 along to its posterity except for debt, right? And so, this is a weird thing that we live in a culture

00:11:34.360 now that does not leave an inheritance to the, to the future generations. It leaves debt. Likewise,

00:11:41.060 a generation that's not interested in the future, not interested in posterity, not interested in 0.92

00:11:45.380 having kids or leaving them anything, has no reason at all to pass on their, their cultural inheritance

00:11:52.620 or their financial inheritance or anything. Who cares about the history of America? Who cares about

00:11:57.120 Thomas Jefferson? Who cares about any of our traditions? We don't even care about the future. We don't care

00:12:01.800 about who comes after us. The fact that we're forgetting about our past ties into the fact

00:12:08.880 that we're forgetting about our future and vice versa. And what you have, I'm remembered of this line

00:12:13.140 from George Orwell in 1984. The line goes, every record has been destroyed or falsified. Every book

00:12:19.840 rewritten. Every picture has been repainted. Every statue and street building has been renamed. Every date

00:12:25.460 has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.

00:12:30.900 Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right. That's George Orwell

00:12:38.460 describing this, this sort of dystopian hellscape in 1984. And that description, I think suits

00:12:46.040 progressives pretty well. Progressives hate the past. It's right there in their name. They want to

00:12:50.560 progress beyond the past. The progressives always want to topple those statues down. And maybe even the

00:12:56.840 sadder part is, it basically suits conservatives well as well. Because conservatives, at least in

00:13:03.400 recent years, have only been focused on the present. They haven't been focused on conserving very much of

00:13:09.680 anything. You saw this at the Supreme Court just this week. But you've seen this in recent decades.

00:13:15.400 We've lost on so many issues. We've given up so many things. And then there's this irony, which is that

00:13:21.960 conservatives always talk about fiscal responsibility. Yet when we get into the government,

00:13:25.280 we spend just as much money, if not more, as the left. Because we're trying to paper over cultural 0.85

00:13:31.200 problems by just spending our way out of it, by just having this facade of prosperity. We don't

00:13:37.180 care if the left topples all the statues and ruins our whole culture, as long as we get a few tax cuts

00:13:41.940 every once in a while. Yeah, not permanent ones, but you know, just every so often give us a tax cut.

00:13:46.420 And then that's fine. Well, that doesn't conserve much of anything at all. And I think it just comes down

00:13:50.980 to this myopic focus on the present, not the past, not the future, not the people who came before us,

00:13:57.300 not the people who come after us, just us, ourselves, just this kind of selfishness. We conserve nothing.

00:14:05.180 I made this point just a few days ago. If you are not able to conserve anything, that there's no point

00:14:12.920 in being conservative, right? They're in the word. If you're not doing the thing the word says, then what's the

00:14:18.360 purpose? And I said this specifically with regard to the conservative legal movement. Call it

00:14:24.120 originalism, call it textualism, I guess, call it what at the Federalist Society, I don't know.

00:14:29.680 We've gotten a lot of conservative judges and yet we haven't gotten a lot of conservative decisions.

00:14:34.240 We've kept Obamacare. We haven't overturned Roe versus Wade. We've radically redefined marriage

00:14:39.320 according to modern ideas from the bench. Now we've redefined sex to mean whatever I want to

00:14:49.560 think that I am. We've redefined sex to be modern gender ideology. We haven't conserved much at all.

00:14:56.540 Senator Josh Hawley, who I think is one of the senators kind of waking up to these ideas,

00:15:01.460 he gave an absolute barn burner speech on the Senate floor yesterday addressing this precise point.

00:15:07.760 This decision, this Bostock case and the majority who wrote it, it represents the end of something.

00:15:16.480 It represents the end of the conservative legal movement or the conservative legal project as we

00:15:23.480 know it. After Bostock, that effort as we know it, as it has existed up to now, it's over.

00:15:31.700 And I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism

00:15:41.920 and originalism in order to reach a decision, an outcome that fundamentally changes the scope

00:15:48.520 and meaning and application of statutory law, then textualism and originalism and all of those

00:15:54.780 phrases don't mean much at all.

00:15:56.640 So Hawley is part of a trend that you're seeing, not just in the Senate, but among conservatives

00:16:01.520 broadly, to actually fight back a little bit, to actually try to conserve some things, to not just

00:16:06.980 focus on the occasional tax cut and let the left take over the whole culture. And I think it's about

00:16:13.460 damn time that people started thinking that way. We'll get to that in one second. We'll get to how 0.98

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00:17:21.920 M-I-C-H-A-E-L. Head over there right now. Or if not right now, if not right this second, then 1.00

00:17:29.620 right after the show ends. Josh Hawley is one of the people pushing back, finally, in the conservative

00:17:37.460 legal movement. I guess, what's the movement? I don't know. The movement's changing right now.

00:17:43.180 The old consensus was don't ever use the government when the left attacks you.

00:17:51.200 When the left attacks you, don't use the government because if you use the government now

00:17:56.100 to fight an actual attack from the left, then maybe someday, hypothetically, the left will use

00:18:03.860 that same government mechanism that it's already using against you. You understand the illogic here?

00:18:10.060 But I still hear this. I hear this from friends of mine. They'll say, Michael, conservatives can't use

00:18:15.040 the few levers of power that we have to fight back against, for example, big tech censorship right now.

00:18:23.460 Because if we empower the government to fight back against censorship in this way,

00:18:29.400 that the left is foisting on us right this very minute, then the left someday, hypothetically,

00:18:35.100 might censor us. Right. I don't need to think about that hypothetically. I don't need to imagine

00:18:39.580 that. It's already happening. They're already doing it. The question is not whether we're going to set

00:18:44.060 ourselves up in this terrible position for the left to censor us. That's already a given. The question

00:18:47.980 is, are we going to fight back? Yes or no? Hawley and others are saying, does it make sense

00:18:55.620 to worry about this future hypothetical problem? And because of that future hypothetical problem,

00:19:01.940 ignore the current one that is attacking us? And I think censorship is the best example here.

00:19:06.260 We saw a huge story on this yesterday. NBC News, news, I put news in quotes because NBC News

00:19:12.820 is not a news organization and they've more or less admitted they're, they're a leftist activist

00:19:18.400 organization and they lobbied Google to kick off a conservative investigative outlet. So NBC News

00:19:26.760 tried to get the Federalist, maybe you, I read the Federalist, maybe you read the Federalist. They do

00:19:32.500 great journalistic work. They were really good on the Obamagate scandal. They've been really good on

00:19:38.200 some of the corruption that's going on in the government. They tried to get them kicked off of

00:19:42.220 Google's advertising platform. And what that means, by the way, Google has, I think, the largest

00:19:46.160 advertising platform in the world. What that means is it's not like you're totally banning the

00:19:50.620 Federalist from the internet, but you're cutting off more or less any way it could make money.

00:19:56.100 And so if it can't make money, obviously the company is going to wither and die. This is what NBC writes.

00:20:01.480 Google's ban of the websites, which would be the Federalist and another website, Zero Hedge,

00:20:07.660 comes after the company was notified of research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate,

00:20:11.700 a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 US-based

00:20:16.080 websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protest. Pause right there.

00:20:22.900 The Federalist is not a racist website. If the Federalist is a racist website, then the word

00:20:27.440 racism truly has no meaning. What they mean by racist is contradicting the leftist narrative. What

00:20:34.300 they mean by racist is in any way disagreeing with leftists at NBC News. They call it racist and

00:20:40.500 they smear it baselessly. They found that 10 US-based websites have published what they say are racist

00:20:48.480 articles about the protests, you know, the riots, and projected that the websites would make millions

00:20:53.760 of dollars through Google ads. Google blocked the Federalist from its advertising platform after the

00:20:58.760 NBC News verification unit brought the project to its attention. Zero Hedge had already been demonetized

00:21:03.440 prior to NBC News' inquiry, Google said. Now, Google came out yesterday after a big hubbub. The Federalist

00:21:09.720 was trending all day on Twitter and they said, oh no, the Federalist wasn't, wasn't demonetized. A big

00:21:14.820 misunderstanding. Don't worry. It was an issue with the comments section, but don't worry. We got rid of

00:21:19.240 that. It's a trial balloon. That's what they always do. The fake news, truly fake news, NBC News made a

00:21:28.280 political operative attack on a competitor and a conservative, the Federalist. Google obliged and

00:21:34.780 demonetized it and more or less said they were going to destroy the business. Then there was enough

00:21:38.800 of an outcry that NBC backed off and Google backed off as well and said, oh no, it was a big

00:21:43.820 misunderstanding. Meanwhile, by the way, the other website, Zero Hedge, demonetized because no one

00:21:48.160 made a big hubbub about that. This is going to increase throughout the election. We are still five

00:21:54.920 months away. The old consensus would have said, well, you know, if, if you don't like what Google's

00:22:01.540 doing, just make another Google. Yeah, sure. They have a monopoly of the, over the flow of

00:22:04.760 information around the internet, but ah, well, that's too bad. Nothing we can do. My hands are

00:22:09.060 tied. Let the left destroy the culture. Let's just hope for another tax cut at some point, please. 0.99

00:22:14.580 We got to get those judges. Look, we'll get the judges in and the judges will stab us in the back,

00:22:18.920 but hey, it's okay. Cause I guess we'll get another tax cut or something, right? That, ah, that's not a good

00:22:23.800 way to conduct politics. That's the old consensus. I think the new idea says hold Google to account

00:22:29.080 by whatever means are available to us. Section 230, right? The section 230 is part of the

00:22:34.940 Communications Decency Act. That is one way that conservatives might be able to go after big tech 0.78

00:22:39.960 oligarchs for abusing their powers and violating the law. Ah, break them up as a monopoly. Just break, 1.00

00:22:45.340 just do it. Why not? Why wouldn't we? They are now trying to tip elections for the left.

00:22:51.060 They are barring conservatives from doing business anywhere even. Go after them.

00:22:57.980 Got to grow a spine, folks. Got to grow some cojones if you want to have an effective political 0.99

00:23:02.820 movement. Speaking of these sorts of questions, just to see what we're up against from the other 0.94

00:23:10.400 side of the Senate aisle, Tim Kaine, U.S. Senator, the man who was almost one heartbeat away from

00:23:16.600 becoming the second woman president, Tim Kaine, gave a speech yesterday on the Senate floor in which

00:23:22.760 he blamed America for inventing slavery. And the only problem with Tim Kaine's speech is that it was

00:23:31.560 completely untrue. We need to do much more within the criminal justice system, but also within all of

00:23:37.540 our systems to dismantle the structures of racism that our federal, state, and local governments

00:23:43.560 carefully erected and maintained over centuries. We know a little bit about this in Virginia.

00:23:49.480 The first African Americans into the English colonies came to Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619.

00:23:55.240 They were slaves. They'd been captured against their will, but they landed in colonies that didn't have

00:24:00.520 slavery. There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. The United States didn't inherit

00:24:07.560 slavery from anybody. We created it. I think maybe Tim Kaine should check up on his history. Actually,

00:24:15.560 in the Declaration of Independence written by that guy who got canceled, Thomas Jefferson,

00:24:19.680 Jefferson complains about how the incipient United States inherited slavery from the British

00:24:25.960 and complained about that as an institution that has had a negative impact on the country. Where does

00:24:32.400 Tim Kaine think the slaves came from when they landed in Virginia? The slaves came from Africa

00:24:38.640 and they were bought from African slave traders, people who still practice slavery to this day.

00:24:45.620 Slavery still practiced in the Middle East to this day. Slavery still practiced in East Asia to this

00:24:51.040 very day. As a matter of fact, not only did the United States not invent slavery, because slavery goes

00:24:56.520 back not just to those slave traders in the centuries before the United States came to be, goes all the

00:25:03.080 way back to ancient Egypt, for instance, might behoove Mr. Kaine to read the Bible, see what the Egyptians

00:25:09.960 did to the Jews in Egypt, goes back throughout all of human history. Ironically, the West is the only 0.96

00:25:16.600 place that's ever abolished slavery. It's not that we invented slavery, we didn't, but we did abolish it,

00:25:21.720 and virtually no one else has. That's a good thing. Ironically, Tim Kaine mentions how slavery came

00:25:29.060 to Virginia. The first officially declared owner of an arbitrarily declared slave for life, right, 0.55

00:25:38.400 the beginning of what we would call our modern system of slavery in America, was a black man. He 0.99

00:25:43.420 was a black man from Angola. Now, obviously, slavery then went on to become a highly racialized

00:25:50.400 system that led to racial consequences that went on for centuries, but it shows you that the situation

00:25:57.700 of how slavery began, much more complicated than Mr. Kaine would have you believe. A lot of people

00:26:03.960 believe this thing. If a sitting U.S. senator believes a lie like this, think about how many people have been

00:26:10.560 taught the very same lie. Our goal as conservatives, our job, is to push back against those things, and yet,

00:26:20.180 unfortunately, we keep giving into left-wing premises, and unfortunately, I think even some of

00:26:24.560 the advisors around the president are beginning to buy into some of those premises. We'll get to that

00:26:28.940 in one second. We'll get to President Trump's big announcement yesterday. We will get to how the riots

00:26:34.120 actually did cure coronavirus. I called that one, too. And we will get to my interview with the White 1.00

00:26:39.640 House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, at the White House. I was in Washington last week, got to stop

00:26:45.180 by the White House and take a minute to sit down with the Chief of Staff. We'll get a little bit of

00:26:49.740 that. First, though, got to thank our friends over at Keeps. I think I've told you many times,

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00:27:43.500 prevention medication. It starts at just $10 a month. If you're ready to take action and prevent

00:27:47.880 hair loss, go to Keeps.com slash Knowles to receive your first month of treatment for free. My gift to you

00:27:53.540 so that you too can, can keep 80% of your power. K-E-E-P-S.com slash Knowles. So president yesterday

00:28:01.640 made a big announcement. The announcement was on police reform and I get it. I get the political

00:28:11.660 calculation here, but I think the president is getting bad advice from his advisors. We'll get

00:28:18.880 to that in just one second. First though, got to thank you. Thank you so much for subscribing to

00:28:22.140 the Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel. Not the Daily Wire YouTube channel, though I'm, you know,

00:28:26.120 I'm glad to go over there, give Ben some views, but we love that you're going over to mine and

00:28:29.400 subscribing. We're very close to 70,000, so thank you for that. We've got bonus interviews there,

00:28:33.520 segments, breakouts, that sort of thing. And recently two brand new interviews with Maddie

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00:28:41.480 gender ideology and John Birch, the lead lawyer on the big Supreme Court case that has enshrined gender

00:28:46.940 ideology into law. Go check that out. By the way, we've got a backstage coming tomorrow and we can

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00:29:21.800 President Trump announced yesterday, a big police reform plan in the Rose Garden.

00:29:34.020 The plan is receiving mixed reviews. I will tell you the good, the bad and the ugly. Here's the

00:29:41.480 president. Thank you all for being here as we take historic action to deliver a future of safety and

00:29:48.400 security for Americans of every race, religion, color, and creed. We're joined today by law

00:29:57.240 enforcement professionals and community leaders. Though we may all come from different places and

00:30:04.960 different backgrounds, we're united by our desire to ensure peace and dignity and equality for all

00:30:12.000 Americans. Okay. Of course we believe all of this. It's good that president Trump is taking charge.

00:30:17.140 We need strong leadership as the cities are burning, but is this the way to do it? Police reform.

00:30:24.520 If, if I had my druthers, if I were advising the president, I would have president Trump release an

00:30:29.640 executive order on criminal justice reform that puts more of these criminals burning the cities down

00:30:35.400 into prison. I think that's probably the better angle. I think, unfortunately, some of president

00:30:40.440 Trump's advisors are convincing him to buy into the left-wing premise that the police are hopelessly 0.87

00:30:45.900 racist and bigoted and slaughtering innocent black men around the country. We know that isn't

00:30:49.620 happening. Okay. We have the statistics. We went through them just last week, I think on the show.

00:30:55.620 How many unarmed black men were killed by police last year? And by the way, unarmed does not mean

00:31:00.980 not dangerous. Unarmed does not mean that the use of force was not justified, but let's even use that

00:31:06.240 number. Unarmed. How many? 9,000? No. 900? No. 90? No. It's nine. Every death is a tragedy.

00:31:13.840 But nine is not evidence of systemic police brutality and racism. And yet that's the premise

00:31:20.920 that the left wants us to buy into. And it wants us to buy into that so that they can get their agenda

00:31:25.220 in there without really having to sell it to the American people. So I just think the whole idea of

00:31:31.080 this. Am I against police reform? No. I think powerful institutions should constantly be reforming

00:31:36.340 themselves, of course. But is that the message we want to send now? I mean, what does the EO do?

00:31:41.220 It doesn't do very much at all. It requires new federal credentials for police departments,

00:31:45.340 which is just another federal regulation being foisted on states and local governments. And it

00:31:50.500 bans chokeholds in most instances. This is, this is the only part of the EO with teeth.

00:31:57.000 The attorney general standards for certification shall require independent credentialing bodies

00:32:00.780 to at a minimum confirm that the state and local law enforcement agencies use of force policies

00:32:06.200 prohibit the use of chokeholds, except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed

00:32:11.000 by law. So even there, if the use of deadly force is allowed, then they can use a chokehold. But are

00:32:15.180 they saying they can't use a chokehold now in any case? That, that seems like you're tying law

00:32:19.840 enforcement's hands behind its back. The problem, it's not going to do very much as an EO. I guess the

00:32:28.060 White House thinks it's going to be good messaging for people. I don't think it's good messaging

00:32:32.160 though. I think we lose ground. I think we lose debates because we give up premises. The best

00:32:39.260 example of this would be how we lost the marriage debate on the right. The marriage debate, where are

00:32:45.780 we going to expand the definition of marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions? The marriage

00:32:51.480 debate focused on a question. What is marriage? For all of human history, sexual difference seemed to

00:32:59.300 be at the center of marriage, whether it was polygamous marriage in certain instances in some

00:33:03.900 places, whether it was monogamous marriage for most of the history of the West. Is it, is, does sexual

00:33:10.840 difference have something to do with that? Does the, the logical possibility of the creation of life have

00:33:14.760 something to do with that? Yeah. The answer to that was always yes. And then a few years ago,

00:33:18.740 we decided, no, that doesn't have anything to do with it. So that's a debate. That's an interesting

00:33:22.180 debate to have. The way the left avoided that debate, which is favorable to the people who want

00:33:28.200 to maintain a traditional meaning of marriage, is they just presumed the new definition. They said,

00:33:35.920 oh, marriage is a union of two people who love each other. They just, they, they redefined it first.

00:33:40.380 And then they said, the marriage debate is about rights. Do you have the right to get married?

00:33:44.540 But that was never what the debate was about. And nobody opposes equal rights. So by the time they,

00:33:49.200 they gate, they got that premise through, the people who wanted to keep a traditional definition

00:33:54.500 of marriage already lost the debate. It was already over. There was no debate to be had.

00:33:59.200 I think that's what the left succeeds at maybe more than anything. And that's how they get so much

00:34:03.880 institutional power. If you cede the premise that the police are racist, terrible, bigoted people who 0.95

00:34:09.640 are brutal and they use too much force and they need to be reined in, then it's a lot easier to

00:34:15.240 get through BLM's radical leftist premises, most of which have nothing to do with black lives mattering

00:34:22.040 or civil rights for racial minorities or anything like that. But they get the premise in. And so

00:34:26.720 they get their policy solutions. We lose ground because we give up the premises. You see this not

00:34:33.660 just on, on these racial issues. You see this on the virus as well. You know how much I hate to say,

00:34:37.980 I told you so. I would never do that. Me. Well, sometimes, maybe. Okay. And on this case, I will.

00:34:43.600 I did a show a week or two ago that said race riots cure coronavirus because the mainstream media

00:34:51.460 and the public health experts and the politicians told us coronavirus was super duper deadly. If you

00:34:55.760 ever walk outside your home, you're going to kill grandma. And then all of a sudden there were all 0.97

00:34:58.920 these leftist riots and the public health officials, the very same one said, oh no, go out there. Yeah,

00:35:03.760 go out by the tens of thousands and breathe all over each other. That's fine. You're not going to get

00:35:07.740 coronavirus. That'll actually help stop the spread of coronavirus. But if a few conservatives want 0.55

00:35:12.460 to maintain their civil liberties, that is deadly. You can't do that. So I said, oh God, I guess the

00:35:18.360 race riots cured coronavirus. Turns out, turns out that might be true. Or in a way it's true. 0.99

00:35:24.080 Minneapolis, which had the biggest uprisings, is now reporting over two weeks later,

00:35:29.740 few new positive cases, according to health officials. So you would think after this craziness

00:35:37.740 out there, two weeks later, past the incubation period, you'd have a spike in cases, right?

00:35:44.420 Hasn't happened. More than 3,300 protesters have shown up to be tested for coronavirus.

00:35:50.880 40% of them, so about 1,300, have gotten their results back already. 1.4% tested positive.

00:35:58.520 That is lower, significantly lower than the positive rate statewide. The positivity rate statewide is

00:36:08.780 3.7%. And among the rioters, peaceful rioters, protesters, it's 1.4%. That's also lower than the

00:36:18.160 current seven-day average rate of positive tests, which similarly stands at 3.7%. And this trend isn't

00:36:24.300 just in Minneapolis. It holds up in Chicago, Illinois, Philly, Pennsylvania, Boston, throughout

00:36:30.180 Massachusetts. They've, they've also seen very few cases, new cases of COVID-19 cropping up.

00:36:38.820 So when they tell you, and this is going to be inevitable, that there's going to be a second wave,

00:36:44.640 you can't go outside, if conservatives want to hold a protest or something, the RNC is going to happen,

00:36:49.160 they're going to say, no, you've got to stay indoors. Forget about our encouragement of those

00:36:52.740 riots. You have to stay indoors because of coronavirus. Just point to all that great science

00:36:56.220 and show that the science, at least the latest science, doesn't back them up. Speaking of cures,

00:37:03.200 President Trump is being unfairly attacked. I know you'll be shocked to hear that. He's never

00:37:07.340 unfairly attacked, is he? Well, yeah, I think he is pretty much every single day by the mainstream

00:37:11.860 media. He's now being attacked because he spoke a little loosely. He got a little wording wrong when

00:37:19.060 he was talking about whether or not we had found a vaccine for AIDS. But the attack that the left is

00:37:25.000 making on Trump, I think reveals a lot about their own hypocrisy. They have come up with things and

00:37:30.960 they've come up with many other cures and therapeutics over the years. These are the people,

00:37:36.840 the best, the smartest, the most brilliant anywhere. And they've come up with the AIDS vaccine. 0.54

00:37:43.860 They've come up with, or the AIDS, and as you know, there's various things and now various companies

00:37:50.060 are involved. But the therapeutic for AIDS, AIDS was a death sentence. And now people live a life 0.62

00:37:59.240 with a pill. It's an incredible thing. Now, lots of people are attacking Trump. They say,

00:38:05.420 we don't have a vaccine yet for AIDS. We've got very effective preventive measures and we've got very

00:38:10.760 effective treatments and we've got a vaccine in development, but we don't have a officially

00:38:15.340 certified, certified vaccine yet. So you're spreading fake news, Trump. I can't help but

00:38:21.580 notice though, that this minor gaffe is revealing a big flaw in the left's argument about coronavirus

00:38:29.560 because many of the same people who are mocking Trump right now for, for saying that we have an AIDS

00:38:36.720 vaccine when we still don't have an AIDS vaccine, even after what, 37 years of research are the very

00:38:43.340 same people telling us that a coronavirus vaccine is right around the corner. What makes you so

00:38:50.960 confident that we're going to have this coronavirus vaccine within the next few months? We've been

00:38:55.380 spending 37 years on an AIDS vaccine. We don't have it. How many other diseases have gone around? We don't

00:39:02.060 have a vaccine. We're nowhere close to a vaccine. It's not as though when scientists go into the

00:39:07.040 laboratory, they say, okay, we're going to make a vaccine. I'm going to estimate it's going to take

00:39:11.520 us about four or five hours, like making a pizza. You know, it's going to, that's, we know we're going

00:39:16.620 to get it. We just have, no, you're discovering the vaccine. You're developing the vaccine. You don't

00:39:22.140 know what your timetable is going to be on that. So fine, you want to attack Trump for misspeaking

00:39:26.740 about the AIDS vaccine. That's okay. But then I think we need to drop what has become the new 1.00

00:39:31.020 left-wing argument, which is we need to shut down our whole country until we find a cure.

00:39:35.820 Initially it was flatten the curve. We did successfully flatten the curve and slowed the

00:39:39.960 rate of transmission and didn't overwhelm the hospital system. Then they transferred finding,

00:39:45.240 flattening the curve to finding a cure. No evidence that we're going to get that cure.

00:39:50.380 It's one of these gaffes, quote unquote, that Trump makes that I think actually was pretty

00:39:55.120 advantageous. I think it shows a flaw in their argument. Now, speaking of the White House,

00:40:00.000 I was hanging around there last week and I sat down with the White House chief of staff,

00:40:05.460 Mark Meadows, on my show with Senator Ted Cruz called Verdict. This was Mr. Meadows's first

00:40:12.000 interview since he became the chief of staff. And I figured there's no way this guy's going to tell

00:40:17.880 us anything, right? He's got a very private job, arguably the most powerful man in the world,

00:40:22.560 right? Because he's the chief of staff at the White House. So he's deciding who gets to come and see

00:40:27.420 the president, what makes it to the president's desk, all from behind the scenes. He's going to

00:40:30.660 be a behind the scenes guy and he's not going to tell us much. He spilt some tea. I got to tell you,

00:40:34.960 Mark Meadows really took us behind the scenes a little bit on some of the challenges that the

00:40:40.260 administration is facing, specifically when it comes to leakers. And the good news out of that

00:40:44.480 is the White House is finally beginning to figure out how to identify those leakers.

00:40:50.320 The other thing that I think that is critical is, you know, you've got this massive bureaucracy

00:40:55.440 with agencies and you think, well, there's a Republican administration. So you, but there

00:41:01.160 is the swamp that continues to go on, whether it's a Democrat or Republican in, uh, in the Oval

00:41:07.840 Office. The elected people come and go. Yeah. And they just kind of wait them out. It's just exactly

00:41:12.100 what Ted was saying. They wait them out. And so one of the great things is, is that if Ted or one of

00:41:18.420 his colleagues, they're getting, you know, the stiff arm, I call it the legislative Heisman,

00:41:22.820 you know, if they're getting that, uh, it's real easy for me to pick up and say, you know,

00:41:27.520 why am I getting this phone call from this Senator, uh, on you not responding to their phone call?

00:41:33.780 Oh, well, we were busy. Well, I was busy too. And I took his call. I mean, why aren't you taking?

00:41:39.320 And so sometimes it's just making them aware that there's somebody else, uh, willing to hold them

00:41:44.100 accountable. And two branches there. I mean, this is actually something that Senator,

00:41:46.700 I know you've talked a lot about is you've been talking now for years about social media

00:41:51.020 censorship, censorship of conservatives. Well, just recently we got out of, out of the executive

00:41:56.140 branch, this executive order on social media censorship. We still don't know a whole lot

00:42:01.020 about that. At least I don't know a lot about that. Maybe could you tell us a little bit about

00:42:04.100 how that came to be? Well, I think Ted and I, uh, know that as conservatives, sometimes our

00:42:08.580 conservative voice, uh, doesn't reach the audience as quickly or as effectively as it is normally

00:42:15.680 intended. It's a diplomatic way to put it. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I was one of the few members

00:42:19.280 of Congress back when I was in Congress that was actually shadow banned by Twitter. Yeah. And so

00:42:23.840 we ought to put that out on a tweet and see if they take that down. They'll say it wasn't shadow

00:42:28.080 banned that we were, but it only happened to be four conservative members of Congress, myself,

00:42:33.720 Matt Gates, Devin Nunes, and Jim Jordan. So you're saying AOC didn't fall into that?

00:42:37.880 No, she didn't, she didn't make it into that. Uh, so, so one of the things that that's important

00:42:43.240 is, is that we need to make sure that the free press is really the free press and it's not censored.

00:42:49.520 And what, what Twitter has done probably more so than some of the other social media platforms,

00:42:55.180 but YouTube is doing it as well, uh, is that they come in and they start to actually monitor content.

00:43:02.660 Yeah. And so it's not this free open, what I call the wild, wild west of social media. That's the way

00:43:08.660 I, and, and as freedom loving individuals, we want the free market to work, but when the free market

00:43:14.360 starts to get, uh, monopolized, uh, by content police, uh, then it's important for us to step in.

00:43:21.980 So we did an EO that actually has the potential of taking away their, their protection from litigation.

00:43:28.240 So if, if we can't fix it, or if Congress can't fix it, let the trial attorneys fix it.

00:43:32.580 It'll happen real quick. Unleashing the trial attorneys is a really powerful weapon. And I

00:43:38.220 got to say, this is an issue where a white house leadership was so needed. And it's so important

00:43:43.180 because we've, you and I've talked about this before. One of the challenges on the issue of

00:43:47.400 a big tech censorship is all the federal agencies are siloed and, and, and it's a hard issue where

00:43:53.100 the antitrust division at the department of justice doesn't quite fit into what they think they want

00:43:57.260 to do. The FTC, it doesn't quite fit in. What do they want to do? The FCC, everyone has,

00:44:01.700 is sort of looking at their own slice of the problem. And the president's executive order

00:44:05.640 on this was important to say, damn it, this matters. I think it's the biggest threat to 0.95

00:44:10.300 democracy in the whole country, but we needed, we needed the president and the white house to lead,

00:44:16.140 to get the rest of the executive focused on protecting free speech altogether.

00:44:22.220 Right. Well, the interesting thing. And so I always try to give you a little bit of a backstory

00:44:26.640 that no one else knows. So that EO, as it relates to section 230, uh, we started putting it around

00:44:33.460 for a little bit of comment on a very limited basis. All of a sudden this proposed EO shows up

00:44:39.880 in the New York times. And, and it really was fed to the New York times by a federal worker that didn't

00:44:48.660 agree with, uh, this administration, or at least it appears that they didn't, and they didn't agree with

00:44:55.000 the EO. And so they took it and fed it to, uh, um, outside sources. And I'm glad to say that we were

00:45:02.720 able to track that person down. They no longer work for the federal government. I'm glad too,

00:45:06.300 because that's, let me ask a question here. That's a great, I hadn't heard that story. And

00:45:11.180 that's, that's a great story. Let me take it a slightly different direction. So, so the job Mark

00:45:16.500 has now, I think is, is may well be the hardest job in all of Washington.

00:45:20.820 I think that's probably true. And I, I love seeing the surprise on Cruz's face when he hears about

00:45:29.060 this leaker. It's funny. You, you just expect everybody's on the same page in Washington and 0.88

00:45:33.140 they all are constantly talking to each other. And I have found talking to a lot of big players

00:45:38.340 in Washington. That is not the case. There actually is surprise. There are these human interactions

00:45:42.380 really do matter. And I love the way that Mark Meadows says that. He says, that individual is

00:45:47.220 no longer working for the federal government. Yep. That's a very diplomatic way to put it.

00:45:52.160 A lot, a lot more great stuff in that interview. So head on over. You can check that out at the

00:45:55.400 verdict podcast. Also, I'm on Dave Rubin's show today. I'm on the Rubin report. This is my first

00:45:59.680 time, believe it or not, going on the Rubin report, even though I've been friends with Dave for years.

00:46:04.360 So head on over, check that out too. And then I'll see you tomorrow. I'm Michael Knowles.

00:46:07.600 This is the Michael Knowles show.

00:46:12.380 If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.

00:46:19.720 And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends

00:46:24.100 to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

00:46:30.100 Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro show,

00:46:34.760 the Andrew Klavan show, and the Matt Walsh show.

00:46:37.720 The Michael Knowles show is produced by Ben Davies.

00:46:40.380 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:46:43.100 Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.

00:46:46.480 Technical producer, Austin Stevens.

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00:46:51.260 Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.

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00:46:58.940 Production assistant, Ryan Love.

00:47:01.100 The Michael Knowles show is a Daily Wire production.

00:47:03.520 Copyright Daily Wire 2020.

00:47:05.720 You know, the Matt Walsh show, it's not just another show about politics.

00:47:09.360 I think there are enough of those already out there.

00:47:11.400 We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.

00:47:16.160 So my main focuses are life, family, faith.

00:47:20.680 Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

00:47:23.500 I hope you'll give it a listen.

00:47:24.820 auditory.

00:47:27.540 guessing.

00:47:28.300 Of course you want to say,

00:47:29.320 we'll give it a listen.

00:47:29.740 Thank you.

00:47:31.280 Groupies.

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The Michael Knowles Show - June 17, 2020

Ep. 564 - Thomas Jefferson Gets Canceled

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Transcript