Amherst College released an Orwellian “common language guide” to police students’ speech on campus. We will examine the most perverse definitions as well as the Left’s obsession with language. Then, Portland State pushes speech codes, studies show trigger warnings are useless, and Cambridge disinvites Jordan Peterson. What do all of these episodes tell us about the modern Left? Date: 03-21-2019
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Amherst College has released an Orwellian Common Language Guide to police students' speech on campus.
We will examine the most perverse definitions, as well as the left's obsession with language.
Then, Portland State pushes speech codes, studies show that trigger warnings are absolutely useless, and Cambridge disinvites Jordan Peterson.
What do all of these episodes tell us about the modern left?
We will explore.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Oh, man.
I think that what these colleges are doing today is basically covering for those rich parents who bought their kids way into school.
Because that was the big scandal.
That was the biggest scandal in higher education ever concerning elite universities.
Until about five minutes later, when these universities again and again, speech codes, common language guides.
This is really perverse.
This was so bad.
That the head of the university and the head of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Amherst both had to issue apologies.
Both had to pull away this guide.
Luckily, we have screenshots so we can read the definitions.
Because this was no accident.
What this was is being described as a gaffe.
You know, you hear politicians have a gaffe, and what a gaffe is supposed to be is when you mistakenly say something you didn't mean.
In reality, what a gaffe is is when you say exactly what you mean, but it's not received well, and you weren't supposed to say it, and you were trying to be more deceptive.
That's exactly what's happening here.
This is all for a purpose.
This ties into the trigger warnings.
This ties into disinviting Jordan Peterson.
We'll get to all of that, but first...
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This guide, the common language guide, was sent out by Amherst University.
Now, it wasn't sent out by the language departments.
It wasn't sent out by the English department.
Amherst does a good English program.
You'd think maybe a guide on language would be sent out by them.
No, no, no, no, no.
It wasn't even sent out by the office of the president or the office of the dean of students.
It was sent out by the Office of Inclusion and Diversity.
This is something out of 1984.
This is something right out of George Orwell, to hear things like the Office of Inclusion and Diversity.
What does that office do?
What is the purpose of that?
Campuses are quite diverse.
They've been very diverse for a very long time.
They're inclusive.
It's a university.
That's the point of inclusion.
I guess they're not inclusive to all of the conservative speakers that they disinvite, but the Office of Inclusion and Diversity is very often leading the charge to disinvite those people.
So what do they do?
They send out Orwellian guides like this.
They police people's language.
They enforce speech codes.
They try to stop the free expression of ideas.
They try to enforce a leftist ideology and a leftist orthodoxy.
So this is how they described it.
They said, So right here you know...
You know immediately that today their excuse that this shouldn't have been sent out, it was a mistake, oh, they didn't mean to do it, blah, blah.
You know that's not true.
They say in their first letter, these are carefully researched.
These have been thoughtfully discussed.
This is very, very intentional.
They tell you twice in one sentence that it's highly intentional.
And the purpose of this is very good.
Ostensibly.
The nominal purpose, what they say is, we need a shared understanding of language in order to foster opportunities for community building.
Now, the purpose of language is to communicate, right?
That's the most basic definition of language.
I have my own subjective experience going on in my head.
You have your own subjective experience going on in your head.
And the only way that we can bridge that unbridgeable gap is through language.
What is language?
It's letters and words and sounds, all of which are symbols to represent ideas that are outside of both of us.
So I look at a tree, and I see the tree.
And it's got leaves, and it's got branches, and it's got a trunk.
And I want to communicate the idea of a tree to you.
How do we do that?
You have your own perception of the tree as well.
But unless we have a common word for the common experience in objective reality of the tree, then we can't communicate.
That's the purpose of language.
You don't need an office of diversity and inclusion to have language.
The English language is much older than the Amherst College Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
So they say their purpose is to foster opportunities for communication.
No, no, no, no, no.
We have words.
We have a language.
What their real purpose is, is to rewrite language, to totally change language, to create new terms that connote new ideological constructs so that they can shape the ideology and the orthodoxy on campus.
So, just an example.
What is capitalism?
We know what capitalism is, right?
We did a whole episode on it the other day.
Basically, it boils down to private property— And people producing and exchanging private property and governments recognizing the rights of private property.
Basically what it comes down to.
Even the term capitalism is basically just invented and propagated by Marxists.
So even that it's kind of a loaded term, but that's basically what it means.
Here is how Amherst's Diversity and Inclusion Office defines capitalism as a quote, economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit rather than the state.
Okay, yeah, basically, I'm good with that.
Then they go on.
This system leads to exploitative labor practices which affect marginalized groups disproportionately.
Hold on a second.
I thought this was a dictionary.
I thought this was a guide to language.
I thought this was just a common language, so we know we're using the same terms.
So what they do is they'll take a term, and maybe they'll even define it accurately.
And then they'll redefine it.
So the first sentence is right.
The second sentence is their ideological redefinition of that word.
And by the way, in the whole guide, sometimes they don't even start with a real definition.
Very often, they just start with the ideology.
They define legal and illegal.
You would think that this is a fairly basic thing.
Legal and illegal.
A highly racialized term.
Alright, we can stop right there.
What?
How is legal and illegal a highly racialized term?
Legal means lawful and illegal means unlawful or criminal.
There is no etymological or historical or philosophical or any connection to race whatsoever.
But that's how it begins.
A highly racialized term to describe a person's presence in a nation without government-issued immigration status.
First of all, what other immigration status is there if not government-issued?
Is it issued by Johnny down the street?
Okay, the government says you're not an immigrant to this country.
You're not a legal immigrant.
But Johnny says you are.
So in that case, you're a legal immigrant, right?
Who else would determine immigration status but the civil authority?
Of course, this is absurd.
Now, the definition goes on.
This is not an appropriate noun or adjective to describe an individual.
Not appropriate.
Says who?
Oh, says you, because you're policing our language.
Often misused to designate certain undocumented members of a society, specifically people of color, To deny their contributions, right to exist, and recognition as people within certain national boundaries.
While it doesn't undermine their right to exist, the people are allowed to exist, I suppose it does undermine their right to exist within certain national boundaries because there are such things as immigration laws.
So what this says is that if you use the words legal or illegal, you are buying into a highly racist, bigoted, awful premise that What this definition does is outlaws, as a matter of speech on campus, anything other than an open borders ideology which denies the nation state entirely.
That's just the second one.
How about assimilation?
This is a related concept.
Assimilation, we know assimilation means you go to a new place and you behave like the locals.
Paesi che vai, usanze che trovi is what they say in Italy, which is translated roughly or translated idiomatically to when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
This is what assimilation is.
When I go to Italy, what do I do?
I wear my...
Nice pair of sole sunglasses and I sip on, you know, Lavazza coffee.
I just do things that Italians do.
Sometimes I do that here as well.
But that's because I'm of Italian heritage.
If I go to Britain, I'm going to behave differently.
If I go to the Middle East, I'm going to behave a little differently.
That's assimilation.
And certainly when you immigrate somewhere, assimilation really matters because you're going to live there.
You want to be part of that community.
This is how Amherst College defines it.
Assimilation.
Happens, quote, as a response to forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, xenophobia, racism, cisheteronormativity, and religious oppression, among other types of oppression.
If you choose to enter another country and immigrate to that country and live in that country for 30 years, You're not doing it because you're oppressed.
If that's oppressive, you can always go home.
You should go home.
You're asking to do that.
You're volunteering to do that.
There's nothing oppressive then about the people wanting you to, I don't know, speak their language, follow their laws, behave a little more like they do than only how you want to behave.
But they invert that.
What is more oppressive?
Invading a foreign country and living there and living off of their welfare and violating their laws and forcing everybody not only to accommodate but celebrate you.
Is that more oppressive or is it oppressive to say, hey, if you want to come to the greatest country on earth and we're going to let you stay even though you broke our laws, maybe speak English.
Which do you think is more oppressive?
They define oppression, by the way.
Oppression.
Is predicated upon access to institutional power.
Oh, see, this is how they're going to tell me that only big, bad, straight, white men who think that they're men, they're the only ones who can be oppressive.
So you can't be oppressive if you invade somebody's country, take all their welfare, violate their laws, and force everyone to celebrate you.
That's not oppressive because it's predicated upon access to institutional power.
Marginalized communities do not have access to institutional power.
So it says women can be as prejudiced as men, but women cannot be just as sexist as men because they do not hold political, economic, and institutional power.
Of course, this is nonsense.
Let's take one institution, the institution that sent out this guide, Amherst College.
At American universities, women constitute the majority of students.
Not even that slim a majority.
They got a few points on men.
So actually, they do have institutional power, specifically at the institution that is claiming that they don't.
How about political power?
In the United States, women have the right to vote.
There are more women in the United States than men.
More importantly, there are many more women voters than men voters.
Women have about a 15-point voter gap on men.
So actually, if we're talking about institutional political power, women have way more political power in the United States than men do.
Just using their own definitions, but it doesn't matter.
What they need to do is not just define the word, but then have that little explainer line afterward.
Women cannot be just as sexist as men.
Marginalized communities do not have access to institutional power.
But they do.
So what happens if they do?
I guess what it means is they're not that marginalized.
They're really not very marginalized communities.
And then this brings us to American exceptionalism.
This is a historical, philosophical, political, linguistic construct that ostensibly a good university completely misunderstands.
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Okay.
American exceptionalism.
This is how Amherst defines it.
A belief in the superiority, rightful leadership, and special moral status of the United States and its people, originally grounded in the 17th century Puritan and Protestant religious culture.
So this, do you see how they start right away?
A belief in the superiority.
Now, the reason that they go for that is because the word exceptional is misused and misunderstood, especially by illiterates like the people at the Office of Inclusion and Diversity at Amherst University.
We think of exceptional as excellent, or superlative, or just the best thing ever.
Exceptional refers to exceptions, deviation from the norm.
And America is certainly an exceptional country.
It's unlike other countries.
From its very beginning, it was founded and developed differently than the old world.
That's why it's the new world.
It was discovered by Christopher Columbus, a devout Christian, greatest navigator of his age.
It was obviously founded by pilgrims at Plymouth.
It was founded by people at Jamestown who wanted a better life.
It was founded by people who basically were not of the aristocracy.
They were not entrenched in the old world.
There was a new beginning here.
There were traditions that they brought with them.
There was a culture.
There was a religion that they brought with them.
But it developed differently, and it developed a little separately from the rest of the world.
It then fired the shot heard around the world.
It launched, perhaps in the history of the world, the only conservative revolution.
It wasn't a radical leftist revolution like the French Revolution.
It was a conservative revolution, and so much as there can be one, it conserved those traditions.
It's been a beacon of liberty for the rest of the world.
That's an exception.
That's why the United States has a unique role in the world.
It's not necessarily to say superior in every and all ways, but that's what they say, because they want to denigrate that idea by misrepresenting it.
And then they have, oh my gosh, the white savior complex.
Have you ever heard of this?
This is a new term.
So they're not just redefining other terms like American exceptionalism.
They're introducing new ideological terms.
American exceptionalism, or white savior complex, an attitude or posture of condescending benevolence based on the idea that white people inherently should, are in a position to, and are qualified to save, people of color.
This can be seen internationally as well as domestically.
See Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism.
So what this term is actually talking about is that Western culture developed beyond any other culture in the history of the world, religiously, politically, technologically.
The obvious one is technologically because the West broadly invented every single thing that's ever been invented and made virtually every discovery that has ever been discovered.
But politically, this is true as well.
Look around the rest of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia, pre-Columbian American systems of government.
Do those systems of government protect the rights of minorities?
No.
Do those systems of government treat women in a particularly nice way?
No.
Do those systems of government protect liberty in an individual and...
Family-based and community-relevant sense?
No.
Are those cultures, have they very often delved into tyrannies that make life short and brutish and miserable?
Yes.
I'm just talking about politically.
And so what they're saying is, how dare you say that Western culture is better than other cultures?
We're going to accuse that statement of being racist.
So you see what they do.
They're saying, to use the term Western, is so wrong.
You're really talking about whiteness, that white people are better than brown people.
That's not what it's saying at all.
Also, this is, again, just another evidence of these people's ignorance.
When you think about the great figures in history, in Western history, are they all blonde-haired, blue-eyed guys?
I don't think that's true.
One example I think of is St.
Augustine of Hippo, one of the five greatest minds in the history of the West.
He was from Carthage.
Something tells me he was a bit swarthy.
I'm a bit swarthy myself, I'll have you know.
The discoverer of the Americas was Italian.
A little on the darker side as well.
But they have to paint all of the West as this just Aryan, white, blonde, blue-eyed, racially uniform type thing.
Because they can't grapple with the ideas.
They can't grapple with history.
So they write it off as bigoted.
And then just very briefly, I have to mention the other two terms they included there.
Tucking and packing.
Do you know what these terms are?
If you're watching with a young child, please cover his ears right now.
Tucking is when a man really wants to look like a woman.
He tucks.
And when a woman really wants to look like a man, she packs.
This is being described in the Amherst Guide to Language.
I mention it, one, because it's ridiculous, but two, because it shows you the lengths to which they will go to invent new terms, to invent new language in service of their own ideology.
And gender ideology is so central to the left's broader ideological agenda right now.
All of this, what is all of this?
Very different versions of it, but all the same assault on language.
This reminds me of the play Alice in Wonderland by Alice Gerstenberg.
There's a passage in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is talking to Humpty Dumpty.
Humpty Dumpty says...
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.
Alice responds, The question is whether you can make words mean different things.
The question is which is to be master, that's all.
Impenetrability.
That's what I say.
Would you tell me, please, what that means?
I meant by impenetrability that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.
That little exchange tells you everything you need to know about this language battle that's going on.
The left, like Humpty Dumpty, wants to use a word and just have it mean whatever they say that it means.
Now, Alice asks the question that we're all asking.
Can you make words mean different things than they mean?
And Humpty Dumpty asks the real question.
Which is to be master?
To use words accurately?
To use words to mean what they mean?
Or to redefine words altogether?
In the long run, reality reasserts itself.
But in the short run...
The left knows that they can impose their tyranny over logic, over reason, by redefining the words.
Humpty Dumpty says, impenetrability!
And what does he mean by impenetrability?
He says, go away now.
Go away.
I'm not talking about this.
He sends Alice away, who's asking for some reason.
That's what's happening at even our elite universities.
Amherst College is considered a very good college.
And this is the sort of thing that they're putting out.
Impenetrability.
Which is to be mastered?
That is the question.
We've got a lot more to talk about.
We've got to talk about how this ties into trigger warnings, Jordan Peterson, and the mailbag.
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We'll be right back with a lot more on the mailbag.
What is the point of all this language doctoring?
The left would tell us that it's just about making people comfortable, just about understanding.
No, it's not either of those things.
The evidence of this is the trigger warnings.
Another way that they try to censor ideas is through trigger warnings.
Before you can encounter a great work of literature or history or whatever, They will now offer a trigger warning, say, if you're prone to post-traumatic stress, you shouldn't read this.
If you've ever been in an alter, you shouldn't.
Oh, it's bad.
This would be bad for you.
So there's a new study that just came out in Clinical Psychological Science showed that people who see words with the warning or without the warning have exactly the same reaction.
The trigger warnings do nothing to alleviate the stress of people who go on to read them.
And it's actually even worse than this.
There was a Harvard study that came out last year.
It showed that trigger warnings make people less resilient.
And it can make reactions to triggering materials even worse.
So then what's the purpose?
Because in an academic context, or in a context of public discourse, you get the warning, okay, but you still have to grapple with the material.
Unless the real purpose is not psychological and not academic.
Trigger warnings are useless on that regard.
They're politically useful because they're really just about censorship.
They're a way to censor ideas and to censor great works and to censor great thinkers under the radar.
That's what it's all about.
It's even the case when it comes to popular speakers.
So I'm not just talking about Plato or Augustine or whatever, Mark Twain.
There's trigger warnings now on Huckleberry Finn.
I'm talking about popular, modern speakers.
A great example of this is Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson...
It was offered to be a visiting fellow at Cambridge University.
This makes sense.
Jordan Peterson is one of the most popular academics.
I mean, certainly the most popular academic of our age.
This is his moment.
And the Cambridge University Student Union complained.
They said that he called white privilege a myth, and this was unacceptable.
He doubted the scientific consensus on climate change.
He claimed that men can be victims of gender oppression, and he argued that the patriarchy is predicated on competence.
This is unacceptable.
They have to censor Jordan.
Now, the takeaway from this is profound for conservatives, because I think there are a lot of conservatives who think, hey, if I'm just kind of squishy, if I'm just one of the nice guys, if I'm just moderate, then the left won't censor me.
They can go after Donald Trump.
They can go after whoever, Janine Pirro, any of the people who are under fire.
They can go after them.
They'll never come after me.
I'm so reasonable.
I'm so moderate.
Doesn't matter.
The left doesn't go after you because of how conservative you are.
They go after you because of how prominent you are.
Jordan Peterson is not that conservative.
I like the guy.
I've always enjoyed talking to him.
We had a cigar with him, you know, a few months ago.
I enjoy talking to him.
He's not some rock-ribbed right-winger.
He wasn't, you know, wearing Brooks Brothers ties during the Reagan Revolution, I don't think.
He dares to contradict certain leftist orthodoxy, and he's very, very prominent.
If he were less prominent, they wouldn't worry as much about censoring him.
If other people were more prominent, they'd go after them.
That's what it's about.
It's not about the ideas.
It's about brute power.
I have to show you this, by the way, before we get to the mailbag today.
I was over in Michigan with Ben, and we had a good time.
There were all these planned protests, and so I got to talk to some of the people out there on the street.
They were holding big signs that said, trans women are women, and Shapiro's a white supremacist, and all that kind of stuff.
We just cut together a quick little clip.
take a look from my little field trip to Michigan, then we'll get to the mailbag.
White supremacy!
This is our university!
White supremacy!
I'm Michael Knowles, we're We're here at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, because Ben Shapiro is speaking tonight.
This has caused mayhem, protests, counter events.
We are going to speak to students to see what they think.
There are a lot of protests planned.
Yeah.
What's that about?
Oh, I don't know.
I guess Ben is just so scary.
I mean, he's like me, a five-foot-nothing Jew.
I mean...
It was kind of getting excited for the protesters, but I haven't seen any.
What is this coming up?
Oh, no.
It's happening.
It's here.
Is that Ben Shapiro's face on a magic mic thing?
Yes.
I believe that is Ben Shapiro's face on a naked male body.
Excuse me.
Hello.
You're here to protest that guy.
Yep.
Well, what group are you with?
We don't need a lot of stuff.
You say that he's gonna lie, that is the closest I've ever been to Ben Shapiro's naked body and I don't need any more of it.
What don't you like about Ben Shapiro?
He's pretty much what's wrong with this country.
Trans women are women.
So should trans women be allowed to compete in women's sports?
They're women.
Doesn't that obliterate the very category of women's sports?
No.
If they are truly women, then how is that any different than someone like, say, Rachel Dolezal, who is a white person who identifies as a black person?
I don't have the answer.
Trans women are women.
That's like...
If a trans woman has a penis, is that a biologically female penis?
Yes.
There's female penises.
Are there male uteruses?
Absolutely.
What are they so afraid of?
Why can't they just go listen to Ben's talk and then they can do their own talk later?
I mean, that's how you really make progress.
We're hoping that we get some people to come and actually listen and actually try and challenge their own views.
Yeah, we're not interested.
Would you like to...
Not a chance.
Would you like to?
I don't do media.
All right.
They want to stand, they want to protest, they want to hold up signs, but they don't want to explain what the signs mean.
We're here because we really care about the issues.
We want to make sure things are getting done about them.
Well, I think you're doing God's work out here.
Thank you very much.
And you say pineapples don't care about your feelings.
Yeah, a lot of people put it on pizza and they get really confused and stuff.
And there's so much debate about pineapples, but they don't really care about our feelings about whether it's on pizza or not.
Do you think Ben Shapiro is a white supremacist?
He's a Jew!
Trans women are women!
Trans women are women!
There is so much more to that...
I mean, some of them, though, it was so screechy that you couldn't even use the audio.
But they...
I understand why they don't want to engage in any sort of discussion.
Like, there was one woman I asked her, I said, you know, doesn't transgender ideology obliterate the category of women if men are basically just defining womanhood however they want, according to whatever drag queen caricature they want?
And she said, oh yeah, that's your gotcha question.
I said, it's not a gotcha question, it's a very basic question, given your premise.
And you can't answer it.
They can't answer it so they want to jump around in signs and wear weird-looking masks.
But that's fine.
Can't wait to go meet some more of them out on the street.
Let's get to the mailbag.
First question from Troy.
Hey Michael, what do you think would happen if the Democratic Party, to the Democratic Party, if a black Republican presidential candidate ran for office?
How would this play into the left's identity politics?
Thanks, Kennedy.
Hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Michael.
It wouldn't matter at all.
They would call us racist.
That's what would happen.
They could nominate the oldest, whitest, straightest, most manly guy in the world.
Probably not the most manly guy if we're talking about the Democratic nomination.
That's probably not going to happen.
But they could nominate the whitest person ever.
We could nominate Wesley Snipes to be the Republican nominee for president.
They would call us racist.
They'd do this anyway.
And they call black people who are conservative Uncle Toms.
They do this to Clarence Thomas.
We have a black Supreme Court justice, one of the greatest justices in the history of the court, probably the most conservative justice in the history of the court.
And they say he's an idiot.
He's a race traitor.
That's all they do.
They would do it to us as well.
They do this to women.
They say Republicans are sexist.
So, you know, we nominated a woman for vice president in 2008.
We had a female presidential candidate in 2016.
We have a ton of women serving in top roles in the Trump administration.
First woman ever to win a presidential campaign is the campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway.
What did they do for her?
All they do is promote her husband saying rude and awful things about her and her boss.
So it wouldn't matter at all.
You're assuming that logic would play some role in the left's attacks on the right.
It's not...
The left's attacks on the right are not because of logic or because of ideas.
It's all about tearing down tradition and conservative thought.
And so they're going to do it anyway, even if it doesn't make sense.
From Stan.
How you doing, Mike?
I know you and sweet little old Lisa are happily married.
But hypothetically, if she were to be unfaithful to you...
How would you handle the situation?
Is adultery a good enough reason to divorce someone even if they did it once?
I know the Bible says till death do us part, but I think that cheating is a horrible act.
I asked Ben the same question a couple weeks ago.
He said he'd stay with his wife for the sake of the kids, but I want to know your thoughts.
Thanks.
Love the show.
Divorce is not permissible.
That's the beginning and end of it.
Divorce is not permissible.
In the case of emotional or physical abuse, a separation could be permissible or even morally obligatory, or a civil divorce could be obligatory.
But this does not dissolve the sacramental union of marriage.
Now, in some cases, annulment recognizes, not divorce, but that a marriage was never legitimate in the first place.
If you find out, you know, you're married to your wife for 30 years and you find out she's your sister.
That's not a legitimate marriage.
And so, that marriage would be annulled.
There is no exception to this rule for adultery.
Some people, I think, want to argue that in the Gospels, Christ makes an exception for adultery.
Those arguments are extraordinarily weak and create a lot of perverse moral incentives.
There's really not a lot of evidence for that.
So, I would think that at my best, I would...
Probably throw the guy out a window.
That wouldn't be me at my best, but that would certainly be what I would want to do.
But I like to think at my best, I would never get a divorce.
I'm pretty forceful on that.
Now, that's a horrible thing if your wife cheats on you.
It's really hard, too, especially because typically it's men who stray, because men very often think with organs that they shouldn't be thinking with, more so than women do.
And so it is a different situation when a man cheats on his wife and when a woman cheats on her husband.
They're both horrific for a marriage, but...
You're even talking about the less common version, so it's incredibly hard.
I don't know how I would react in that situation.
I don't know how I would get over it.
I don't know how I would react to it.
But it's not a legitimate cause for divorce.
Nope.
Sorry.
Or maybe that's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
From Nicholas.
Dear Knowles, my older brother refers to you as Daddy Knowles.
What do you think about this?
I love it when they call me Big Papa.
And I only smoke stokes when they roll proper.
That's what I think.
From Christian.
Dear sir, I'm a pretty good Christian, but I admit that a vice of mine is that I like to listen to and partake in edgier comedy like Adam Carolla and Gavin McGinnis.
I know it is not the most wholesome comedy, but I find them very funny and I do not think this causes me to sin.
Can I keep listening?
Very respectfully, Christian.
Yeah, of course.
That's not a sin.
It's not a sin to listen to dirty comics.
Come on.
Both of those guys are very funny.
No, that's not at all.
But we've really broadened the definition of vice and sin if we think that listening to the Adam Carolla podcast is a sin.
Now, you might be wasting time or you might be being lazy.
I guess that could be a sin.
But the comedy itself, no.
Comedy is a nice thing.
Comedy is one of the consolations of life.
Go on.
Enjoy the podcast.
Make sure every day, once you finish listening to my podcast, you're more than welcome to go on and listen to Adam or Gavin.
From Joshua.
Local students in my state, Bates College, Michigan, found signs posted around campus that says it's okay to be white.
Obviously, campus officials, local authorities, and the local media are freaking out over this.
What are your thoughts?
This was a pretty smart PR campaign by white racial politics activists.
It's okay to be white.
Why is this a good campaign?
Because nobody but a bigot could disagree with that statement.
Of course it's okay to be white.
It's not terrible to be white.
It's okay to be black.
It's okay to be Hispanic.
It's okay to be Taiwanese.
Yeah, it's okay to have certain immutable physical characteristics.
Now, what do the signs imply?
What the signs are trying to do is something that racial activists have tried to do for a long time, which is raise a white racial consciousness.
In some ways, this reaction should be totally expected.
The columnist Sam Francis predicted this.
He sort of called for it, which is that if the left is going to embrace racial politics for every other racial group, then it...
And by the way, if those racial groups are going to categorize whiteness as a legitimate category, if those intersectional politics people will say whiteness is a racial category, then it makes perfect sense that the people that they are criticizing and attacking for being then it makes perfect sense that the people that they are criticizing and attacking for being white are going to It's like my friend Mr. Klavan always says, bigotry turns the other person into what you say they are.
I think there could be a legitimate critique of whiteness, per se, because perhaps the differences between Italians and Irishmen are legitimate, are distinct, are profound.
And maybe to classify them as one race is painting with too broad a brush.
However, because the left has embraced racial identity politics, there is now a white racial consciousness.
Some people think this is the only way forward to preserve Western civilization.
I think that's total bunk, and I think it's mistaking the cart for the horse and the tail wagging the dog.
The foundation of Western civilization is not physical.
It's not a physical trait.
It's not even cultural.
It's certainly not political.
It's religious.
Hilaire Belloc said, Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe.
That is what creates Western civilization, is Christianity, the faith.
From there, because culture is downstream of religion, because culture is downstream of the cult, you get Western culture, and from there you get Western politics.
And from there, as the West came into geographic form and expanded to other places, you get certain racial characteristics.
But I think it's really backwards, and it's an easy mistake to make, but it's one that all of these racial politics guys make.
Certainly on the left, but on the right too.
From...
Hi, Michael.
Do you think AOC has a legitimate chance in 2024 to win the primary or general election?
I thought she was a guarantee for the primary until recent polling shows a dip in approval.
How do you see the trend moving from here?
Thanks.
Love the show.
She's very good at getting attention, but she's only gotten attention now for six months.
She hasn't been in the public eye for very long.
We're going to see if she flames out or if she has staying power.
Donald Trump is also good at getting attention, and he has consistently gotten attention for 40 years, which is why he was a more legitimate pop culture candidate than AOC or somebody like that.
She will be 35 before Election Day in 2024, meaning she could—I guess she could be elected. It would make her certainly the youngest president in American history, so the likelihood that she goes anywhere, I'm not so sure— And she's just so ignorant and she's so bad when she's not reading scripted remarks that something tells me if she got onto a debate stage she would be blown out of the water, even with a radicalized Democrat party.
But we'll have to wait and see.
From Seamus.
Hi, Michael.
I recently heard the argument that the fusing of fiscal and social conservatism within the same political movement is incoherent as fiscal conservatism and capitalism are not philosophically connected to the preservation of traditional social values.
How would you respond to this claim?
Well, we're using very broad terms.
However, I don't really buy that premise.
Because if we're talking about fiscal conservatism as globalized free markets with no tariffs whatsoever and no thought to American workers and no thought to American industry, then, yeah, I'm not so sure that that makes a whole lot of sense with social conservatism or traditionalism.
However, if we're talking about fiscal conservatism as protecting private property, then that's quite conservative.
We're talking about it as lower tax rates, lower property tax rates especially, less corporatism, less cronyism.
Yeah, I think that has a whole lot to do with social conservatism.
It is certainly the case that when you have The long-standing, landed, propertied interests that keep their own property, that is going to be a great bulwark against radical social change and radical social evolution.
When you have a system that recognizes private property rights as a moral imperative rather than just some sort of efficient utilitarian economic design, then you have a very good bulwark against radical social engineering and revolution.
So in that case, I think there is a very good argument for fiscal conservatism And social conservatism.
You just have to be careful to define fiscal conservatism and not simply equate it with some open borders, constant open trade of libertarianism, basically, because those are not the same thing.
Okay, that's our show.
I'm in Missouri tonight.
I'm going to be giving a speech at Truman State University.
So if you're in Kirksville, Missouri, swing on by.
Come on by.
Just a quick three-hour drive from the Kansas City airport.
Otherwise, I will see you on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Walsh Show today, we will talk about what I've noticed.
A certain trend is this merging of celebrity and politician, where more and more politicians are attracting fans rather than supporters, you know.
And I will explain why, in my opinion, we should never be fans of politicians.
We should only ever be, at most, cautious, skeptical supporters.
Also today, a video of a hunter killing a sleeping lion in Africa has provoked outrage online.
We'll talk about that and we'll discuss the ethics of big game hunting.
