Kanye West has said the only slavery in America 400 years on is mental imprisonment. He's entirely correct. Who knew that in an age of sexless Boy Scouts, senseless Democrats, and Californians banning Christian books, a frequently incoherent rapper named Kanye Omari West would be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness? Then, on This Day In History, J. Edgar Hooker and the all-powerful FBI.
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Kanye West said in an interview that the only slavery in America 400 years on is mental imprisonment, voluntary mental imprisonment, at which point a bunch of ignorant people proved his point on Twitter and elsewhere.
Kanye is entirely correct.
We will explain it.
Who knew that in an age of sexless Boy Scouts, senseless Democrats, and Californians banning Christian books, a frequently incoherent rap artist named Kanye Omari West would be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness?
Who knew?
Then, on this day in history, the demise of James Edgar Comey, I'm sorry, I mean J. Edgar Hoover, ends five decades of anti-constitutional overreach at the FBI.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I should clarify, by the way, because sexless Boy Scouts is a general and confusing term.
I, too, was a sexless Boy Scout, but I'm talking about sexless meaning having neither gender or no specific gender, not the way in which I was a sexless Boy Scout.
Sad.
Also, are we ever going to do a show again that isn't just about Kanye West?
This is going to be the new show.
Kanye is the new covfefe.
Kanyefe.
I don't know.
We have a lot to talk about today.
The thing that Kanye said has caused universal condemnation.
Everyone is screaming and wailing and gnashing their teeth.
What he said is completely right.
We'll get to that in a second.
Before we get to that, we have to talk about toys.
We have to talk about toys.
So, we get to talk about this toy.
This toy is so cool, man.
It makes me upset that I am an adult.
Many things make me upset that I'm an adult, like accountability and having to pay bills and taxes and all that.
But this, more than any of them, Little Bits.
Little Bits is the coolest toy ever.
That's it.
It's the coolest toy ever.
If you have a kid or a niece or even if you're 30, get it.
It's the coolest toy ever.
LittleBits is an award-winning platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks for creating inventions large and small.
You know, we all had those building blocks when we were kids and various versions of them.
This is just the insanely way cooler version of all of that.
You can get the complete Droid kit.
That's what they sent to me when we onboarded them.
This thing, I was walking through the office...
Because I thought, oh, that's good.
I'll send it to my nephew.
I'll send it to my, you know, my nephew will really like this.
Hordes of 30-year-old Daily Wire employees are trying to take my toy from me.
They're trying to take a toy from my little nephew.
It's really, really cool.
He loves it.
He was so excited when I called and told him I was sending this to him.
You can work it on a mobile device.
So there's six bits, 20 droid parts, three sticker sheets.
There's a free app.
You can go to drive mode, force mode, self-navigation, all these authentic sounds from the Star Wars movies, 22 missions in the app, customizable droids, you can give them personality, and kids learn to code, so you can code while you're doing it.
It requires a smart device.
It's very cool to control from your app.
That is why my nephew loves Little Bits and loves this Droid kit.
Get yours right now.
Get $10 off a Droid Inventor kit.
Go get it, seriously.
You always need a gift for some kid for Christmas or whatever.
This is the one.
Get it now and you'll save $10.
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It's really, really cool.
You know what else is really cool?
Kanye West keeps saying true things.
This guy, I'm not a huge Kanye West fan.
Now I am.
But it's not like I listen to Kanye West all the time.
I think he has a couple songs that are pretty good.
I think he was hugely important for hip-hop.
I think he made hip-hop much, much better.
Because he actually does have a brilliant musical ear.
A great ear for how music should go.
Even if I don't like his own music.
And even if he's great for hip-hop, even if he's the best thing that ever happened to hip-hop, which he probably is, I don't like hip-hop.
Nevertheless, I really like what he's saying.
He just came out and he said, before we even get to the slavery, that's the most controversial quote.
He's been saying these great things over the last few days.
He's been talking about Candace Owens.
I actually tweeted out, someone said, you shouldn't like Candace Owens.
She's only repeating Thomas Sowell quotes, the wonderful, great economist Thomas Sowell.
And I said, well, even if that's all Candace is doing, and I don't agree with that, but even if that's all she's doing, Kanye West isn't going to tweet Thomas Sowell quotes.
And that tweet did not age well because like two days later, Kanye West actually tweeted quotes from the famed 80-something-year-old economist, unbelievable political thinker, Thomas Sowell.
So this is all great.
The new one he sent out is, Kanye said that Barack Obama is like opioids for black people.
Obama is opioids for black people.
And this is a brilliant analogy.
He said, Obama made us feel good, but it didn't fix any of the underlying problems, basically.
It didn't actually fix the symptoms.
It made us feel really good, but it didn't do anything.
A perfect analogy.
It's very timely because the opioid crisis is happening.
It's headline grabbing because it's so sensational and it's correct.
The reasoning here is excellent.
All of the problems that Barack Obama could have healed, there were racial problems.
He could have healed the racial divide in America once and for all.
He chose not to do that.
He chose to stoke the flames of racial divide and to say that kids who had been beating up Hispanic neighborhood watch people were like his children.
They looked like his children.
They didn't look like Barack Obama.
The premise of that is that all black people look alike.
All black people don't look alike.
They're individuals.
Kanye West, I'm beginning to think this guy is smarter than people give him credit for.
I'm not saying he's a great genius.
I'll get to that at the end.
I'm not saying he's playing 4D chess or something.
But he clearly has an eye and an ear for something that is...
Stronger than people give him credit for.
He also tweeted out another analogy.
He said, And people are using this to say, well, Kanye West doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's saying these kind of incomprehensible things.
And he does this.
He does say strange things.
And just like any artist, he says strange things, but especially Kanye West.
Except it's a great analogy.
The overground hell road.
First of all, what is he saying started today?
Is he talking about Is he talking about where we are in America?
Is he talking about all of the attacks that he's getting?
What is he talking about?
And you have the Underground Railroad, that's what he's alluding to, Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad, the system of getting slaves out of slavery and up.
To the free north.
But this is overground.
What is the overground hell road?
I think it's really important because it plays on a line.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
There are all of these good intentions that you hear especially from the left.
They say, oh, you know, we want to give black people this way.
Extra bit of money or this extra advantage in hiring or this extra advantage in admissions or this welfare program or this government program or this subsidy or this or this or this.
And that safety net becomes a spiderweb and it keeps people entangled in it.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it's a road to hell anyway.
And it's overground.
It's out in the open.
It's government policy.
It's in the mainstream media.
And what Kanye West is saying, the thread that has gone through all of his tweets and all of his interviews is, I just want to be free.
I just want to be free.
I want to have free thought.
I want to have free speech.
And all of these people, John Legend was texting him and saying, think of your fans, think of your legacy, don't say this, don't think this.
And he said, look, John, I love you.
I appreciate what you're trying to do.
But you're bringing up my fans and my legacy to shut me up and to say that I can't think this or I can't say this, and I'm not going to do it because I want to be free.
That's a beautiful sentiment.
That is a beautiful sentiment.
And the analogy to the Underground Railroad is apt.
And the pitfalls of good intentions, the allusions to hell, and the sort of hellish civic culture that we have now, that is apt.
Those are excellent analogies.
So he goes on to talk about slavery.
Well, let's just play the clip.
You can hear Kanye say it himself.
You hear about slavery for 400 years?
For 400 years?
That sounds like a choice.
Like, you was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all?
This is the big one.
This is the one people are saying, how dare you?
Everyone is saying this.
Conservatives are saying this.
Lefties are saying this.
This was the top trend on Twitter because the headline was Kanye West says that slavery was a choice.
Except he didn't say that.
Kanye West is saying that black slaves in America chose to be slaves, and they chose to put themselves in bondage and come over on the Middle Passage and end up in the Americas, except he didn't say that.
And Kanye West, except he didn't say that.
I don't know, do I need to pull gunk out of people's ears?
that when Kanye West said that, this was the reaction from just about everybody on Twitter and in reality.
That's, I think that's a live stream because it's still happening.
I feel How could you?
By the way, Kanye West clarified what he said.
Kanye West said verbatim, when you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years, that sounds like a choice.
Like you were there for 400 years and it's all of you all?
Like we're mentally in prison.
Slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks.
So prison, mental prison, is something that unites us as one race, blacks and whites being one race, we're the human race.
Beautiful.
Absolutely correct.
Absolutely spot on.
Will.i.am, who I guess is some entertainer or something that I know nothing about, he said he was deeply hurt.
He was so offended.
He was so deeply hurt.
Alleged comedian Ty Barnett, another person I've never heard of, said Kanye West needs to shut the F up.
He used more colorful language.
He literally said, you have to shut up.
That's, by the way, how you know that Kanye is on the right, is that everyone's telling him to shut up.
Everybody's telling him to shut up.
That's how you know he's in the right.
Because when you're in the right, you don't need to shut other people up.
You can let them make a fool for themselves.
When you're in the right and someone else is saying crazy things and is in the wrong, the best strategy you have, the best tactic at your disposal is to just let them keep talking, right?
But, if you're in the wrong, or if you're trying to push a wrong agenda, or an oppressive agenda, or you have your own nefarious plots, and someone is speaking the truth, what you have to do is tell them to shut up.
You've got to keep them quiet.
I will explain why, historically, and mathematically, Kanye West is obviously correct.
How everyone with even a passing knowledge of history or math knows that Kanye West is 100% correct about slavery.
Before we get to that...
Got to talk to you about sheets.
Let's talk about some sheets.
These guys, you've heard me talk about Bowling Branch before.
Bowling Branch sheets.
This was such an elevation in my life because, as you know, I try to sleep at least 18 or 19 hours a day.
You know, I come in here, basically, I spread a little covfefe for a while, and then I go back and I go to sleep.
But I would always buy these really not nice sheets, just whatever the cheapest thing was.
I didn't realize sheets could be so nice as bowl and branch.
Getting a great night's sleep is easier and more affordable than you think.
You don't need to get a new expensive mattress.
You don't need to take sleeping pills.
Just change your sheets.
Seriously, I had no idea what a difference really nice sheets can make.
Now, when you look, I'm getting married soon, you look on the wedding registries, really nice sheets can cost up to $1,000, more than $1,000.
And I, listen, Ben doesn't pay me anything, and he certainly doesn't pay me enough to buy really nice sheets.
So, Bowlin Branch, what you do is you can buy directly from them, so you're essentially paying wholesale prices.
You can get luxury sheets that should be over $1,000 in the store.
Bowlin Branch will only cost you a couple hundred bucks.
I am telling you, treat yourself.
Even if you don't spend 19 hours a day sleeping like I do, you still should treat yourself.
You're going to feel like a king, and you can do it for just a couple hundred bucks.
Everyone who tries Bowling Branch loves them.
That's why they have thousands of five-star reviews.
Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, everybody's talking about Bowling Branch.
Three U.S. presidents sleep on Bowling Branch sheets.
Three U.S. presidents.
There are probably a lot of jokes that one could make about that, but I'm going to avoid that.
And I'll just point out, three U.S. presidents, the highest office in the entire world, they choose these sheets.
Shipping is free, and you can try them for 30 nights.
So I know a lot of you are lying out in gutters most of the time, and what you can do, you just try it for 30 nights, no shipping, and you at least get a good night's sleep for a month.
That sounds pretty good.
If you don't love them, send them back for a refund.
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There is no risk.
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This is one of those things.
You say, oh, I don't need that.
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Do it, man.
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Back to how absolutely accurate Kanye West is here.
He said, again, I'd like to get this quote right, when you hear about slavery for 400 years, that sounds like a choice, like you were there for 400 years and it's all of you all, like we're mentally in prison.
400 years, he said.
That's the number, 400 years.
So, when did African slavery get introduced to the Americas?
The Dutch introduced African slavery to the Americas in 1619.
That was the first time.
Now, slavery had existed in the Americas long before that, since the dawn of time.
A lot of so-called indigenous peoples or native Americans or whatever the euphemism du jour is, the people who were here before the Europeans, they all enslaved one another.
There was rampant slavery, as there was throughout the entire world, especially outside of the West, but even at various times in the West in antiquity.
Now, this was 1619 when the Dutch introduced African slavery to the Americas.
One of the first legally recognized slave owners in America came just a Ironically, it was a black man, a black man named Anthony Johnson.
He was a black Angolan, and in the Kayser suit, Virginia recognized his right to own a slave.
Now, 1619 was when the Dutch brought African slaves to America.
Slavery was abolished in 1865, 246 years later.
So that was the 13th Amendment, the end of the Civil War.
246 years later, slavery was abolished.
Now, that is the largest count.
If you go all the way back to the Dutch, not the English, not the American founding in the late 18th century, just the very first time.
By the largest count, some black people were enslaved in America for 246 years.
We know that slavery existed everywhere throughout history, and we know that only in the West was slavery abolished.
And it was abolished pretty quickly because of Christianity.
246 years.
The entire history of the world, thousands and thousands of years, it existed in the modern West for 246 years, and we abolished it.
Now, for 400 years of slavery to be true, as all these mawing, mooing, crewing people who were apparently lightly educated on Twitter and elsewhere and in the media are saying, for 400 years of slavery to be true, slavery would have had to continue 153 years after it did, after 1865, which would take us to 2019, which is one year in the future.
So not only would slavery have to have persisted in the United States as a matter of law from 1865 to the present, not only would there have to be rampant legal slavery in America today, it would have to continue until next year and we would count that.
We would have to be living in the future for that to be true.
So if you think that you have been enslaved for 400 years in America, that is a choice.
That's an absurdity.
That's not true.
It is a mental prison.
That's a mental prison that you live in.
Kanye explained all of this.
He said, quote, We need free thought now.
Even the statement was an example of free thought.
It was just an idea.
And what did you get for that free thought, Kanye?
You got piled on by a bunch of people who can't even do basic math.
They can't even do basic math.
That if black people were enslaved legally in America for 400 years, we would be living in the future.
And the Civil War would never have happened.
Oh, 150 years ago.
He makes this great point.
He said, the reason I brought this up, one, is to exercise my free thought and to show you all what happens when you dare to exercise free thought.
To quote Clarence Thomas, when someone deigns to think for himself and not kowtow to an old racist order.
He said that in his famous high-tech lynching defense.
But also, we can't be enslaved for another 400 years.
What he's saying is, this is a mental prison, this is a choice, and it will persist.
If you don't think for yourself, if you don't take off the shackles off of your mind, this will go on forever.
There will be no end to that slavery.
Only you can undo that slavery.
There's a really good slave narrative.
Kanye West got me thinking about slave narratives.
And there's a really wonderful one called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself, by Harriet Jacobs.
It's the best slave narrative I've ever read, and it's really eloquently written.
She writes, Harriet Jacobs writes, quote, I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America.
The felon's home in a penitentiary is preferable.
He may repent and turn away from the error of his ways and so find peace, but it is not so with a favorite slave.
She is not allowed to have any pride of character.
It is deemed a crime in her to wish to be virtuous.
This explains...
How insidious slavery is.
This explains why the West got rid of it.
Why the West's Christian culture and the culture that came from Christianity forced it very quickly, almost immediately, to do away with slavery throughout its territories.
Because slavery isn't about material things or luxury or money.
A lot of people today who are race hustlers want to say the effects of slavery, the heritage of slavery is poverty or not nice living conditions or whatever.
Very few people are poor for a long time in America.
It's almost impossible to be poor for a long time in America.
If you're poor in America, you still have television and microwaves and it's pretty nice unless you have a drug habit or a mental illness or something like that and can't exercise liberty.
It's a pretty luxurious life.
We live in a materially wealthy culture.
That isn't the problem.
It is true.
A lot of times you'll hear people say slaves in certain parts of the South in America had it better than poor people in Europe.
And that's both true and false.
It is materially true.
If you think of slavery just in material terms, that is true.
And you hear people write about this in slave narratives, that actually slaves had better material conditions than poor people in Europe.
But it isn't true.
They didn't have it better because they were deprived of something essential, much more important than luxury, which is liberty.
They were deprived of liberty.
And I'd rather be a poor guy with nothing and free than a very wealthy slave.
We all would do that.
Jacobs is alluding to how slavery harms even the slave owners by depriving even the slave owners of virtue.
She understands something that so many geniuses in the West don't understand today.
It's a point that Andrew Klavan talks about a lot, which is that our primary motivations are not money.
Our primary motivations aren't sex, like all of the new atheists tell you, all of the guru types.
They say, oh, we're really driven by sex.
We're really driven by money.
We're really driven by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No.
What we're driven by is a need for virtue, a need to be virtuous and to use our liberty to shape ourselves to do the good.
And in this slave narrative, she identifies it perfectly.
The slave can't be virtuous.
It's a crime for the slave to be virtuous because there's no freedom.
And slavery is so insidious because it deprives the slave master of virtue.
Because he is partaking of this horrible ripping away of liberty, because he is denying liberty, he himself cannot be virtuous.
He cannot pursue the virtue.
He's stuck in this awful, peculiar institution.
In this slave narrative, she quotes Byron, the poet Lord Byron, and says, Each is tortured in his separate hell.
These are separate hells, but they're equally torturous.
That is what Kanye is identifying.
He's identifying this central problem, ironically better than virtually anybody else.
The central problem of liberty.
The liberty here to pursue virtue.
This isn't about money.
This isn't about keeping yourself in the past.
This isn't about...
Even historical ignorance.
It's about liberty and virtue.
And listen, I don't want to be accused of painting too rosy a picture of Kanye here.
He's making excellent points, and he's making very important points, but I don't think he's playing 4D chess.
This is what they're going to say.
4D chess was invented by critics of Donald Trump, especially on the right, who said that his supporters thought he was the greatest genius in the world.
That isn't true.
We don't think he's like the greatest strategic genius ever in the whole world.
We think he's good at the media, and he's a pretty smart fella who's succeeded in some of the most competitive industries in the entire world and managed to get himself elected president the first time he tried.
We think he's a pretty smart fella.
That's what I think about Kanye West, but I don't think he's some great genius.
Here's actually how I know, because he tweeted out, he said, if this was 148 years ago, I would have been more like Harriet or Nat.
I would have been like Harriet Tubman or Nat Turner.
Now, I wonder, why did he say 148 years ago?
148 years ago was 1870, but that was after slavery ended.
So what does it mean to be Harriet Tubman after slavery is abolished?
What does it mean to be Nat Turner after slavery is abolished five years after the end of the Civil War?
And then I just googled.
I had a hunch.
So I googled how long ago did slavery end in America, and the first result says 148 years ago, but it's an article from 2013.
So I think that's it, right?
I think that probably explains it.
It's off the top of his head.
Kanye said, how long ago did slavery end?
Okay, I'll use that number.
And so I'm not saying he's a Rhodes Scholar.
I'm not saying he's this great political philosopher.
But he's making extraordinarily important points.
And he has an important virtue, the courage to withstand the leftist onslaught that he's currently getting from everybody.
And it's not just on Twitter and it's not just on TMZ or whatever stupid television shows he's going on.
He's getting it in text messages from friends of his and family and people who are saying you're mentally ill, you're a traitor, you're this, you're that.
And he's got this manliness.
Harvey Mansfield writes about it that even a manly virtue is to be confident and to pursue the right as you see the right, even when you lack perfect knowledge, even when you lack technical knowledge, even when you lack total detailed knowledge.
It's why Kanye West is similar to Donald Trump.
It's why they share dragon energy.
Because when Donald Trump entered the race, he certainly didn't possess a perfect knowledge of public policy or foreign policy.
But he just knew what he thought.
He knew his vision for the country.
He knew the motivating principles, the premises, and he followed them.
And he wouldn't allow himself to be intimidated by all these little technical soy boys who say, well, you didn't read this book.
No, they speak confidently and they're right.
Even if Kanye West is off by a few years on the tweet, the point he's making is right.
And speaking of manliness, we've got to burn through this.
We've got a couple more stories we've got to talk about.
Speaking of manliness, the Boy Scouts are now the Girl Scouts, which has come as a surprise to the Girl Scouts who are about to disappear.
Is that confusing?
This, I'd like to cut really quickly to Steven Tyler for comment.
Yeah, that sounds right.
That sounds right.
That sums it up, I think.
Yeah, that is what, you know, this is the evidence of that manliness, because Stephen Tyler, I don't know if he knows everything about this issue with the Boy Scouts, but he can really cut to the core of what it is.
The Boy Scouts are no longer the Boy Scouts.
They're now called the Scouts BSA. I just bring this topic up to show that leftist ideologies are essentially about destruction.
They're not about creating new things.
They're about destroying traditions.
They're not about creating the Girl Scouts.
The Girl Scouts already existed.
Actually, what they're doing now is this pernicious ideology of saying that men and women are exactly the same.
That destroys the Girl Scouts.
It doesn't create the new Scouts.
It just destroys them and makes it all this bland, gray thing.
And, frankly, I'm surprised it took this long.
Because we live in a gender-neutral society.
We've lived in the gender-neutral society increasingly for a long time now.
I'm surprised the Boy Scouts even managed to continue to exist.
And this gets to the point, even conservatives will say, oh, who cares about the bathrooms?
Who cares about if men can use the women's room or if there's a law that says men have to be able to use the women's room?
Who cares about redefining marriage?
Who cares about it?
We all have gay friends.
We want them to be happy.
Who cares about redefining the central relationship in human nature?
Who cares about it?
So marriage for all of history meant the union of husbands and wives.
And now it means...
It includes monogamous people of the same sex, but only two of them.
For some reason, not three.
And who cares?
What's the deal?
Look, this is not a debate about rights.
This is about the abuse of language.
I just did a Prager video on this, and the Boy Scouts proved me right.
You can trace the demise of the Boy Scouts to the success of the gender-neutral society.
The words contain whole premises, and when you control the language, you control the culture.
The founding mission of the Boy Scouts in 1910 was to teach boys patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values.
Courage, self-reliance.
But the gender-neutral society says that virtues manifest in exactly the same way they do for men as they do for women.
So in the old days, in the old days before like five minutes ago, we used to say, well, courage for men and courage for women can look quite different.
To have an unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy that you didn't expect and then to carry that child to term and then to raise that child sometimes on your own, that's...
Unfathomable courage.
That is profound courage.
That's a courage that only women have access to.
Men can't do that.
Men can't do that courage.
Now, slaying entire armies of Philistines with the jawbone of an axe, that's a more manly courage.
You don't expect women to do that because they're not as physically strong.
So acts of physical courage tend to be reserved for men.
Women just can't do that.
If they compete with men in acts of physical courage, they're going to lose.
But the gender-neutral society says, no, it has to be the same.
It has to be the same.
So the Boy Scouts of America, the current participation rate is 2.3 million.
That's down from 2.6 million in 2013, which is down from 4 million in the peak years of the past.
But I'm surprised it took this long.
The Boy Scouts of America doesn't make any sense in the gender-neutral society.
Why would you have Boy Scouts if there's no difference between boys and girls?
That's what we're taught.
That's what I was taught in public school.
I was taught there's no difference, but never hit a girl.
But there's no difference between boys and girls.
All the differences are superficial and meaningless, but you should hold the door and pay the check.
You say, well, hold on.
I don't understand.
How can that possibly be true?
The biological sexes are entirely identical.
They're interchangeable.
They're indiscernible.
But also there are these different rules that you have to follow.
You say, well, maybe the sexes are complementary.
We know with the language here, the language changes the culture.
We started using gender-neutral language.
We started abusing language.
That changes the culture, and the culture changes the institutions.
And this might take years to happen.
It might take decades to happen, as it has in this case.
But ultimately, the institution of the Boy Scouts will be changed as well.
And this even changes political institutions and government institutions.
You see this.
David French wrote a wonderful article at National Review...
About how California, new law in California, would ban certain Christian books.
There's a new California law, AB 2943, which would ban certain Christian books.
The bill declares, quote, sexual orientation change efforts are to be, quote, an unlawful business practice.
Sexual orientation change efforts.
Now that's like, you know, if sweet little Elisa wants to change my sexual behavior and say, Michael, stop it!
Don't stop it!
Don't go, you know, then I guess that would be a change effort, wouldn't it?
I don't know.
What is a sexual orientation change effort?
That is such a broad phrase, and as is business practice.
It's so broad that it could ban books.
The bill applies to services and goods.
It bans the sale or release of goods or services that would attempt to change sexual orientation.
It also bans advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual.
So if you tell someone that their sexual behavior maybe should change, if you even just suggest that to a person, if you advertise that, that would be against the law.
The left wants to pretend that we're talking about electro...
electrocution therapy or something here.
Like there's a wide epidemic of electrocuting gays in America.
Which I don't...
Have any of you ever seen that?
Have you ever heard of that?
Or known someone that that's happened to?
Because I haven't.
And I know a lot of gay people.
You know, I'm from New York and I live in LA and I went to Yale where it's one in four maybe more.
And these days it's one in three maybe me.
Who knows?
I haven't...
You don't know everything about me.
But on...
But now we're talking about something that could include books.
We're talking about something that even could include books.
This is a huge overreach.
They'll probably have to rewrite the law now because everyone's denying that that's the case.
But this is what happens.
You control the language and you have these mental prisons.
It's exactly as Kanye West is alluding to.
There is a hopeful note I'll leave you on before I say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You can't stump Trump.
You can't stump Trump.
Now we have leaked interview questions, apparently, from the Mueller investigation into Trump.
They're leaking all of this.
Mueller wants to subpoena Trump, apparently.
Democrats who are running on the nothing burger Russia narrative, in the words of Van Jones, have bankrupted Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign aide.
They've bankrupted him.
Caputo has had to sell his house, jeopardize his kid's education because he's had $125,000 in legal fees, All because as he points out, Democrats lost an election, so they decided to bankrupt this guy.
CNN has had Stormy Daniels' lawyer on 59 times in two months.
CNN is absurd.
I see it sometimes at the airport now, and it's become insane.
The CNN headline today that went to all the iPhones, you would see it in Apple News, was Mike Pence did a dumb thing in Arizona yesterday.
That was the headline.
That's CNN, facts first.
CNN, facts first.
Facts.
There's a facts, but I'm a banana.
I don't forget what their advertisement was.
That's it.
Mike Pence did a dumb thing.
And the dumb thing was that he complimented a politician CNN doesn't like.
That's breaking news.
Facebook is admitting to censoring conservatives.
Mark Zuckerberg admitted to a new system on Tuesday.
It will rank news sites by trust, which explains why all the right-leaning pages have seen all of their engagement drop to nothing.
And yet, despite all of that, Donald Trump's daily approval rating is 49%.
All of that, they are doing everything they can to destroy this guy, and yet half the country, exactly half the country, approves of him.
It's perfectly divided.
49% approve, 49% disapprove.
Voter confidence in the U.S. winning the war on terror is the highest it's been since we killed Osama bin Laden.
Voters still support President Trump's temporary ban on immigrants from dangerous countries.
Despite the constant negative press, covfefe abounds.
This is a really wonderful thing.
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We've got a great This Day in History where I talk about James Edgar Comey and the politicization of the FBI, so you're going to want to stick around for that, but...
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, I'm sorry, folks.
You've got to go over to dailywire.com.
We've got really exciting news.
This Sunday, we're going to have the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special debut.
This is going to be a new long-form interview show with Ben.
He's going to have the best and brightest political and thought-leading voices in America come on the show.
The first guest is Jordan B. Peterson.
It's going to be really good.
Do not miss it.
And if you're a Ben Shapiro show subscriber...
If you're a Ben Shapiro show subscriber already, it will just pop up in your feed.
So you'll get to see that right there.
It's going to be really cool, so check it out this Sunday.
Also, Daily Wire is on Apple News now.
So if you don't want to just read Mike Pence Does a Dumb Thing, now you can also get the Daily Wire to counterbalance all the fake news from CNN. Plus, sign up, folks, because what do you get?
You get me, The Andrew Klavan Show, The Ben Shapiro Show...
You get all of those extra perks, and you get to ask questions in the conversation.
The next one stars little old me.
So make sure you sign up before then.
You can have your questions answered in the order that they come in.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
None of that matters.
Oh, it's still warm because you can serve the leftist tears hot or cold in this tumbler.
Oh, the Kanye vintage is just...
It's just magnificent.
The aroma when it...
The first notes are flavors of angry hip-hop stars and CNN commentators and everybody else on Twitter.
But then when you...
When you get it on the palate, you get how horrified the leftists are at truth.
So you get everything.
Make sure you get, this is the only FDA approved vessel to drink the salty and delicious leftist tears, hot or cold.
I'm having mine hot right now because I'm feeling a little saucy today.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back to talk about James Edgar Comey.
Hoover.
James, J. Edgar Hoover.
That's a Freudian slip, the Hoover and the Comey.
A Freudian slip is where you say one thing but me and your mother.
I don't know why I keep doing it with Hoover and Comey.
On this day in history, in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover died after five decades running the FBI. Now, we talk today, we talk about the FBI as this central American institution.
If you criticize the FBI, oh, what are you, you're attacking America.
The FBI was created in 1908.
Hoover took over 16 years later.
He ran the thing for five decades.
This ties in with today's theme, by the way.
When the FBI was first founded, the first task of the FBI in those days was to investigate and shut down whorehouses in the enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act.
Basically, there was what we would call sex trafficking today, and one of its first assignments was to shut that down.
Hoover took over in 1924, and he turned this pretty inefficient agency into an extremely powerful crime-fighting organization.
So Hoover gets a lot of flack.
I will defend J. Edgar Hoover at the beginning and then I'll attack him at the end.
There was great stuff in the early years of Hoover.
Do not believe the fake news.
He curtailed the massive influence of the FBI. Or of the FBI, of the KKK, another Freudian slip, of the KKK that was growing in the 1920s.
He shut that down.
He investigated grisly Indian murders.
He apprehended or killed very notorious criminals who had been on the run.
John Dillinger, Babyface Nelson, Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, all those names that you think of as cartoon characters, basically.
He caught them.
As early as the 1920s, the FBI started wiretapping people to enforce prohibition.
This is when things started to get a little dicey.
But it was hugely effective.
They were able to do a lot against organized crime.
Now, the FBI also, because they had all this information on people, they started compiling lists of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans in the run-up to World War II. They said, if we went to war with the Axis, we might have to put these people in detention camps.
Let's just get their names here, just in case.
Just in case.
Okay.
Okay.
That's fine.
And we know that that happened to a lot of Japanese Americans.
They were put into detention camps as questions of their loyalty were raised in World War II. Now, J. Edgar Hoover, he fought the Cold War very effectively after the Second World War.
He had a What he and agents under him did was basically great stuff during that time.
They went after communists and they went after radical leftists and they did it pretty effectively.
They deserve a lot of credit.
Broadly speaking, I really like the guy.
I really like what he was able to accomplish during his tenure, especially in the Cold War.
But...
This is the big but.
From the very beginning, the FBI itself was just unacceptably powerful.
It is unacceptably powerful.
From the very beginning, the FBI could spy on any American that it wants to.
It could create lists for internment camps.
It could tap phones.
The line about this was...
That J. Edgar Hoover served for five decades because everybody was afraid of him.
Some of his biographers recently have said, oh, that's not true, that's a legend, that, no way.
We know it's true because the presidents themselves said it.
Richard Nixon was recorded in 1971 saying that he wouldn't fire Hoover because he feared what Hoover would do to him.
If you can spy on every American, if you can tap their phones, you're going to get dirt on everybody.
That's an insurance policy.
President Truman said this too.
Truman said, quote, We want no Gestapo or secret police.
The FBI is tending in that direction.
They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail.
J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.
And he did that.
He would find out, generally, people who serve their whole lives in Congress or the Senate or whatever, they're pretty depraved people.
They're really hollowed out from within.
And, you know, all those guys in D.C. have some weird sex scandal or something in their past.
And so what J. Edgar Hoover would do is he'd find out about that, and that was blackmail, and he'd have it over them, and they would never fire Hoover.
Now, we hear from a lot of lefties, and we hear from Trump critics on the right, how great the FBI is, how Trump is attacking the FBI. The FBI is beyond criticism.
They are objective politicians.
Public servants there.
And look, there are a lot of great people at the FBI. Totally.
There are a lot of great FBI directors.
There are a lot of great agents.
Especially a lot of great agents.
How dare you?
How dare you?
We're criticizing the FBI as an institution.
Hoover himself was a great FBI director.
But the nature of the agency means that it requires constant, unrelenting vigilance.
By nature, the FBI wants to exceed its constitutional boundaries.
It's right there.
Look at all the power it has.
In its jobs, in its wiretapping, in its investigations, it has basically unchecked power.
We're seeing this now.
We're seeing this in the attempted coup of certain bureaucrats to try to undo a presidential election because it didn't turn out the way they wanted it to turn out.
And the FBI has to be reined in.
We see this in the text messages.
We see this in the text messages that alluded to that totally corrupt FBI agent Andy McCabe, deputy director.
We see it alluded to in Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, those jilted lover text messages where they talk about how they need to undo the election, how they don't want Trump to win and they want an insurance policy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Bill Kristol, who for a long time has been a conservative thought leader, said in a tweet, in a horrifying tweet, between the deep state and the Trump state, I choose the deep state, meaning the bureaucracy, meaning the unaccountable agencies.
Between the deep state and the Trump state, I want both.
I want to have both of those.
I do want an effective national security apparatus, and I want it to respect the American people and our Constitution.
If we can't have both, you have to side with the Constitution.
You have to side with the elected people.
If we don't have that, what is the FBI protecting?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
People have had their perceptions of this warped.
Especially in D.C., especially in the swampland, where they are letting the tail wag the dog.
They're putting the cart before the horse.
What other analogies can I come up with?
They are prioritizing the agent of this wonderful republic of ours over the republic itself.
Not a good idea.
We can't be sentimental about this.
The left wants us to be sentimental.
Trump's critics want us to say, oh, the glorious agencies.
I love bureaucratic agencies.
Give me my old bureaucratic agencies.
No.
They're good.
They serve a purpose.
They do good work sometimes.
A lot of the time they do good work.
And when they don't, we've got to rein them in.
That's the way it is.
You've got to look at this with cold, clear eyes and free yourself, to quote Mr.
West, the great political philosopher, Kanye West, free yourself from a mental prison.
It'll be very nice.
Okay, that's our show today.
Get your mailbag questions in so I can free you from more mental prisons on Thursday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
