Ep. 119 - Are Social Media Giants Killing Conservatives? ft. Austin Petersen
What Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away. Big tech giants are clamping down on conservatives, with catastrophic results. We’ll discuss with Austin Petersen, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri who was just banned from Facebook for running an AR-15 campaign giveaway. That’s my kind of campaign. Then, my grand theory of Trump headlines, tariffs, the UK deporting that vicious terrorist Lauren Southern, and we come full circle with FDR’s fireside chats on This Day In History!
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Big tech giants are clamping down on conservatives with catastrophic results.
For us and for all of society, we will discuss with Austin Peterson, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, who was just banned from Facebook for running an AR-15 campaign giveaway.
What's the matter with that?
I don't know what...
That is my kind of campaign.
Great giveaway.
Then, my grand theory of Trump headlines, tariffs, the UK deporting that vicious terrorist, Lauren Southern.
You know that hot dude that we had on the show last week, that terrorist?
And we come full circle with FDR's fireside chats on this day in history.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
It is a good day for a couple reasons.
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Now, just one other bit of housekeeping.
I've noticed occasionally, you know, obviously I'm always waiting for Ben to just come in and fire me and kick me out of his broom closet here, but occasionally I'll check in and see how our numbers are doing.
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Can we bring on our guest now?
Do we have Austin?
Austin Peterson is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate for Missouri.
In 2016, Austin ran for president in the Libertarian Party primary, receiving the backing of erstwhile Republicans Mary Matlin and Eric Erickson.
After the Libertarian Party primaries concluded, Austin endorsed Gary Johnson for president.
During his Senate campaign, Austin was banned from Facebook for giving away a rifle as a campaign promotion and to highlight Democrat incumbent Claire McCaskill's terrible record on defending Americans' constitutionally protected civil right to keep and bear arms.
It later came out, by the way, that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has just, you know, just coincidentally donated the maximum amount of money permitted by law to McCaskill's campaign.
It's kind of one of those weird coincidences.
Austin, thank you for being here.
Hey, good to see you, Michael.
Thanks for having me.
So, there's no bias at Facebook, right?
Clearly, there's no, they don't have any bias against conservatives.
No, Silicon Valley loves conservatives, right?
That's why Dennis Prager is having to sue YouTube.
That's why conservatives all around the country, I mean, I've been here in Missouri, I ask everybody at these little Republican town meetings, you know, old people even that are on Twitter or Facebook, has anybody here been censored by Facebook or Twitter for being too conservative?
And a lot of them raise their hands.
So, I think there's some bias here.
Listen, they're allowed.
It's their own platform, private property and everything.
But maybe they should be a bit more clear about their bias, or at least honest about it, don't you think?
Well, this is where it gets really tricky because I have, obviously from the media side, I've seen what they're doing to conservative publishers and to publishers in general.
On a personal side, I will note, this is just an anecdote, on 2016 on Election Day, I posted a meme to my Facebook page that made fun of Hillary Clinton and said not to vote for her.
I was banned for 24 hours, exactly 24 hours from Facebook.
And this is the question of regulation.
We're conservatives.
We don't like too much regulation.
Facebook is the largest publisher in the history of the world.
Should Facebook be regulated as a publisher?
No, because as much as I don't like their behavior, today's Facebook is yesterday's Myspace, right?
Or what about Friendster, right?
The problem is that right now in urgency, right, we're seeing people like publishers like ourselves.
I run a small publishing firm too, and trust me, I know how hard it can be to make a living, especially when they're squashing our views and the algorithms seem to be biased against us.
But that creates a market opportunity, right?
The socialists would step in and say, well, it's a market failure and we need to regulate.
So let's not give in to their arguments.
Let's talk about alternatives, right?
Right now, there haven't been a lot of good strong ones, but the last thing we want is an echo chamber.
So I think what's going to happen is eventually we will see some sort of open source platform, maybe based on Well, I'm not even saying we should break them up as a monopoly, as I think a lot of people are saying on both the left and the right.
What I'm saying is, though, there is something different about Facebook than MySpace because they are in the publishing business.
They control all of the ad revenue to publishers.
They have a built-in platform called Instant articles for publishers.
They decide what you see in your newsfeed and what you don't.
And yet, they're not regulated as a publisher because they do this little dance routine and they say, oh, we're just a technology company.
We're not a publisher.
Do you think moving forward...
I know a lot of people who have already been elected are saying they need to start regulating them as a publisher.
On that specific regulation, do you think it's still playing too much with fire to get into regulation or do you think we should level it out?
Yeah.
Nah, I do.
And listen, you're talking to someone who is actually harmed by this, right?
I run a small website, I have a small audience, and I make a little bit of my revenue from Facebook, from Twitter.
But I just think it's really important for us to keep the internet off, keep the government off the internet, right?
Because then you kind of get the camel's nose under the tent on some of these things, and it's just like net neutrality, right?
It's like, oh, it's sold to us for public good.
But there's always these unintended consequences that come at us later on down the line.
So I just – I really wish that Facebook would stop.
I would really just like some clarity, right?
Just be honest about your biases.
A lot of times we get this like fake news that comes from the left and they're trying to pretend like they're objective, right?
Just be honest about your biases.
Ben Shapiro says that all the time actually.
He's like, hey, I'm honest about my biases.
I'm biased but I'll tell you that I'm biased, right?
And then let's discuss the facts.
So I would rather just have Facebook be clear about their terms of service.
And when it comes to banning us, they said before it was okay for us to give away the rifle.
Now it's not okay.
Just be honest.
Tell us what's going on.
This is, I think a lot of people don't understand this who haven't been in publishing on Facebook.
There are, and at all of these tech companies, there are so many levels of people that exist just to make their terms of service seem unclear to the So you call them and they say, oh no, well, we'll run it up the flagpole and their whole point is not to make it clear.
You brought up blockchain and you have an accomplishment in this regard.
You have received the national record For the largest Bitcoin donation in American campaign history.
The downside of this is that was back when Bitcoin was trading at around $16,000 per coin, and the cryptocurrency is now in a slump of about 44%.
So two questions.
One, would you prefer if people donate cash from now on?
And two, on the larger point, on the political point, libertarians in particular have embraced cryptocurrencies.
Do you think these sorts of technologies are a fad, like the tulip bubble, or does Bitcoin have a future And how do you get your 44% back?
Well, you know, actually, the tulip bubble was kind of an overblown story.
A lot of people use that, but it wasn't quite as bad a bubble as many people said.
So you should definitely check that out.
The Economist kind of debunked that recently.
But when it comes to crypto, donate it.
Yeah, we actually get more value out of Bitcoins than we do of Federal Reserve notes because All of the publicity that Bitcoin gets, whether it's up or down, really does bolster us.
And it gives me the chance to talk about federal monetary policy, which I don't get to talk about.
You know, I usually got to stick to God guns and weed, right, when you're talking about big issues of the day.
At least two of those are important.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, listen, medical marijuana being on the ballot here in Missouri, this is going to be an issue, right?
I didn't tell you which to, Austin.
I didn't.
No, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Good point.
Good point.
Well, I was going to say a 90-year-old woman the other day asked if I was for it.
I was like, yes.
And she's like, high five!
Okay.
Okay.
It's a true story.
But no, it gives me an excuse to talk about monetary policy.
And I don't know if Bitcoin is going to be the crypto of the future.
We don't know.
But what I think is just really exciting is that a lot of the sort of libertarian and conservative economists, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, they kind of predicted this in a sense before the digital revolution happened where they would talk about like baskets of currencies.
So in a way, what we're doing is we're experimenting to determine what is the best form of money.
And Hayek actually wrote back in the day that we don't know what good money is because government controls the tap, the supply, the amount of money into the money supply with the interest rates.
But Bitcoin doesn't have a central bank.
They can't tell us what it's worth.
So it's fluctuating.
Yeah, it goes up and down, but that's going to happen.
You've got to let the market determine.
There's other competitors stepping in.
Who knows what will be the currency of the future?
I just want to let them Determine what it is on the free market.
That's a beautiful thing.
And it's a great way for me to talk about it.
And we raise quite a bit of money.
That is an interesting point because, you know, I'll joke that the currency could be down 50% on a day.
But there are these ancillary benefits of you get a bit of publicity for it because you're clearly leaning into this technology.
And whenever conservatives can talk about monetary policy, that is a wonderful thing.
And it isn't that sexy.
I'll totally admit it isn't that sexy.
But, you know, if it's in the news constantly, I know our pal Ty Lopez has a Bitcoin podcast that always does very well.
If you can tie it into something that's very newsy, that's probably a good way to talk about it.
For sure, yeah.
Go ahead.
Well, I want to, on the political side of things, this libertarian Republican tension does create some problem.
You've got some powerful endorsements behind you in your campaign.
Bob Barr, Joe Walsh, from what I can tell, a lot of others.
But the big magilla in the room, President Covfefe, the Donald, as well as Vice President Pence and Leader McConnell, have endorsed your opponent, Josh Hawley.
Why is that, do you think?
And do you think you can sway their support?
Do you think their support will matter in the race?
I think that it probably, of course it helps in the primary, but it may hurt in the general, right?
Imagine that, you know, Claire McCaskill and the left, they can easily tie whatever the president does to whoever the candidate is, right?
But sort of being sort of independent such as I am and just calling shots like Ben Shapiro does, I think actually makes my case a little bit stronger because I'm trying to be a statesman, not just some pander bear to the establishment interests.
And just remember, I mean, Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove were the people who bragged that they pushed Josh Hawley into the race, right?
So I think that the thing with the president, the president isn't paying attention to the primary in Missouri, right?
He's got Mike Pence, and he's got those people like McConnell saying, hey, do us a favor, Mr.
President, just back this kid.
And, you know, he doesn't know.
He doesn't know who's running.
And, of course, I did try and run in 2016 as a libertarian, so maybe there's a little bit of angst on some people.
But, you know, conservatives and libertarians have a lot in common.
This is something, you know, I think you want to talk about perhaps the future of the conservative movement, the GOP, where it's at and where it's going.
So I would just say that, you know, having a conservative libertarian alliance going forward is a good way to sort of springboard from where we're at, which is just sort of bland populism without principle in some ways.
And if we want to go forward with a real intellectual revolution and sort of complete the promise of the Tea Party days...
Then a conservative libertarian alliance is the way to go.
Do you think as a political matter that your affiliation with the Libertarian Party is going to hurt you with Republicans?
Or do you think it might actually help you with people who don't necessarily care much for the Republican Party?
Well, Missouri actually has a pretty strong liberty Republican base.
Ron Paul did pretty well in the caucuses out here.
So there's a strong constitutionalist streak.
And conservatives tend...
They're not like conservatives from Alabama.
They're not like You know, conservatives are Massachusetts, right?
Like the Midwest Republican conservatives are really sort of true constitutional conservatives in many ways.
So they're very attracted to my candidacy, a lot of them.
I'll tell you a brief little anecdote.
The other day I was at a meeting, a Republican meeting.
This guy came up and said, are you more libertarian or are you more Republican?
And I go, well, call me a conservatarian, right?
You know, I said I'm pro-life, I'm pro- He's like, Ron Paul caused a lot of trouble here in Missouri.
And I'm like, you know, maybe they deserved it, I wanted to say, but I didn't.
I didn't, of course.
I just was diplomatic.
But then a guy who was standing right behind him, who was leaning in, said, conservatarian.
That's what I think.
That's what I believe.
He's like, I wasn't even going to come here tonight.
He's like, you got me and my whole family's votes.
We're going to go out and put out signs for you.
So there's a lot of people.
Some people are curmudgeonly.
Some people don't like freedom too much.
It's a scary thing.
Freedom is dangerous as hell.
Frankly, I prefer it to the alternative.
But young people, people who are paying attention, they tend to like the conservatarian approach.
It's the hip new thing.
It's popular, man.
It's cool.
We're cool guys.
We're just cool guys.
We're cool.
Us and that 90-year-old woman.
Now, I do want to talk about one thing that we have in common, which is totally separate from the monetary policy and the political issues on the ground.
I've been in a number of little indie movies that nobody has ever seen and in plays and things like that.
The Republican Party has run a lot of actors for office.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson, Alan Autry, Fred Grandy, George Murphy, Jack Kelly, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono, and Ronald Reagan, just to name a few.
You graduated from Missouri State with a degree in musical theater.
You've appeared in sketches on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Executive produced a feature film.
Why is there so much overlap between politics and show business?
Well, you know, politics is just show business for ugly people.
I wasn't going to say it.
I wasn't going to say it.
Right, right, right, right.
I just couldn't hack it as an actor because I didn't have the face for it, right?
I've got the face for radio.
No, I think that, you know what it is, is that the reason why I was actually, I think, so successful in politics transitioning from a show business career is because most people in Washington, D.C. and in politics have backgrounds.
They're all lawyers or they're all poli-sci degrees, right?
But if you actually have somebody who understands conservative principles and can communicate them and who can produce videos and journalism and who can be, you know, I was a television producer for Judge Napolitano at Fox News, right?
That actually kind of gives you a little bit of an advantage because most of the people in D.C. are doing something else, right?
So there's a little bit of a value add having a background, a creative background.
Plus, people are so sick and tired of these sanctimonious Hollywood actors telling, you know, blowing people up by, you know, blood by the gallon.
And then telling us we can't have guns while making money on the backs of it.
There's a lot of people like Chuck Woolery.
There's a lot of good Republican actors.
Clint Eastwood.
Penn and Teller, right?
Some of the biggest libertarian, some of the biggest celebrities in the world, right?
Both libertarians.
So I think it's actually kind of attractive to have somebody who can communicate the message and who's not a filthy stinking comic.
Right, right.
That is so true.
And there's so many, you look at all the lawyers and you think, oh, all right, there's another lawyer running for state assembly or whatever.
But I've always also felt, obviously there's a performative aspect to politics and you've got to look good on camera and you've got to sound good and everything.
But there is also fundamentally in the craft of acting and in the It seems to be focused on the human condition, on the eternal questions that people have thought about through all of history, and you also have to like people.
You have to enjoy people if you want to create characters, and if you want to talk to voters and represent them in Washington.
There seems to me, even beyond all the glib, you know, we have to look good and everything, there seems to me a significant and a profound relation between those two things.
But this leads to another question.
Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, can I just...
Yeah, let me just say one thing on that.
I'll let you get your question.
Well, just remember, the ancient philosophers and statesmen were also playwrights, right?
And even some of the later ones, you know, 17th or 18th century writer, not Tartuffe, the guy who wrote Tartuffe and Candide, Voltaire, right?
He was a leading political philosopher, but he was also a playwright, and he wrote award-winning plays.
So it didn't used to sort of be some sort of church and state sort of separation between entertainment and politics, right?
Many of the greatest intellectual thinkers of the time would also delve into playwriting, into, you know, propagandizing their ideas, right, once film became a medium.
So it's definitely not so separate as many people would think.
That is an excellent point.
And it goes all the way back to Sophocles.
I mean, this is a trend throughout time.
Why does show business always break left?
It seems like some of the most successful show business people to go into politics are conservative, and yet the vast majority of people in show business, also going back to just after Sophocles, are all left-wing.
Why is that?
Great question, and I mean, I know why, because I spent so much time in the theater department, right?
All my friends from college, from the musical theater department now hate me, right?
They're all lefties.
But...
I think it's because it's empathy first, right?
In order to be like a good actor or to emote, right, you go to a part of your brain that sort of avoids things like rational calculations, right?
Rather than using like the kind of cold hard logic that's necessary in order to make determinations on like fiscal policy, right, you're going to go towards what feels good.
So I think that that's really what it is, is you're leading with your heart.
And there's that old Winston Churchill quote, right?
If you're young and you're not a socialist or a liberal, then you've got no heart if you're old.
And you're not a conservative, then you have no brain.
And I say, if you're not a libertarian, by the time you're 90, you've got no heart and no brain.
But you do a pot.
But you have white.
But there you go.
There you go.
So I would just say that that's why, right?
It's a strong empathy thing.
And we could learn a lot, right, from the left in that sense.
Many times libertarians and some conservatives, we come off as cold and heartless and calculating when we really do need to empathize.
I believe in the Second Amendment, and I totally feel for what happened to those kids down in Florida.
But there's no tragedy no matter how great that justifies taking away rights from innocent people.
And that's, I think, the best way to package this message.
And of course, you could also say mass shootings have declined a lot, school shootings have declined a lot, gun homicides are way down in this last several decades, and it all seems to bounce right off because you have Hollywood celebrities, you have Jimmy Kimmel crying on television and he says, you don't care, you don't care.
It's a tough conundrum, and some of the best conservative leaders that we've ever had, like Ronald Reagan, were able to match both of those things together, the reason and the empathy and the communication.
Austin, thank you for being here.
Where can people find you?
Yeah, AP for Liberty on Twitter.
If you send me a message on Facebook, I won't get it because I'm banned for 25 more days.
But it's AP for Liberty.
And of course, if you want to win the gun, you can just go to AustinPeterson.com slash AR15 underscore raffle.
Please register there.
I really appreciate the time, guys, and the revolution continues.
I've just got to write that down, obviously.
I won't find you on Facebook, but I do want the gun.
That is one of the best political fundraisers I've ever heard of.
Austin, thank you for being here.
We've got to move on to news.
Thanks, Michael.
Got it.
Alright, let's get in some news first.
I want to get into a little bit of news, then I'll probably have to sign off in a little bit.
But first, before we sign off, I want to talk about steel tariffs, gun confiscation, the world is coming to an end, Donald Trump is going to take away everything, this is it, this is the pivot to the left, it's all over.
This is my working strategy with regard to Donald Trump.
Whenever Trump says anything or does anything, I get a thousand text messages from my never-Trump conservative friends and from my lefty friends.
They See, now are you going to disavow him?
You have to disavow.
Come on, do it, do it, do it.
My strategy with regard to Donald Trump, keep calm and covfefe.
Keep calm and covfefe.
That is it.
He told us a week or two ago that he was going to confiscate our guns and then we'll have due process later because we don't have time.
About 12 hours later, he sent out a tweet and he said, respect the Second Amendment.
Now we have a gun bill that he's pushing that does not even raise the age to buy these guns.
It is simply about arming people who are in schools, allowing people who are in schools to carry guns to present these awful shootings that we've seen.
Works for me.
If I had freaked out the minute he said he was going to steal all my guns, if I had started ripping my hair out, if I did that every time he sent out a tweet, I would have a very miserable life.
But because I wait a little bit, because I keep calm and covfefe, it's very nice.
Everything in politics is going just dandy, much more conservative than we've seen in decades.
That is fine.
We're seeing this with the tariffs.
We were told on these steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump has been threatening for a while and that now it appears that he's instituting that this was going to cause crazy trade wars.
The global economy is going to plunge.
Our allies, our trading partners, are going to turn on us.
He's already rolling back the tariffs.
And good Trump observers knew this from the beginning.
They predicted this.
They said, yeah, this isn't going to happen the way it is.
That we're seeing it happen.
So what does it look like?
We were told that the U.S. auto industry was going to crash because of these tariffs.
Analysts on Wall Street are already predicting, they're already seeing that this won't really hurt the U.S. auto industry.
The market's a little bit confused on it still.
We're not going to have a market apocalypse because of this.
And Donald Trump is going to exempt Canada and Mexico.
Okay, so where else do we get Steele from?
He's going to exempt our major trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
He said that other allies can negotiate for an exemption on the tariffs, and he's really referring to the European Union here.
So, from what we know about Trump, from what we know about the art of the deal, as the book is called...
What do we think that means?
It means you need to start paying up for NATO. It means you need to start changing some of your trade restrictions.
It's not like the European Union has totally free trade.
They have plenty of trade restrictions as it currently stands.
Maybe he's trying to do what he's been saying for a decade, which is he wants to renegotiate trade deals.
Seems much more like a Trumpian threat and Trumpian leverage than something else.
But what about that other steel partner, China?
This entire move is clearly aimed at China, which illegally subsidizes its steel industry.
That is not free trade.
The Obama administration actually filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization because China is subsidizing its steel industries, but nobody cared because Barack Obama was weak and they knew that he wouldn't take any retaliatory action and he had no credible threat of violence or trade violence.
This is the same thing that we've been seeing from Trump all along and And if these tariffs are only poised to target China, that might not be the worst thing in the world.
If they're really just being used as leverage to renegotiate deals with China and try to get China to stop breaking the law and to stop violating the terms of the World Trade Organization, that's a very good thing.
Candidates of both parties have been talking about this for a long time.
This is the first president we've seen in a while who's actually doing it.
Okay, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You know, it's funny because I keep getting killed on YouTube from the YouTube side of it, but the numbers keep going up.
So whatever you're doing, keep slipping through.
I don't know if you're paying off people at the YouTube headquarters or something, but we appreciate it.
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All right, but forget about all that stuff.
What you really need, look, you subscribe to The Daily Wire, you get me, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get, you know, take the conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
And let me tell you, if Austin Peterson sends you an AR-15 from this Facebook raffle, you are going to need this because all those tears are going to be pouring out of Menlo Park.
Cheryl, whatever her name is, at, Cheryl Sandberg at Facebook is going to be weeping lefty tears and you're going to want to collect them.
This is the only FDA approved vessel for leftist tears.
We'll be right back.
Let's try to get to some other news before we have to go here.
This is a particularly good one.
Lauren Southern.
Do you remember Lauren Southern?
She's that hot dude we had on the show.
You know, that YouTube star who's making a movie about farmlands in South Africa.
Well, Lauren was banned from the United Kingdom for suspicion of terrorism, which I actually think, for the UK's part, is evidence of transphobia.
I think that's a clear...
No one's talking about that, but the UK has become very transphobic in recent days.
Let's do a little recap.
Lauren Southern, YouTube star, just talks about how feminists are kind of crazy.
She is banned.
She is detained and banned from the UK. Who has the UK allowed into their kingdom in recent years?
Let's go back a few decades.
The six Iranian Arab gunmen who seized the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 took six hostages and murdered two of them.
They were allowed in.
Abu Nidal, who killed the Israeli ambassador in London in 1982, he was allowed in.
Mustafa Mahmoud Mazzeh, who blew himself up with two floors of a London hotel while trying to murder British author and former Muslim Salman Rushdie for insulting Islam.
Four Muslim terrorists who murdered 52 people and injured 700 by targeting public transit during rush hour in 2005.
Those guys got in.
Bilal Abdullah and Kafil Ahmed, who rammed a jeep filled with gas canisters through the Glasgow airport doors in 2007.
They also were allowed in.
Also to the airport, I guess, because they rammed their way in.
Two Muslim extremists who murdered and decapitated the British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013.
Muhaideen Meyer, who attacked three tube travelers with a knife while shouting, this is for Syria in 2015.
Salman Abedi, who was radicalized in Syria before returning to the UK and murdering 22 people and injuring 250 at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last year.
The three Muslim terrorists who rammed 48 people in a white van across London Bridge, after which they leapt out and started stabbing people, also last year they were allowed in, and Ahmed Hassan, an 18-year-old Iraqi who blew up the tube stop at Parsons Green, injuring 30 people.
Also last year, they were all allowed into the country, and Lauren Southern was not.
Also allowed into the country for decades are those Middle Eastern immigrants who groomed upwards of 1,000 children in Britain's worst ever sex abuse scandal, which was just being reported on today, where sex gangs targeted girls as young as 11.
What the British do here is they call them Asian men, but what that means is Middle Eastern men, Muslim immigrants into the United Kingdom, but they call them Asian for fear of racism.
The British authorities reportedly and intentionally have failed to record details of the Middle Eastern abusers of these many, many very young girls for fear of racism.
And it cuts both ways.
It's, I think, on the authorities' part, fear of being called a racist and losing your job and your status and being probably deported at this point in the UK, but also it's the fear that if they say the identity of these people, if they talk about the identity of these abusers, then other Muslim people will be unfairly targeted. then other Muslim people will be unfairly targeted.
Mind you, this does not happen in large scales ever after any of these attacks.
The number of attacks that happened in the United States on Muslims after September 11th is not shocking for how many there were.
There were some.
It's shocking for how few there were.
There were so few you would expect a big backlash.
The big backlash has never come.
The left always warns us of this awful...
Islamophobic is the term they use, backlash.
It has never happened in the West.
This is similar to German girls who were raped by Muslim immigrants and refugees in Germany and they lied to the police and they said they were raped by German men because they didn't want to seem racist.
They didn't want to give away the...
The UK authorities were so scared on this point of being called racist and of seeming racist, they failed to investigate one case here five separate times until a member of parliament intervened.
This has been going on since the 1980s.
One 18-year-old Middle Eastern immigrant at that time, in 1985, I think, abducted a 14-year-old, forced her to have sex with hundreds of men, threatened to abduct her sisters and kill her parents if she ever spoke up.
This is not an isolated case, but it's been going on for a long time.
Girls were forced to take the abortion pill multiple times per week, multiple forced abortions on all of these girls, and those rings were covered up for 40 years.
They're just coming to light now.
But Lauren Southern.
But Lauren Southern.
Cute little 20-something who makes YouTube videos about how crazy feminists are?
She cannot be allowed into the country.
Gang rapists and terrorists?
They can probably make it in.
Little YouTube star?
Criminals, criminals, criminals.
For 40 years.
Lauren was detained in the French port town of Calais Sunday night by UK authorities under the Schedule 7 Anti-Terrorism Act for reasonable suspicion of terrorism.
And I knew it.
The minute I looked at that girl, I knew you look like a terrorist, Lauren.
You look, you look, you don't look like a dude, but you look like a terrorist.
They took away her cell phone.
They accused her of distribution of racist material.
I wonder if that's because she's making a movie about South Africa.
She's made this movie talk to her last week.
She's making this movie about some of the farm murders in South Africa that the South African parliament voted to take away the land from white people and redistribute it to black people in the country.
And she's made a movie about some of the murders that have been going on over the past few years.
I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
Because I can't point to episodes of Lauren Southern ramming cars into people or calling for the death of novelists like Salman Rushdie or calling for the death of entire countries and peoples.
I don't hear any of that.
I just see her making a movie about what's happening in South Africa.
Maybe the UK should get its priorities in order.
This brings us all the way full circle to this day in history.
On this day in history, this is all the way back from the beginning of the media trying to shut down different voices and what's appropriate for the president, what's not appropriate for the president.
On this day in history, in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat broadcast directly from the White House.
Here's a clip.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.
To talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks.
I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.
I recognize that the many proclamations from state capitals and from Washington The legislation, the treasury regulations and so forth, couched for the most part in banking and legal terms, ought to be explained for the benefit of the average citizen.
I owe this in particular because of the fortitude and the good temper with which everybody has accepted the inconvenience and the hardships of the banking holiday.
It's a little dry.
I could use a couple sad exclamation points or something like that.
The 1930s were a little more stayed time.
At that time, though, when FDR started giving these addresses, 25 to 33 percent of the U.S. workforce was unemployed.
FDR gave many, many dozens more broadcasts throughout his presidency.
He reached upwards of 90 percent of American households.
He used these chats to To push his New Deal policies, to push it past the media, which generally liked him, but to even go straight to the American people.
He tried to push vast government expansion, court packing, adding his own judges to the courts so that they would stop striking down his anti-constitutional laws, pushing his own candidates in primaries.
All the while, he did say, he said, I'm not asking the voters to vote for Democrats, but But, but it'd be cool if you did.
But, you know, like he doesn't, I mean, it's so, it's so transparent what he's doing and he's pushing that in during the party primaries.
Radio was the Twitter of the 1930s and the 1940s and FDR used it.
Was it below the stature of the president to go on radio?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.
I'm sure people said that at the time.
Was it a threat to a free press to have this propaganda coming straight out of the White House?
I don't know.
The press was flacking for him anyway.
The most important question is, was it effective?
Well, FDR did serve four terms.
He served until his death.
Probably could have served four more terms if he hadn't died in office.
He probably would have stayed and been the American king that he envisioned himself to be.
Democrats always used new technologies, and then they tell us not to do it.
So in 2008, Barack Obama was the digital candidate, you remember.
He's running the digital campaign.
Now we're being told, after Donald Trump took that away from Democrats, that Trump manipulated social media to win.
Obama's the digital candidate.
Trump manipulated social media.
Barack Obama and FDR both used the bully pulpit to comment on cultural issues and to push the culture in America to the left.
But then we're told that Republican presidents should never comment on cultural issues like, say, the NFL players disrespecting their own flag.
That, oh, that you can't do.
Only Democrats get to comment on the culture.
The left constantly tells us to unilaterally disarm.
And some people on the right take the bait, unbelievably.
They say, oh yeah, no, you're right.
We shouldn't.
No, that's a good idea.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
We should use the same tools, the same technological and the same cultural tools that these guys use.
We should use those tools to push our values, to push our vision of the world, to push the moral framework that informs the world that we live in.
But we should use the same tools.
We shouldn't...
Unilaterally disarmed.
That would be crazy to do.
There's plenty of precedent for this.
And by the way, some of the propaganda that came out of FDR's fireside chats, some of the anti-constitutional propaganda that came out of those chats makes Donald Trump look like a schoolboy, makes those tweets look tame.
So, as was the case when we're talking about the tariffs and the gun confiscation, this and that and this and that.
Maybe let's keep calm and covfefe and keep an eye on these social media platforms where they created the new media and then the new media went right wing and now they're trying to kill the new media.
Don't let them do it.
Keep sneaking out.
Keep getting those words out.
Keep applying pressure.
And I'll have to disagree with my guest on the show today.
I think we should regulate these guys like publishers.
They're the biggest publishers in the history of the world.
We should regulate them like that and hold their feet to the fire.
We should not allow this opportunity to get away from us.
Okay, that's our show.
We'll be back tomorrow.
We've got some excellent topics and guests this week, so tune in.
I won't spoil the surprise.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
