Michael Knowles argues political correctness isn’t just free speech debate but a century-long Marxist-Gramscian project—from Marcuse’s campus radicalism to tech censorship and cancel culture—designed to dismantle traditional norms, leaving conservatives trapped between surrender or nihilism. He contrasts modern liberalism’s unchecked "liberty" (e.g., heroin analogies) with settled truths (Chesterton’s "thought that stops thought"), insisting self-governance requires epistemological limits, like banning "2+2=5" in schools while defending ideological debates. The host counters with structural free speech but agrees secular liberalism’s neutrality is a myth; both clash over reclaiming institutions, with Knowles favoring cultural/political revival and the host prioritizing defensive protections—ultimately framing the battle as integralism vs. Protestant individualism over who controls the narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
So as you know, we like to elevate the show or class up the show a little bit by bringing on excellent guests.
But today, just for a change of pace, we thought we'd go in the opposite direction and bring on Michael Knowles, the author of Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Now, not everybody knows this, but the pinnacle of Knowles' career before this was imitating me on Twitter.
This is absolutely true.
This is how Knowles became part of the Daily Wire is I needed somebody to pretend to be me on social media because I didn't want to do it myself.
I asked my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, if he knew anybody, he said I'd have my fellow Yale Michael Knowles.
And Knowles was so brilliant imitating me on Twitter that seriously I used to look at his tweets to see how I was supposed to sound.
And how far you've fallen since you're talking about it.
I know.
That was the best job I ever had.
I do think of all the jobs I've ever had, from subway sandwich artists when I was 14 to today doing the show, the job I was best suited for was being you on Twitter.
It was a masterpiece.
But it actually, in all seriousness, it actually made me think like, that's a talented guy, because that really sounds like me.
So before we get started, talking about speechless and other things, I have two things I want to say about it.
One is, I was genuinely, I know I'm not allowed to say nice things to you, but I was genuinely impressed with the way you wrote this book.
You actually put your back into it.
No, it's so easy.
You know, you have a popular show.
You could have just put your face out there with, you know, the left sucks.
101 ways to own the left.
Number 72 will shock you.
And instead, you actually wrote a book.
I've now finished it.
It's like you wrote a serious book about a serious issue, the control of speech and what it means.
And it's terrific, and I seriously recommend it.
Having said that, you and I have a fundamental, and have had for a long time, a fundamental disagreement about the way to proceed.
And the thing that's interesting to me about that, I mean, obviously two people are going to disagree about things, but what's interesting to me about this is that it kind of represents a division in the conservative world that's not just a division between old people and young people, in which case I would just say, well, you're on your own because I'll be with Jesus.
But it's not just that.
It's an actual philosophical break on the right.
So I want to get to that.
But first, let's talk about the book because it's not just ranting at the left about political correctness.
You actually have a theory, a thesis about political correctness.
Yeah, it's not just ranting at the left about political.
It's also ranting at the right about political correct correctness.
Yes, my thesis is that we have misunderstood what political correctness is.
We think it's been around for about 30 years.
It's actually been around for about 100 years.
And we think that political correctness represents a debate between free speech and censorship.
I don't think that's what it is.
I think that political correctness aims at the destruction of traditional standards.
That is what it is after.
And so it lays a trap for conservatives because conservatives react in one of two ways.
Either you've got the squishes who just go along with it, right, who just will use whatever the pronouns are, use whatever the new jargon is.
They'll acquiesce.
Obviously, that helps the left win.
But then you have the more stalwart conservatives, the ones who say they're free speech purists or free speech absolutists, the ones who say, I will not go along with this new standard.
But in so doing, they tend to eschew standards entirely.
They will say, you know, say whatever you want, do whatever you want.
Either way, I think this permits the left to advance because what the left is aiming at is the abandonment of traditional standards, and that happens in either case.
And because nature abhors a vacuum, the left's new woke codes fill their place.
And I don't think this was always the way it was, but I do think for the past, at least the past 30 years, conservatives actually took on a lot of the left's slogans and premises to fall into this trap.
And it's a subtle trap, and I don't blame people for falling into it, but it is the reason why, no matter how hard we fought against PC, I mean, Trump launched his campaign that said PC is the greatest threat to the country.
And many people have been talking about it for longer.
But it seems almost that the harder we fight against it, the more ground we lose.
And so the reason you feel for that is because what some on the right are saying is there should be no censorship.
There should be no limits on speech, and therefore they're abandoning standards, which is what the left is after.
Yes, that the debate between free speech and censorship, there's something to it, obviously.
We do want to have a somewhat broad defense of free speech.
We don't like being censored, but it's sort of an illusory situation.
It's a false dichotomy, I think.
I think all speech regimes necessarily limit some things, in part because language is limited.
Language discriminates one thing from another.
If Bruce Jenner is he, he isn't she.
I suppose that's imposing a limit, a sort of censorship on people.
But society will always have some things that are settled, that are beyond debate.
Bill Buckley talked about this in 1966.
He was debating the future of McCarthyism with Leo Chern, and a lot of people were shocked to hear about the future of it.
I thought that was in the past, you know.
And Leo Chern said, surely what is most important to both of us is the open society.
The open society is so crucial.
By the way, open society is the name of George Soros' foundation.
This is a left-wing idea.
And Bill Buckley said, well, he was actually sitting in chairs like this.
And so he said, no, I don't want society to be more open.
No, I would like the society to be closed.
I am an epistemological optimist, to use the unfortunate phrase, by which he meant we can know things, some things are settled, and he sees no reason to rehash the rights of the Nazi to go speak in the public school or the rights of the communists to do that, for that matter, either.
Some things will be settled, and that will, in those limits, you will have the flourishing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, when they talk about banning critical race theory from schools, the left says, well, we should teach it.
And I think, should we teach white supremacy?
No.
You know, it says racism is racism.
Why do it?
So fair enough.
Now, just before we get to where you start to lose me a little bit on the theory, you say this has been around for 100 years.
Give me the can, the brief history of it so that people can, because this is important.
It's important to know where this comes from.
This was not one day somebody woke up and said we should control speech.
Give me a quick rundown.
The really condensed version goes back to Marx.
I know it's become cliché for conservatives to blame Marx for everything.
He's blind for everything.
He actually is.
Yes.
He was responsible for a lot of bad things.
He has a line that he writes to Arnold Ruga, which is, he calls for the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
And so he just wants to tear down everything, right?
Marx fails.
The revolution doesn't materialize.
Turns out the oppressed masses don't really like his kooky theories.
And so his intellectual heirs, men like Antonio Gramsci, communist in Italy, he realizes the revolution can't succeed unless the revolutionaries have some grip on the common sense.
It won't succeed unless the radicals have cultural hegemony.
He calls for a war of position.
Not a war of maneuver, you advance and retreat, but a war of position where you take positions of power and then wield that power once you've got it.
Even if your numbers are smaller, you can still wield disproportionate power.
The Frankfurt School develops some of these ideas.
Critical theory comes out of this.
Critical race theory is a derivation of that.
You see one Frankfurt School theorist in particular, Herbert Marcuse, rises up in the 1960s as the father of the new left, the student radicals.
He has an infamous essay, Repressive Tolerance, which says that you can't tolerate intolerance, and so what we've got to do is basically censor all the conservatives and encourage speech from the left.
The student radicals read Gramsci through the lens of Mao.
now becomes very important at this time with the translation of the little red book.
They come up with this phrase, Rudy Dutchke in particular comes up with this phrase, the long march through the institutions, and they start to march.
The feminists in the 1970s really developed this, particularly the Marxist idea of false consciousness, the idea that the reason you're so happy, poor oppressed masses, is that you don't know how oppressed you are.
So the radical women groups in New York would hold what I call wine and cheese soires, W-H-I-N-E.
And so these happy bourgeois housewives would come in and they'd leave miserable because they would be awakened to their misery.
And it comes from this idea in an essay by Carol Hanish that the personal is political.
All the settled things in our private life, they actually ought to be open to public and political scrutiny.
Now we say, why is everything so political?
Why is the NFL political?
Why are running shoes political?
Well, they used to be settled because we all agreed on it.
The Personal Became the Political00:15:51
It just wasn't up for debate.
Then what these radicals did in the 70s was they opened everything up to debate.
The personal became the political.
And now we're trying to win that political battle so they can be personal again and no longer debated over.
It really explodes on campus in the 80s.
Obviously, the university has always been an incubator of these ideas.
You had the campus battles.
Hey, hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go, as Jesse Jackson said at Stanford.
Then PC really explodes on the public stage in the 1990s, a little bit of backlash in the 2000s.
Then you have the advent of big tech.
Big tech starts to exert real censorship.
I mean, they just censored the duly elected sitting president on January 7th and 8th.
Handful of oligarchs controlling speech in a republic.
It's a really dangerous situation.
And then you have the advent of cancel culture, which is just a form of ostracism and censorship along leftist ideological lines.
I'm not saying no one has ever been ostracized.
I'm not saying no one's ever been censored.
In the 50s, you got censored and ostracized if you were a communist.
Today you get censored and ostracized if you're not a communist.
The fact of it hasn't changed.
It's just the standards by which you are ostracized or censored.
That is what has changed.
And that takes us to today.
Yeah, as I was talking about this, to criticize everything that exists is to secretly suggest that you have something better.
And the thing is, their better idea is based on an illusion that there's such a thing as a state that is going to act benevolently instead of a group of powerful people who are going to act to secure more power, which is always the case.
So here's where our disagreement, I think, lies, as a quoting from speechless, controlling words, controlling minds.
In a self-governing republic, speech is politics and politics is speech.
As the realm of politics requires limits, so too must the realm of speech.
By failing to acknowledge this practical reality, the so-called free speech purists give the game away to politically correct censors.
Now, I'm not a free speech purist in the sense that I think that there are, for instance, that Supreme Court decision that allowed a girl to curse without being punished online, a high school girl.
I thought there was some sense to it, but I don't necessarily think foul language is part of free speech or burning a flag is part of free speech.
Free speech.
I agree.
But the expression of ideas is part of free speech, I believe.
And it seems to me that you're drifting toward the leftist habit.
The left does this all the time.
They start out by saying, you know, racism is wrong.
Whites should not be hating black people because racism is wrong.
And they end up saying white people are terrible.
They essentially, because they want the power that they see being done by the wrong, they essentially adopt the wrong.
What you are essentially saying is the censorship is fine.
They're just censoring the wrong things.
Yes, I am.
But I'll defend it, which is Chesterton has this great line.
He says, there is a thought that stops thought.
And this is where we kind of agree.
This is where the Venn diagrams are.
Yes.
There is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
There have been obviously many exceptions to free speech in America.
Fraud, threats, fighting words, obscenity.
List goes on and on.
Why those exceptions?
Because those exceptions undermine, they are speech in a certain sense, but they undermine speech.
If you have a protection for fraud, for instance, then you can no longer rely on speech.
If there is a First Amendment protection for deceit through your speech, then speech loses so much of its effect in the body politic.
If you have an exception for threats, you are really encouraging people to silence other people.
If I can threaten you, then I am shutting you up.
I'm using my speech to overwhelm your speech.
Obscenity is an even dicier one, or it's a subtler one, but I think it's equally important.
The reason there's no, well, the reason there didn't used to be a First Amendment protection for obscenity, increasingly it seems we're drifting in that direction, is because obscenity actually compromises your freedom.
We now today seem to conflate liberty and licentiousness.
Our founding fathers did not, certainly from the time of the founding.
You see all sorts of documents saying liberty must not be abused to licentiousness.
You know, I think you're actually ducking something here, if I may, okay.
Because I don't think those things are censored because they stop thought.
I think they're censored because they're speech acts and they're wrongful acts.
A speech act, as you know, is when the words you say actually perform a duty beyond just expressing an idea.
So if I promise you I will pay you Thursday for the, if you give me a hamburger today, I am actually committing an act which is making a promise.
Right, right.
And if that promise turns out to be a lie, you have a right to come back to me and act against that.
So fire in a crowded theater, threatening people, committing fraud.
Those are all speech acts.
They're a special category.
That's fair enough.
What about speech that advocates for the Communist Party?
I, in fact, would not, I'm not afraid of speech that advocates for the Communist Party because even though, even though I think that if you get in an argument, if you allow arguments between communists and non-communists, the communists might win.
One of the things about freedom is it's very, very dangerous because the bad guys might win.
I know in the past we have actually made communism illegal at certain moments.
I can almost understand it if you're advocating for the overthrow, for the violent overthrow of which I think by definition you are.
If you're saying I'm a communist and I want to pursue a communist program, that entails overthrowing the government of the United States and virtually every other government too.
Well, it depends.
If you can make the argument that you are advocating for socialism as controlled by the Constitution, if you can make that argument, you should be allowed to make that argument.
Sure, but I mean even Whitaker Chambers, one of our favorite writers.
Yes, great writer.
He makes a big distinction between those weak, silly socialists and the communists.
And I'm not actually arguing that we ought to even censor socialists or those.
But I'm talking about this narrow exception, which, you know, on the books, plenty of people were prosecuted for being communists.
But I'm using it to make the broader point.
The communist is using his speech to undermine the entire free speech regime.
It seems that there are certain...
So are you.
No, I think I'm using it in accordance with the broader history of the American speech.
So that you want to protect free speech.
You're censoring speech to protect free speech.
Yes, I'm censoring.
I'm putting certain limits on speech in order to protect free speech.
I mean, this is why, for instance, John Locke famously says free speech for everybody except for atheists and maybe Catholics.
And I say this is a mackerel-snapping papist.
John Milton said the same thing.
Most famous defense of free speech in the English language.
Everyone gets free speech, but not those papists.
Why did he say it?
Is it just because he was stupid?
Is it just because he didn't get it?
No, I think he did get it.
I think what he realized is there must be a bare minimum of understanding and shared thought to keep a stable regime that will permit the free expression of ideas.
So to ask the Thomas Soule question, who decides?
I mean, if you look at the people who have power in America today, can you name one of them to decide which speech is harmful?
Well, so this is my, I think the practical or the hypothetical objection that people very often make is if we permit there to be limitations on free speech, why they might threaten our free speech.
And my answer is we've already permitted that, and it's already happening, and we're already the victims of that.
They can kick the duly elected president off Twitter.
They can do anything.
No, no, you're absolutely right.
But the question, that's still avoiding the question.
Well, no, but then I'll take it even further.
So yes, I agree.
Right now we're in this terrible position where the left is controlling our speech and controlling our minds and controlling our country.
And I want to fight back against that.
So I can either fight back against that by saying, hey, guys, stop it.
We shouldn't have any limitations on speech.
Or I can fight back against that by reasserting the traditional American limitations, the traditional American standards, and wielding political power to actually force them to stop using their political power against me.
And my answer to it as well is there is the left right now, which is saying, we're going to censor you, and we're going to have hate speech laws and whatever.
Then I think there is the call it the libertarian answer, although, you know, this would have been a foreign idea to people like Locke or Milton, but call it the classical liberal libertarian answer of no limits at all.
And then I think there is the very far sort of Catholic integralist answer, which is, how do we determine the limits?
Submit to Pontifex.
There you go.
Now we've determined the limits.
But I'm actually offering a different suggestion, which is a very naughty word that you're not allowed to say.
Talk about censored words.
Prudence.
I think prudence is not only a virtue, I think it's the conservative virtue.
And it's something that Edmund Burke talks about at great length.
How do we decide what the necessary and inevitable limits are?
Because also part of my argument is not we don't have limits, but we should.
Part of my argument is we always will have limits.
The question just is, what are those limits?
So my prudential argument is, why don't we just look to the past?
Why don't we look to what our forebears thought was reasonable?
Why don't we look to what has worked and led to flourishing in America?
I don't think anybody believes that today's speech regime is the best we've ever had in America.
Because by the way, some people say we have way more free speech than we used to.
Some people say we have way less free speech than we used to.
It's kind of a little bit of both.
I think we just have different standards.
And so I can say any of those George Carlin words on TV, and I'd be applauded for it.
But I can't say that a man is a man.
And I could actually face many repercussions from the society.
Soon enough, I might face legal repercussions for it.
Well, first of all, going back, one of the reasons we can't go back to the past is because we don't live there.
And one of the things you had in the past, I mean, when John Adams said our constitution is for religious people, the reason he said that is because you have to oppress people if they will not control themselves, right?
I mean, if they are not responsible to a moral order, you have to oppress them, right?
That's how free regimes fall, because chaos ensues, and as Plato said, then you need the strong man.
But once that, when people have stopped believing, when people have stopped holding themselves to a moral order, then I don't understand how you impose the ideas of the past without oppressing them.
One of the things that strikes me is I think we're suffering from too much censorship even before this.
And the most important way I think we've allowed them to censor us is by taking religion out of the public square and God out of the schools.
So there's an area where the censorship, to me, paved the way for everything else.
So if our answer had been, no, no, wait a minute.
this is one of the key aspects of human life.
We should be able to teach it and put forward.
Yes, but I don't think taking religion out of the schools was, you know, I guess this is kind of my central view of the whole thing is I don't think it's just along this scale of free speech to censorship.
I think when they took religion out of the schools, you had some free speech, free speech for Christians to pray, and you had some censorship.
You were not permitted to espouse atheism in the schools or frankly anywhere else.
When the Supreme Court decided to invent the constitutional prohibition on prayer, you just switched the standard.
Now you were perfectly free to espouse atheism.
Now it's effectively mandatory.
But you were not permitted to espouse Christianity.
So I don't, it was freer for some people.
There was greater censorship for other people.
And I think the religion point is very good, because I totally agree with your point on John Adams.
One way, I mean, there is a little bit of a paradox here, because in order for people to be free, they need to be educated.
That's what liberal education is, to make sense of your freedom and to tamp down all your base passions.
But in order to educate people, you kind of have to coerce them.
Well, that's true.
There are some things that you can do in a school, and especially in a public school, that you can't do anywhere else.
And when you bring children into things, everything becomes a lot more complicated.
Yeah.
But it strikes me sometimes that what you're trying to do is you're trying to the left took 70 years to march through our institutions, and they took them over.
And they took over our cultural institutions.
They melted people's minds.
They taught people ignorance and all this.
And what you're trying to do is let's pass a law against that.
In other words, you're trying to solve, you're trying to solve by the heavy hand of government what the left accomplished by the hard work of taking over the culture.
I think we need to do both.
The left also accomplished it through the heavy hand of government, like when they banned prayer in the public schools.
Well, but they did that through argument, right?
They did that through winning in the Supreme Court.
I mean, some rogued lawyers did.
Yeah, I don't know if their arguments were.
No, no, fair enough, fair enough.
I just think, yeah, of course I agree.
And I do not in any way advocate ignoring the culture.
I think very much we need to infiltrate these institutions and retake them or demolish them in the case of those that have been so hollowed out.
But Andrew Breitbart's slogan that politics is downstream of culture is true in as much as it's true.
But like all slogans, it's also not true.
And by that I mean, you know, all bumper stickers are wrong.
They're too simple.
So yes, culture influences politics, but politics influences culture.
And the example I use on this is Germany.
West Germany is religious today.
East Germany is atheist.
It's 10% religious.
Is that because of cultural variations in Bratwurst or something?
No, I think it's because of the political regime that dominated, that was officially atheist.
You're now seeing cultural effects of that downstream.
And I also think the line between politics and culture is a little blurry.
Is Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are they private institutions?
Kind of.
You know, they also kind of work with the government.
And the universities, are they private?
Well, they kind of work with the government, too.
Well, here's a place where I think we have a lot in common because I do believe our philosophy, our national philosophy, is that our freedoms come from God and that the government is, the governments are instituted among men to preserve those freedoms.
If they're being taken away by Amazon, it's the same as if they're being taken away by the government.
The government still has to preserve our freedoms in some way.
Cocaine Mitch McConnell made this point.
He said that these corporations are acting like a parallel government.
They are.
And the left used to know this, by the way, when the government was, when the corporations tended to be on our side, when we had a manufacturing instead of an information economy, the corporations were on our side, and the left, even the word corporation, sent them really.
I want to talk about the religious aspect about this, because you've mentioned Catholics a number of times, and much of this essential criticism of liberalism or even libertarianism.
I'm not a libertarian, but I am a liberal.
I am somebody who believes in the free flow of information, the free exchange of ideas.
I'm willing to risk my freedom on allowing people to have the freedom to debate even bad ideas.
And I have frequently said, there are some people who say, you know, liberalism has failed.
Freedom has failed.
And I say, like, if freedom sinks into the tar pit of history, the last thing you're going to see is my fist.
Because I'm going to say, this is a good thing worth defending.
It seems this movement is a Catholic movement, Patrick Denise, Orabamari, you, you know, people saying that we have too much liberalism.
And I can't help but wonder if you're trying to solve a Protestant problem with a Catholic solution.
That in other words, that I am.
Yeah, you are.
You are.
That this is the problem.
I mean, write itself the Protestant problem.
Catholicism vs. Protestant Problem00:06:07
I mean, yeah, because one of the reasons we have so many great Catholics on the Supreme Court is because that's the kind of papal institution we have in this country.
But the country is a Protestant idea.
There's no getting around that, I think.
Yeah, I suppose.
I mean, except in as much as Protestantism is just a derivation of Catholicism.
You know, there are 30,000 different denominations.
But a derivation that Catholics used to burn people for.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
We lost all of our kindling or something.
Yes, I mean, the idea of the natural law was not something that was discovered in 1776.
This is an idea, and it wasn't discovered by Martin Luther.
You know, the civilization was built by the Catholic Church, not to put too fine a point on it.
The basis of the civilization was definitely the Catholicism.
And so while, of course, America has some opposition to that.
I mean, I think it was Schlesinger who said anti-Catholicism is the deepest bias in America.
I mean, some of my ancestors who are currently turning in their grave, the pilgrims, I mean, they were rather anti-Catholic, anti-Anglican, too.
But beneath all of that, we are, that is the fundament that we're arguing from.
And so the question of liberalism then, liberalism certainly does come out of Protestantism, and there are some problems with liberalism.
And John Locke, the father of liberalism, would probably not recognize what passes for liberalism today, and he'd probably be shocked and appalled by it, I think.
Just read his letter concerning toleration, which you can read in Speechless, or parts of it in Speechless.
The question that I think you have to ask is, what is liberty?
Because there's the modern liberal view that liberty is being able to do whatever you want when you want to do it.
And there is the classical view, which is not just Catholic.
It's not just Christian more broadly.
It's pagan.
And it's the great statesmen in history have recognized that liberty is not the ability to do whatever you want to do, but the right to do what you ought to do.
This is Lord Acton's distinction.
Lord Acton, who are libertarians I think still like.
But that is a shocking definition to the modern liberal sensibility on the left and on the right.
But I think it's the only one that makes sense.
And the example I keep going back to is the heroin addict.
The heroin addict, especially in, say, Oregon or one of these states with liberal drug laws, as long as he's got a couple bucks in his pocket that he can shoot up, he is the freest man in the world, right?
He wants to shoot up.
He gets to shoot up.
He satisfies that appetite.
Good.
But he's not free.
He's not free at all.
he's a slave.
The free man is the one who tamps, the man who sins is a slave to sin, right?
Who said that someone?
The man who tamps down his base passions, the man who controls his appetite and brings those baser desires into discipline underneath his rational will, and the rational will mediates between the divine will and the appetite.
That man is free in the classical understanding of it, in the Christian understanding of it, in the understanding of our founding fathers.
And that just went away sometime in the 1960s.
So when we say, you know, freedom is bad or something, liberalism is bad, we're not really saying freedom is bad or liberty is bad.
We're saying this perversion of liberty is bad.
And actually, it's not even liberty.
It's the opposite of liberty.
Well, listen, this is where we agree, obviously, and this is the conversation we've had numerous times.
The difference, I think, for me is that I'm not a libertarian.
I'm a structuralist.
And by that, I mean what I feel we should be defending is the structures by which people are free.
If people cannot live in those structures because they no longer have faith, to destroy those structures is not to win them back.
And so what I feel is we should be on the mission of teaching people why we think the things we think and why we think the structures should be there and let them argue back.
I'm willing to let communists talk.
I'm willing to let Nazis talk.
I'm a real free speech.
I am kind of a free speech fanatic.
I'm not a purist about it, but I am a free speech fanatic when it comes to ideas.
I'd rather have somebody attack my ideas with their bad ideas and hope that my good ideas win than silence them.
Sure.
And I think I love debate.
I love going to a debating society, have a nice glass of some whiskey or something.
The issue is that this very often focuses on the schools.
And a third-grade classroom is not a free marketplace of ideas.
No.
And education, getting back to that earlier point, because education is coercive, this does require the heavy hand of censorship.
I'll use the C word, censorship.
We need to be able to go in.
When the left says, we need to expand the curricula, you can't expand the curricula.
There are only so many weeks.
There are only so many books.
When the left says we need to, or even parts of the right say, we need to educate, not indoctrinate, the words mean the same damn thing.
It's just one of them is good and one of them is bad.
You need to teach somebody.
If 2 plus 2 equals 4 and the student writes 2 plus 2 equals 5, he needs to get a bad grade.
He needs to be punished for that.
But this is true in philosophy.
This is true in ethics.
This is true in history.
This is true in literature, for goodness sakes.
We actually can know true and false and right and wrong.
And I guess this is my real argument is with our pal David French.
David made this point.
He said Drag Queen Story Hour is a blessing of liberty, one of the blessings of liberty.
James Madison is just rolling in his grave hearing that.
It's not.
It's not.
It's simply not.
But his point is, if we say that these perverts can't twerk for little kids, they'll tell us we can't go to church.
First of all, they're already doing that.
But second of all, if we really have adopted such a radical skepticism and we've bought into this canard that there is a neutral playing ground in secular liberalism where we can debate things, if we really can't decide between Drag Queen Story Hour and going to church, then we can't govern ourselves because the ability to say some things are true, some things are false, some things are right, some things are wrong, the ability to have what Buckley called epistemological optimism,
to just know some basic things and have them settled, that is required for self-government.
And if you lose that, even though it feels like a limit, I think you lose freedom too.
Ought Culture Dispute00:01:06
Yeah, well, I think, listen, it's a strong argument.
I think that there is a difference between somebody running a private Drag Queen Story Hour and having it in a library.
And one of the things about David French is he can't tell the difference.
You know, I mean, if parents choose to take their kids to that, I'm not sure whether stopping that is actually the right way to go.
I do think, though, I do think the question, what we're really arguing about is the means, because we agree on what is the right and the good.
But it's how you bring that back into the world.
And I really think the left did it by taking over the cultural institutions.
And I think we have to take them back.
I totally agree.
I guess my only, I don't think the disagreement is you think it ought to be culture and I think it ought to be politics or government or something.
I think the disagreement is you think it ought to be culture and I think it ought to be culture and government.
I just can't think of anybody in the government I want to make those decisions.
We got to elect me.
I would vote for you.
We got to stop there.
Read the book because it's a fascinating argument, speechless, controlling words, controlling minds, and it's well done.
And it would be on the New York Times bestseller list if they weren't a bunch of lying scum.