The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 992 - Elon Officially Owns Twitter And The Libs

00:00:00.000 All they had to do was give the Babylon Bee its account back. All the libs had to do

00:00:07.280 was just not censor every little tiny thing that they disliked all the way down to a satire

00:00:14.840 website. But they couldn't do it. The libs who ran Twitter just couldn't do it. So Elon Musk

00:00:22.880 had to take Twitter away from them. It is now official. The company has confirmed it. Elon Musk

00:00:29.180 is the owner of Twitter. It all went down exactly as he said it would. In less than three weeks,

00:00:37.740 Elon Musk went from announcing a major investment in Twitter to gobbling up the entire company to

00:00:43.700 take it private. At first, the board tried to stop the takeover by offering Musk a board seat.

00:00:50.380 That didn't work. Then they tried to stop the takeover by issuing a poison pill to water down

00:00:56.520 his shares and stop him from buying more. That didn't work. Then they leaned on woke financial

00:01:02.940 institutions, BlackRock, State Street, to block the takeover. That didn't work. The kingdom of

00:01:09.480 Saudi Arabia even got in on the action, trying to stop Musk from buying Twitter. That didn't work.

00:01:16.580 In the end, Elon Musk bought Twitter for exactly the price that he offered from the very start.

00:01:22.280 He got exactly what he wanted, and he didn't pay one penny more than he offered.

00:01:29.060 The move is terrific for a lot of reasons. For one, the libs are losing their minds. They have not

00:01:37.560 cried this hard since election night 2016, which is delightful. Also important, censored conservatives

00:01:46.160 will likely get their voice back on Twitter, which is important because Twitter is in many ways the

00:01:51.120 public square. Speaking in the public square is how republics govern themselves. A lot of

00:01:55.600 conservatives are reporting right now that their follower counts have exploded overnight. Their

00:01:59.740 engagement has exploded overnight. I've seen it myself. I'm up something like 25,000 followers in 24

00:02:05.500 hours. Part of that might be the fire tweets that I'm sending, but I think maybe a clearer explanation

00:02:11.060 is technologically, algorithmically, something must have changed. No less important, though,

00:02:17.240 than both of those reasons. Perhaps the most delightful part of it all. Elon Musk is right

00:02:23.760 now in real time vindicating the great man theory of history. The idea that individual men can actually

00:02:31.440 shift to some degree and set and reset the course of human events. For years now, the libs have wanted

00:02:40.240 us to believe that individuals cannot make a difference, that history is governed simply merely

00:02:46.480 by an impersonal science, quote unquote, that will unfold regardless of what human beings actually want

00:02:53.680 or do. The arc of history inevitably bending toward whatever the libs want. They were so confident.

00:03:01.780 And then in walks some eccentric South African billionaire, possibly a conservative,

00:03:07.520 I'm not even really sure, to take not only Twitter, but their total absolute hegemony and

00:03:14.380 their confidence away from them. Absolutely love it. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:03:28.540 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Roy Munson, who says,

00:03:32.680 I'm shocked at how long it took for this insanity to be a major story. Marjorie Taylor Greene has

00:03:38.320 bigger cojones than most of those rhinos in office, and no one has spoken up about this kangaroo court

00:03:44.200 BS. Good point. This is on how the Georgia Democrats are dragging Marjorie Greene, this Republican

00:03:50.500 congressman, to court using a little known provision of the 14th Amendment to try to stop her from being on

00:03:58.100 the ballot because they know they can't beat her at the ballot. They know she's very popular.

00:04:02.680 So if they want to beat the Republicans, they've got to stop Marjorie Greene from ever even

00:04:08.500 appearing there. It's probably not going to work though, okay? Because we the people are taking

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00:05:22.680 Knowles in their how did you hear about us box so they know that we sent you. The libs have 180

00:05:29.140 degrees pivoted from their previous argument on Twitter. The previous argument was that this is

00:05:35.880 horrible. If Elon Musk takes over Twitter, it will be the end of the world. He's actually offering a

00:05:41.280 low offer for the company, $54.20 per share. That's low. Twitter actually has more value than that.

00:05:47.840 The board's got to stop him. The shareholders have to stop him. BlackRock, State Street,

00:05:51.940 Saudi Arabia, they've all got to stop Elon Musk. And then he got it through a number of maneuvers.

00:05:57.720 Elon Musk got what he wanted. And now the libs are trying through their tears. They're trying to

00:06:02.940 plaster on a smile and say, oh no, this is fine. No, this is good actually. Ha, actually Elon Musk is

00:06:09.220 an idiot. He paid a lot of money for Twitter. Ha ha. The joke's on him. The Twitter shareholders,

00:06:16.320 they're the ones who just made $44 billion. Ha ha. What an idiot. He got ripped off.

00:06:22.580 This argument does not really work because they were making the opposite argument just a few days

00:06:27.620 ago. But let's even go with it. One, Elon Musk offered $54.20 per share and that's what he got.

00:06:34.740 That is a considerable premium, over a 30% premium on what the value of the stock was when he announced

00:06:42.200 that he owned 9% of the company. And it's a 50% premium or more over the price of the stock when

00:06:47.940 Elon Musk first actually started buying Twitter. So yes, he did pay a little bit more money.

00:06:55.220 But if it's such a good deal for Twitter, if this is such a bad deal for Elon Musk,

00:07:01.000 why didn't the Twitter leadership take the deal when he first offered it?

00:07:04.720 Why did Twitter and the leadership and the institutional investors fight the deal tooth

00:07:11.040 and nail? If it's such a good deal, if $54.20 per share is such a good deal, why didn't they

00:07:16.200 jump at the opportunity to have it? Because it's obviously not a good deal for Twitter.

00:07:21.540 It might be if you just look at the numbers, but Twitter is about more than just the numbers.

00:07:26.540 Elon Musk said it. He said, this is not primarily an economic decision for me.

00:07:29.880 And that's not just a political twist of rhetoric. It's important because the value of Twitter is

00:07:39.460 not merely in the dollars and cents and the ability to advertise and monetize. The value of

00:07:43.720 Twitter is controlling the public square. Twitter is the smallest of the big tech companies.

00:07:49.720 Facebook is much bigger. Google is much bigger. But Twitter does punch above its weight because so

00:07:54.100 many blue checks, so many influence peddlers, so many opinion makers are on Twitter.

00:07:59.880 And so if you control Twitter, you are controlling a huge portion of the digital public square. If

00:08:04.760 you control the public square, you control the government. You control the political order.

00:08:09.360 And so this doesn't totally solve the problem because now we just have our billionaire controls

00:08:16.000 it, which is something that's a start. It's better than their billionaires controlling it. It's better

00:08:19.420 than their corrupt institutions controlling it. But that's the value in Twitter. Sure, it's a little

00:08:25.660 bit the advertising. Sure, it's a little bit the monetization. But much more than that, if you can

00:08:30.060 control the way that discourse happens in America, which is at least in name a self-government, at least

00:08:36.520 in theory the way we govern ourselves as we persuade one another, then you have an insane amount of power.

00:08:42.280 Why do you think Saudi Arabia cares? Saudi Arabia has got enough money. If they want to make money,

00:08:47.260 they can just put a straw in the ground and pump oil out of it. Why do you think Saudi Arabia was

00:08:51.080 throwing its weight around on Twitter? Why do you think huge institutional actors were throwing

00:08:55.740 their weight around on Twitter? It's not because it's the biggest company in the world. It's because

00:08:59.720 it plays a huge role in controlling speech in America. And now we've got at least a shift

00:09:06.880 in that power away from the libs, which had hegemonic control over it, towards something more closely

00:09:13.440 resembling the tradition of free speech in America. So that's the first cope that the Democrats and the

00:09:19.320 libs have. Well, he overpaid. Haha, this is actually good for us. Okay, sure. Sure. Why were

00:09:24.060 you fighting it so hard then? Brian Stelter on CNN has a different cope, which is, okay, so Elon Musk

00:09:29.580 got Twitter, even though we fought him tooth and nail on it. Well, who's even going to use Twitter

00:09:34.320 anymore? I think that's an example of a broader question for Twitter, which is, if you get invited

00:09:43.800 to something where there are no rules, where there is total freedom for everybody, do you actually

00:09:49.440 want to go to that party? Or are you going to decide to stay home? And that's a question for

00:09:53.520 Twitter users. Some Twitter users might love the idea that there's going to be absolutely no

00:09:57.920 moderation and no rules at all. Others might not want to be anywhere near that. Am I crazy, Matt?

00:10:02.220 No, no, you're right. And what happens to the advertising? I mean, if there's no moderation or

00:10:06.440 little moderation, do the advertisers stay away? What does that do to the business prospects for

00:10:10.940 Twitter itself? I think that's very much an open debate. So Stelter is completely wrong

00:10:16.120 in his conclusion and in his premise. Even if his premise were right, his conclusion would still

00:10:21.280 be wrong. Well, if Elon Musk gets rid of all the speech regulations on Twitter, are people even going

00:10:26.820 to want to be there? Yeah, they will. He's saying, why would the Libs stay on Twitter? They're going to

00:10:32.380 stay on Twitter for the same reason conservatives are going to stay on Twitter when the Twitter

00:10:37.020 leadership was going after conservatives. They're going to do it because that's the public square.

00:10:40.940 And Twitter gained a critical mass. And now it plays a huge role in the public square.

00:10:46.620 And so conservatives are going to stay on it, even when they go after us, even when they kick

00:10:49.980 off Trump, even when they kick off the Babylon Bee. We're going to stay on it because that's where it

00:10:54.380 is. That's where people talk. I wish that were not the case. If that were the case, if that were not

00:11:00.020 the case, Elon Musk wouldn't have had to go in and buy it. But that's why the conservatives stayed on.

00:11:03.740 Why are the Libs going to stay on? The same reason.

00:11:06.480 They can, where are they going to go? They're going to go to Parler?

00:11:09.120 They're going to go to Gab? They're going to go to Truth Social? They're going to go to the

00:11:13.060 conservative option? No, obviously not. At least there was an argument for conservatives to go

00:11:17.380 there. They're not going to go there. Go to the liberal Twitter. That was Twitter until we took

00:11:22.960 it away from you. So that's why. But furthermore, the premise is wrong because Elon Musk is not getting

00:11:31.980 rid of all the regulations. In fact, Elon Musk said when he bought it, he said, I'm going to add more

00:11:36.580 regulations. I'm going to require some verification so that you are who you say you are. I'm going to

00:11:40.520 get rid of the stupid bots. He's going to take away certain regulations too. He's going to free up

00:11:46.320 speech, he says. He's going to let conservatives talk more. He's not going to ban conservatives for

00:11:50.200 saying innocuous things. But it's not really a debate between total free speech and total censorship.

00:11:56.820 censorship. What's funny now is that the left, through the voice of Brian Stelter,

00:12:03.160 is taking the side against free speech and for censorship. In the 1960s, they did the opposite.

00:12:08.920 But it was always a false debate. This is the point of my book, Speechless. That's never the

00:12:12.840 way it really is. The real question is, what are the standards? What are you allowed to say? What are

00:12:16.720 the customs? What are the mores? What are the rules? What are the limits? The libs had completely

00:12:20.940 pushed it in their direction. So you weren't allowed to question Fauci. You weren't allowed to say

00:12:24.920 that boys aren't girls. You weren't allowed to say perfectly ordinary things. But you were allowed

00:12:29.720 to dox conservatives. You were allowed to threaten conservatives. You were allowed to do all sorts of

00:12:35.600 terrible things. And now, now that conservatives maybe have a little more control over Twitter,

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00:13:50.100 digital marketing trial today, go to constantcontact.com. Yesterday was a really good day for Elon Musk,

00:13:57.500 just in general. Yesterday, Elon Musk not only took over Twitter, he also signed his first deal with an

00:14:08.260 airplane to provide free Wi-Fi through his company, SpaceX. Because this guy is just doing whatever

00:14:14.660 he wants. He's building cars, he's sending out rocket ships, he's building global internet, he's

00:14:19.120 owning Twitter. So, Elon Musk struck a deal with Hawaiian Airlines. Hawaiian Airlines, obviously,

00:14:27.440 is flying over the Pacific, and they've always had this issue with Wi-Fi. It's hard to get Wi-Fi when

00:14:31.680 you're flying over the middle of nowhere in the Pacific. So, Hawaiian has not offered Wi-Fi

00:14:36.220 that you could pay for or that you don't pay for. Elon goes in with his Starlink system,

00:14:42.560 which was providing some internet in Ukraine. It can provide internet by satellite. And he said,

00:14:47.080 okay, I'm going to offer it for free to Hawaiian. So, there are two aspects here. One, it's going to

00:14:52.880 give him a lot of control over internet, period. But two, it's going to pressure other companies to

00:14:59.180 give free Wi-Fi on the internet. Right now, you can go on the most expensive airline in America,

00:15:04.080 you can buy a first class ticket, you can spend, you can spend a thousand dollars or more on an

00:15:08.460 airplane ticket. And they still expect you to pay 30 bucks for the internet. And that's kind of

00:15:13.180 annoying. People don't like to do it. So, Elon Musk is pressuring the airlines now, maybe potentially

00:15:18.000 transforming the way that people communicate when they're up in the air, the way that we travel.

00:15:23.420 And solving a problem for Hawaiian Airlines and for other airlines that are flying over the Pacific

00:15:27.580 where it's much harder to provide internet. All of which brings me back to my first point. Yes,

00:15:33.880 it's hilarious that the libs are crying over this. It's really, really funny. Yes, it's really great

00:15:39.140 that conservatives are not nearly as censored. Already, you're seeing the shift. I mean,

00:15:43.220 I'm seeing this in real time right now on my Twitter account. But the fact that Elon Musk can do

00:15:51.920 these things is itself delightful. Because it shows that the conservative understanding of history,

00:15:59.360 the conservative view of history, that individual moments really do matter. Individual men really do

00:16:05.540 matter. Individual twists of history actually do matter. And it's not all just some totally discoverable

00:16:14.420 scientific, scientific, deterministic system that the left wants us to believe. That is a wonderful,

00:16:22.580 delightful thing. I don't want to say that I was predicting what was going to happen with the whole

00:16:30.260 Twitter saga. But, you know, sometimes I put on my Noel Stradamus hat. Sometimes I take out my crystal ball.

00:16:36.600 And I, sometimes I have to say, I told you so. And the way that I was predicting, just to, this all

00:16:43.520 happened so quickly. I was just maybe a few days ahead of where some of the conversation was.

00:16:47.820 One of the reasons I was doing that, whether it was Elon Musk turning down the board seat,

00:16:52.960 taking a, potentially making a tender offer to the shareholders. One of the ways I could do that is

00:17:00.880 because Elon Musk was sending out these really cryptic tweets. And people were debating what are

00:17:05.440 the cryptic tweets. Yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted out, and be my love in the rain. And most people

00:17:13.380 thought, okay, he's just a weirdo. He's just tweeting out some random line. I don't know what

00:17:18.520 that is. Maybe it's from a song. I don't know. I happen to be a fan of the American poet, Robert

00:17:23.280 Frost. So it was quickly clear to me that he was referencing a Robert Frost poem. The poem is a

00:17:31.360 line storm song. And so I went back, I didn't really remember all the lines of the poem. I looked back at

00:17:37.380 this poem. And one of the lines was, quote, the birds have less to say for themselves in the wood

00:17:45.000 world's torn despair than now these numberless years, the elves, although they are no less there.

00:17:53.680 People told me, Michael, studying English and American poetry, that's not going to get you

00:17:59.320 anywhere. There's no practical application. Well, joke's on you folks, because the fact that I know

00:18:04.320 a little bit about poetry actually allowed me to interpret where Elon Musk was going with all of

00:18:08.920 this. The fact that he's referencing the birds during this whole saga about Twitter does not

00:18:13.620 seem to me a coincidence. The poem, a line storm song, is about a destructive force, a sort of

00:18:21.600 unpredicted and destructive force, violent force that comes in and renews the woods and renews the

00:18:28.900 whole world. A chaotic force, maybe like this eccentric billionaire who comes in and reorders

00:18:34.940 the public square. The birds have less to say for themselves. That's right. Twitter had much less to

00:18:39.880 say for themselves. It seems to me to be signaling, this is going to go through. I am buying this thing.

00:18:45.120 And this comparison here between the birds, right, the Twitter people who are just going about their

00:18:51.560 technocratic lives and we've got everything and we're in control of all the speech. And then here come

00:18:55.580 those elves, those little magical mystical forces that we sometimes deny exist and we forget that

00:19:02.240 that mystique around the way that the world operates. We forget that sometimes those guys

00:19:07.280 come in there and they just mess things up and they turn things around. That, I don't think I'm

00:19:11.740 reading too deeply into it because that's exactly what played out. Previously, Musk had tweeted out,

00:19:16.080 blank is the night. Blank is the night. Some people were saying, is it lonely as the night? Is it this?

00:19:20.500 I knew he was referring to tender is the night, which is the name of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

00:19:26.760 And actually the title of that F. Scott Fitzgerald novel comes from a poem by John Keats. The poem

00:19:32.580 is ode to a nightingale. And the line in that poem is, and mid May's eldest child, the coming musk rose

00:19:38.820 full of dewy wine, the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eaves. Is it a coincidence that the poem that

00:19:45.100 he's referencing has the word musk right in it? A sort of unusual word is in it. I don't think so. I don't

00:19:50.200 think that I've, I don't think that I'm the sort of romantic, you know, nose in the air version of

00:19:58.860 Alex Jones here, you know, putting on my tinfoil hat, trying to read tea leaves. I think what this

00:20:03.960 is telling or what this is showing rather is that Elon Musk is a very sophisticated thinker. This is a

00:20:13.080 guy who doesn't do things by accident. He, just for one, how many, how many business tycoons do you

00:20:19.960 know who are familiar with poetry? Not very many. Usually they're the kind of humanities people.

00:20:25.760 Usually there are the kind of artistic types. And then there are the business types who are only

00:20:29.580 interested in commerce or technology or engineering. And yet here's Elon Musk, I think pretty clearly

00:20:37.080 referencing Fitzgerald and Keats, but certainly without question, he's referencing the Robert Frost

00:20:41.500 poem. He actually knows something about this. And it's even funnier because he's South African. He's not

00:20:45.160 even, he's not even American. Now he's an African American because he's become American, but that's

00:20:49.980 a story for another time. All of this to say, not that it's particularly important that people could

00:20:58.000 decipher exactly what poems the guy was referencing. All of this to say, this guy is operating on a much

00:21:04.900 higher level than most people in public life. This guy, the joke about Washington DC, the joke about

00:21:12.700 Congress is that the average IQ is something like 85, right? That our representatives in DC are very

00:21:18.680 often much stupider than the average American. They don't know very much. They're just kind of

00:21:22.420 glad handing windbags. A lot of people in business are that way too, actually. They just are all about

00:21:29.420 commerce. They're just all about dollars and cents. Elon Musk is not just about commerce. When Elon Musk

00:21:34.720 says my decision to buy Twitter is not purely economic, I think he's being honest. I think he's telling

00:21:39.440 the truth. This guy has higher ambitions. This guy is going to be a line storm song that this guy's

00:21:46.260 going to be a line storm where we're in the song right now, I guess, who is going to come in and

00:21:50.560 just out of nowhere, mess things up and turn things around and shake up the dreary, apparently

00:21:57.820 deterministic course of history and decay. And he's going to come in and say, no, no, we're not going to

00:22:02.960 do that. So this is really, really great stuff. Not just because we can tweet about how Dr. Fauci's

00:22:09.120 a liar and how men aren't women and how ivermectin's a wonder drug. And not just because we can do that.

00:22:13.380 That's all fun too. But because of what it says about history, because of what it says about the

00:22:18.220 way that we can affect the course of political development. So of course, you know what's going

00:22:24.260 to happen. The libs are going to try to take this guy out. They're already doing it.

00:22:28.080 There was a story and I think it was a variety yesterday, one of the trade publications in

00:22:32.800 Hollywood that FX and the New York Times have just announced an Elon Musk expose that right on

00:22:41.300 time, right on time. I guess they probably had to speed it up a little bit because the Musk Twitter

00:22:48.140 takeover sort of came out of nowhere and then occurred really quickly. It occurred within just

00:22:53.040 a matter of weeks. And so now they've got their expose and the expose is going to focus on his car

00:22:57.660 company, Tesla, and how the self-driving car experiments have resulted in deaths. And so

00:23:04.320 they're going to focus on that. And they're going to try to basically paint him as a sociopathic

00:23:08.120 killer, probably a serial killer. I don't know. They're going to accuse him of all sorts of things,

00:23:13.620 which is fine by me. To me, it makes me more likely to defend Elon Musk. I don't know the man.

00:23:22.560 I don't know exactly what he believes. The things that I've heard that he believes make me confident

00:23:26.900 that he's basically got his head screwed on straight. The fact, for instance, that he rejects

00:23:32.160 the overpopulation narrative, this preposterous liberal narrative that goes back actually centuries,

00:23:37.780 but has been really popular for the last 50 years. The fact that Elon says actually the world is

00:23:41.600 underpopulated. The fact that he seems to be pro-human. The fact that he seems to be pro-American

00:23:46.860 tradition of free speech. These are all good signs. But the thing that makes me most likely

00:23:53.220 to support this guy is the fact that the New York Times and FX and the Hollywood liberal establishment

00:23:59.520 is trying to take him out. The fact that BlackRock and State Street were trying to squeeze him out,

00:24:05.540 that the Twitter board was trying to keep him out. To me, that's the best argument. When I'm trying to

00:24:10.760 figure out who my political allies are, I look at what my political opponents are doing, who they're

00:24:15.920 most vociferously opposing. And then I think, huh, that person must have something right.

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00:25:14.340 you should do so immediately. It sold out in less than 24 hours when it was released. But don't worry,

00:25:20.020 it's back in stock right now. It will sell out again. So pick up your copy of Johnny the Walrus

00:25:24.300 today at johnnythewalrus.com or on Amazon. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:25:40.900 Not only is the New York Times going after Elon Musk, not only is FX, Hollywood going after Elon

00:25:47.660 Musk, the White House is going after him too. Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, was asked yesterday

00:25:53.820 about the Twitter takeover. And she seemed to suggest that the White House is going to be

00:26:00.960 taking a stronger hand in regulating social media now. Does the White House have any concern

00:26:05.700 that this new agreement might have President Trump back on the platform?

00:26:10.560 Well, I'm not going to comment on a specific transaction. What I can tell you as a general

00:26:14.940 matter, no matter who owns or runs Twitter, the president has long been concerned about the

00:26:20.480 power of large social media platforms, the power they have over our everyday lives, has long argued

00:26:26.460 that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause. He has been a strong supporter

00:26:31.440 of fundamental reforms to achieve that goal, including reforms to Section 230, enacting antitrust

00:26:37.460 reforms, requiring more transparency, and more. And he's encouraged that there's bipartisan interest

00:26:43.740 in Congress. In terms of what hypothetical policies might happen, I'm just not going to speak to that

00:26:49.980 at this point in time. Jen Psaki said one word there that tells you the whole game. Everyone thinks this

00:26:57.220 is about free speech, including many, if not most conservatives. And it's not. It's just not.

00:27:03.520 This is about that one word that Jen Psaki said, power. It's about power. It's about who is setting

00:27:14.360 the rules, who has the right to set the rules, who is enforcing the rules. Notice Jen Psaki says,

00:27:21.040 the president's concerned about the harm that social media causes. What are we talking about the harm that

00:27:25.980 it causes? Are we talking about the harm to kids developing brains? That's actually a real,

00:27:29.660 that's a real problem. When kids are just spending 52 minutes on average on TikTok a day,

00:27:34.440 swiping and getting their brains melted by weird Chinese propaganda. Yeah, that's a concern. That's

00:27:39.240 not what they're talking about. Are they talking about the threats to the public square, the harm

00:27:42.700 caused to democracy when you kick half the country off, or at least you suppress what half the country

00:27:49.100 is allowed to say? You kick the duly elected sitting president off just because he's a conservative?

00:27:53.740 No, I don't think Biden's talking about that. He's talking about the harm

00:27:58.580 of misinformation, the harm of questioning Dr. Fauci, the harm of raising questions about the 2020

00:28:05.640 election, the harm of questioning the Democrat narrative, the harm of saying that boys aren't

00:28:12.240 really girls. That's what he's talking about. What Jen Psaki is saying is, we're going to go in

00:28:18.280 and fight Elon Musk and take this away from him, and therefore take away from you conservatives

00:28:24.940 the strongest voice you've had in social media in a long time. It's about power. It's not about

00:28:31.520 free speech. It's about who sets the standards, who holds the power. Elon Musk is not, maybe he'll

00:28:40.920 free up speech a little bit, or maybe he'll just free it up in certain places and restrict it more

00:28:44.600 in other places, like for instance, anonymous accounts. That's probably more likely what's going

00:28:47.780 to happen. Maybe he'll just shift the way that speech is done. But what he certainly did was

00:28:54.200 shift the balance of power. And the White House does not like that very much. That's what all these

00:28:59.480 battles are about. Moving on from social media, because it's not only about social media. This

00:29:03.260 is what the education fight's about. The education fight is not about free speech. If the education

00:29:08.940 fight were about free speech in Florida right now, conservatives would be against free speech.

00:29:13.340 And liberals would be for free speech. Because we're saying we need to restrict the number of

00:29:18.620 books you can teach in the classroom. We're trying to restrict the number of words that you can say

00:29:22.060 in the classroom. We're trying to restrict the number of conversations that kindergarten teachers

00:29:25.580 could have. That's a good thing. Teachers should not be allowed to say whatever they want in the

00:29:30.260 classroom. That has no place in the American free speech tradition. It's completely incoherent.

00:29:35.180 It has nothing to do with what education is. In the 1960s, conservatives were against free speech

00:29:44.120 in the sense that they were against relaxing obscenity standards. They were against relaxing

00:29:50.680 other norms and customs and standards in our speech and behavior. It was the liberals who were

00:29:55.380 pushing for it. And they used free speech as an instrument to do that. But it was never genuine.

00:30:00.420 The very people who pushed the free speech movement at Berkeley then became the most

00:30:05.240 pro-censorship people in the country. Because it's never about that sort of thing. Okay?

00:30:09.700 And so I think we've got to ditch that kind of talk. I don't think that kind of talk is particularly

00:30:13.760 helpful. And we need to recognize that what we're talking about here is a little more about the

00:30:18.060 substance. It's a little less about the abstraction. And it's a little bit more about the substance.

00:30:22.660 Is a kindergarten teacher trying to trans a five-year-old? Well, then that teacher's out.

00:30:26.160 See ya. Sayonara, sucker. Bye. But my free speech right to talk about how little kids should

00:30:32.480 mutilate their bodies and take coronavirus. No, you don't have that right. If that's what free

00:30:35.860 speech is, I'm against. It's not really what free speech is. But if that's what it is, then never

00:30:39.180 mind. See ya. Bye. This is a popular message. Not just among old fuddy-duddies, by the way.

00:30:46.300 It's actually especially a popular message among young people. There's a new poll. It's just out.

00:30:50.160 It's a national poll from the Harvard Kennedy School. So it's not exactly a right-wing

00:30:54.060 institution that shows that 18 to 29-year-olds, in particular, agree with the statement,

00:31:01.820 parents should have more control over their children's education than they do now.

00:31:06.560 46% agree with that statement. Only 23% disagree with that statement.

00:31:11.600 So it's not just that the young people are for whatever you want to teach in the schools, man,

00:31:16.580 and free speech, man. And it's the old fuddy-duddies who are saying that. Actually,

00:31:20.300 it's disproportionately the young people who have children right now, who have kids in these schools

00:31:26.040 who realize, no, I don't want you teaching my kid critical race theory, you weirdo. I don't want you

00:31:31.740 telling little Johnny he's really little Jane. No, we need more controls in schools over what kids

00:31:36.920 can say, or at least different controls. Right now, if a teacher teaches the Bible in a classroom,

00:31:42.100 the teacher is certainly going to be fired. It might be, I don't know, might be charged with some

00:31:46.920 sort of crime or something. They'll have violated the law, those teachers.

00:31:53.000 Meanwhile, if a teacher teaches the gender unicorn or the gender bread man or any weird,

00:31:58.280 perverted sexual stuff in class, the teacher will be applauded. The teacher will be encouraged by the

00:32:02.820 Biden administration. So it's not even about more or less speech. It's just about what are you

00:32:07.700 teaching? What is the substance here? Daily Wire had previously reported that the COVID-19 lockdowns

00:32:14.740 probably had something to do with this shift in attitudes because during COVID-19,

00:32:19.220 really, I don't even want to say during COVID-19 because there was COVID-19, there's the virus,

00:32:23.760 which is sort of whatever. I think most people out there have had it by now. And then there were

00:32:27.460 the lockdowns. And I think they were basically separate phenomena. The COVID-19 virus was the excuse

00:32:35.120 for the lockdowns, but I don't think that the politics of the lockdowns had very much to do with

00:32:39.180 the virus. So in any case, you've got two years of lockdowns during which time virtually every student

00:32:47.160 is being homeschooled to some degree in as much as they're at least sitting on home. They might be on

00:32:51.360 a computer or an iPad, but they're still at home doing distance learning. And a lot of kids were just

00:32:56.120 taken out of the schools and taught by their parents. So you had homeschooling rates grow from

00:33:01.540 5.4% in March of 2020 to 11% in just in September of 2020. So that's a six-month period.

00:33:09.880 By the summer of 2021, 5 million American children were receiving their education at home,

00:33:15.360 which is a huge number. And all of a sudden, these parents get a taste of that.

00:33:20.180 And they say, oh, hold on. My kid doesn't need to just be indoctrinated for eight hours a day into

00:33:24.600 critical race theory or into weird sex theories or into just leftist politics generally. Oh,

00:33:29.840 that's not a requirement. We actually can. I can have some say over this. I like that. That's

00:33:35.640 pretty good. Not just the radical right-wing Republicans. If it were only the radical extreme

00:33:40.880 right-wing Republicans, those numbers wouldn't be possible. That's a huge upswing. What are kids

00:33:46.100 being taught in school? Let's leave the elementary schools for a second. Let's go all the way up to

00:33:49.880 college. There's a school in Utah, Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah. They are right now

00:33:58.820 offering a course on hardcore pornography. This is a private college, not state-sponsored,

00:34:05.660 but it's a private college offering a course on hardcore porn. This is Gender 3000. So already,

00:34:10.840 you know, the course is in a gender studies department, which means it should be abolished

00:34:15.580 because gender studies and all of these sort of critical studies that cropped up in recent decades

00:34:21.780 to give stupid students something that they can study because they weren't able to keep up in the

00:34:26.600 real academic disciplines. So you say, okay, we're going to do gender and ethnicity and migration

00:34:33.180 studies. And it's just an education in leftism. And so as long as you say the right political

00:34:38.760 slogans, you can get a good grade and you can graduate. It was a way to give the left an even

00:34:43.080 stronger foothold in education. So the minute you see gender studies, you think, okay, nevermind.

00:34:48.460 This should get rid of this. As long as we're fixing standards here, just abolish this whole

00:34:53.560 department, turn it into a library or something. In any case, the gender three studies course

00:34:58.220 is called porn. And here's the description. Hardcore pornography is as American as apple pie and more

00:35:03.980 popular than Sunday night football. Our approach to this billion dollar industry is as both a cultural

00:35:09.300 phenomenon that reflects and reinforces sexual inequalities, but holds the potential to

00:35:13.680 challenge sexual and gender norms and as an art form that requires serious contemplation. We will

00:35:18.700 watch pornographic films together and discuss the sexualization of race, class, and gender as an

00:35:23.480 experimental radical art form. This is a very bad idea. This is very harmful to students' education.

00:35:29.620 This should not be permitted at any college or university in the country. This is extremely obscene.

00:35:35.580 This appeals primarily to the prurient interest, and it is not protected by free speech. In the

00:35:41.160 American tradition, this class would have no free speech protection, no first amendment protection.

00:35:47.960 Why? It's not because pornography is not a worthwhile phenomenon to discuss. It is. It's a

00:35:55.920 huge problem in America. It's a major political problem. We don't really talk about it enough.

00:36:01.180 It's destroying the lives of especially a lot of young men. How many times every week I get letters

00:36:05.820 into my mailbag, lots of letters into my mailbag saying, I've been hooked on porn since I was 10. It's

00:36:10.340 ruined my life. How do we fix it? So I think the conversation is really important to have. I think

00:36:15.200 it's really important to study how pornography was mainstreamed into America, how legal prohibitions

00:36:20.700 against it were overturned. That's a really interesting conversation. But that's not what

00:36:25.560 this class does. This class involves sitting down with boys and girls and the teacher watching this

00:36:33.320 stuff. Well, that's very different. It'd be like taking a class on crystal meth and cocaine and

00:36:41.660 hardcore narcotics. You could take a class on that in chemistry, for instance, and talk about these

00:36:47.660 drugs and what they do and their effects. And you could even have a policy discussion on whether or not

00:36:53.440 they should be legal or regulated. That class would be perfectly fine. But the minute that the class says,

00:36:58.360 okay, and as part of your final exam, you're all going to do a bunch of crystal and tell me how it

00:37:03.120 feels. You're all going to blow a bunch of lines of Coke, smoke a pipe of crack and tell me how it

00:37:06.340 feels. That's a very different thing. And that's what this porn class is doing. Because the way that

00:37:11.400 you use crack cocaine is by smoking it. The way that you use heroin is by injecting it. The way that

00:37:17.260 you use pornography is by watching it. The very act of watching pornography is what destroys that

00:37:23.280 sort of academic environment. Because when you watch porn, it's the same reason that you shouldn't

00:37:27.400 be doing these kind of hardcore drugs. When you watch pornography, you are not appealing to your

00:37:32.940 rational faculties. You're not appealing to your intellect. You're not appealing to your rational

00:37:37.800 will. You're losing control of that because you're appealing to the appetite. If you watch a lot of

00:37:44.020 porn, if you do a lot of drugs, if you drink too much, if you do things that are in the indulgence

00:37:51.660 of your vices, you are going to lose your higher will. You're going to weaken your rational faculties.

00:37:57.560 And that's not a very good thing. Unfortunately, that's what our society has become. I know that

00:38:02.660 we always talk about 1984 by George Orwell as though that were the description of the society

00:38:07.820 we're living in. There's censorship. There's an increasingly totalitarian form of government.

00:38:11.740 Yeah, sure. Actually, the way that the establishment controls the American people is much more like

00:38:19.000 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, then 1984 by George Orwell. Huxley, who was Orwell's French

00:38:26.180 teacher, I believe, actually wrote a letter to him to this effect and said, you know, George,

00:38:30.320 it's a good book that you wrote, but my version of it is more accurate as to how political elites

00:38:35.900 actually gain power. They don't do it by just smacking you with a stick. They don't do it by beating

00:38:41.320 you into submission. They usually do it by appealing to your desires, by appealing to your appetites

00:38:46.520 and your lusts. They do it by promoting drugs, by promoting promiscuous sex, by destroying the

00:38:52.920 family. Which is more, when you look at those two visions of a dystopian society, which seems more

00:38:59.880 correct? The absolute, rigid, transparent party program that has all of these very strict rules

00:39:05.260 that you've got to follow or a society of licentiousness and hedonism that tells you if

00:39:10.900 it feels good, do it. Obviously, it's the latter. That's the way the society is decaying. And that's

00:39:15.540 not only is that a function of the really decayed aspects of popular culture, that's now what's

00:39:22.560 literally being taught in universities, the purpose of which is to do the opposite. The purpose of which

00:39:28.080 is to give you a liberal education and teach you how to make sense of your freedom. That's what's

00:39:33.460 going on. And that's going on in the universities. You're getting a similar, perhaps a little watered

00:39:38.740 down version in the high schools, in the middle schools. And despite what the libs tell you, you are

00:39:43.180 getting this kind of weird stuff in the elementary schools. Thanks again to libs of TikTok, one of

00:39:50.940 my favorite Twitter accounts, which I suspect is going to get even more of a boost now that the

00:39:55.900 left is not suppressing conservatives accounts quite as much. Libs of TikTok posted a video

00:40:02.480 of a teacher playing a slideshow about how he is going to indoctrinate kids into transgenderism.

00:40:09.720 It opens up, it says, just this quote, stop brainwashing our children in the classroom with

00:40:15.020 the LGBT agenda. The teacher kind of looks and smiles and laughs. It says, Ms. Beeman is now mixed

00:40:20.280 Beeman. You know me as Ms. Beeman. I'm still your teacher, but now I'm mixed Beeman because I'm

00:40:25.240 non-gendered now. And I'll go by he and they, and I'm transgender and non-binary. And I'm the same me,

00:40:31.940 but we're going to work together so that you can recognize that I'm not just a boy or a girl.

00:40:35.780 What's transgender? What's non-binary? It's where you look like one thing, but you're actually a

00:40:40.400 different sex on the inside. And that's why I've got to be mixed now, MX, rather than Mr. or Ms. or

00:40:46.640 Mrs. or Miss, really. Because that's what transgenderism says and transgenderism is true.

00:40:54.280 That's just, I did give the quick version because it's TikTok, so they're moving very quickly.

00:40:58.060 But that's what a teacher is teaching five-year-olds. I actually, I don't know what level of student

00:41:05.660 this teacher is teaching, whether it's a five-year-old or whether it's an 18-year-old for

00:41:09.460 that matter. It's just not true. The teacher is saying that transgenderism is real, that you can

00:41:15.360 really secretly be the opposite sex, that you should call people by this made up prefix, mix,

00:41:21.760 and that she is now really a he or they. And that's not true. Her name is they because they

00:41:29.540 are legion or something. No, that's none of that is true. And the teacher should be fired or put into

00:41:34.540 counseling. I mean, the teacher should be probably placed on leave, told to go see a psychiatrist,

00:41:39.420 psychologist. Unfortunately, these days, the psychologist will just affirm this woman in

00:41:44.180 her delusions. And, but if the psychologist somehow could convince the woman that she really is a woman

00:41:48.980 and she realizes that she was deluded before, then maybe she could come back and teach the kids.

00:41:54.120 But if she, if she's not going to be convinced of reality and she's going to insist on peddling

00:41:58.900 destructive falsehoods in the classroom, then you got to fire her because she's harming kids'

00:42:03.860 education and she has no right to do that. It's not an act of cruelty to do that. It's actually an act

00:42:09.580 of compassion to the students and compassion to her because the further down this rabbit hole of

00:42:13.900 fantasy she gets, the worse off she's going to be. People don't flourish when they are

00:42:18.800 totally untethered from reality. Got to get a little tougher because sometimes getting tougher

00:42:26.900 is more loving. So that's, that's what we call tough love. Speaking of the mistreatment of kids,

00:42:32.220 now that the American people are so done with COVID and they're so done with the ridiculous public

00:42:39.520 health measures that were based on lots of lies and errors and deception. Now that they're really,

00:42:46.320 really done, there's this last gasp, this desperate final push to keep the country locked

00:42:51.580 down. On MSNBC, you've got some quacks showing up saying that the new, the new fad, the new fashion

00:42:58.700 is, of course, you need to keep wearing your mask, even though this, the court said you no longer have

00:43:04.320 to. Yes, you absolutely have to social distance and take your 7,000th vaccine and, you know, do all

00:43:10.280 the sorts of things that Dr. Fauci wants you to do. But even for your kids, you're really,

00:43:13.920 really little kids who are too young to take the vaccine and who are too young to wear a mask.

00:43:18.620 Well, you need to, you basically need to put them in a space helmet.

00:43:22.380 Parents, parents of young kiddos less than six months of age, if they've been breastfed,

00:43:27.160 there is some, they will have some degree of protective antibodies. My wife's a pediatrician,

00:43:31.760 you know, we chat about this at the dinner table. You, if you have something, if you have a different

00:43:37.040 way to get your end destination and you want to travel with your child that's less than six months

00:43:40.940 of age, try the car if you can. If not, if you can avoid traveling for those first six months,

00:43:47.320 ideal in an airplane cabin. Moving forward, this is something that some pediatricians are

00:43:52.680 recommending for six months of age and above, Katie, the bucket hat with a face shield. I

00:43:57.520 personally have not purchased this, but it might help with some droplet protection,

00:44:01.640 just something that we can do here to protect our kiddos while we're wearing.

00:44:04.440 Bucket hats are also very, they're also very cute on kiddos.

00:44:08.940 Yeah, they're really, really cute. A bucket hat with a face shield. So you've got to,

00:44:13.860 they want you to put on your four month old baby. They want you to put the little hat,

00:44:18.800 maybe we can put it on if the baby goes into the sun, like a little bonnet with just a giant plastic

00:44:23.160 cone around it, a little face shield for the, for the baby. For the little baby who's scared of his

00:44:29.680 own shadow, who just wants to snuggle up next to mommy, you've got to put him in a basically a

00:44:33.940 hazmat suit to protect against the virus that statistically poses an extremely low risk to

00:44:39.700 children two years after, well over two years after six, two weeks to slow the spread rather.

00:44:47.500 I'm not going to do that. I don't think you're going to do that. I don't think anyone should take

00:44:51.440 that, that all that seriously. This is how they operate. I don't mention it because this sheds any

00:44:57.580 light on coronavirus or the lockdown. It sheds light on politics. They are so desperate to hold

00:45:03.360 onto this power. Why did they turn down that good offer from Elon Musk that offered a premium on

00:45:08.620 Twitter? Because the power is worth more to them than the money. And the power is worth money really

00:45:14.540 in the long run. Why are they holding onto the coronavirus two years after two weeks to slow the

00:45:19.880 spread after we know that the projections about death counts were just completely bogus after they've

00:45:24.560 even had to revise down the total death counts by three quarters. What was it? 72,000 people or

00:45:30.660 something just a few months ago. And probably it will be even more than that in the end. Why, why, why?

00:45:36.160 Because the power is worth a whole lot to them. Speaking of the poor treatment of children, I do have to

00:45:43.820 get to this point. There's a horrible decision that was just made today by a criminal court. Texas's

00:45:49.960 highest criminal court just halted the execution of a woman who tortured and killed her two-year-old

00:45:54.920 daughter. This woman, Melissa Lucio, she's one of the people who Kim Kardashian and other very ignorant

00:46:05.480 left-wing political activists have been trying to get off the hook. This woman had 14, I think it was

00:46:11.740 14 total kids, might have been 14 kids plus this little girl. She tortured and killed this little

00:46:19.140 girl. The little girl was found. Initially, this mother said that the way the little daughter died

00:46:24.120 was because she fell down the stairs. It's the oldest excuse in the history of domestic violence.

00:46:29.380 The experts later found no, she was killed by blunt force trauma. The mother confessed to killing her

00:46:35.920 daughter. There were bite marks on this woman. Hair had been pulled out. She had a broken arm for weeks

00:46:39.960 before she was ultimately killed. Just horrific, horrific torture. The woman certainly needs to face her

00:46:45.280 punishment. I hope she repents. I hope she turns her life around. Hanging concentrates the mind.

00:46:52.460 But what this tells you, what this decision tells you is, one, this society does not care about kids

00:46:57.160 at all. We're conducting creepy medical experiments on kids that are going to destroy their bodies,

00:47:02.860 potentially give them bone diseases like the puberty blockers, for instance, that are going to make

00:47:09.340 them infertile, that are going to sterilize them all because of our weird ideological fads to make

00:47:13.960 delusional adults feel better about their sexual dysfunctions and disorders. We're killing 800,000

00:47:19.400 babies a year in this country, at least for now. Hopefully, we'll overturn Roe versus Wade.

00:47:24.820 One, it tells you society doesn't care about the kids. And two, it tells you that this society

00:47:28.520 is harshest to the innocent and most lenient to the guilty. That's a disordered society. It's a

00:47:33.280 society where the standards are upside down, and we need to go in there and exert our political will

00:47:38.280 and reorder them. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.

00:47:42.060 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.

00:48:11.140 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring. Supervising Producer Mathis Glover. Production Manager

00:48:16.660 Pavel Vidovsky. Editor and Associate Producer Danny D'Amico. Associate Producer Justine Turley.

00:48:23.220 Audio Mixer Mike Coromina. And Hair and Makeup by Cherokee Heart.

00:48:27.580 The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2022.

00:48:32.100 Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, Twitter accepts Elon Musk's offer to buy, and we examine all the

00:48:37.120 leftist panic and all the possibilities. That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show. Give it a listen.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 26, 2022

Ep. 992 - Elon Officially Owns Twitter And The Libs

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