The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 677 - The “Free Speech” Myth

00:00:00.000 President Trump has been kicked off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and most other

00:00:06.280 internet platforms. A handful of oligarchs in Silicon Valley have the power and the willingness

00:00:13.580 to censor the duly elected sitting president of the United States.

00:00:18.420 And conservatives let it happen. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:21.500 Welcome back to the show for now. I guess we're still on for now. I feel as though we're on. Who

00:00:34.200 knows? This might cut out at any minute, judging by the way social media are going. My favorite

00:00:38.500 comment though, until then from Friday, is from user 115 who says, so when Kamala Harris raises

00:00:45.680 money to bail out criminals arrested in violent riots, she is not inciting violence. But when

00:00:51.180 Trump says, go home peacefully and be responsible, he is guilty. Yes, that's the way that it works.

00:00:58.500 That is the way that the new standards work. And it's obviously the left's fault and the left is

00:01:03.680 clamping down very hard right now. And it is legitimately threatening conservatives' ability

00:01:08.440 to participate in our republic. However, conservatives let it happen. Conservatives got this thing wrong

00:01:15.220 from the beginning. This debate over free speech. This debate over censorship. This debate over all

00:01:21.960 manner of these questions. And we're paying the price right now. It's enough to drive a man crazy.

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00:02:42.780 Go check them out. Big clampdown going on right now on conservatives on social media. And it's

00:02:52.380 important to remember the history that conservatives have had with social media. Social media is the

00:02:57.040 reason that conservatives were ascendant for much of the last 10 years. Because before that, we were

00:03:02.740 shut out of the mainstream media. Even when we did manage to get presidents elected, they were pretty

00:03:08.100 liberal like George Bush, for instance, or the other George Bush. Social media allowed conservatives to

00:03:14.500 have a voice when we had been shut out of the TV networks, when we've been shut out of the newspapers,

00:03:19.740 when we'd been shut out of Hollywood. The new media gave us that kind of freedom. And now they're

00:03:25.600 taking that freedom away. The clampdown that's going on right now is pretty significant in that

00:03:33.480 basically every prominent right winger on social media is losing lots and lots and lots of followers.

00:03:40.660 And when people complain about this, it seems sort of petty. It seems like a vanity contest. Oh no,

00:03:46.100 you lost 30,000 Twitter followers. Boohoo for you. I've got real problems. But I think actually that's

00:03:52.240 sort of why big tech is pursuing this strategy because it sounds petty, but it is significant

00:03:57.420 because if you take away conservatives followers, all of a sudden conservatives no longer have a

00:04:02.420 voice. And it doesn't just affect some pundit and it doesn't just affect some elected representative.

00:04:08.040 It affects all conservatives who can't get our voice out there. That's what they're betting on.

00:04:14.120 Jake Tapper came out and he said, I don't know how many Twitter followers I've lost because I don't pay

00:04:19.600 attention to that because I'm an adult, which is not true. Jake Tapper has bragged about his Twitter

00:04:24.660 followers in the past, but that's not even the point. Tapper hasn't lost any Twitter followers.

00:04:29.360 Actually, they've increased significantly over the past few days. Whereas every prominent

00:04:34.660 conservative just about has lost a lot up to and including the president who lost his entire voice

00:04:39.900 on social media. Why does Jake Tapper gain followers? Why is Twitter gaming their system to give him

00:04:45.840 a larger audience? Because Jake Tapper is a submissive vessel for the liberal establishment.

00:04:51.660 So obviously they're going to reward him and that he's going to continue to do their bidding.

00:04:55.660 Whereas for conservatives, we're not going to do that. And so Twitter won't either.

00:04:59.760 Twitter's ridiculous excuse for the clampdown up to and including the man that the American people

00:05:08.020 chose to be president, at least until January 20th, that guy's the duly elected president.

00:05:12.360 Twitter says to clear up confusion about fluctuations in follower accounts. Fluctuations. It's just going

00:05:20.060 down, by the way. It's not like going up 50,000 and then down. It's going down. To clear up the 0.83

00:05:25.500 confusion, in order to prevent spam, we regularly challenge accounts to confirm details like email

00:05:31.460 and phone number. Until that info is confirmed, these accounts are not included in follower accounts.

00:05:37.140 That's obviously untrue, right? What Twitter is saying is, yeah, look, we think there, this happens

00:05:43.580 every so often. First of all, we've never seen this happen before and it's not happening evenly.

00:05:48.820 It's only happening to conservatives, but they're saying, look, what happens is there are a lot of

00:05:52.260 accounts. We don't know if they're real accounts or not. So we just take all of them out of the follower

00:05:56.160 accounts. And then as people confirm their details, then all of a sudden we add them back in.

00:06:01.760 But if that were true, then all the conservatives, I guess everybody, including liberals,

00:06:08.380 their follower accounts would drop dramatically and then slowly increase as people confirm those

00:06:13.340 details. That's not what's happening. The follower accounts are steadily decreasing,

00:06:18.080 but only for conservatives. And the only time it's not steady is when you're talking about the

00:06:21.880 president of the United States and associated accounts, which have been shut down by some hipster 0.98

00:06:27.940 looking radical oligarch in Silicon Valley named Jack Dorsey, who runs Twitter.

00:06:35.500 Now you might say, okay, well, you have no right to use Twitter's platform. Twitter's a private

00:06:41.060 company after all, sort of. We'll get into that in a second. What, what very often liberals and

00:06:48.940 squishy conservatives, fake conservatives have said for in recent years is make your own Twitter.

00:06:55.300 Oh, come on. You have no right to use Jack Dorsey's platform. Make your own Twitter. Yeah. Okay. Maybe

00:07:00.160 Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Google have conquered the entire public square and they now control

00:07:07.080 discourse in our Republic, but look, private company, they can do whatever they want.

00:07:12.860 The problem with this, there are many problems with this argument, but the main one, the most obvious

00:07:17.340 problem with this argument is you can't make your own Twitter. When they say, go make your own

00:07:22.680 Twitter, they won't let you make your own Twitter. Dan Bongino did go make his own Twitter. He called

00:07:28.860 it Parler and he put it up there. And then when Twitter started censoring conservatives, a lot of

00:07:34.440 conservatives went over there and then Google and Apple came out and they said, we're not going to

00:07:39.380 allow Parler on our operating systems. They're not going to be in the app store. So I guess if you've

00:07:44.740 got it installed, good for you for now, but that's it. It's, it's over. Google and Apple control 99%

00:07:52.300 of the mobile operating system market share. 99%. If they kick you out of their stores,

00:08:00.280 you're gone from cell phones. So they won't let you make your own Twitter. Okay. Well, hold on.

00:08:05.800 You can still access Parler through the web browser on your phone. Can't you? Sure. You can't use the app,

00:08:11.680 but you have no right. Google and Apple private companies sort of. So you have no right to force

00:08:17.640 your app into their app store. Just go on the web browser. Well, that's what Parler said they would

00:08:22.040 do. And guess what? Amazon web services, the web host said that Parler is not allowed to even have

00:08:28.280 a website. If you go to parler.com right now, chances are it will not load. Now, Dan, friend,

00:08:36.740 friend of the show says that he's got a backup plan. I hope Parler is back online quickly.

00:08:41.680 But how long before that web server says, no, we're not going to host you either.

00:08:48.600 This happened to a gab. Gab was this, this alternative to Twitter that came up before

00:08:54.780 Parler did. Same thing, kicked out of the app stores, kicked off their web hosting,

00:08:59.360 their domain registrar, GoDaddy. They couldn't even get the website.

00:09:03.880 So all of a sudden we go from build your own Twitter. Come on, just build your own Twitter to,

00:09:08.800 come on, build your own mobile operating system, to build your own cell phone, to build your own

00:09:17.180 web servers, to build your own domain registrar, to build your own internet, to, I guess, build your

00:09:26.100 own government. Is that the end of it? Oh, wait a second. That's what we should have been doing the

00:09:29.540 whole time. We should have been engaging in politics so that we could wield political systems

00:09:36.280 when the people gave us power. And the fact that we did not do that on the right is the fault of

00:09:44.340 conservatives. You know, we stopped engaging in politics. And part of the reason for this

00:09:51.580 is that we took expressions, like Andrew Breitbart's famous expression, when he said,

00:09:57.200 politics is downstream of culture. That's obviously true to a degree. But we took an expression like that

00:10:03.180 as an excuse not to engage in politics. We, we took it as an excuse to say, well, no government,

00:10:12.760 it's always bad whenever government does anything. And that's why you need to elect us so that we

00:10:17.760 won't do anything that you want us to do. And we need to let big business run roughshod over our

00:10:22.880 culture because we've, we've exclusively got to focus on the culture and not on politics. Well,

00:10:29.580 look where that's gotten us. As if by the way, there were some totally distinct line between

00:10:36.240 culture and politics. There obviously isn't. Culture affects politics, movies and TV and books

00:10:42.780 and art affects politics and politics affects culture. We know that conservatives are willing

00:10:49.560 to admit that in our most candid moments, right? When conservatives talk about the disastrous policies

00:10:55.540 of LBJ and the great society, all those welfare programs that trapped people in generations of

00:11:00.520 poverty, that was politics affecting culture, wasn't it? Thomas Sowell writes about this all the time

00:11:06.260 when he says black Americans were doing a whole lot better before the great society. And then the great

00:11:10.520 society comes in and all of a sudden they start doing much worse. What changed? Did the movies

00:11:15.740 change? I guess a little bit. Did the art change? Yeah, sure. No, what changed is the government

00:11:19.780 policy. Obviously politics can shape culture. And, and I think it's just a recourse for people

00:11:29.640 who in a cowardly way don't want to engage in the political system, who don't want to go in and say,

00:11:35.420 no big tech, you don't get to do that. We're going to break you up. We're going to break you up under

00:11:38.760 antitrust laws. We're going to break you up because of section 230 of the communications decency act.

00:11:44.180 We're going to bake you, break you up because of the fraud that you've engaged in. This was so

00:11:50.300 predictable. This was so predictable. They, they had been signaling this for months. The minute that

00:11:58.820 Twitter put a fact check on the president's tweet, I thought it's only a matter of time before they

00:12:05.260 kick him off. The fact check was so ridiculous. You remember Trump said, we, I think we won the

00:12:11.900 election. And then Twitter says this claim is disputed, but they didn't really mean this claim

00:12:17.460 is disputed. Any claim on social media could be disputed. And if a claim is disputed, that means

00:12:22.860 that the counter claim is disputed too. But they didn't put, when Biden said we won the election,

00:12:27.040 they didn't put a claim that said this claim is disputed too. Obviously that claim was disputed by

00:12:30.220 Trump. They had picked a side. Well, okay, fair enough. Questions of free speech and censorship,

00:12:38.640 I suppose people can pick a side, but are we comfortable, whatever you think about,

00:12:42.820 whatever you think about the election, whatever you think about Joe Biden, whatever you think

00:12:45.700 about Donald Trump, ask yourself this, are you really comfortable with a handful of radical left

00:12:52.400 wing oligarchs in Silicon Valley, billionaires censoring the duly elected president? I did not

00:12:59.820 elect Jack Dorsey. I did not elect Mark Zuckerberg. And conservatives helped this happen.

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00:14:28.080 Go check Ring out. Conservatives are, are largely responsible for this.

00:14:37.540 The left is, I don't want to victim blame. The left is the aggressor here. Conservatives let it

00:14:43.900 happen. How did we let it happen? Well, first of all, we had four years of the Trump administration

00:14:48.660 and two years of unified government to, to attack big tech, bring them down to size. We didn't do it.

00:14:55.440 Do you know what we did instead? We called in the big tech executives and then the legislators

00:15:00.320 got really good sound bites on TV yelling at the big tech executives and they got really good

00:15:06.560 campaign commercials out of it. And then nothing happened. And then Mark Zuckerberg goes on TV and

00:15:12.180 he says, yes, we have to do better. Oh, we will do. Yes. Oh, I, oh, this was bad and we'll do better.

00:15:19.320 And he's obviously lying, right? He's obviously not telling the truth because they didn't do better.

00:15:24.600 They, they got a lot worse. At least Jack Dorsey, to his credit, he's never even pretended to care.

00:15:31.380 Jack Dorsey, it looks like hipster Rasputin with his beard. And he basically says, I don't,

00:15:37.340 I don't care about any of you guys. So we let that happen. But the problem's even deeper than that.

00:15:44.140 And it's going to take a lot of soul searching on the right. Republicans have been shilling for big

00:15:51.640 business for decades now, for decades. Really starting, I guess in the seventies, but really

00:15:59.380 ramping up in the eighties and nineties and two thousands. Conservatives have been shilling for

00:16:06.020 giant multinational corporations that hate our culture, that ship our jobs overseas,

00:16:10.780 that don't give a damn about this country. They've, they've embraced this line, build your

00:16:15.340 own Twitter. Oh, you can never tell Mark Zuckerberg what to do. He has his sacred right to censor the

00:16:21.900 president. It's his platform. We shilled. We made an idol out of the free market and a boogeyman out of

00:16:29.460 big government. Now, am I saying that I don't like free markets? No, I think the free market is wonderful.

00:16:34.160 I think it is one of the most brilliant mechanisms ever devised and discovered that is conducive to

00:16:41.120 human flourishing, but it is not the moral arbiter in, in my political philosophy. If, if the, the free

00:16:52.240 market, if the invisible hand of the free market and the morality of the free market tells me that I've got

00:16:56.980 to let Mark Zuckerberg censor the duly elected president, then something's gone wrong in that

00:17:01.400 ideology. Same goes for big government. We made this huge boogeyman at a big government such that we ended

00:17:07.940 up defending big business. This is not what the, the libertarians of the 1960s talked about. The young

00:17:16.000 conservative writer Saurabh Sharma posted a pretty funny meme the other day. It was about how libertarians

00:17:21.720 in the 60s, like Barry Goldwater said, we're against big everything. We're against big government. We're against

00:17:27.320 big monopolies. We're against big corporations. We, we realized that that kind of unrestrained power,

00:17:33.740 unrestrained, there's the key, is what is the threat to liberty. Some conservatives embraced

00:17:41.400 small government. There is no small government in America. There cannot be small government. You cannot

00:17:48.120 govern a nation that, that spans not just an entire continent, but beyond a continent, to Hawaii,

00:17:55.320 to Alaska, to the Philippines, to Guam, to all of our overseas interests. Do you know that we have

00:18:00.900 something called AFRICOM? Have you heard of AFRICOM? That's the United States African Command.

00:18:07.080 Last I checked, we don't have a state in Africa. Well, why do we have something called AFRICOM?

00:18:11.980 Because we have a massive empire all over the world. And you might say, well, that's bad and we've got,

00:18:17.820 okay, fine. All I'm saying is you don't govern that country with small government.

00:18:22.800 You can, however, govern that country with limited government. Those are not the same thing.

00:18:29.940 Limited government means you are restraining the powers. You don't let the government do whatever

00:18:34.080 it wants to do capriciously, arbitrarily. Well, that's good. You got to rein that in. Absolutely.

00:18:40.240 But don't just give a blank check to big business. Big business is just as capricious and dangerous as

00:18:45.900 big government. Actually more so because there's no accountability whatsoever. When Zuckerberg and Jack

00:18:51.240 Dorsey want to censor the people's representative. At the same time that this was going on, the left

00:18:59.760 was pursuing a similar policy. So, so what the right was doing was shrinking the legitimate realm of

00:19:05.180 politics saying we can't, we can't, we actually can't question Mark Zuckerberg's behavior. Private

00:19:10.740 company, business good, government bad. At the same time, the left was going in and also shrinking

00:19:17.200 the realm of politics. In the, in the seventies, these awful screechy second wave feminists had 1.00

00:19:22.960 this expression, the personal is the political. What they meant by that is that personal behaviors,

00:19:29.740 the way a husband relates to his wife, the way you relate to your kids, the way you educate your

00:19:33.760 kids, that's all open to public scrutiny. While at the same time, political questions get taken out

00:19:39.920 of politics. So a way to kind of bring this to earth and give a good example is abortion. Abortion, 0.96

00:19:45.860 highly controversial political issue. Obviously it's not addressed in the constitution. The people

00:19:51.960 have a right to debate and decide, do we want to permit the killing of a million babies a year

00:19:57.940 in the womb? Or do we want to outlaw it? Or do we want to outlaw it after 10 weeks? Or do we want to

00:20:04.060 outlaw it after 20 weeks? Or do we, whatever, right? That's a political question. And then what the left

00:20:09.120 said with Roe versus Wade is that they had the Supreme Court invent a fictional constitutional

00:20:14.820 right to abortion. So while everything's becoming really political, they take a, a very important

00:20:19.880 political question, remove it from the realm of politics. So in that way, the political realm all

00:20:26.160 shrinking, the private realm growing, growing, private realm taking over these political questions

00:20:31.100 and who sets the rules? Jack Dorsey. Don Jr. to me, nearly, he nearly got this exactly right.

00:20:39.020 He observed something that was very true and he just missed a couple of words. He tweeted

00:20:42.220 out, big tech has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America. I think a lot of people

00:20:48.680 feel that way right now. It's not quite true, but it's close. It's not that big tech has totally

00:20:55.100 eliminated the notion of free speech in America. It's that big tech has totally eliminated the

00:21:00.660 American notion of free speech. Let me ask you a question. Is speech in America today freer or less

00:21:11.980 free than it was in the past? What do you think? I think most people right now, most conservatives are

00:21:18.300 going to say, well, speech is much less free. We used to be able to speak more freely. I'm not so sure

00:21:24.120 about that. Is speech today more or less free than it was in the fifties? Well, for conservatives,

00:21:31.880 I guess it's less free, right? You know, now if you wave an American flag, you can, you can be kicked

00:21:37.660 out of school or if you wear a make America great again hat, you will, you can actually be suspended

00:21:41.400 from school. So it's less free, but it's more free today for communists. In the 1950s, we had

00:21:47.200 something called the Smith Act through which hundreds of communists were prosecuted for their

00:21:54.200 associations, for their beliefs, for their free speech. In the 1950s, you had people who expressed

00:22:00.440 communist political views. They were blacklisted. They couldn't work anymore. So, so today speech is

00:22:07.140 less free for conservatives, more free for communists. How about the 1790s? In the 1790s,

00:22:13.660 we had the Alien and Sedition Act, which meant that if you were to criticize, there were a lot of

00:22:19.800 aspects to this law, but if you were to criticize the government wrongly, if you were to lie and

00:22:25.000 criticize the government, slander the government, you could be prosecuted for that. So, so today

00:22:30.220 speech is much more free for dishonest critics of the federal government than it was in the 1790s,

00:22:37.520 but it's much less, less free for conservatives. Go a little further back, go back even before the

00:22:42.440 Declaration of Independence. Go back to the 1620s, earliest days of our country, you know, after the

00:22:47.840 pilgrims came here. There was a colonist by the name of Thomas Morton. Thomas Morton was guilty of

00:22:54.820 a heinous crime. He wrote poems and sundry verses, according to then Governor William Bradford,

00:23:02.120 that were lascivious. They were verses that were kind of like sexy, you know, he wrote some like sort

00:23:07.540 of sexy poems. Governor Bradford marooned him on an island and banished him to Britain.

00:23:14.340 Do you, do you think, do you think that speech is more free or less free today for people who want

00:23:19.760 to write sexy poems? Probably more free for them, but less free for conservatives. The 1.00

00:23:26.740 aspect of this social media purge of this battle over political correctness or wokeism or big tech

00:23:35.260 tyranny or whatever term you want to use. Everyone thinks it's about free speech and

00:23:41.040 free speech and censorship. It's not. It's not. At all times in all societies, some speech is permitted

00:23:49.000 and some speech is censored. What it really is about is a fight between competing standards,

00:23:55.860 the conservative, the old standard, where you're allowed to wave the flag, but not the hammer and

00:24:00.200 sickle, or the new standard where you're allowed to wear the Che Guevara shirt, but not the MAGA hat.

00:24:04.640 Now, that's the competition right now. That's the debate. Which standard are we going to live

00:24:10.580 under? And the more we talk about free speech absolutism, we don't censor any speech. The more

00:24:16.780 we talk about that, we're actually playing into the left's hands because they know there's got to be

00:24:22.120 some censorship. There's always got to be some censorship. You're not allowed to say whatever

00:24:27.960 you, no society has ever permitted that. Least of all the United States, you can't preach sedition.

00:24:32.520 You can't preach fraud. You can't preach fighting words. You can't preach threats.

00:24:36.420 There's got to be some censorship. Which standard is going to reign? Which is going to reign? Right

00:24:41.200 now, it's not looking good. And it's really not looking good for us here. I mean, I, as I referred

00:24:46.820 to earlier, conservatives are being clamped down on, on social media. We are losing tens of thousands of

00:24:54.960 our audience by the day. It's not because people are unsubscribing. It's because big tech is limiting

00:24:59.420 our reach. Then when we try to go to other platforms to get the message out so that we

00:25:03.100 can communicate with one another, they shut those down too. How long before they come after us?

00:25:08.720 How long before they kick these shows off of social media? It could be days. This is,

00:25:15.480 I hope it's not. I hope we get to stay on, but it could be days. They've already tried shenanigans.

00:25:21.300 And then how long before we're kicked off of the internet? I don't know. I, we, we've just got,

00:25:28.220 this is going to go through a period of pain right now and we've got to be very careful. One way to do

00:25:32.540 that is you have to subscribe. You know, I, I usually don't pitch subscribing to Daily Wire

00:25:38.140 super duper hard because you can listen to the show on radio. You can listen to the show on your

00:25:43.960 podcast apps for free. You can watch some of it on YouTube. I just don't know how, for how much

00:25:48.480 longer that's going to be true. They're, they're very likely will come a time when you need to

00:25:52.900 subscribe. It's the only way that we can fight back and get a voice out. So please head on over

00:25:56.500 to dailywire.com, become a member. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:25:59.860 We have got to ditch these shallow slogans like free speech absolutism or these shallow ideas like

00:26:21.560 we don't want to censor anything. We do, we, I want to censor threats. I think we should censor

00:26:27.460 threats. I think we all agree with that. I want to censor fighting words. I think we all agree with

00:26:33.700 that. I want to censor fraud. I think we all agree with that. I want to censor sedition. I think most

00:26:40.800 of us agree with that, don't we? I think so. I want to censor ideas that undermine the very basis

00:26:51.180 of the country, the philosophical basis of America. Conservatives always agreed with that. Now, I don't

00:26:56.820 know. Maybe it's more split. Conservatives used to agree with the idea that we shouldn't be able to

00:27:01.420 desecrate the American flag because it's an incoherent act. You're not allowed to claim

00:27:06.020 First Amendment protections as your justification for burning the American flag, which is a symbol of

00:27:12.300 the entire country, including your First Amendment protections. It doesn't make sense. In recent years,

00:27:17.220 we've taken a much more permissive stance. What's it gotten us? Not, not very far, not very far.

00:27:22.600 Big tech used this excuse of the Capitol riot to clamp down on us.

00:27:31.620 If the riot had not happened, I think they would have eventually found something else.

00:27:37.380 I think they've been looking for an excuse for a long time. And they've done it to some people,

00:27:42.920 right? They kick Alex Jones off the internet and no one really says boo. Some of us did. I mean,

00:27:49.240 I, I, at the time I said it was a very bad thing, but most people didn't care. Because Alex Jones,

00:27:55.060 he's that crazy guy who talks about how they're turning the fricking frogs gay. Remember that?

00:28:00.000 Which, you know, it's funny of all the things that Alex Jones has said, some of which are a little,

00:28:03.920 a little more out there than others. The thing about the gay frogs actually turned out to be true. 1.00

00:28:09.460 This is how I looked it up one day. There actually, there was some study, I think it was between Yale and

00:28:12.980 the EPA that some chemicals in the water had been making frogs hermaphroditic. So actually it's not

00:28:18.300 that they were turning the fricking frogs gay. They were turning them trans. They were, Alex Jones

00:28:22.680 was actually too reserved in his, in his take on things. Neither here nor there. Very few people

00:28:28.460 spoke out for Alex Jones. Now they're taking off the president. That's quite a, even the New York

00:28:35.020 Times, which has gone so insane. Even Kevin Roos, the technology columnist at the New York Times

00:28:39.180 published a column. They said, man, this is bad. This is at least very scary

00:28:44.060 that this amount of power resides in the hands of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and these

00:28:53.360 unaccountable billionaires. But they're going to keep using this. They're going to use the Capitol

00:28:59.320 Hill riot as the excuse to shut us all up. And you're going to have squishy fake Republicans, 0.63

00:29:05.080 guys like Mitt Romney or Arnold Schwarzenegger come out. Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor

00:29:09.160 of California, but he was basically governed like a Democrat. He wasn't, wasn't particularly strong.

00:29:13.280 They're going to come out and use any manner of hyperbole to cram this narrative down our throats.

00:29:22.900 Schwarzenegger just came out. He posted a video comparing the Capitol Hill riot to the Nazis in

00:29:29.480 Kristallnacht. I grew up in Austria. I'm very aware of Kristallnacht or the night of broken glass.

00:29:37.040 It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the proud

00:29:45.380 boys. Wednesday was the day of broken glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in

00:29:52.640 the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol.

00:29:58.280 They shattered the ideals we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building

00:30:03.980 that housed the American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.

00:30:12.140 Is that so, Arnold?

00:30:15.680 Last I checked, during Kristallnacht, rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany,

00:30:25.360 Austria, and the Sudetenland. They murdered at least 91 Jews, very likely many more. 7,000 Jewish

00:30:34.660 businesses were damaged or destroyed. And 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration

00:30:41.700 camps. And during the Capitol Hill riot, one of the pro-Trump rioters, Ashley Babbitt, was shot and

00:30:51.920 killed by police. And a police officer sadly died. And a rioter took, took photos messing up Nancy Pelosi's

00:31:04.060 office. And some other fellow took a podium and posed for funny pictures with a podium.

00:31:11.860 Both bad things. I'm not saying that either of those events were, you know, Kristallnacht or the

00:31:16.620 Capitol Hill rioter. I'm not, not defending either, either of those events. Not on the same level.

00:31:21.520 Very different. Torching hundreds of synagogues, deporting tens of thousands of people, 1.00

00:31:29.320 killing lots and lots of people, damaging 7,000 businesses. Different. Very different.

00:31:36.060 Not every bad thing is the Holocaust. This should be emblazoned on every debate stage, 1.00

00:31:46.380 on every camera that films a political commentator or a politician. I wish people would take this to

00:31:54.100 heart. Not every bad thing is the Holocaust. Idiots compare bad things to the Holocaust all the time 0.94

00:32:01.280 because they don't have any other historical perspective. So the two, you know, the two things

00:32:06.860 you'll hear, everything is either the Holocaust or the fall of Rome. I suppose some things are like

00:32:12.020 the Holocaust and the fall of Rome in some ways, but very few. There are other historical events.

00:32:19.940 And, you know, Schwarzenegger was not alone in, in this kind of hyperbole. AOC, everyone's favorite

00:32:26.840 darling socialist congresswoman, went on television and said, look, you think that, you know, it was a

00:32:34.200 demonstrator who died and then a police officer died later from wounds and apparently some other

00:32:38.300 medical condition, but it's sort of unclear. No, it wasn't that. And then I think three other people

00:32:43.640 just like happened to be around the protest and had heart attacks, things like that.

00:32:48.740 Obviously not from the violence. But regardless, say, I don't know, five, five people, four of whom

00:32:54.520 were demonstrators, three of whom then died from their own medical emergencies. Okay. Very, very sad,

00:33:01.920 right. AOC took that and somehow read that as, uh, nearly half of Congress almost dying.

00:33:10.640 Well, you know, I absolutely believe that, um, impeachment should be scheduled for several

00:33:14.860 reasons, several reasons. One, of course, uh, our main priority is to ensure the removal

00:33:19.760 of Donald Trump as president of the United States every minute and every hour that he is in office

00:33:25.540 represents a clear and present danger, not just to the United States Congress, but frankly,

00:33:31.300 to the country. But in addition to removal, we're also talking about complete barring of the president

00:33:37.960 or rather of Donald Trump from running for office ever again. And in addition to that, the potential

00:33:44.200 ability to prevent pardoning himself from those charges that he was impeached for. We came close

00:33:52.260 to half of the House nearly dying on Wednesday. I don't think that we did. I don't, I don't think

00:34:02.540 nearly half of the House almost died. Uh, I don't think nearly any member of the House almost died. I don't

00:34:10.860 think any member of the House was even injured. Uh, that's just a complete lie. It's just completely made

00:34:18.740 up. Well, why does AOC, AOC is very good at this. You might call it the big lie. She's, AOC is very

00:34:26.280 good. That's, that's a phrase by the way that you're going to be hearing a lot of left-wingers

00:34:29.680 now referring to. Like for instance, because, uh, Joe Biden has been comparing Republican politicians

00:34:34.940 to Joseph Goebbels because Joe Biden is a liar and an idiot and a cynic and a hack and a very,

00:34:42.080 very, very bad man. And so they're going to, they're all going to call everyone Nazis. And then

00:34:48.420 AOC is going to come out and lie and say, oh, half the members of Congress almost died. Not, uh,

00:34:53.760 none of them. The, the last time that members of Congress almost died like that

00:34:58.820 was not the Capitol Hill riot. It was 2017 when a Bernie bro shot up the congressional baseball game

00:35:05.380 and very nearly killed Steve Scalise and other members of Congress. Steve Scalise really was close

00:35:11.740 to death, but other guys, right? Rand Paul was hiding out, right? Rand Paul could have been hit

00:35:16.180 other people too. That, that story disappeared from the news. You didn't hear about the Nazi

00:35:23.040 Democrats and all these sorts of things because that was not helpful to their narrative. So even

00:35:29.380 though the congressional baseball game shooting was much, much, much, much, much more dangerous to

00:35:34.160 members of Congress, that one disappeared. And you didn't see the hand wringing and all of these

00:35:40.260 sorts of, uh, hysterical calls for, for instance, the impeachment of the president. Why do they want

00:35:45.460 to impeach the president? He's going to leave office in what? Eight days or something, 10 days.

00:35:51.940 Why do you want to impeach him? Because they don't want him to be able to run for office again. Why

00:35:55.600 don't they want him to run for office again? If this guy's such a failed president, he never would

00:35:59.900 have a chance, right? Wrong. They are not doing this because they believe that Donald Trump

00:36:07.380 is very, very weak and Joe Biden is very, very popular. Quite the opposite. They are not shutting

00:36:14.440 up every conservative on social media and trying to legally bar the president from running for office

00:36:20.420 again, because they think that he could never get a lot of votes, that he could never win,

00:36:26.340 that he's not popular. That's not it at all. Raises a lot, a lot of eyebrows. Moreover,

00:36:33.800 if we're told that now, because president Trump said, Hey, attend a rally in DC to support me and

00:36:40.980 the make America great again movement, but don't become violent. Be very peaceful. Go home. If

00:36:45.960 you're getting violent, don't be violent. If we're told that that is an incitement to violence that is

00:36:51.840 worthy of impeachment, what do we make of Kamala Harris who actively encouraged the BLM riots that

00:36:58.460 burn down cities coast to coast and killed dozens of people over the summer? I know that there are

00:37:04.060 protests still happening in major cities across the United States. I just not seeing the reporting on

00:37:08.340 it that I, that I had for the first few weeks. Um, they're not going to stop. They're not going

00:37:13.300 to stop. And that's, they're not, this is a movement. I'm telling you, they're not going to

00:37:17.880 stop and, and everyone beware because they're not going to stop. It is going to, they're not going

00:37:22.960 to stop before election day in November and they're not going to stop after election day.

00:37:26.900 And that should be, everyone should take note of that on both levels, that this isn't,

00:37:31.780 they're not going to let up and they should not. And we should not. They're not going to let up and

00:37:36.900 they should not. And we should not. They had been burning cities and burning businesses and killing

00:37:43.420 people all around the country to achieve a political end. And Kamala Harris encouraged it.

00:37:51.100 The equivalent would be if Mike Pence came out after the Capitol, let's say for instance,

00:37:55.480 that the Capitol Hill riot was much deadlier than it was. Let's say that they burned down,

00:37:59.680 I don't know, the Capitol building, or they burned down some other government buildings,

00:38:02.300 or they killed dozens of people. And then the next day, Mike Pence came out and instead of

00:38:06.660 condemning it, like all the Republicans did, including the president, let's say Pence came

00:38:09.880 out and he said, Hey, they're not going to stop. Huh? Those guys at the Capitol, they're not going to

00:38:14.900 stop, nor should they stop. And we shouldn't stop either. They're never going to stop.

00:38:19.820 So give us power. Could you imagine? No, you can't imagine. Because Republicans don't do that

00:38:27.240 sort of thing. But the left does. And they've somehow, because they've just taken over the

00:38:33.560 whole culture and they've taken over the politics and they've taken over the language that we use,

00:38:39.820 they have somehow convinced us that the Capitol Hill riot, bad as it was, was worse than months and

00:38:46.280 months of BLM death and destruction across the country. And the apparently elected vice president 0.96

00:38:54.680 elect Kamala Harris, encouraging it. Kamala Harris, when people got arrested for burning down

00:38:59.600 Minnesota, do you know what, do you know what she did? She posted a fundraising link

00:39:03.420 to, to their bail fund. Some of that money was used to bail out a child rapist,

00:39:10.140 a guy who raped an eight year old girl. She's apparently going to be the vice president. 0.62

00:39:18.000 Imagine that. And we're hand wringing about, oh, Donald Trump. Well, he should have condemned the

00:39:23.880 violence eight minutes prior. He, he waited five minutes too long. Give me a break. Goodness gracious

00:39:30.760 people. Somehow, some people are still sort of listening to Mitt Romney. Well, he lectures all of

00:39:37.140 us. Romney marched with these, with these guys, BLM and Antifa. He marched with them. Well, no,

00:39:44.240 he only marched with the, with the peaceful BLM protesters, not the violent BLM and Antifa rioters.

00:39:53.980 First of all, didn't see a whole lot of a difference if you look at the rubble of the

00:39:58.700 cities the day after. But do you think that that subtle distinction is, is being appreciated on the

00:40:03.580 right between the 99.999% of peaceful demonstrators and the 0.001% of people who stole a podium and

00:40:13.300 messed up Nancy Pelosi's desk? I don't think so. Not the only ones. Slate, former CNN contributors,

00:40:23.580 other prominent leftists, current CNN anchors, all promoting violence, all promoting violence.

00:40:31.120 These are the BLM stuff and the Capitol Hill stuff. They are analogous except in one way, two ways.

00:40:41.020 One, BLM was much deadlier, much more ruinous, caused much more damage to businesses and people's

00:40:49.120 lives. But two, BLM got something out of it. BLM got political concessions out of it. BLM helped shape

00:40:58.280 the Democratic Party agenda on defunding the police. Talk about, you know, attacking the heart of our

00:41:04.480 democracy. Law and order is, is the heart of our democracy, right? The, the police are the law

00:41:09.360 enforcement agency that go in and defend the American system. That seems like a threat to me.

00:41:15.460 The left got something out of it. The right didn't get anything out of the misguided and very,

00:41:20.860 very bad. Capitol Hill riot. Slate comes out, quote, nonviolence is an important tool for protests,

00:41:30.140 but so is violence. They tweeted that out June 4th, 2020. This was during BLM.

00:41:36.480 Nonviolence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence. Imagine if the Daily Wire the next day

00:41:43.400 tweeted out, you know, nonviolence is good for the Make America Great Again movement,

00:41:47.220 but violence is important too. Should have taken a few more podiums. Should have smashed a few more

00:41:53.800 windows. Maybe worse. That would be the equivalent. Slate still has its Twitter account.

00:42:00.360 If the Daily Wire ever tweeted anything like that, I assure you not only would our social media accounts

00:42:05.240 be gone, our web hosting would be gone too. The president tweets out, be peaceful. They take away

00:42:10.320 his Twitter account and Facebook access. Other leftists, CNN's Riza Aslan, who is actually a

00:42:18.080 cannibal. He's actually eaten human brains. That's the kind of person they put on CNN.

00:42:22.240 He tweets out, quote, if they even try to replace RBG, we burn the entire effing thing down.

00:42:29.080 I don't need to point out what would happen if a right winger said something similar.

00:42:33.620 Emmett McFarlane, who's some blue check mark on the left. I don't even know what he does.

00:42:36.680 Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court.

00:42:41.220 Laura Bassett, same thing. If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be

00:42:45.680 riots. Okay. Well, there were, I guess. Charlotte Clymer, who is this transgender fellow who is very

00:42:52.140 vocal and left wing. We're now walking to Mitch McConnell's house to protest. So now actually going

00:42:58.540 to threaten the guy's house. Obviously. Chris Cuomo, I guess is probably the greatest example

00:43:06.580 of this. Cuomo openly on national television. If you can call CNN national television, it's mostly

00:43:12.420 just an airport intercom system, but theoretically it's a big TV network goes out and defends violent

00:43:19.040 protests. Now, too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow

00:43:26.680 citizens to take to the streets, persistent and poisonous inequities and injustice. And please show me

00:43:34.520 where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful. As we have noted before,

00:43:40.540 the first amendment is where it says that protests are supposed to be peaceful because you have the

00:43:44.340 right to peaceably assemble. But I actually can't believe I'm saying this. I want to defend Chris

00:43:50.020 Cuomo for a second, not defend the point he's actually making, but to defend the thinking behind the point

00:43:56.300 that he's making. While we're all getting blue in the face, yelling about the double standards here,

00:44:04.320 we are failing to acknowledge that this is about standards. Getting back to what we were talking

00:44:10.720 about earlier in the show. This is not about free speech. This is not about censorship. All societies

00:44:18.100 permit some amount of speech and they all enforce some degree of censorship. This has been true

00:44:24.060 everywhere throughout the entire history of the world and it has been true in the United States,

00:44:29.080 maybe particularly in the United States. Areopagitica, which is the greatest defense of free speech in the

00:44:36.540 English language, says that we shouldn't give free speech to Catholics and Milton actually makes some good 1.00

00:44:41.100 arguments for it. John Locke in his letter on toleration says we shouldn't tolerate atheists and he makes 1.00

00:44:47.400 some good arguments for it. Even the most robust liberal defenses of free speech acknowledge that

00:44:54.540 there are limits in censorship. What the left is saying is that if you go out and you protest and

00:45:02.320 it becomes violent and you loot Gucci stores in the name of BLM, that is a good thing and we will 1.00

00:45:08.740 tolerate that. But if you go out and wave the American flag and let's say it becomes somewhat violent,

00:45:14.060 we will not tolerate that. We will give BLM spots at the Democratic National Convention and we will put 0.99

00:45:20.940 the MAGA protesters in jail and certainly the rioters are going to jail. Those are different

00:45:27.600 standards, but we've always had standards. In the 1950s, if you went out and held a big protest,

00:45:34.760 even a peaceful protest for communism, you could be prosecuted for that. As well, you should be.

00:45:41.680 Frankly, if we were a little tougher on communism today, we might not be in the position that we're

00:45:46.560 in. And if you went out then and waved an America flag or you said, make America great again, you'd be

00:45:51.860 totally fine. We had standards then too. We will always have standards. And what conservatives have

00:45:58.740 unfortunately done is we've come out and we've said, hey, I support all sorts of speech. I don't want

00:46:07.700 any standards at all. Say whatever words you want on television. Oh, drag queen story hour. It's a 0.99

00:46:12.140 blessing of liberty. Oh, it's wonderful. I would never, because if I tell you that you're not allowed

00:46:18.720 to host a drag queen story hour and have transvestites twerk for toddlers, well, then you might tell me that 1.00

00:46:25.680 I can't go to church. And so we're all just going to throw up our hands because they're all the same,

00:46:29.380 right? No, no. Good to go to church. Bad to go to drag queen story hour. We should encourage people

00:46:38.940 to go to church or, you know, practice their religion generally. Good religion though, not like 1.00

00:46:44.940 Satanism. I don't think we should promote Satanism. Don't think we should promote secular 1.00

00:46:50.000 liberalism. That's a pretty weird religion. There was just a video that went around, a New York Post

00:46:54.100 sent it out of this, this white woman forcing her children to kneel down and pray to black women, 0.99

00:47:01.960 actually to make an idol out of black women, actually to objectify black women, which is kind 0.98

00:47:06.660 of ironic. She doesn't think she's doing that. I just thought, man, secular liberalism, that is a

00:47:10.220 weird religion. That is one of the strangest religions I've ever seen. But you want to promote 1.00

00:47:14.400 the good. You want to discourage the bad. We've always understood this in America. Conservatives,

00:47:21.460 libertarians, liberals, all understood this. Well, liberals and progressives still understand this.

00:47:28.200 They still understand. You got to promote some things. You got to discourage other things.

00:47:32.400 Just they flip the standards. Right now, there's a tweet, went up on January 7th from the Chinese 0.95

00:47:38.980 embassy in the United States. It says, quote, study shows the population change in Northwest China's

00:47:44.500 Zhangjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region involves the overall improvement in population quality.

00:47:49.860 Oh, man. An increasing number of youths chose to spend more time and energy on personal development.

00:47:56.040 Population change and population improvement. This is an open call by an enemy nation for genocide. 0.76

00:48:04.660 Open promotion of genocide on Twitter. Totally fine. That's okay, according to the new standards.

00:48:10.160 But the duly elected sitting president of the United States calling for peace, not permitted on Twitter.

00:48:20.220 Are we going to say, well, I can't take a side. We can't promote one over the other. We need to support

00:48:24.700 every single view. Viewpoint neutrality. We're going to say that? It doesn't seem to be working well in

00:48:30.720 practice. Speaking of racial caste systems. Joe Biden is proposing one. President elect Joe Biden says

00:48:40.380 his priority when he gets into office is going to be to support black businesses and Latino businesses

00:48:51.280 and all sorts of businesses, but not white businesses. Our focus will be on small businesses 0.54

00:48:56.620 on Main Street that aren't wealthy and well-connected, that are facing real economic hardships through

00:49:02.920 no fault of their own. Our priority will be black, Latino, Asian, and Native American-owned small

00:49:09.420 businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild. 1.00

00:49:15.380 That's a new standard. That's a new standard. The older standard, which we've had for, you know,

00:49:21.460 at least about 50 years, at least half a century in this country, is we're not going to push racial 0.96

00:49:27.580 preferences. We're going to let people stand on their own. We're not going to prioritize race.

00:49:33.540 Now we've got a new standard, which is we are going to prioritize race. Certain races are going to 0.81

00:49:37.820 get preferences. Certain races are not. Pretty ugly stuff to me. That's the future unless you stand up 1.00

00:49:44.120 for a standard of your own. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.

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The Michael Knowles Show - January 11, 2021

Ep. 677 - The “Free Speech” Myth

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