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Nov. 21, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:19
Ep. 256 - The End Of Feminism

Twitter bans a feminist writer for hate speech after she wrote, "Men aren't women." We will explain why the Left can have transgenderism or feminism, but not both. Then, the real story of Thanksgiving. Finally, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last Thursday, feminist writer and podcaster Megan Murphy tweeted her observation that men aren't women.
Twitter promptly suspended Murphy for hate speech.
As somebody who's been banned from Twitter for making completely innocuous statements before, I feel for Murphy.
She is now experiencing as a leftist the same targeting and censorship that big tech companies inflict on conservatives on a daily basis.
But...
I cannot help but feel just a teeny tiny supremely satisfying tinge of schadenfreude as the left's ideological chickens come home to roost.
The problem is clear.
The left can have transgenderism or feminism, but it can't have both.
Murphy correctly observes that transgender ideology, which believes that gender is fluid and socially constructed, undermines feminism, which advocates the advancement of women, a real and essential gender category.
What Murphy doesn't seem to understand, however, is that the root of this new, censorious, anti-woman ideology of transgenderism lies in feminism itself.
First-wave feminists of the 18th and 19th century Women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton acknowledged and celebrated the differences between the sexes.
Both of them were married.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton actually was married to the co-founder of the Republican Party, just a little aside.
They didn't hate men.
They didn't hate the natural differences between men and women.
By the 1960s, however, radical feminists of the second wave, women like Shulamith Firestone, rejected the complementarity of the sexes.
Shulamith Firestone called the love between men and women the single greatest impediment to women's liberation, and she sought to deconstruct gender categories altogether.
In this very extreme view, sexual difference necessarily impedes equality.
Therefore, no distinction between men and women may be tolerated.
Now, 50 years later, it's that very premise that threatens to destroy the feminist ideology that begot it altogether.
The left can have transgenderism or it can have feminism.
It cannot have both.
Either men cannot be women or there is no such thing as a woman.
Either men and women are distinct categories or, to quote Planned Parenthood back in March, some men have a uterus.
If some men have a uterus, That is to say, if some men are women, then what exactly is a woman?
If the sexes are the same or they're only superficially different, they're only different in a trivial way, then why do we have different words, man and woman, to describe the same thing?
Further, if there's no categorical distinction between man and woman, that is to say, if there is no real difference between the sexes, then what precisely is feminism?
Shouldn't we just have humanism or mankindism?
The very word feminism demands that there be a difference between men and women.
Even the targeting and the censorship that Murphy is now experiencing finds its roots in the second wave of the feminist movement.
Those radicals of the 60s and 70s adopted the slogan, the personal is the political.
This comes from the title of an essay by feminist writer Carol Hanisch.
The personal is the political.
That means that the private is the political.
There's no difference between our private lives and our public obligations.
That distinction, however, between the public and the private is essential to our liberal society.
The erosion of that distinction has coarsened the character of political activism and it's encouraged a politics of animosity and personal destruction.
The trouble for the left now It's set leftism on a course of radical subjectivism that prioritizes feeling over fact, your truth, over my truth, over the truth.
It even justifies the censorship of opinions by redefining speech as violence, which has led us to justify the censorship of triggering, unsafe, hateful language as a violent act.
Megan Murphy is absolutely right to acknowledge that men are not women, and she's right to fear the consequences of a politics that is so personal.
Conservatives have long known these simple truths.
Now the leftist feminists, such as Murphy, face a difficult choice.
Do they ally with conservatives who support free speech and admit facts don't care about your feelings, or do they persist with a left that would annihilate feminism altogether?
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
A lot to get to.
One of the most interesting questions facing leftist ideology right now.
Plus, we've got to talk about the real story of Thanksgiving.
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So much to get to, but I love this question.
We have to delve into this question because the left is finally acknowledging this central conundrum in their ideology, which is you can have transgenderism or you can have feminism, but you cannot have both.
Right now at Eastern Michigan University, the school is canceling a performance of the vagina monologues.
I've done a lot of theater in my life, so I'm familiar with this.
If you're not familiar, it's women who get on stage and they talk about their vaginas.
That's the vagina monologues.
This was a groundbreaking theater in recent years.
They're canceling this performance.
Why is it?
This has long been a favorite staple of feminist groups on campus.
They always do the vagina monologues.
The reason they're canceling it is because it's offensive to people.
Because, of course...
Not all women have vaginas.
And not all people who have vaginas are women.
Don't you know that?
Of course, that's ridiculous, but that's what they believe now.
Not all women have vaginas.
Because some men who dress like women or who think that they're women or who very much want to be women are now calling themselves women.
And this erases the category.
I feel for this woman, Megan Murphy.
If you're watching Megan, this feminist writer in Canada, you're welcome to come on the show anytime you want.
We can talk about this because it has me siding with the feminists.
That's a rare occurrence.
Choosing that new gender ideology or feminism is a little bit choosing cyanide or arsenic.
But if I have to choose, I'm going to choose the feminists because at least they're sort of talking about women.
At least...
Feminists of the old school, at least of the first wave, are talking about women.
And the feminists in the 1960s and 70s made a deal with the devil.
Specifically, they made a deal with Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.
They made a deal with relativism, with nihilism, with obliterating the category of gender altogether.
The reason they did this, it makes perfect sense why they did this.
That first wave of feminists, they wanted the vote for women, they were suffragettes, they wanted certain political protections, certain political privileges and advantages and economic advantages.
Okay, that's fine.
They still acknowledged that men are men and women are women.
Men and women have different bodies.
They have different virtues in many ways.
They have different tendencies, often have different goals, have different ways of being.
Just for one example, women tend to be more moderate than men.
Harvey Mansfield writes about this in his book, Manliness.
They tend to be more moderate than men.
I can tell you this because I was at a bachelor party two weeks ago.
I know that moderation is not a particularly manly virtue.
It's not something that men are very good at.
Men tend to be bolder, more assertive, and more willing to take risks.
That's why the vast majority of entrepreneurs are men, because they're more willing to engage in risky behavior.
That's why the people who fall off of mountains and go swimming with sharks also tend to be men, because they take riskier behavior that sometimes leads to needless danger.
Women do not do that as much.
What are some other virtues?
Modesty is one.
Women are more naturally inclined to the virtue of modesty.
This is another virtue that feminism has tried to cancel out.
They've tried to pretend that men and women have the same attitude towards sex.
For instance, men are not terribly modest.
Men, if anything, are given to a little boastfulness or a little aggression.
And women are modest, which is why men pursue women.
I really can't stay.
Baby, it's cold outside.
The man is pursuing the woman.
The woman says, oh, I really shouldn't, but I'd like to because it's very nice to be here with you.
Feminists have attacked that traditionally feminine virtue as well.
Now they've insisted that women be promiscuous, that women go out and treat sex just like men do.
But the trouble is men like casual sex a lot more than women do.
And a lot of what you're seeing on campus, the so-called campus rape epidemic, is not so much about rape.
It's about consensual relations that maybe involve a little too much booze or a little too much this or that, and a lot of bad ideology.
So in a lot of these campus so-called rape hoaxes, we've found out from text messages or emails or phone calls that very often women will go back to the man's room.
They'll engage in certain sexual acts that are perfectly consensual and then the next day they will regret it and say this was rape because I didn't really want to do it or I wish I hadn't done it or I drank too much or whatever you want to say.
The cause of this, obviously this is not to say that men should ever feel that they can get aggressive or if a woman says no, that they should be able to have sex with her anyway.
That is totally, that's the point that feminists want to focus on.
That isn't the point.
The point is that second wave feminism has made these women miserable.
Studies show this.
From the 1970s all the way to, I think the study goes up to around 2010, we see that women become much less happy during the rise of second and third wave feminism.
That's true in relative terms.
That's true in absolute terms.
Not just relative to men, but absolutely their happiness has decreased.
A lot of this has to do with the denial that men and women are different.
And just as a matter of...
Talking about the virtues of men and women, it seems to me an insane notion that developed in the 60s and 70s that the only way for women to be free, to be equal, to be living their best lives is to pretend to be men, to be a worse version of men, to be aggressive, to be promiscuous, to be some of the worst characters and characteristics of men that women would adopt.
This seems crazy to me.
Even just on that question of promiscuity and the virtue of modesty, it is true there's a sexual double standard, that this has been true forever.
Men get away with more, they get away with more casual sex, and women take them back, and this isn't true the other way around.
The traditional response of women to this is to try to get men to stop being such dogs, to stop being such cads.
But the response of second wave feminism changed that, flipped it on its head and said women should be dogs too.
Women aren't any better than men in that regard, but in that regard, really, they are, traditionally.
All of this is to say, when you erode the distinction between men and women, you end up with transgender ideology that ironically guts feminism itself.
When I talk about transgenderism, I'm not talking about the handful of people who are confused psychologically about their gender.
They're a man, he's a man who thinks he's a woman, or he very much wants to be a woman.
We're talking, in that case, about 0.2 to 0.4% of the population at the wildest estimates.
I'm not talking about those people.
I'm talking about the ideology of transgenderism, which is being foisted on us by leftist activists, which is why 0.2% of the population is dominating the national conversation about the sexes, because it's not really about helping those people at all.
What it's about is erasing the difference between men and women.
Okay, fine.
That's one strategy if they want to take it.
They say, okay, the way for women to be equal to men is to just behave like men and pretend that they're men and to act like men.
All right.
If there's no difference between men and women, as we are told time and time again, there's no difference.
Even the physical differences are minor, but really, on a real level, there's no difference.
Then what's a woman?
The reason that we have different words for men and women is because they're different.
If men and women are the same, you would only have one word, which is man.
Or woman, I guess, but you don't really, just one word.
There wouldn't be any difference.
Okay, now, few of us would grant that, that there's actually no difference between men and women, even though the ideologues are trying to tell us this.
But take that one step further.
If there's no difference between men and women, then why do we have feminism?
Feminism.
Femme.
It comes from femme, from females.
But if there's no distinction between males and females, why have feminism at all?
What is feminism?
It's nothing.
What this opens the door to, especially the transgender ideology, Is a question of who gets to define what a woman is?
And this is the big argument that people like Megan Murphy, the feminist writer, is having with Twitter right now.
Which is, Twitter is taking the side of the transgender ideology.
And Megan Murphy is defending the feminist ideology.
And what Megan Murphy is saying is, I am a woman.
I will define what a woman is.
Men do not get to define what a woman is.
And what Twitter is saying is, no, there's no definition of men and women.
No, how dare you?
How hateful of you?
But just think of the transgender ideology.
One of its expressions is transvestitism.
Cross-dressers, drag queens, you go to drag bars.
Would you say that a drag queen, and I'm from New York, so there are drag bars all over the village, you know, you see this a fair bit.
Would you say that a drag queen is a woman?
That that's what a woman is?
No, of course not.
That's one fantasy version of a woman.
That's a caricature or a cartoon of a woman.
Big eyelashes, crazy hair, wild outfits, big lipstick and everything.
That's a cartoon of a woman.
But that's not a woman.
And feminists have been telling us for years, they're saying, how dare you doll us up and force us to wear makeup and high heels and big eyelashes?
That's not what a woman is.
A woman can be anything.
This is the snake eating its own tail.
This is the natural, logical conclusion of second wave feminism.
The feminists, like Megan Murphy, are upset about this now because, obviously, it's undercutting their entire ideology.
But this is not some random turn of events that swooped in and tried to undermine feminism.
The roots of feminisms being undermined is in the ideology itself.
You have to decide, are men and women different, or are men and women exactly the same?
Are the sexes complementary, or are the sexes indiscernible, identical?
Exactly without any distinction between them.
Reasonable people, for all of history and including right now, all reasonable people will have to conclude men and women are different, are complementary.
This is true biologically.
This is true spiritually.
This is true psychologically.
It's true socially.
They're complementary and different.
They are not exactly the same.
But this raises many more difficult questions for the left.
Because if men and women really are different, if there is a difference between the sexes, then what are we to make of the courts redefining marriage?
The court has redefined marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions, but not polygamous same-sex unions, not polygamous different-sex unions.
Why is that?
Because the premise, not the debate over whether we should expand the definition of marriage, but the premise of just doing it by judicial fiat is that sexual difference doesn't matter to marriage.
It doesn't really matter that much at all.
But the question is, what is marriage?
Does sexual difference have something to do with marriage?
It has for all of history in every single society ever.
Now we are on an experiment of the gender-neutral society.
We're trying to see if we can erase sexual distinctions, not just from marriage, but from bathrooms, from occupations, from battle, from athletics.
Can we erase them?
And I suppose we can.
We're doing it.
We're plodding along.
But is that good?
Is that good for women?
Is that good for men?
Is it good for society?
Is it real?
I'm not so sure about that.
If we conclude that men and women are different, I think it's very hard to look through history and culture and just our own experience of the world and pretend that sexual difference doesn't have something to do with marriage, for instance.
Or that sexual difference doesn't have something to do with athletics.
You know, now millennials are shocked when they find out that Serena Williams can't beat professional male tennis players.
Remember, there was that big hubbub a while ago.
Serena Williams, the Williams sisters were insisting that they could beat male tennis players.
And this became, of course they could, they're wonderful tennis players, but they can't.
They can't at all.
They tried this in 1998 at the Australian Open.
They said that they would be able to beat any male tennis player ranked outside of the top 200.
So the guy who was ranked number 203, Karsten Brosh, decided he would play both of them in the same day and see if they could beat him.
He prepared for his matches by playing a round of golf, drinking a couple of beers, and smoking a few cigarettes.
He beat one of the Williams sisters 6-2 and the other one 6-1.
He handily beat...
Of course!
I'm not making fun of the Williams sisters or female athletes.
I'm saying that male athletes and female athletes are different.
And men, physically, are stronger than women.
This is a fact of biology and a fact of nature.
We're trying to pretend that that isn't true.
We're seeing this now in certain...
Combat positions among soldiers.
We're seeing this in other athletics as well.
There was that woman, Tamika Brentz, I believe, a female UFC fighter who decided she was going to fight a transgender, which means male, A fighter, someone named Fallon Fox.
So they went into the ring.
Tamika Brantz is a great athlete.
She got her skull crushed.
She got her skull cracked open by this guy.
She said she'd never felt more overpowered in her life.
Of course, men are physically stronger.
This is why in our culture, men don't hit women, like Michael Avenatti, allegedly.
You're not supposed to hit women.
Why would we not hit women if men and women are exactly the same?
If men and women are exactly the same, there's no difference, then there's no reason To treat women in some special way.
But of course men and women are different.
We should treat them in a special way.
We've been grappling with this problem for a long time.
Conservatives have been pushing and discussing this for a long time.
We haven't let up on it, even in the wake of second wave and third wave feminism.
Transgenderism brings this issue to the bear because it's no longer just theoretical.
It's no longer just a question of, well, you know, perhaps in some hypothetical world, men and women are the same.
No.
Men are now pretending to be women.
They're demanding that they use the changing rooms with little girls.
They're demanding that bathrooms have genders erased from them, that there are all gender bathrooms.
And even that The deconstruction of male and female is leading to the deconstruction of gender categories altogether.
Facebook has 56 gender categories, or they had 56 gender categories, and now they have an unlimited number.
56 was too restrictive.
So you have to ask the people, how many genders are there?
What is a gender?
If we're told that the genders are all the same, then why have...
Why have two?
Why have 56?
Why have any?
They're all the same.
They're all the same and they're all different.
It's a total destruction of these narratives that have been building for a long time.
We should celebrate this because we're correcting a lot of errors that have been in our culture for 50, 60 years at this point.
Both sides have to be honest here.
And it's fun to watch various factions of the left battle with each other.
It's like the Iran-Iraq war.
You somehow want them both to lose.
All you're hoping for is a prolonging of the battle.
But we hope that they come out on the right side here.
We have to make sure because as this woman is finding out, Megan Murphy, she is being silenced for saying that men are not women.
She's being silenced for stating the premise of feminism.
I hope that this opens her eyes also to the kind of censorship that conservatives face on a daily basis on these platforms.
And perhaps we'll end up with a feminist-conservative alliance against this absurd gender ideology.
But it's going to mean that feminists have to come to the table, that they have to stop insisting that the personal is the political, that they have to deal with an alliance With people that they might not agree with on a number of other issues.
I think it's just delicious.
I think it's a little Thanksgiving treat.
I'm excited.
Feminists watching this show, come on.
Come on over.
The water's warm.
Can't wait to have you on.
We'd love to have you on the show to talk about it.
We have a lot more that we have to talk about, too, though.
So Thanksgiving is coming up.
This is very exciting.
I'm about to get out of here.
I'm going to fly out on the red-eye tonight.
I'm going out with my in-laws.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
Right now, oh, you know, gosh, before we get to it, I wonder too, it just occurred to me, if we're having this battle now between the feminists and the transgender, what will happen about other conflicts within the left?
There are other conflicts within the left, central ideological conflicts.
One that comes to mind are the people who are vegan but pro-abortion.
You know a lot of people like this.
They say, oh gosh, I love the cute little chicken.
I could never eat the cheese.
It's a cute little chicken.
Oh, that baby?
Kill it.
That human baby that's going to become a person with consciousness and thoughts and appreciation of beauty and love?
Kill that thing.
But the chicken?
But the Delta smelt.
I love the Delta smelt.
Stop talking to me about the baby.
Get the baby out of here.
That, of course, is impossible.
You can't coherently be a vegetarian or a vegan in favor of abortion.
But the left does it.
I don't know what will force them to deal with that issue.
Perhaps sonograms or something.
But it's the same with Islam and Western liberalism.
You have that same conflict too.
Western left-wingers, Western liberals have embraced Islam because they want to be open-minded.
They want to be religiously tolerant.
And also they don't really like Western culture and the West and the Islamic world have been engaged in a tension since the 7th century.
But what happens when you invite in this Islamist ideology which undermines all of Western liberalism?
Which undermines religious tolerance itself.
G.K. Chesterton said there's a thought that stops thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
Will the left understand that tension, that essential conflict?
There's so many others.
We could talk about them all day, but we don't have time because Thanksgiving's coming up.
But food for thought.
If we can get them to reconsider their feminist premises, what other premises will the left have to reconsider?
We're living in the best timeline.
I tell you this all the time.
On Thanksgiving, the University of Oregon is hosting an event called Thanks, But No Thanks, Thanksgiving.
They hate Thanksgiving.
Why is it?
They call it decolonizing an American holiday.
The description of the event, the main messages of Thanksgiving are that of gratitude, food, and family.
However, Thanksgiving is, foundationally speaking, a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures across the globe.
You knew that, right?
That's what you do.
You go to your Thanksgiving table.
You sit down.
Oh, it's so nice to see you, Auntie May.
All right, well, let's raise a glass to the ongoing genocide of native peoples all around the globe.
Let's chin-chin!
Huzzah!
Sláinte!
No, I don't think so.
That's not what happens.
It's just not true.
true.
This is what happens when an entire generation is deprived of a historical education, and instead that historical education is replaced with ideology.
The Pilgrims did not commit any genocide against the Native Americans.
It did not happen.
In fact, the opposite happened.
The real story is much more interesting.
Christopher Columbus did not commit a genocide against the Native peoples.
He adopted his Indian friend's son, is what he did.
He didn't commit any genocide.
He It just simply didn't happen.
So from an historical standpoint, their main premise is bunk.
The real story, though, is so much more interesting.
I have four ancestors who were on the Mayflower.
One was a pilgrim, Dr.
Samuel Fuller.
The other three were derelicts.
They were strangers.
You know, half the Mayflower were these pilgrims who were godly men, religious separatists, wanted to start their own religious commune.
And the other half were just guys who wanted to go into the New World.
So three of the four were those guys.
One of them, 11 years before the Mayflower sailed, Stephen Hopkins was actually shipwrecked in the New World.
And that shipwreck was the basis of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
He was a mutineer.
Another one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, John Billington, was the first man in America executed for murder.
The other, Francis Eaton, was another mutineer, another troublemaker.
So those three kind of shady fellas.
But one of them was good and a godly man, Dr.
Samuel Fuller.
And so they came over.
The story of them arriving is a miracle.
It is pure providence.
There is no other way to explain it.
They were separatists living in England.
They then moved to Leiden in the Netherlands because they wanted to escape persecution.
They were there for about a decade and they started to get a little nervous though because their children became a little too Dutch.
They didn't like how Dutch their kids were becoming.
So they decided they're going to sail for the new world, start their new community.
Okay.
They hire a captain.
They hire a cruise and everything.
But because of the religious tension between them and King James, between them and the Church of England, there was an attempted sabotage to stop the ships from sailing out.
This delayed them by months.
They finally make it out of England, but they're many months late.
They sail across, and they veer way off course.
They were headed for Manhattan.
They ended up around Cape Cod.
So they had no land grant to that area.
They land there.
It's not nearly as hospitable as Manhattan was.
They land, and they couldn't find a good place to park the boat.
But they get out there looking around.
They immediately are approached by a group of 30 Indians who start hurling arrows at them.
And miraculously, none of them was hurt.
None of them had even a scratch on them after this encounter.
They're wandering around.
They finally end up at Plymouth.
Plymouth Harbor.
They pull into Plymouth and they find fields that are totally cleared.
They're cleared for agriculture, but there are no people there.
They're just whitened bones because an epidemic had taken place just within a couple of years before the pilgrims landed.
And they cleared the field.
They found a bushel of corn that was just waiting for them there.
And they also found arrowheads.
They found some weapons that they could use against any potential hostile natives.
What the pilgrims did is they took the corn.
So one of their first acts in the New World was an act of theft, but they wouldn't take the arrowheads.
They wouldn't disturb what was a gravesite.
They felt it would be very wrong to disturb what had become a religious gravesite for them.
So there was this act also of respect toward the natives.
They're there for about two months, and out of the woods walks a naked Indian, naked as the day he was born, Samoset, who says in English, welcome Englishmen.
They somehow stumbled on one of two natives in the Western Hemisphere who spoke English, and Samoset wasn't even supposed to be there.
He was from Maine, and he just happened to be visiting down by Plymouth, down where the pilgrims landed at exactly the time that they accidentally landed there.
He says, welcome Englishmen.
It gets weirder because he then brings them Squanto, who speaks virtually perfect English.
Squanto was at that time a hostage of the Poconocet, Sachem, Massasoit, and he was brought there to communicate between the natives and the English.
He also just happened to be walking down.
He spoke perfect English because he'd lived in Spain and London.
He was captured by Thomas Hunt, an English sailor years earlier, brought to Spain, worked there as a slave.
He somehow makes it to England.
We don't know how.
One story is that Catholic monks smuggled him over.
We really don't know.
He's talking to the Englishman about the streets of London.
Can you imagine the feeling that the pilgrims must have had?
He then is brought, because of a kindly Englishman, back to the New World.
He wanders down to Plymouth and is then...
Held hostage by Massasoit just at the time that the pilgrims accidentally arrived there or providentially arrived there, which seems obviously to be the case.
So they make it there and they negotiate a peace between the natives and the pilgrims.
This was not taking advantage of the natives.
I think the left now, what they want to pretend is that the natives are these idiots.
They're these imbeciles who can't possibly talk to the advanced Englishmen.
And they don't know anything about politics or war or statecraft.
That's absurd.
That's so disrespectful to the natives.
Massasoit was a serious man.
He forged an alliance with the pilgrims.
It helped him essentially found the Wampanoag nation to greatly expand his power as the head of the Wampanoag nation.
And he helped out the pilgrims.
The pilgrims saved his life one day.
Massasoit was on the verge of death.
Edward Winslow, a pilgrim, He cleared out his mouth, gave him a little medicine, brought him back to life.
He then told the pilgrims that the Massachusetts tribe, I think led by Elizabeth Warren, was going to attack them.
They were able to join together and repel them.
This was an incredible alliance.
They embraced Christianity, the natives, largely.
They took on Christian names.
Massasoit's children were named Alexander and Philip.
They had Christian names.
Alexander remained a good friend of the pilgrims until he died, unfortunately, while he was being interrogated by the pilgrims, and his brother, King Philip, blamed the pilgrims for his death.
There's no evidence that the pilgrims killed him.
But that means that within 20 to 30 years after the Pilgrims landed, that wonderful alliance which benefited both of them had broken down because King Philip was a terrible leader and made a mistake in his interpretation of the events and destroyed the whole region.
He started a war that killed a lot, a lot of natives and ultimately broke down that relationship.
That's the real story.
That's a very different story than what the left wants to foist on you.
It's a much more interesting story, too.
It gives much more respect to the natives and it gives a lot more respect to our ancestors, to whom we should be very grateful, to whom we should give thanksgiving.
We are standing on their shoulders in this greatest We're the best country ever in the history of the world, and we are spitting on our ancestors because we want to judge them, not only from our leisurely position in history and from our dubious moral stances in our present time in 2018, but also based on history that is total bunk.
You can bring that one up at your Thanksgiving table.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got to get to the mailbag today.
So first, if you're on dailywire.com, Thank you very much.
You keep the lights on.
You keep Covfefe in my cup.
That's very important.
It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You get the Ben Shapiro Show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag, which is coming up right now.
Most importantly, the Leftist Here's Tumblr.
I don't recommend that you prod your left-wing relatives at the Thanksgiving table.
If they bring something up, answer it, but don't prod them.
But if they bring it up and you've got to talk to them about how incredible this administration has been, how great the country is going, peace abroad, tax reform, Justice Kavanaugh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, I'm getting all excited.
You're going to need this.
Or you're going to get flooded right out of your living room, right out of your dining room.
Maybe you can try to grab onto the dining room table like your rose in the Titanic.
But this is the safer option.
Collect the leftist tears in the only FDA-approved vessel for them, the leftist tears tumbler.
And we'll be right back.
From Ryan.
Is the right to vote a positive right or a negative right?
This question was asked yesterday during the conversation, but you sort of drifted into another, albeit informative, tangent and never actually answered.
I do that sometimes.
The answer is voting is a positive right.
I'm sorry, I got very taken by your question.
I remember it yesterday during the conversation.
A negative right is a right to be left alone.
It's your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It's a right that doesn't require anything from anybody else other than they're respecting that right.
A positive right is something that does require somebody else.
So healthcare is a positive right.
If we have a political right to healthcare, it is a positive right because it requires certain technology, certain advancements, certain buildings, certain people's labor, money, productivity.
So that's a positive right.
Voting is a positive right.
It is established in our country.
It's run by the states, so you need states to run it.
You need voting machines to process the votes.
You need poll workers to check people in.
You need poll security to make sure that people aren't violating...
The laws when it comes to elections.
You need people to count the ballots.
You need people to certify the ballots.
You need a lot of people.
So it's a positive right.
It's a good right that we have in this country.
I'm not saying that all positive rights are bad in any way.
Governments do create positive rights and they need money and they need participation to ensure those.
But it's not a negative right.
And we talk about as conservatives how important negative rights are.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
That's true.
But we interact with positive rights every day and that's a wonderful thing.
From Nathan.
Deplorable Knowles.
A leftist asked when I thought the child became a human life, and I said when it's got its own DNA at conception.
He said sperm and ovaries have their own DNA, and it must be a crime every time a woman ovulates without giving birth or a man ejaculates.
Any counter to this argument would be helpful.
Thanks, Nathan.
I think the human child becomes a human around 18 years old.
Maybe 22, I don't know.
No, the traditional answer and the correct answer is at the point of conception.
You're absolutely right.
Human beings have 46 chromosomes in their DNA. The sperm and the egg each have 23 chromosomes.
And that's when the sperm and the egg come together, you get a human being, which is 46 chromosomes.
You're making the argument from DNA. Fair enough.
I think that's a perfectly fine argument.
But that's why.
That's why it's different.
You know, the sperm left alone will never become a human adult.
It doesn't have the DNA for it, and it won't happen.
Same thing with the egg, but brought together at the point of conception that new human life will develop.
When does the human life begin?
We know that at the point of conception, the It is living.
That created entity, that begotten entity, is living.
And we know that it's human.
It's not a duck.
It's not a platypus.
It's not a sperm.
It's not an egg.
It's a human being.
It's what we would call a human.
Just as a matter of language, too, conception is the beginning.
When the thing is conceived, when it is begotten, when it is initiated, that is the beginning of it, by definition.
And the question for your friend, I guess, is when else would be the beginning of that human life?
We know it's human at that point and not before.
We know that it's living at that point and not before.
When else would the human life be a human life?
Three weeks later?
Why?
Because it grows fingernails or something?
Do fingernails make us human?
No, of course not.
A human life becomes a human life at the beginning when it becomes a human life.
From Jared.
Dear patron saint of the Covfefe's, my wife and I are starting to argue more just because it is difficult to clean my Leftist Tears tumbler.
Every time that we attempt to clean it, it just fills up again.
Especially after the recent DeSantis and Scott wins in Florida, as well as Mia Love pulling ahead in our state of Utah.
How can we attempt to clean the tumbler out if it just keeps on filling?
You've got to drink faster.
It's the only way that you can do it.
I can't do this for you.
I can't give you some magical device to desalinate your leftist tears.
You just have to drink faster.
If you're not drinking fast, do you love your country?
Do you love watching the left implode?
I don't know.
I'm beginning to question that.
Guzzle guzzle, especially on Thanksgiving Day.
Leave a little room.
Leave a little room for pumpkin pie and leave extra room for leftist tears.
From Max.
Dear Michael, what do you think about the metric system?
Should it be introduced in the United States?
Thanks for the show.
You're just trolling me, aren't you?
Is that what this is about?
I think the metric system is the soccer of measurements.
That's what I think it is.
It's absolutely un-American.
It's horrific.
It's too rational, is the problem.
That's the thing I dislike the most about the metric system.
It's based on units of 10, and you've got the Mila and the Senta and the Desa.
Okay, that's fine.
Too rational.
Life isn't that rational.
Life isn't that clean.
It's not that clinical.
How many inches in a foot?
Twelve.
Why?
I don't know.
Couldn't tell you.
How many feet in a yard?
Three.
Why?
I don't know.
Couldn't tell you.
That's why.
Because it's American, damn it.
Because we're in the West.
Because we've done it for years and years.
Because that's our tradition.
It's built into our institutions.
It's built into our culture.
And I'll be damned if you're going to replace it with some French nonsense.
They did this in the French Revolution.
After the French Revolution...
They took away everything that was beautiful and traditional about that culture, and they just divided the country up into quadrants and neighborhoods along these perfectly rigid lines, and it just was disgusting.
It's too clinical.
It's too rational.
One point I will make, too, about the English system, the standard system of measurement, is it's got these really nice numbers in there.
Three.
Three feet in a yard.
Like the Trinity.
Like the Holy Trinity.
Three is a very important number.
Twelve inches in a foot.
Twelve apostles.
One plus two is three.
That's a beautiful...
I like this.
This is very nice.
There's something that speaks to something deeper than just the cold French rationality, Frenchy rationality of the metric system.
Get it out of here.
No way.
If it comes into the United States, I'm moving to Canada.
Except they have the metric system, too.
Damn it, that's not good.
That's very...
Maybe I'll move to England.
No, no, they use it sometimes too.
Oh, that's very tough.
Where am I to go?
This is the last best hope of man on Earth.
If the metric system comes here, there's nowhere left to escape it.
So we have to defend standard measurements.
From Peter.
Dear best book writer ever, Knowles.
What do you think it will take for the United States to have a second Civil War?
Love the show.
Thanks, Peter.
It would take people getting off their couch.
Yeah.
Take people lifting up their eyes from their smartphones for two seconds and not taking selfies constantly.
I'm not that worried about the Civil War.
I know some people are.
We're in a cultural cold war, if you want to use that language.
I know Dennis Prager uses that language.
Some other people do.
We do seem to be Very angry with one another culturally.
There's not much bridging that gap.
But that's all tweets.
I'm not worried about tweets.
Tweets can't shoot me.
We use these terms, war.
We bandy them about attacks.
We bandy them about...
Dan Crenshaw, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, made this great point on Face the Nation.
The other day, some lefty lunatic on Face the Nation was saying, Donald Trump is attacking our freedoms.
He's attacking.
He's attacking.
Dan Crenshaw said, listen, I've been attacked.
This is my wound from my attack.
Let's use our words precisely.
Because when we tweet, that's not an attack.
That's not what that is.
I don't think we're moving toward a civil war.
Who would have the stamina to fight the civil war?
To say nothing of the fact that only conservatives have guns in this country, more or less.
So I don't think the civil war would last very long.
I think we've got relative peace for the time being.
We've got to put down these little Antifa thugs, of course.
But more or less, I think we're doing just fine.
Something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.
From Mark.
Dear Michael.
If we make it easier to voluntarily commit insane people in order to protect the public from them, don't you have an inherent fear that the left will use that as a tool against anyone who happens to own guns because gun owners are pretty much insane people to them?
Side note, I mean seriously.
You should have seen the faces on my colleagues over here on the East Coast when I told them my two-year-old son loves to help me load Nerf guns.
I said I'd rather have him be comfortable with guns and know about them than to always be in fear of them.
Their faces were priceless.
You make a good point.
The story illustrates that.
The left doesn't understand guns.
They would try to commit gun owners.
Right.
We need to be able to make it easier to involuntarily commit people because we've got lunatics who are hurting themselves, who are hurting society, who are shooting people, who are committing all sorts of violent acts.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that some government agent should be able to come in and lift you out of your home and throw you into the loony bin.
Perhaps, though, your family should be able to do it more easily.
Perhaps relatives of yours, your spouse, your maybe close friends should be able to do it a little bit more easily.
It doesn't have to be big brother government comes in on the helicopter and lifts you out of your life, or we allow crazy people to live on the street in squalor, hurting themselves, hurting society, and posing a danger to society.
There is some middle ground.
I know this irritates libertarians sometimes, but we need to be able to deal seriously with these problems that are not accounted for in their ideologies.
We need to be able to account for people who cannot take care of themselves, who are mentally unfit to behave in society and who pose a danger.
We've got to be able...
Perhaps most importantly, to protect society from them.
This has been true in virtually every society in history.
This was true in the United States until just a few decades ago and we need to return to that.
The reason that we let the lunatics out of the asylums is because of the development of psychiatric drugs.
So you would take the drugs and many of your symptoms would be cured.
This is good.
You no longer have to lock them up.
The trouble was that when people got out, they would stop taking the drugs and this would pose a threat to society, to themselves, and make them live in squalor.
If we can make them take the drugs and ensure that they'll keep taking the drugs, it's fine to let them be on the street or in their own homes or wherever behave in a way that is conducive with civilized society.
If not, you've got to pin them up because they pose a threat.
From Peter.
Millennial Knowles.
I was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic school, but have been an atheist most of my life.
Recently, I've been attending Protestant churches with my girlfriend.
I've learned much more about the Bible in Protestant churches than I did from Catholic school and church.
Protestant churches seem to have an hour-long homily and little sacrament.
Catholic mass is the opposite in my experience.
Can that change?
Should that change?
I've noticed this too in certain Protestant churches, which is that, especially evangelicals, Southern Baptists, you get this a little bit, they just can be excellent exegetes of the Bible.
Sometimes they're very poor exegetes of the Bible.
The trouble with an hour-long homily is sometimes it can be illuminating, life-changing spiritual, and sometimes it can be drivel.
It can be anti-biblical, anti-Christian heresy.
The trouble is and depends upon who is giving the homily.
This is a major difference, though.
I love Bible studies.
I love exegesis.
I like reading theologians, some Protestant theologians as well.
But I don't go to church for a Bible study.
I go to Bible study for Bible study.
I read my Bible for Bible study.
I read books about the Bible for Bible study.
I go to church to worship God, to engage in the sacraments.
Christ came down.
He's the divine logic of the universe and He became incarnate.
The only begotten Son of God who is God became incarnate and talked to men and touched them and rubbed mud on their eyes.
And spoke to them and had a body.
And in my view at least, in the Catholic view, he founded a church.
And he left us sacraments.
He says, do this in memory of me.
This bread is my body, which will be given up for you.
This wine is my blood, which will be given up for you.
This bread is my real body.
You have to eat the flesh of the Son of Man.
My flesh is real food.
This is a hard saying.
He harps on this, you might say.
He makes this...
A very serious point of saying this is real food.
You have to engage in a real sacrament, in the real combination, the real meeting of the metaphysical and the physical, the metaphor and the literal.
And that's what happens in Catholic churches.
That's what happens in certain Protestant churches, Church of England, Anglo-Catholic.
This is what happens in Eastern Orthodoxy.
And so that's what I go there for.
I go there to worship God.
Sometimes I get a good homily.
Very often I get a not-so-great homily, and maybe I'll listen to somebody else's homily on the ride home.
I'm glad that you're learning more about the Bible and getting good exegesis, but you might ask yourself, what else should I be getting?
Should I be getting sacraments?
Should I be eating the flesh of the Son of Man?
Should I be worshiping God?
In a way that is not just edifying for me and my knowledge of the Bible, but which is giving praise to the creator of the universe and giving thanks, which we'll do on Thanksgiving.
That's our show.
Have a very good Thanksgiving, everybody.
I hope you survive all of the traffic and the dinner table discussions of politics.
I will see you back on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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