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Jan. 30, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:50
Ep. 289 - Grievance Studies

As the 2020 race heats up to be a battle over whose mother washed more floors for less money, we ask when victimhood became a substitute for virtue. Then, Kamala Harris flip flops on Medicare For All in record time. She really is Hillary 4.0. Finally, some bad pop culture, and voter fraud in Texas! Date: 01-30-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As the 2020 race heats up to be a battle over whose mother washed more floors for less money, we ask when victimhood became a substitute for virtue.
Fortunately, we are joined by Peter Boghossian and Jim Lindsay, authors of the infamous Grievance Studies experiment that got papers on human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon, published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Then, Kamala Harris flip-flops on Medicare for All in record time.
She really is Hillary 4.0.
Finally, some bad pop culture and voter fraud in Texas.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage has been rescheduled for the evening of February 5th.
Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Alicia Krauss, and little old me will be smoking stogies, breaking down the issues of the day, separating the MAGA from the non-MAGA, and enjoying those sweet, sweet, delicious leftist tears.
Will we finally see President Trump deliver the State of the Union?
I don't know, maybe.
Tune in on Tuesday to find out.
As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
A lot to get to today.
The Howard Schultz for President campaign is rolling along beautifully.
It is creating big divisions within the Democrat Party.
It is causing Kamala Harris to immediately switch up her strategy for 2020.
And it's all leading toward victimhood and grievance.
Howard Schultz just doesn't get it.
But our guests coming up, Peter Boghossian and Jim Lindsay do.
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The Howard Schultz for President campaign could not possibly be going better.
Howard Schultz was on MSNBC. He's discussing his independent bid for president.
He's been a lifelong Democrat, but the Democrat Party has moved very far left.
He could never win the Democrat primary today, so he's running as an independent.
This is a billionaire, and already Democrats are throwing tomatoes at him.
They don't want him to run.
They hate him.
He's a plutocrat.
He's a billionaire.
He's a straight white man.
Here's how Howard Schultz responds.
Why not just run as a Democrat?
We know you are a Democrat.
You've given to Hillary Clinton.
You've supported her candidacy.
No, I have been a Democrat.
So are you no longer a Democrat?
No, I'm not a Democrat.
I don't affiliate myself with the Democratic Party, who's so far left, who basically wants the government to take over health care which we cannot afford, the government to give free college to everybody, and the government to give everyone a job, which basically is $40 trillion on the balance sheet of $21.5 trillion.
We can't afford it.
What can we do?
What we need is comprehensive tax reform.
What we need is sensible solutions to immigration.
All of these things cannot happen under the current environment.
Now, I've also been criticized for being a billionaire.
Let's talk about that.
I'm self-made.
I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York.
I thought that was the American dream, the aspiration of America.
You're going to criticize me for being successful?
Yes, yes.
I'm not going to criticize you for being successful, but the Democrats will criticize you for being successful because the left gets everything backwards.
We've talked about this for weeks now on the show.
It's become clearer every day.
The left gets it all backwards.
To a large portion of America, being a self-made billionaire is not the dream.
For a large portion of America, to the left, the American dream is to be the most aggrieved.
It is to be the biggest victim.
To check off all the victimhood boxes.
That is the dream.
That is what people are trying to do now.
There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren't.
A great example of this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She grew up in a nicer town than I did.
She grew up right next door to where I did, a very affluent county, one of the richest in the country.
She grew up there from the age five all the way up through college.
She attended a private college.
According to her voting records, she lived in ritzy northern Westchester until just two years ago.
And what does she do?
She pretends she's Jenny from the block.
It's not my phrase.
She tweets it out.
She says, I'm still Alex from the Bronx.
She's pretending that she's had a worse upbringing, a worse education, a more difficult, aggrieved experience of life than she has because people are ashamed on the left of success and privilege.
And so they even flip humility and modesty.
True humility does away with false modesty.
But what these people are is really prideful.
They're really prideful and they don't want to admit the privileges that they've had.
They don't want to be thankful for it.
They don't want to aspire to even greater privileges.
They want to flip it.
They want to say, no, no, I didn't have any leg up in life.
No, no, I didn't.
No, I'm...
I had it really hard.
My mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did.
That's what they all say.
They've flipped success and victimhood, and victimhood today carries a cachet.
This is why, when you look around at college campuses, there has been a whole, what's called the campus rape epidemic.
So many of the biggest of these stories, the most widely read, the UVA story, the gang rape story in Rolling Stone, so many of the high profile stories have proven to be hoaxes.
The Duke Lacrosse one, obviously, Mattress Girl at Columbia.
On and on.
We did a show about a month or two ago where we went through about a dozen of these.
Why is it that all these huge stories turn out to be hoaxes?
Because victimhood carries a cachet.
It carries a social currency.
People want it.
They think it makes them more virtuous.
This is our new vision of the world from the left.
This isn't how the right views things, and this is creating a real division.
It's why Howard Schultz's candidacy will probably hand the election to Donald Trump, so thank you, Howard.
But also, it would be quite instructive to America, because I do think there are people who are traditionally on the left, or traditionally Democrats, who say, gosh, they're really getting everything backwards here.
I don't want to live in a world where victimhood is something to aspire to.
His candidacy, I think, will show that fissure in the Democrat Party.
The trouble for him is that the people who think that, I think, are just going to vote for Trump.
I don't think that they're going to vote for Howard Schultz.
It's that issue.
I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal that we were talking about yesterday.
The actual people who want that very narrow appeal are pretty small.
But the people who are traditionally Democrats, they consider themselves progressive.
They don't care about sexual issues.
They haven't really thought through pro-life.
Whatever.
They want to be reasonable.
They see the left right now spiraling down.
And things happen slowly.
And then they happen all at once.
And I think we're seeing the all at once part of that now.
You had over time the cash identity politics, multiculturalism.
Okay, now this is certain privileges are bad.
Okay, do, do, do, do, do.
And now we're spiraling down into this subjectivism, this idea that we have to invent our own pain.
We have to invent our own realities.
You even had then Anthony Kennedy, when he was on the Supreme Court, say that people have a right.
To define reality.
But of course nobody has the right to define reality.
You're entitled to your opinion but it might be incorrect.
You don't get to define it.
You certainly don't get to define it for everybody else.
We're seeing that all at once and it leads us into grievance studies.
This is a phenomenon that's happened at colleges where they're not studying history, philosophy, English, whatever, math.
They're studying...
Ethnicity and gender studies.
Studies, studies, studies.
And it's really just ideology.
It's not a traditional academic discipline.
And it becomes more and more ridiculous.
My guests coming up, Peter Boghossian and Jim Lindsay, submitted a number of academic papers to peer-reviewed academic journals.
And seven of them have been accepted.
I think another seven of them were accepted but not published or revise and resubmit or whatever.
Actually, even more than that.
Only a few of them were rejected before...
I think it was actually a conservative journalist pointed out that these were probably fake.
And they exposed a major flaw in the academy, a major flaw in our grievance culture.
We will get to them in just one second.
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Let's get to our guests.
Peter, Jim, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having us on.
You two are my heroes.
And I should point out, you're not conservatives.
Nope.
You're not Christians.
You are both left wing.
You are both atheists.
Correct.
That is absolutely correct.
And yet, we agree.
We completely agree.
You are an inspiration to me because what we're talking about is reality.
Right.
You guys have very different views of reality than I do.
Religious truth, political reality.
And yet, we're at least talking about reality.
Exactly.
And that's the big difference here between us and the intersectional crowd who believes that a paper titled...
Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon could be a real peer-reviewed academic paper.
Not only, but also honored for exemplary scholarship in feminist geography.
Congratulations.
Thank you very much.
We should explain to people who don't know what peer review is.
What peer review is.
Peer review is a system where academics want to make sure that scholarly research is up to scratch.
The idea would be, I want to write a paper.
I've done my research.
I've read things.
Maybe I did an experiment.
Maybe I did this.
Before I'm going to publish that paper, I'm not going on my blog and putting it out there.
Before I publish that paper, I'm going to send it to other experts in the field who know their stuff.
Ideally, they're not going to know who I am.
I'm not going to know who they are, so there's no conflict of interest involved.
That's blind peer review, which is the standard now.
And they're going to go through my paper and they're going to say, this part's okay, this part's bad, this part needs fixing.
Have you considered these insights?
Did you use the right statistical methods?
Did you use the correct logic to get to the conclusion?
They're going to go through and pick my paper apart for everything that's wrong with it while giving some constructive positive feedback as well.
And then I'm going to have to fix up my paper and make sure that other experts in the field, at least two, sometimes four or more, are going to check off and say, yeah, this paper actually meets scholarly credentials and deserves to be published as scholarship.
And then they'll make a recommendation to the journal editor who says, ah, real experts that know this field well recognize this as a contribution.
And so papers that have passed peer review that have been accepted as a genuine contribution to scholarship written by you guys under pseudonyms would include...
Who are they to judge overcoming anthropometry and a framework for fat bodybuilding?
As well as going in through the back door, challenging straight male homo hysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use.
Yeah, that one's got a lot of big words.
Let me sum that one down for you a little bit.
Boil that down.
It was that straight men are transphobic, clearly, and they can fix that by putting things in their butt.
Right.
And they thought this was a great idea.
It's brilliant.
I mean, it's such a genuine contribution.
And you guys, you're a mathematician.
You are a philosopher.
You are in the academy or refugees from the academy.
Are you experiencing professional kickback from this?
You published this hoax.
It had to be done.
You are exposing this shallow, ridiculous academic culture.
What's the ramification?
Right.
Well, many, many people have been incredibly supportive, and many people from all across the political spectrum, people...
I get, for example, emails, it might seem odd that I, as an evangelical Christian, are writing in support of the author of a manual for creating atheists, but I want to say that I support you, or conservatives will chime in on that, so there has been a lot of support.
The administration is...
One might say not too happy with this.
They're less supportive.
Thank you.
That was lovely.
Wonderful politic answer.
They're less supportive of me in this context, yeah.
Now, what you have done is actually a great service to the academy.
There is a crisis of the academy.
We saw just in psychology there was that replication crisis a few years ago.
They couldn't replicate all of these studies.
Peer review, by the way, for those of you who have friends in academia, has been so abused.
Very often it's professors pass this down to grad students who skim, who let the nonsense go through.
This is a major crisis.
And one of the biggest issues is...
I notice as a millennial, a lot of millennial friends, millennials are supposedly the most educated generation in history.
And they certainly have the most degrees, the most credentials, most of them go to college.
And yet they might be the most ignorant generation I've ever come across.
How does that work?
What is the conflict?
Well, it depends on what they're being taught and how they're being challenged, right?
To become truly educated means not just to be exposed to lots and lots of courses, but to be exposed to relevant ideas within your field, but also challenging ideas that make you think outside of your field.
I see there's actually this kind of internet subculture movement building up to try to find an alternative to the university, and I don't like it personally.
I think that the idea of the university in its...
Essence should be that you, same as peer review, you have experts who guide students and challenge their thinking, give them viewpoints that they don't agree with, and make them work through how they might understand that perspective better.
And if it's wrong, they should learn to articulate the arguments for why it's wrong.
And if it's right, then they can try to work through some of that.
But there's been this increasing institutionalization of a certain kind of That our papers are really trying to dig into is that There's a certain shallowness, like you were saying, to if we're going to talk about issues of cultural relevance like race or gender or so on, then you just know the right answer.
This is the right answer.
If you put that on your test, you get the grade, and if you don't, you don't.
So you have this problem, and then you go into institutionalizing that into the general education requirement instead of, say, something like civics or Western civilization.
I had to take American history.
Many of my friends were dependent on a degree at my school.
What a bigoted school would make you take American history?
I'm so outraged.
It was required for every degree except engineering, and they had to take Western Civ.
I don't know why, but whatever.
These were things that were happening before, but now you can fill this in with, you know, Asian studies or some such.
And so there's a degree of that happening, I'm sure.
There have also been, you know, other factors, not to put it all on, like, grievance studies, because, for example, when I was finishing my degree, they actually, in my state, which was Tennessee, By state mandate, cut the number of hours required for a bachelor's degree so that more people would be able to get them.
So there are political factors as well.
Right.
Lowering of standards.
Lowering of standards.
Yeah.
And one of the things that I've seen happen that I'm deeply concerned about is that there's a lack of intellectual diversity in the academy.
And I think it's a tremendous problem when, for example, and I don't know, this is probably, this may showcase a difference of ours.
I don't know.
I've never spoken to you about this.
But a person in my class...
I commented about he does not believe global warming is anthropogenic.
And he said, and I thought this was a great point, it's totally legitimate, why should we believe this?
We already know that the overwhelming majority of professors are, you've proven it, they adhere to a radical leftist intersectional worldview.
They're the same folks writing this, so why should I believe that?
Their credibility is so in question.
So that's why we need more diversity in the academy, and that's why we need to look at the scholarship that comes out.
We need something to rely upon, and we can't do that now.
And this, to your point before, I... I love the university.
I like the idea of the university, to use John Henry Newman's phrase.
I don't want to give up the university to these lunatics who are attacking it from within.
So you've come in and taken a stand, and it's worth pointing out, too, what grievance studies is, because you come from philosophy.
You come from mathematics.
I majored in history.
These are liberal arts.
These are...
Now, increasingly in universities, you'll have new departments.
Women's, gender, and sexuality.
Anything with studies in it.
It's any of the studies.
There's a kind of irony here because whenever there are these new women's studies, gay studies, whatever studies, the studies always likes and approves of the thing that it's studying, except for American studies.
That is the one studies department that actually despises the object of its studies.
When did these studies...
Crop up.
When did the Deputy Assistant Dean of Inclusion and Sexual Studies, when did this happen and start gutting our university?
How surprised are you going to be to find out it was the late 1960s?
There were a lot of things going on around that time.
But really, that was part of it.
There was the big cultural kind of change that was happening in the late 60s and going into the 70s, following civil rights and all of this.
And the university really wanted to be on the vanguard of that.
They wanted to showcase diversity and And they wanted to have more scholars that were women and that were racial minorities and try to be on the forefront of making a more diverse professional class.
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.
Well, not quite yet.
But yeah, now.
And what happened was they started to create these kind of boutique departments around very politically fashionable ideas like women's studies, feminist studies, race studies, etc.
And because of a number of factors that can get pretty complicated, and it's a lot of inside baseball, they never really got challenged.
Exactly.
They also simultaneously picked up a very fashionable postmodern deconstructive philosophy for doing their stuff.
This is what I want to actually get to because I saw dear old Yale crumbling during just my four years there.
I saw this really pick up fast.
I mean, you had kids screaming at their professors by the time I graduated.
One thing I notice is that we all agree on reality.
We all agree that reality exists.
We're arguing over these facts.
There's also this radical subjectivism now, which says there's no truth.
There's your truth and my truth.
Where does that idea come from, and where is that leading us, and how do we fight that?
We have a whole minute left, so I'm sure you can answer that question.
The deep answer is that's postmodern deconstruction.
It goes back to the 60s, these French philosophers.
The narrow answer is in the late 80s and 90s.
It took a turn.
You had race scholars like Kimberley Crenshaw and gender scholars like Judith Butler who were saying things like, We know identity must be real because oppression based on identity is real.
And if we want to change things, if we want to have effective activism, progressive activism, we need to admit that those are real and then continue to use our deconstructive methods to deconstruct the conversations around those objects.
So we agree on reality existing and we mean one particular thing by it.
They would say they agree that reality exists also, but that it's rooted in the one real thing is oppression based on identity, which is always based on power.
And the moral oppression, the clearer view of reality.
Yeah.
This is such a brilliant observation.
I have never heard this before, but you have explained it.
Sometimes when I'm on college campuses, people ask me, they say, how is it that the intersectional left can so embrace identity as this absolute, But then they become subjectivists when it gets to identity.
A man can be a woman.
A white lady can be a black lady.
It's all kind of fluid.
And your answer is because of the reality of the oppression.
So as long as you can claim victimhood, as long as you can claim oppression, the Details of the identity from which you get the oppression, that's all malleable.
It's just all about the oppression, the grievance.
And the more oppression variables one has, the clearer view of reality one has.
That's called standpoint epistemology, which is a kind of related thing to another thing.
This all has like real deep, I mean, it's real academic stuff.
Right.
We called critical constructivist epistemology grievance studies.
It's a little bit easier to grasp what's going on there.
And the idea with these, especially standpoint epistemology, is that there's always a power dynamic.
And if you're on the upside of the power dynamic, you are, let's say, a man who lives in a man's world.
So you have one perspective, man and man.
But if you're a woman who lives in a man's world, now you have the woman perspective, and because you live in the man's world, you have the man perspective too.
Therefore, you know more things.
Plus, you get to claim oppression and victimhood.
And you add another variable to that.
Black, disabled, trans.
They get even more...
What do they call it?
Strong objectivity, as Sandra Harding called that.
You get more access to know the truth in your personal subjective experience by having oppression.
I mean, as a Christian, that must be horrific.
Truly shocking.
The entire world is upside down.
This is so interesting, though.
And it's why I love that...
Real academic people, such as yourselves, did this hoax.
Because the hoax is really funny.
An ethnography of breastaurant masculinity, themes of objectification, sexual conquest, and masculine toughness in a sexually objectifying restaurant.
That was accepted and published.
I mean, just wonderful...
Our struggle is my struggle.
Solidarity feminism is an intersectional reply to neoliberal and choice feminism.
That's a chapter of Mein Kampf.
That's a chapter of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
I mean, these are really funny, but it's not just a ha-ha, look how ridiculous the other side is.
They do have a...
Coherent train of thought.
Absolutely.
That's just perverse.
These aren't even actually hoaxes.
We started with hoaxes.
We failed to get hoaxes in.
The first six papers we wrote all failed.
They couldn't get in.
So we started to actually learn how they think and write the papers in accordance with what really is grievance studies.
We became grievance scholars ourselves, in a sense.
And we learned to think like they do.
We understood their comic book universe, where sometimes people can fly or whatever.
And we wrote accordingly.
And then...
We uncovered some pretty serious issues.
So they have this tight ecosystem in coherence.
In philosophy, we call it coherence theory.
All these nodes in a matrix of belief, they all cohere together.
And it does make an ecosystem.
The Batman, Superman, or DC and Marvel.
Yeah, it's like in the Batman universe, right?
Batman can do a lot of cool stuff, but he can't fly.
So if you wanted to write a fan comic and you make Batman fly, everybody's going to be like, what?
He needs a hang glider or something.
Right, right.
Yes, and this...
Unfortunately, we're out of time, and I have to let people know where to find you.
On Twitter, at Peter Boghossian.
Jim, you can find on Twitter, at Conceptual James.
There's a documentary coming out, I think.
There's a documentary.
Yeah, it should be later this year.
Mike Naina.
Mike Naina's doing a documentary on this, which is, I'm glad you brought this up here at the end, it isn't a hoax.
What you have done is gone in, identified, not just how the grievance studies illogic thinks, but you have gotten these papers peer-reviewed and published.
And recognized for excellence.
Recognized for excellence.
It is outrageous to call it a hoax.
You could call the whole field a hoax, but you couldn't call what you have done a hoax.
It is so important.
If we want to combat this nonsense, if we want to try to save the university, save liberal education, you have to be able to actually understand how these people think, how they have gone so wrong in their trains of thought.
Only then can you come back and get back to a sane reality.
We very much want to restore confidence in the academy, and that confidence and trust has been eroded not only in the peer-review system, but in the whole academy.
The whole institutional structure.
I think you're doing God's work, both of you atheists.
Thank you so much for being here, Peter.
Jim, we've got to go.
Great to have you.
Thank you so much.
Great.
Thank you.
Those are the first guys who could explain to me some of the contradictions within the intersectional left.
I hope people pay attention to them because they've really got an insight here that explains so much of the craziness and all the shrieking kids on college campuses and all the other nonsense flitting about our culture.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got to get to Kamala Harris, that seductress Kamala Harris launching her political career, apparently, with a married man.
But before we get to that, It's time for you to get on the right side of history, which is in fact the title of Ben Shapiro's new book.
It officially hits stores March 19th, but if you go to rightsideofhistory.com, you can order your copy right now before they sell out.
Do it.
You will thank me later.
Ah, it pains me to say nice things about Ben earnestly on the show, but I have to do it.
The book is very good.
The book is really, really good.
I read an early draft of it, and so he's, I think, even punched it up a little bit since then, and it was excellent.
I read all these books that come out, all these popular books, many of which are not very good, and Ben's is like the answer to that book.
I hope it sells a zillion copies.
It would be really helpful to the culture.
So go check it out.
Okay.
I won't say any more earnest, nice things about Ben.
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It has questions on Backstage, which is coming up.
You'll get to ask...
Oh, get your mailbag questions in, by the way, for tomorrow.
You get to see another kingdom.
You get everything.
You get this.
This is the...
You know what this is?
This is the Pike Place roast of leftist tears.
This is that Howard Schultz is going to re-elect Donald Trump and spoil it for the Democrats sort of...
You know, some people say that that Pike Place is bitter.
I think it's just perfectly sweet.
Yum, yum.
It's sweet and salty in the leftist tears tumbler.
It's like kettle corn of some sort.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
All of this talk about grievance politics has got me feeling aggrieved.
And I am feeling aggrieved because Hillary Clinton is not running for president.
Jeff Zeleny is reporting that Hillary Clinton is not closing the door on running for 2020.
Do you think she would actually do it?
Look, you know, I take her at her word.
She's not running for president.
She's not running for president.
This is according to John Podesta, her spirit-cooking warlock of a former campaign chairman.
It sounds like Hillary is out.
Now, of course, when Hillary Clinton says she's not running for president, there's still a 98.8897% chance that she is running for president because Hillary Clinton has been running for president since she was five years old.
But unfortunately, it sounds like she's not going to run.
It's too bad.
Fortunately for us, we have Hillary Clinton 4.0, also known as Kamala Harris, who is running.
So yesterday...
We showed a clip of Kamala Harris endorsing Medicare for All, the most extreme socialist form of health care.
Here is her endorsing it with Jake Tapper.
Just to follow up on that, and correct me if I'm wrong, to reiterate, you support the Medicare for All bill, I think initially co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders.
You're also a co-sponsor onto it.
I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance.
So for people out there who like their insurance, they don't get to keep it?
Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care.
And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.
Who of us has not had that situation where you've got to wait for approval and the doctor says, well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this?
Let's eliminate all of that.
Let's move on.
Let's eliminate all that.
Let's move on.
This is Kamala Harris.
That was her yesterday, I guess.
The CNN ran that article.
They ran that clip because it was aired on CNN.
They then updated the article.
This came out this morning.
They said, quote, As the Fuhrer grew, Not the former leader of Nazi Germany, Fuhrer, F-U-R-O-R. As the Fuhrer grew, a Harris advisor on Tuesday signaled that the candidate would also be open to the more moderate health reform plans, which would preserve the industry, being floated by other congressional Democrats.
It represents a compromise position that risks angering Medicare for All proponents, who view eliminating private health insurance as key to enacting their comprehensive reform.
So what does this mean?
Kamala Harris comes out there and says, yeah, let's destroy a sixth of the American economy.
Let's just eliminate it.
Boop, gone.
And obviously, those companies, those private insurers, private healthcare providers, people who like having choice in their healthcare, there was huge blowback there.
And so Kamala Harris says, okay, okay, well, maybe I didn't quite mean that.
Now, this is how we know that she's Hillary Clinton 4.0, is she's a weather vane.
Whatever way the wind is blowing, she's going to do it.
She began her career, according to former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, by dating a married man.
That came out yesterday.
A married man who was like 20 or 30 years older than her.
He said yesterday, the guy who did this, married man, dates Kamala Harris and says, oh yes, yeah, I dated her and then as a result I put her on some influential committees and look where she is today.
This is a woman who will do whatever it takes to become president.
The kind of woman who launches her career that way with an older married man is the kind of person who will do whatever it takes.
And so maybe that means tacking all the way to the left, if that seems like the way that the winds are blowing.
Maybe that means moderating 24 hours later, if that's the way that the winds are blowing.
Obviously, it is crazy.
It's crazy to eliminate a sixth of the economy to take that over.
CNN is actually correct in its coverage.
The Medicare for All...
So-called the socialist healthcare advocates, they do view any private insurance as an impediment to their utopian solution, to their plan.
I mean, they are radicals.
They are Jacobins.
They are the ones who are speeding, hurtling toward a totalitarian, utopian future.
And so they see, if anyone else has any control over healthcare, be it the...
Patients, be it the doctors, be it the insurance providers, be it any market forces, that is an impediment to them having total control over your health.
And if you've got control over people's health, you've got control over people.
This is why making the healthcare industry socialist, why a government takeover of healthcare is different in kind from takeovers of other industries.
It would also be a big deal if the government took over the oil industry.
It would be a big deal if they took over the computer industry.
It would be a big deal if they took over those industries, too.
Healthcare is something special because it's about It's about your life.
It's about life and death.
It's about your health.
And if they have control over that, people don't always make the most rational choices.
This is actually how these socialists have been able to infect the healthcare system.
is they say, well, the markets for buying a new computer, the markets for buying a new car are very different from the markets when you're deciding which medical tests to take.
They have a certain point.
We do care more about our health than we care about which car we drive, but nevertheless, human nature doesn't change.
And when you can see costs, when you can see incentives, when you can have freedom to choose what kind of care you want to get, you are going to make choices by definition that are more tailored to you, to your preferences, to your health than if some government bureaucrat does it.
But that's what they're playing on.
That's what the socialists are exploiting.
It's a real vulnerability.
So Kamala Harris now is tacking back to the other end.
Why?
She's responding in many ways to Howard Schultz and she's responding to Mike Bloomberg.
Mike Bloomberg, another zillionaire, my former mayor of New York, who was a Republican for five minutes, but he's really a lifelong moderate Democrat and a nanny state He bans smoking in New York.
He wants to ban guns.
He's just a billionaire, elitist, I know better than you, I'm your benevolent better sort of guy.
I mean, he's got the Howard Schultz vibe to him.
And he says, quote...
I think you could never afford Medicare for All.
You're talking about trillions of dollars.
To replace the entire private system where companies provide health care for their employees would bankrupt us for a very long time.
It's just not a practical thing.
Yes, of course that's true.
So Kamala Harris today is swinging back.
You've got to remember the 2020 race has not even really begun yet.
There are a lot of undeclared candidates right now.
Not many candidates have declared.
And we're going to see which way the wind blows.
I mean, politics has been pretty volatile for the last two years.
If in the course of one week we can tack back to the center and say we're going to preserve private insurance, no, we're going to have pure socialist, single-payer government-run health care, no, back and forth, we're going to see.
And what is going to define which way it blows are the candidates who are in this race.
And when you've got 20 candidates in the race plus at least one independent Democrat in Howard Schultz, maybe two independent Democrats in Mike Bloomberg, they're going to define it.
It's going to be very volatile and we're going to see.
The only thing we can predict right now is that we can't predict anything.
If you had asked a year out from the 2016 election who is going to be the Republican nominee, very few people would have told you Donald Trump.
And he, in so many ways, defined that election.
He pushed the bigger issues of Immigration.
He pushed the issues of defeating ISIS. He pushed the issues of building a wall, securing our country, even economic protection.
He pushed all of those things, which were not really at the forefront before him.
Kamala Harris is obviously not going to be the leader here.
She's the follower.
She's the Hillary Clinton.
She's not going to set the tone.
She's gonna be the weather vane.
But if a candidate is bolder than Kamala Harris and can have the courage to set the tone, probably that's gonna be the person who's gonna be leading in the field.
That's going to be the person that other people are going to follow.
Unfortunately for Democrats right now, they have a whole field of cowards.
They don't have anyone.
You know, for all of her wackiness and wicked ideology, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be a candidate that people could rally behind on the Democrat Party.
It's no coincidence that 74% of Democrats say they would vote for her for president.
Thank goodness.
She's too young to run right now.
But I think that's the sort of thing that our present politics is going to reward.
Kamala Harris is a pretty smart candidate, but if she doesn't get a little bit bolder, she's going to fall way behind.
Which also wouldn't be a terrible thing.
We talked about all the good news in pop culture yesterday as it relates to abortion.
People finally realizing that babies are babies.
Even while politicians like New York's Andrew Cuomo legalized the wholesale slaughter of babies, the pop culture TV shows, they're kind of understanding it now.
They're even making dark jokes about how babies are babies.
This is not the case with the transgender ideology.
Kate Hudson...
Last week, came out and said she was going to raise her daughter genderless.
She said, quote, I think you just raise your kids individually regardless, like a genderless approach.
We still don't know what she's going to identify as.
I will say that right now, she's incredibly feminine in her energy, her sounds, and her way.
Probably because she's talking about a baby girl.
That's probably why she's feminine.
If she were a baby boy, she probably wouldn't be feminine.
She wouldn't be a she.
So now she's coming out and saying, I'm not going to raise my daughter genderless.
Does she want mother of the year for that?
Does she want a cookie?
I'm not going to abuse my child.
Oh, great.
Good.
Hooray.
Good job.
She's saying she was taken out of context by clickbait websites.
But she wasn't.
You heard the quote.
She said it.
That was what she said.
And she's buying into a popular culture that pushes this.
I don't watch the show Supergirl because I'm a person and therefore nobody watches this show.
But there was a clip going around of it where one of the characters is describing coming from the alien planet Naltor.
But that isn't what really defines her identity.
So when did your mom come from Maltor?
When she was 18.
The night before she fled her planet, she had a dream about a farmhouse where she would meet her true love.
And she saw a bunch of random coordinates that she plugged into her craft, and she landed on Earth in Parthas.
A human family took her in, farmers, and she fell in love with their son, my dad.
Wow.
Yeah.
I can't imagine having grown up anywhere else.
Because you have parents from two different planets?
Yeah, but also because I'm trans.
I always knew that I was a girl.
My parents were amazing.
They affirmed my authentic self and helped me transition young.
I've always been able to be open about who I was in Parthas.
I'm not saying it was easy.
There were definitely people who didn't understand.
But the town's ethos of inclusion is strong, and I think if I grew up anywhere else, it would have been a lot tougher.
Thank you for sharing that with me.
Of course.
This is actually a pretty insightful scene.
I mean, it's absurdly written.
It's not good art in any way, but it's pretty insightful in its ideology because it is, in fact, the case that transgenderism is just as real as the alien planet Naltor.
They are exactly as real.
They have exactly as much to do with reality.
Science fiction and reality are now indistinguishable on the left.
There's no difference.
Why is this?
In part, I think this is because, as we always say, politics is downstream of culture.
Culture comes from the cult and the religion and what one worships.
And so we have myths.
We have founding myths in our civilization.
Myths that seem to bear out throughout many civilizations.
The same kinds of stories, the echoes of our ancient past come out throughout all these various societies.
Why?
Because they tell us something about our human nature.
And then in the case of Christianity, Christianity is the true myth.
It is where myth and the literal world coincide in a person, in a place, in a time, in the incarnation and in the crucifixion and the resurrection.
When those are the stories, real and mythological, that define your world, you have a certain civilization.
You have what would have been Western civilization until our postmodern era.
But now that that is gone, now that religiosity is on the wane, the nuns are up, an uncultured generation, a basically ignorant generation has risen up, We still need stories and so we fill them with kind of weird science fiction.
Now the only myths people talk about are Harry Potter or science fiction.
The only movies people go see are the superhero movies.
They're the only movies that dominate at the box office.
The popular culture is very influential, and right now, this transgender question is all throughout pop culture, where it's on Orange is the New Black, Transparent, I Am Kate, Tangerine, A Fantastic Woman, The Danish Girl, on and on.
There are like ten people who are confused about their gender in the country, and there are ten pieces of pop culture that come out every year on this question.
When the culture is saturated, people become numb.
So now, it seems perfectly normal.
It seems perfectly normal to...
I mean, first of all, that isn't a transgender girl or man.
That's a female.
That's an actress that's talking about this.
But it becomes numb.
We say, oh, there's really no difference between men and women.
And so we start confusing children.
We start injecting them with hormones, as this scene is advocating.
We start putting kids in drag and having men at bars throw dollar bills at them, as is happening now.
We begin to abuse children, it seems perfectly natural to us, because we just have these narratives swirling around, but the narratives aren't true.
They come from false myths.
They come from false stories and false ideas.
Everybody's got to serve somebody, and either you will...
Ground your view of the world in reality, in real fact, in true myths, and in the myths, or you will fall into fantasy.
And fantasy, when you live out of accordance with reality, has really terrible effects for people, for society, for politics all around.
That's our show.
Get your mailbag questions in.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
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And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know what I dislike?
Killing babies and killing Jews.
And yet it seems that the Democrats are determined to do both.
We will talk about that on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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