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Aug. 7, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:46
Ep. 197 - The Frogs Are Only Going To Get Gayer

Big Tech has banned Alex Jones and his website InfoWars from virtually all of their platforms: Apple, Facebook, and YouTube. Conservatives are split on how to react. Then, a look at all of the other conservatives being censored, how the rot runs so deep it’s even infected The Bachelorette, and the Purple Heart on This Day In History! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Big Tech has banned Alex Jones and his website Infowars from virtually all of their platforms.
Apple, Facebook, YouTube.
Conservatives are split on how to react.
I will explain why we should vigorously defend the conspiratorial, frequently incoherent, shirtless vitamin salesman.
Then, a look at all of the other conservatives being censored, how the rot runs so deep it's even infected the Bachelorette and the Purple Heart on this day in history.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I've got to touch a little bit on Mueller too.
On Mueller and Manafort and all that ridiculous nonsense noise that the Democrats are playing.
A lot to get to today.
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So, okay, they banned Alex Jones.
The biggest corporations on earth decided that the way that they were going to disprove the crazy conspiracy theorist guy was to all gang up and ban him seemingly arbitrarily on the same day at exactly the same time.
That way to disprove the conspiracy theories, guys, really, really good thinking.
So for those of you who have been living under a rock or who don't drive around and listen to the radio at three in the morning, Alex Jones, I mean, he's a little kooky.
He's a little kooky.
I think we can all agree with that.
But he's a pretty entertaining broadcaster.
I actually enjoy listening to him sometimes because he's so...
I'll just let you see it.
Now that we can't see Alex Jones anymore, I'll just...
Alex, take it away.
I don't like him putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!
Serious crap!
Liberty is rising.
You understand how good it feels out here right now?
You understand how high I am off being out here?
This feels awesome.
This feels fantastic.
This is what it is to be alive and her ancestors running around and stuff a lot colder than this, taking animals down and hauling them back to the women with big fires in the caves.
Yeah, living.
So again, am I a beach body?
No.
Am I Tarzan?
No.
Am I, you know, some Olympic swimmer?
No.
The point is I'm a big guy.
I got big muscles.
I've always been strong.
And I've got that in-between body size.
What's it called?
You've got the three different body sizes?
Yeah.
But I'm the middle size, so I can gain muscle really fast, you name it.
It's hard for me to lose weight.
But it has just come off of me.
And soon, there'll be nothing left.
Again, I'm not Mr.
Beachbody.
I don't have all the answers.
I don't claim I'm Mr.
Sexy.
The point is, compare this to some photos we'll show of me five years ago.
There might have been a little bit of fake news in there.
The in-between body and I'm high on life.
I don't know.
I don't know.
There may be some things that are of questionable credibility.
But he's a really entertaining performer.
And, you know, this is his shtick, right?
He goes out and he's this sensationalist, wacky, tabloid, conspiracy theorist kind of guy.
They decided to shut him down uniformly.
Apple Podcasts, Twitter.
No, Twitter I think he's still on.
Facebook, YouTube.
They decided to shut this guy down.
Why?
A lot of people, what they're talking about is that he spreads fake news.
This is the popular defense of shutting down Alex Jones.
He spreads fake news about conspiracy theories and false flags and vitamins.
I don't know.
He's lying and we need to stop all of the fake news.
Okay, I don't find that to be a very compelling argument, first of all, because You know, who's to say who the judge of truth in news is?
Maybe if you're talking about aliens and tinfoil hats and things, it's easy.
But what happens when you get down to questions of domestic politics?
What happens when you get down to questions of what certain policies will do?
What happens when you get down to what foreign governments are doing, where there's conflicting information?
Who's going to decide what the real news is?
Alex Jones is an easy target.
That's why they picked him.
That's why they're trying to get all of us to say, oh, that's fine, you can take Alex Jones.
But, you know...
When they came for the shirtless vitamin salesman, I was silent.
And then they came for me, right?
Because they weren't coming for me.
That...
Okay, that's the popular understanding of it.
But that's actually not why they kicked him off.
Fake news is not why they kicked him off.
Explicitly, they actually admit this.
He was banned not for fake news, but for hate speech.
Five out of six of Jones' podcasts have been removed by Apple.
Why?
What was the explanation that Apple gave?
Quote, Apple does not tolerate hate speech.
And...
I don't know about you, but I don't think that they're turning the frickin' frogs gay.
I don't think that qualifies as hate speech.
I don't know.
Maybe it's homo-tadpole-phobic or something like that.
But I don't think it qualifies.
Facebook said the same thing.
They said, quote, Well, much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue, and we are working to address it by demoting links marked wrong by fact-checkers.
Which fact-checkers?
I don't know, all the left-wing ones.
Don't tell.
By fact-checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred today's removals were related to this.
So at least they're being honest.
Typically, Facebook is very opaque.
They're very untransparent.
But this time they're actually saying, no, this was hate speech.
This was not fake news.
So what was the hate speech?
They said, quote, specifically using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims, and immigrants.
So all of the conservatives, all the people who don't like Alex Jones, they're reacting to this and they're saying, well, look, this guy's a wacko.
I don't want to be associated with him, so I'm not going to protest this.
It doesn't matter.
They didn't kick him off for talking about the frogs.
They kicked him off for his comments about transgenderism, Islam, and immigration.
What does that mean?
Does that mean that I can't criticize transgenderism anymore?
That certainly seems to be the direction that they're going into.
What if Ben were on that TV show with Zoe Tur this year and referred to Zoe Tur as a man?
Would he be banned?
Would he be kicked off?
Would our company be shut down?
Maybe.
What if someone wants to criticize the religion of peace?
Capital R, capital P, trademark sign over it.
What if someone has a legitimate gripe with the religion of peace?
You know, Islam says that they crucified Christ not.
Islam explicitly denies the cross of Christ.
So if a Christian points this out, is that hate speech?
Is that Islamophobic?
Are we going to lose our Facebook accounts?
What about immigration?
What about immigration?
If we don't refer to illegal aliens as future dreaming, undocumented, beautiful dreaming, Americans, whatever, if we don't use their stupid euphemisms, if we refer to them as they are, illegal aliens, are we going to lose our Facebook pages?
Are we going to lose our YouTube accounts?
They are setting the stage for that.
That's what this is all about.
They're using a wacky looking guy so that we allow them to establish the principle that they can kick you off of their services for making criticisms of transgenderism, Islam, and illegal immigration, or legal immigration for that matter.
You know, Stephen Miller apparently, reportedly, has a policy that he's pushing now from the Trump administration to limit legal immigration.
This is, you're not allowed to speak about this ever, that perhaps we should change our immigration policy and bring in people who have certain skills and not other skills from certain places and not other places.
You're not allowed to say this anymore.
I'm old enough to remember when Firing Line had a major debate, Bill Buckley's show, on whether or not we should limit legal immigration.
This was a totally valid point of view at one time.
Now I think you'd be tarred and feathered if you said that in polite company.
So-called polite company on the coasts or something like that.
That's what they're establishing.
And by the way, this is why Facebook was so honest about this.
Facebook was very honest.
They said, no, no, no.
Make no mistake.
It's about transgenderism, Islam, and illegal immigration.
It's about immigrants.
Make no mistake.
Because then when they come after...
My show, or Ben's show, or Drew's show, or when they come after us for saying something politically incorrect, we say, well, we're not talking about the gay frogs.
They say, that's not what this is about.
That's not what this is about at all.
It clearly is not.
And all you need is the Democrat Senator Chris Murphy to show you this.
Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut, for a time my Senator, I'm sorry to say, he tweeted out, quote, I know Facebook and Apple and YouTube have gotten so big, they sometimes seem like the government, but they aren't.
They are private companies that shouldn't knowingly spread lies and hate.
They took a good first step today by removing Infowars.
Did you catch that?
They didn't say they did a good thing by removing Infowars.
They said they took a good first step.
I wonder what that next step is, huh?
Looking around my room closet here waiting for the walls to start falling down.
What's the next step?
Because hate, you might be confused.
You'd think hate means hate.
Hate doesn't mean hate.
Hate, to the left, I mean, in reality it does, but to the left, hate means something with which I disagree.
That's what hate is defined as.
So they use this all the time.
They say, well, yeah, you can have free speech but not hate speech.
Well, what's hate speech?
Is Alex Jones taking his shirt off hate speech?
It's not a very attractive speech, but it's not hate speech, is it?
That's what they're saying.
They're establishing this, and they say it's a good first step.
Also, first of all, he says that they're a private company.
You hear conservatives say this sometimes.
They're private companies.
We can't tell them what to say.
We can't force them to publish certain people.
They're private companies.
Yes, I'm sympathetic to that point of view.
However...
They're trying to play two sides right now.
They both want to present themselves as an open platform, a technology company, a simple platform that just allows people to publish what they want, and they're also behaving like a publisher.
They're saying, no, this will stay up, this will go down.
This will not exist, we'll delete this.
They're acting, they're curating their content like a publisher.
Which are they?
Because there are different laws, different regulations that apply to each, and they're trying to have their cake and eat it too, and they're not allowed to.
Are they a publisher or a platform?
We'll get back to that in one second.
We'll answer that question.
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So, Chris Murphy goes on.
Chris Murphy says, so he said, you know, he said, this is the first step, okay?
Next tweet, quote, InfoWars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart.
These companies must do more than take down one website.
The survival of our democracy depends on it.
Tears of rage.
That was Cory Booker.
That wasn't Chris Murphy.
But the first part was Chris Murphy.
He said the survival of our democracy depends on it.
Oh boy.
This is how you know when a demagogue is speaking, and right now the left is full of demagogues.
Every one of them who spoke at that Netroots conference, demagogue, Chris Murphy, demagogue, they always say two things.
They say, the survival of our democracy, and they say, think of the children.
Those are the two things.
When they say that, you know you're talking to a demagogue, and you've got to question their motives.
By the way, I don't want this to be confused with an abortion argument, which is legitimately like, think of the children because you're killing them.
I'm talking about this.
The survival of democracy because a guy's talking about the gay frogs.
Give me a break.
This, by the way, I'd like to point this out.
I mentioned this yesterday, that the Democrats are always projecting.
The left is always projecting.
You've got little white girls shrieking at a black woman and Because she won't behave the way they demand that she behave.
And they're saying, you're promoting white supremacy to the black woman because she won't do what they're telling her to do.
They are the white supremacists.
They're the one promoting white supremacy.
With these guys here, the iceberg of hate that's dividing the country, who's it coming from?
Is it coming from the shirtless vitamin salesman or is it coming from a United States senator who is demanding that we censor the people who disagree with him?
When it comes to attacking the media, by the way, you always hear Donald Trump is attacking the media.
He's going to repeal the First Amendment.
He's taking away freedom of the press.
What about Chris Murphy?
What about Chris Murphy?
Because Chris Murphy just called this website that he doesn't like the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that tears our country apart.
That is as bad as anything that Donald Trump has ever said about CNN. And by the way, at least Infowars is kind of honest with its point of view, right?
I mean, Infowars is a conspiracy website.
They don't put on the tie really nice and talk really seriously.
He takes his shirt off.
They're pretty honest about where they're coming from.
But CNN is utterly unserious.
CNN, you get Fredo Cuomo looking in the camera, all doe-eyed and like a mook.
They're not serious about it.
They're not honest about where they come from.
Trump attacks the media, sure.
These Democrats are attacking the media that they don't like.
Just the other day, Bill de Blasio, the Bolshevik mayor of New York City, he went on a long rant attacking Fox News, attacking news corporation Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.
He said the country would be much better off if we hadn't had Fox News for a quarter of a century.
If only, if only, if only we didn't have Fox News for a quarter of a century.
Did you read about that one in the newspaper?
No, you probably didn't because it isn't being reported because the media projects.
They just project and they only cover Trump hate.
They only cover what fits their narrative.
It's all the news that fits their narrative.
But they're doing it just the same.
Now, so Chris Murphy says, okay, this is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate.
We've got to kick him off of YouTube.
We've got to kick him off of Facebook.
We've got to kick him off of all these things.
Look, I could throw a dart at a wall.
I could hit anything to use as an example of the people who are allowed to stay on social media who are actual hate mongers.
So let's just use Louis Farrakhan.
Louis Farrakhan is usually the easiest one.
I go to Louis Farrakhan's Twitter account.
I just looked at the first tweet.
I just, I didn't even scroll.
I didn't even take the time to scroll.
Just the first tweet pinned right up there.
Louis Farrakhan says, quote, Thoroughly and completely unmasking the satanic Jew and the synagogue of Satan.
Full video.
So if you watch the video, this is the sort of thing that you see in that video.
I'm talking about the wicked ones in the Jewish community that run America, run the government, run the world, own the banks, own the means of communication.
They are my enemies!
But as sure as I'm alive, my enemies will be made my footstool.
And so will yours.
The Jews will be made my footstool.
Louis Farrakhan.
Louis Farrakhan allowed to have his YouTube page.
Has anyone even threatened his YouTube page?
Has there ever even been the question that Louis Farrakhan is going to lose his YouTube page?
How about Facebook?
Is he going to lose his Facebook?
He's on Twitter.
I was just on his Twitter account.
He has his own YouTube channel.
He has a lot of subscribers.
He's the head of the Nation of Islam.
He's the head of this, what you would call a hate group.
But the left wouldn't call it a hate group, because to the left, hate is only when you disagree with the left.
Louis Farrakhan poses no problem to the left.
They want to play nice with Louis Farrakhan.
They do.
They play nice with Farrakhan.
They play nice with a number of his followers, a number of people who are associated with him.
So they don't want to rock the boat, because Louis Farrakhan can play nice with them, so they'll play nice with Louis Farrakhan.
Who else is on Twitter?
I mean, who isn't?
You know, it's so arbitrary.
And this is the part that conservatives really should worry about.
Because I understand the point of view, the conservative point of view.
They're companies that can do what they want.
Fine.
That isn't really our criticism.
That isn't the most important conservative criticism.
The criticism is that they're not transparent.
It's totally arbitrary.
They're pretending to be one thing, but actually they're another thing.
They're pretending that this is this open space, but then they go in and they pluck out individuals that they don't like.
And they pick out the easiest ones.
You know, Alex Jones, it's really easy to pluck him out.
Who's going to defend Alex Jones?
Me!
I will defend the wacky shirtless vitamin salesman from being censored by the left.
I'm perfectly willing to.
I'll explain in a second why other conservatives sometimes are not willing to do that.
Richard Spencer.
They'll go in and take the neo-Nazi type, Richard Spencer, and they'll take away his Twitter checkmark.
Why?
Is he no longer Richard Spencer?
But they haven't kicked him off, but they've kicked other people off.
They kicked off that other white supremacist kid, James Alsup.
They kicked him off.
They didn't kick off Richard Spencer.
Why?
And why do they let the crazy lefties, why do they allow that fringe, that hateful fringe, why do they let that exist?
But they go after the right.
It's totally arbitrary.
And when we ask for clarification, their terms of use are totally opaque, and they're changing all the time.
So you never know who's, you know, they'll pluck out Alex Jones, And then they'll censor my show.
Maybe I should take my shirt off.
At least then I'd have a little fun while they're censoring my show.
At least I'd get my money's worth, you know.
Next time.
I only have a few buttons on this shirt, so I can't do all of it.
It's totally arbitrary.
It's totally unfair.
And so the question we have to ask them, because what are the threats that we're going to make?
Are we going to make our own YouTube as conservatives?
It sounds kind of ghettoizing, doesn't it?
Are we going to make our own Facebook or Twitter?
Are we going to try to threaten them with the government?
What are we going to do?
The question we have to ask is, is big tech, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, are they a platform or are they a publisher?
Because they're behaving like both.
They want to have it both ways.
Right now, according to a new study, Google consumes one-third of our digital time and our digital minds.
That's according to Pivotal Research.
One-third.
Facebook use has declined slightly, 10%, including Messenger, down from a full hour per day.
So it's still a pretty big number.
Use of WhatsApp, use of Instagram have also declined recently.
Google holding pretty strong.
Google owns YouTube.
Are they a publisher or are they a platform?
If they're a platform and they're open for speech and they're just allowing people to use it then they need to be open and they need to at least be clear in their rules and they need to be less arbitrary.
If they're a publisher, if they're going to start curating content and they're going to shadow ban people And promote other posts and take certain people off and take away people's check marks and all this mishmash of craziness.
If they're going to curate their content like a magazine or a newspaper, then they need to be regulated like publishers.
One of the reasons that they haven't been is because they would shut down, basically.
They would be responsible for everything that was posted on their platform.
And so all the libel, all of the copyright infringement, intellectual property theft, all of that they would be liable for, they'd shut down right away.
Which is why they're very insistent on remaining a tech platform.
And they always say this.
We are a tech platform.
We're a tech platform.
Okay, good.
I hope you're a tech platform.
They're a wonderful opportunity.
They're a great way for conservatives to get our message out.
But if you're not going to behave like a tech platform, then you're not going to get the legal benefits of being a tech platform.
This is all about 2016.
It still comes back to 2016.
The left hasn't gotten over it.
Before recent years, the left had a monopoly on the media, on the traditional media, and they could shut out conservative voices, or they could bring them on for a little bit, and if it were a pre-taped interview, they could edit it to make us look stupid, or if they were just covering a story, they could distort it, they could pervert that story to fit their narrative.
They can't do that with new media.
They can't do that with speaking directly to the American people.
Donald Trump's Twitter account is the great example of this, And they've gone after it.
It shut down.
Remember that rogue employee they said?
Who knows what actually went on?
Shut down Donald Trump's Twitter account for 11 or 20 seconds or something like that.
If you can speak directly to the American people, your message will get out.
Think about how incredibly well politics has gone for conservatives in the last two years.
We have won on virtually everything.
The one public policy area we haven't won on yet is shrinking the entitlements, shrinking the unfunded entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
It's the one area that we haven't really progressed on.
Everywhere else we've done very, very well, and we've done well in the culture among certain demographics.
Black voters have been in the news recently.
President Trump's support among them has almost doubled in just a few months.
This is great news.
It's because the conservative point of view can go out unfiltered, I don't know.
I don't know.
Excuse me, of not wanting to defend Donald Trump.
I'm not comparing Trump and Jones, though they're both quite entertaining, a little sensationalist.
But it's the same thing, which is, why do I have to?
Why do I want to?
I'm a refined person.
I sip my Chablis glass the right way.
I drink my tea on top of a saucer so that I don't leave a little ring on my table.
I have a saucer.
I'm a civilized person.
I'm a sophisticate.
Don't lump me in with them.
I read the Atlantic sometimes.
Come on, man.
I don't want to be one of those crazy people.
Right.
Who cares, though?
Who cares what these people think of you?
They're trying to silence you.
They're trying to shut you up.
They're telling everyone you're a racist and a bigot and all manner of evil.
They're slandering you.
They're libeling you.
And they want to gut your reputation.
They want to shut you up.
Why are you so eager for their affection?
Why are you so eager for their approval?
On the left, the New York Times, the mainstream media.
Why?
Who cares?
Look, I get it.
You're not Alex Jones.
You're not the same as Alex Jones.
That's fine.
I'm not either.
I'm not concerned about that.
I'm not worried about that.
I don't think, well, maybe I am though.
Am I really?
No, I'm not.
I'm confident.
You should be confident too.
But we have to defend Alex Jones because this is the left's trap.
This is the trap they're setting for conservatives.
They're saying, well, if we go after, I don't know, Ben Shapiro, maybe they'll defend him.
We can't do that.
If we go after Rush Limbaugh, They're going to defend Rush.
We can't do that.
How about National Review?
No, they won't.
How about, I don't know, Washington Freebeak?
No, they'll don't.
But Infowars.
There will be enough conservatives who don't want to even touch that with a 10-foot pole that we can start there, establish the principle, then we'll go after them.
Don't let them do it.
Ask yourself, do you think that this conspiracy website should actually be off the internet, that it has to be off the internet?
It's going to destroy our democracy?
No, of course not.
Nobody thinks that Alex Jones is going to destroy democracy.
Even people who don't think that the frogs are turning gay don't think that Alex Jones is going to destroy our democracy.
So then why are the Democrats so dead set on doing it?
Why is the left so dead set on doing it?
You know, someone tweeted at me yesterday, said something to the effect of, well, well, Michael, maybe if everyone on the left is telling you not to do something, maybe you shouldn't do it.
I think you've got that backwards, buddy.
When everyone on the left is telling me I'm doing something wrong, I am almost certain I'm doing something right.
I'm almost, because they do that thing, they say, oh, it's for your own good.
No, look, I'm just, what do I care?
I'm just concerned for you.
You shouldn't defend Alex Jones from censorship.
Yeah, I'm a little skeptical.
They did this to Kanye West, all of his friends, when he came out and endorsed Trump.
I'm really concerned for you, man.
I'm concerned for you and for the fans.
And Kanye very maturely responded.
He said, you're bringing up my fans and you're supposed to care for me because you're trying to emotionally manipulate me.
I won't be manipulated.
It's not going to happen.
I will not do it.
That's the trap that they're setting.
And we shouldn't fall for it.
Who cares?
What they think of you.
Who cares?
I certainly do not.
You know, they've already banned Tommy Robinson from Instagram.
Do you remember him?
He was the British political activist and journalist who was jailed for 13 months, spent 13 months in, or sentenced to jail for 13 months because he was reporting on Muslim child rapists.
He just had a video, a live stream of the proceedings outside the courtroom where Muslim child rapists were being tried and the British authorities put him in jail for it.
Now why?
Because Islam is a touchy issue in the UK, in London.
We can't talk about that.
We can't talk about disproportionate rates of certain crimes among certain immigrant groups.
We're not allowed to talk about that.
So they've already banned him from Instagram.
Why?
I don't know.
I don't know what Tommy was posting to Instagram.
Probably videos of these sort of proceedings.
They've already throttled a GOP campaign ad.
Check this out.
Elizabeth Hange, running in California's 16th congressional district, she made an ad about her parents' escape from the Khmer Rouge communists in the 1970s.
That's an important thing, especially as socialism is on the rise in America.
Here's the ad.
In Cambodia, under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, being young and single often meant a gruesome life, and likely death.
They approached my father, and in order to save his life, he said he was about to be married.
They asked him, to whom?
He pointed to the prettiest girl that he saw, having never spoken to her before.
The soldiers approached her, and she said yes.
They got married the very next day.
41 years later, they're still the happiest couple I know.
That's hate speech.
It's banned.
Facebook would not allow her to run that ad.
Now, I don't know.
It sounds nice, doesn't it?
For those of you who couldn't see, there were some photos of the Cambodian Civil War where the communists killed 300,000 people, displaced 2 million people.
And you're not allowed to do that.
That's hate speech.
That's inappropriate.
You're not allowed to do that.
Facebook also deemed diamond and silk, you know, those two black women who were Donald Trump supporters, that they were, quote, unsafe to the community.
If you saw that you're walking down an alley at night and you turn a corner and, oh my gosh, it's diamond and silk.
Oh no, run for your life.
Are you kidding me?
Unsafe to the community.
Marsha Blackburn, a Republican candidate for Senate and a sitting congressman, Twitter pulled her ad for being inflammatory.
Here's the reason that they pulled it.
Here's that part of the ad.
I'm 100% pro-life.
I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts, thank God.
Are you offended?
Are you shocked and horrified that she says she's pro-life?
And she stopped Planned Parenthood from selling baby body parts, which they were doing, which they admitted to multiple times on video that we all saw.
How about you ban Planned Parenthood for selling the body parts?
Oh my gosh, are you people kidding me?
Yeah, they wouldn't let her run that ad.
It was inflammatory.
No!
You know what's inflammatory?
Selling baby body parts.
That's inflammatory.
Ban Planned Parenthood for that.
But they won't.
They only go after the right on these sorts of things.
Twitter now is going after libertarians.
Daniel McAdams, the director of the Ron Paul Institute, he's been banned from Twitter.
Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com, he's been banned.
Antiwar.com, that now is too offensive.
You can't be anti-war.
You're going to get banned because that's hate speech.
If you don't want to kill people, it's hate.
It's hate speech.
If you want to stop killing people, oh my gosh.
Meanwhile, the lefties are trying to change the rules for themselves.
So, you know, we've heard of the fake news and the fake accounts and the bots and all that.
So while they're talking about how we have to purge all of those, journalists, a bunch of journalists out of Colombia, sent a written letter, a request to Mark Zuckerberg.
To allow them to make fake accounts and use bots.
I kid you not.
This just happened.
They want them, because they say it's easier to do journalism if you have fake accounts.
You're the ones who have been agitating for us to get rid of all the fake accounts.
To get rid of all the bots.
But no, no, it's okay.
We have one set of rules for thee and another set of rules for me.
That's what they want.
They're now, by the way, trying to control the internet.
They're trying to control the internet.
There's a policy paper being circulated among Democrats, starting with Mark Warner, that advocates a new government takeover of the internet.
This is not the same as net neutrality.
They want far more regulations now to save American trust in, quote...
Our institutions, democracy, free press, and the markets.
There they are again, folks, saving America.
There's that language.
That's how you know they want to control your life.
It's always to save, right?
It's always another crisis.
We have to do it.
They're trying to take it over.
So they're utter hypocrites on this.
Conservatives should not be under the impression that it's somehow hypocritical of us to criticize Facebook and YouTube for their absurd policies, for their censorious policies, for their unfair, untransparent policies.
We have a lot more to get to.
We've got to talk about The Bachelorette.
I've got to talk about my favorite show.
After Jersey Shore, Florida, Bama Shore, The Bachelorette.
That one comes up.
And we've got to talk about a little bit more of the left's attack on freedom.
Trump, Mueller, Russia.
Man, we have so much to get to.
And this day in history, because it's Purple Heart Day.
And I'll talk about my grandfather.
So, make sure you tune in.
But if you're on dailywire.com, thank you very much.
You help us keep the lights on.
If you are on Facebook or YouTube, you're probably long gone by this time.
I'm probably long gone by this time.
There's no way we're still on after this show.
But if you are, go to dailywire.com.
It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, The Andrew Klavan Show, The Ben Shapiro Show.
Get to ask questions in the mailbag.
That's coming up Thursday.
Get them in.
And you will get to ask questions in the conversation, which I'm next up on, I believe.
And then this.
This is the one.
The Chris Murphy, Save Our Democracy, Cory Booker Tears of Rage, Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You need it because we need to save our country.
Tears of rage, lies and hate.
You can cram all of that in this Leftist Tears Tumblr.
That's a pretty big Tumblr.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
Speaking of tears of rage, scripted tears of rage, we've got The Bachelorette.
So this last episode of The Bachelorette has created quite a hubbub, also about censoring people on social media.
Take it away.
We're engaged!
We just got engaged!
We saw it all go down on the season finale.
Rebecca Jokufrin, my Becca, will you marry me?
Wow.
It brings a tear to my eye.
A tear of rage.
I've never watched this show.
That is the most of The Bachelorette or Bachelor that I've ever seen.
I don't ever intend on watching it.
But a good news story came out, so we've got to talk about it.
I'm going to butcher these names.
On the premiere of The Bachelorette last year, Garrett Irigoyen got the first impression rose from Becca Kufrin.
And this apparently is a big deal, because then at the season finale, he proposed to her, and they're going to go live happily ever after, and isn't that lovely?
But then, the Huffington Post found out that he liked some conservative jokes on Instagram.
That's right.
Garrett Igahoga Higahaga liked some conservative jokes on Instagram, and now they're in turmoil!
ABC, by the way, the network that hosts The Bachelor, same network that canceled Roseanne.
Just reminding you of that.
So they got engaged, and he was forced to apologize.
What was he forced to apologize for?
He liked a variety of pictures.
You can see some of them on the screen.
You know, pictures joking about how David Hogg is a crisis actor.
You know that little kid from Portland, the one who keeps yapping about and calling Republican senators terrorists and stuff?
By the way, the way I know that he's not a crisis actor is he's a terrible actor.
Crisis actors are good actors and he's awful on screen.
You know, joking about how Tommy Lauren is really hot.
The funniest one, kind of a dark humor...
It's a picture of a soldier swinging a little kid around, and then the caption was, what happens when an illegal alien kid jumps the border and you've got to throw him back over?
It's really not funny at all is what it is.
That's what I think it is.
Not funny.
That's why Garrett Hoogie Hoogie had to apologize.
And so he apologized.
His apparent fiancé from the show is a big Hillary supporter, lefty.
She went to the Women's March.
And so she accepted his apology, sort of.
She said, quote, The Instagram situation, I don't condone that.
First of all, if you are asking your wife to condone things, like asking permission to you condone this...
There better be a garret-shaped hole in that wall.
Get out of there, buddy.
This is not a good situation.
Probably the first tip-off was that she went to the Women's March for the pink hat still.
She goes on, I know he stands by his apology and he feels so bad for everyone that he did offend.
And you know, he didn't mean it, but I just want to move forward and learn and grow and continue to educate ourselves.
Okay, right?
This seems fine, right?
But the left can't let it go.
They can't let it go.
If you even intimate that you are sort of moderately amused by any sort of conservative humor, they have got to kill you.
They're so upset right now.
It's always...
And this ramps up, by the way, this crisis, this urgency.
We have to shut down Alex Jones.
We have to shut down this guy in The Bachelorette.
We've got to do it.
It ramps up the better things are going for the country.
That's how it works.
If things weren't going great for the country, they could just run on that.
They can't run on that.
So they have to gin this up.
They have to run on Alex Jones and the Bachelorette.
That's how you know that the country is going well.
That's how you know the administration is doing something right.
It's all about freedom.
The left has never been this openly tyrannical in my lifetime.
I've had a short lifetime.
I haven't been around very long.
But I've never seen them embrace censorship in this way.
Censorship all over the universities, on the media, on television.
I've never seen socialist candidates running this openly.
The Democrat Party, which has been running away from socialism for 100 years, now openly embracing it.
You've got Bill de Blasio, the comrade Bolshevik mayor of New York.
He's...
Griping about Airbnb, Uber.
He's trying to shut them down constantly.
All this economic freedom.
He's trying to shut down the gig economy.
The gig economy, which sprung up largely, by the way, because of the terrible economic policies of Barack Obama.
Because people couldn't get full-time jobs, so they had these gig jobs.
He's trying to shut that down.
No economic freedom.
No side hustle.
None of that.
On the universities at Harvard right now, they're banning fraternities and sororities.
and sororities are getting really upset about this because they now are saying every club has to be co-ed, every club has to have both sexes.
The sororities are saying, wait, what about our safe space?
What about, I don't want men in my sorority.
So now some of them are just shutting down as a result of that.
I've never seen them this tyrannically.
It's really about freedom.
It seems funny.
It seems like it's about gay frogs and the bachelorette and senators saying stupid things and sororities and all that.
These are all symptoms of this huge problem, which is about freedom.
You've got a real choice in these midterm elections and in 2020.
A choice, not an echo, to use Barry Goldwater's line.
Do you want freedom or do you want slavery?
That's what it's about.
That sounds hyperbolic.
Maybe I sound like I'm Alex Jones, but it is that clear.
Do you want the government to take over more and more of your life?
Do you want small, technocratic, bitter interests to take over your life?
Or do you want to have some freedom and assume the risk of freedom and take on the rewards of freedom?
Those are your choices.
And that's the question that we're going to see play out, not just in tech, but in politics and the economy and foreign affairs.
What do you want?
Do you want freedom or do you want slavery?
Me?
I want freedom, baby.
I want to paint my face like I'm Mel Gibson.
We've only got a few minutes left.
I've got to talk about Mueller and Russia and all that nonsense, and then I do want to talk about the Purple Heart Day, because it is Purple Heart Day.
By the way, if you had to...
Ask me a prediction of which way we're going to go.
Are we going to go for freedom or slavery?
I think we're going for freedom.
I think you're seeing it in all of these public polls.
Even, you know, Brett Easton Ellis, the novelist who did American Psycho, he's coming out now.
He said, quote, I've never seen liberals more annoying in my lifetime.
And it's not like this is some arch-conservative guy.
They are annoying right now.
They're really tedious and self-serious.
And it's turning people off.
You're seeing that in the public polling.
And I think it's probably happening even beyond the public polling.
So my hope is still for freedom, but you've got to stay vigilant.
And one of the ways they're trying to get at this administration is this Russia stuff.
The Mueller probe.
The Manafort investigation.
Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
What do we know?
Manafort is on trial now.
We've seen a few days of this trial.
We've seen a very zealous prosecution.
And Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's old aide, old employee, has now taken the stand to testify against him.
Which is really not an admirable thing from an interpersonal perspective.
You don't wear a wire if you're clean.
You don't testify against somebody if you're innocent.
You do it if you're a crook.
And you flip, and then you say, I'll cooperate with the prosecution if you don't throw me in jail, or not in jail for as long.
So that's what you're seeing here.
They're going to try to make out Rick Gates as some honest fella.
No, he's an admitted liar and an admitted crook, and so you've got to take his testimony with a grain of salt.
But what are they getting Manafort on?
You would expect, after all the buildup, they'd get him on, you know, going on yacht trips with Vladimir Putin plotting out the 2016 Trump campaign, right?
That's not what they're getting him on.
They're getting him on having nice suits.
He buys suits that are too expensive.
Even the judge said, guys, you've got to quit talking about these suits.
Who cares?
And they're getting him on some tax evasion.
They're getting him on hiding some money.
Some of his lobbying work wasn't acknowledged.
Okay.
Not good.
I'm not excusing that.
That's certainly not a good thing.
Lobbyists are pretty oily people a lot of the time.
That said, this is happening a lot of places.
It's not like Paul Manafort was the only one doing this, and this trial wouldn't be happening if not for the Trump campaign.
Almost certainly.
Why Bob Mueller is involved in this, the special counsel investigating Russia, why he's involved in Manafort not paying his taxes, really unclear.
There's been no Russia aspect of this really presented at this trial.
It's just a distraction, it seems.
It's just nonsense.
You know, they're talking about the Trump Tower meeting and the alleged Trump Tower meeting where Don Jr.
met with some Russians to get dirt on Hillary.
Trump finally tweeted about this.
He said, fake news reporting, a complete fabrication that I'm concerned about the meeting my wonderful son Donald had in Trump Tower.
This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics, and it went nowhere.
I did not know about it.
That's fine.
Now they're saying, he's admitted to a crime!
He's admitted to a crime!
What the left doesn't seem to understand is that that tweet has just baited them.
It just baited them into confessing something themselves.
Because if...
Donald Jr.
going to meet with somebody who said they had dirt on the opponent's campaign, if that's a crime, if going to meet with someone who's a foreign representative, maybe comes from a foreign government, if going to them for dirt is a crime, then Hillary committed the crime because she's the one who paid for all that Russian intelligence on the Steele dossier on Donald Trump.
She's the one who paid for that.
She commissioned that.
The Trump campaign didn't pay for anything.
They left the meeting, right?
But Hillary actually ordered it, commissioned it, paid for it.
Foreign intelligence.
Christopher Steele's a British guy, and he's getting information out of Russia.
She did it.
If that Trump Tower meeting is where they're going to lay their hand, then it all goes down to Hillary, and we'll see if any of Hillary's people are called in.
I suspect that will not be the case.
In the last few minutes here, let's talk about this day in history.
On this day in history, in 1782, the Purple Heart was established by George Washington.
You know the Purple Heart.
It's the medal for people who have been wounded or killed in battle, or who have had bad treatment as POWs.
Initially, it was established just for merit.
So it's a little purple heart badge, and it said Merit written across it.
George Washington established it.
And it was given to just three people in the Revolutionary War.
To Elijah Churchill, William Brown, and Daniel Bissell Jr.
After that, it fell into disuse.
People didn't really use it afterward.
It kind of disappeared.
It reappeared 100 years later, over 100 years, 150 years later, 130 years later, when General Charles Summerall sent a bill to Congress to revive the badge of military merit.
General MacArthur took up this cause afterward.
He was Summerall's successor in 1931 to reinstate it for the bicentennial of Washington's birth.
And in 1932, the War Department created the Order of the Purple Heart.
And that is what we now know it as, the Order of the Purple Heart, which is awarded to people who were injured in the line of duty.
My own grandfather, George Knowles, won the Purple Heart for his service in the Vietnam War and so wanted to wish a special Purple Heart Day to him and to all of the people who have served and who have been injured, who have been killed, who have been mistreated in the line of work.
And thanks for defending our freedom and defending our country.
That's a nice button on what all the rest of us can do who don't have the guts to go out into the line of fire and risk our necks for the country.
How else we can defend freedom here in the United States.
Alright, that's it.
That's my show.
Get your mailbag questions in on Thursday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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