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April 17, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:56
Ep. 333 - Liberation By Fire

Rolling Stone celebrates the burning of Notre Dame as “an act of liberation.” Meanwhile, Library Journal condemns libraries as tools of white supremacy, and anti-white Democrats only want to nominate a white guy. We will analyze how the West lost its mind. Date: 04-17-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Rolling Stone magazine celebrates the burning of Notre Dame as an act of liberation.
Meanwhile, Library Journal condemns libraries as tools of white supremacy.
And anti-white Democrats only want to nominate a white guy for president.
We will analyze how the West lost its mind.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I hate to say I told you so.
No, I love to say I told you so.
And I told you so yesterday.
What would happen when we start talking about rebuilding Notre Dame?
We just don't have the intellectual and spiritual and moral and religious and cultural tools to be able to do it.
And Rolling Stone magazine proved this yesterday in one of the most egregious and outrageous articles I've read in a long time.
But it's actually a worthwhile article because it does accurately embody the problem that the West is facing right now.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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You might have seen this going around Twitter.
This was making the rounds yesterday from Rolling Stone.
Rolling Stone put out an article that said, How should France rebuild Notre Dame?
Much of the structure survived the blaze, but as rebuilding efforts move forward, the country will be left with a big question.
What does the cathedral mean to 21st century France?
This is the question.
What are we rebuilding?
What country is rebuilding it?
What is France?
When Notre Dame was built 800 years ago, France was entirely animated by Christianity, by the church.
Eight centuries later, things have changed dramatically.
What would it be?
Rolling Stone wants to make sure that you don't miss the point that they're making.
They put it in really gross terms.
But for some people in France, Notre Dame has always served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution, and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place.
The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation, says Patricio Del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University.
Wow.
First of all, leave it to the American universities.
Leave it to Harvard.
This is the kind of person who is teaching your children.
The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation.
Imagine for just a second if the Al-Haram mosque in Mecca burned down, or half of it burned down, or the roof collapsed.
Imagine that.
And then imagine Rolling Stone writing and saying, you know, for many people, the burning down of that mosque, which was so overburdened with meaning, felt like an act of liberation.
I don't think they would say that, would they?
What does it even mean to be overburdened with meaning?
Actually, it does have a meaning.
It has a meaning in the long history of Western thought.
The meaning here is the central theme of Western modernity, which is liberation or emancipation.
Or whatever you want to call it.
Call it liberation.
I mean, this is the major theme of the West.
This is the dominant theme of liberalism.
Capital L liberalism.
Classical liberalism.
Left-wing liberalism.
Liberalism itself.
We sometimes forget, because liberals hate freedom so much, it seems, in this modern time, that liberalism is about freeing yourself.
It's about liberation.
Many times you'll hear conservative critics say, liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.
So this kind of crazy, decadent, suicidal culture that we're living in now is the inevitable result of the ideas of liberalism.
When people talk about that, this is what they're talking about.
This is what happens at the radical extreme of liberation.
Because it begins, especially in the modern era, with liberation first from institutions, then from the ideas themselves.
So it always begins with the institutions.
And you say, well, I don't want to just be tied to some silly, deeply flawed institution.
So I'm going to divorce myself from the institution, then I'm going to...
Be able to live in this pure realm of ideas, but it doesn't really work out that way.
What happens is you divorce yourself from the institution, then you divorce yourself from the ideas.
You see this most obviously in the church.
So, beginning...
I mean, this is a process that now has gone on in our civilization for a thousand years, certainly since the Protestant Revolution.
You see a divorce from the church, then a divorce from religion itself.
So even today, plenty of people who grow up and go into their local church with their families, grow up every week, maybe they go to Bible study or something...
What you see on the trend lines is those people who then leave the church, they'll say, well, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious.
Because the church, whatever church you belong to, the Baptist church, the Methodist church, the Anglican church, Catholic church, whatever church you belong to, You can always say it's a deeply flawed institution.
Obviously, the Catholic Church is a deeply flawed institution.
Hilaire Belloc, one of the most famous Catholic writers ever, said that the proof of the divinity of the Catholic Church is the fact that it still exists, because any merely human institution that was conducted with such knavish imbecility would certainly not have survived a fortnight.
Obviously you can point to all of these other religious institutions as well.
You can point to the problems in the Methodist Church or the Baptist Church or the Evangelical Church or whatever.
So you say, okay, I want to leave this deeply flawed institution and that way I'll have a purer sense of religion.
I've liberated myself, so now I'm just in the realm of ideas.
But spiritual but not religious, or religious but not organized religious, or eventually you just divorce yourself from the ideas as well.
Think about what's happened to national institutions.
First you liberate yourself from national institutions, civic institutions, then you divorce yourself from the nation itself.
We've seen our Our commitment to religious institutions declined dramatically over the past 40 years.
What happened?
Trailed it by about 10 or 20 years?
People's declining in religiosity itself.
As people pull away from the Boy Scouts and the Lions Club and other civic institutions, what have we seen trailing it by a couple decades is...
Less of an identity with the nation itself.
How about familial institutions?
As we liberate ourselves from the institutions of the family, what happens?
We isolate ourselves from family ties themselves.
We have a society that has never been more lonely, never been more isolated.
This happens.
This is what Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservative thought, This is what he saw as a perverse liberation.
In one of his most famous excerpts from Reflections on the Revolution in France, he wrote, The age of chivalry is gone, that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Never, never more shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom." The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment, and heroic enterprise is gone.
This is a very hard statement for a modern Western person to hear.
For a classical liberal or a modern liberal or a leftist liberal or whatever, to hear that dignified obedience, that proud submission, that subordination of the heart which kept alive even in servitude itself and exalted freedom.
What Burke is addressing here is that you can't just liberate yourself forever.
You can't just keep liberating and liberating and liberating.
Ultimately, you'll liberate yourself from all meaning.
You'll liberate yourself from everything that matters.
You'll liberate yourself from yourself.
There is this shallow liberty, this shallow freedom.
And then there is an exalted freedom which actually requires some subservience.
It actually requires some obedience.
We're in Holy Week now and...
Christ, who comes to free people from sin, free us from our own damnation, how does he come?
Does he come as a guy who's totally liberated, who's walking around like a modern 20th century liberated hippie guy?
No.
He comes as a servant.
He is serving.
He is submitting to the will of his Father.
He's serving others.
So what is the ultimate liberation?
Rolling Stone tells us.
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So what is the ultimate liberation?
Rolling Stone tells us the ultimate liberation here is liberation from meaning.
They write this here, they say, that the church, the cathedral of Notre Dame, was overburdened with meaning.
What does it mean to be overburdened with meaning?
I love meaning.
When you get a gift, do you really care about the material gift itself?
No, you always say it's the thought that counts.
What we care about is the meaning, is the significance.
If we don't care about meaning, then everything is just insignificant matter.
Everything is just flesh.
Everything is just stuff.
Everything is senseless.
Meaning is what counts.
So the ultimate liberation here is the liberation from meaning.
You can think about sexual liberation.
I guess that's the most recent, most revolutionary one.
Sexual liberation is when you separate sex from meaning.
And this is a great example, because meaningful sex carries transcendent qualities.
Meaningful sex is the two souls coming together, being united, becoming one flesh, becoming one spirit, is all of this stuff.
And meaningless sex is a bunch of filthy people doing something shameful.
It's the same physical act.
But in one of them, you have this transcendent, wonderful, joyful, loving feeling.
And in the other one, you take a walk of shame in the morning.
You say, why did I have that extra drink?
What was I thinking?
That's what meaning does.
Liberation from meaning ultimately is destruction.
It has to be destruction.
It's burning it all to the ground.
You don't liberate yourself from meaning by adding meaning.
You can't do that.
And when we build things, we add meaning.
We develop.
When you take that meaning away, it just turns to rubble.
It turns to ash.
You actually see this not just in the ashes of the cathedral at Notre Dame.
You see this in the transgender ideological movement.
Obviously, I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days after there was a near riot at the University of Missouri-Kansas City because I made the statement that men are not women.
I've thought, why is this issue, why is this transgender movement dominating the national conversation?
Why was I attacked by some weirdo with a squirt gun full of chemicals for saying that men are not women?
By all accounts, the number of people who are confused about their gender is about 0.2 to 0.4% of the population.
There are some new recent estimates that put this number much, much higher, that'll put it at...
Double, basically, at 0.6% of the population.
Even if that is the case, We're talking about this rare psychological disorder that does not affect 99.4% of the population.
99.4% of the population, at least, maybe 99.8% of the population, does not have this rare condition, and yet it is dominating all political discourse, social discourse, bathrooms, pronouns, all this stuff.
Why?
What is it about?
Is it just because left-wingers have completely gone insane and focused on this one little trivial myopic topic?
No.
It's because this is the theme of liberation.
This is the theme that defines Western modernity.
Liberating yourself from your own nature.
Liberating yourself from the basic fact of your nature, which is sex.
It's how we get our nature in the first place.
Birds do it, bees do it, even sentimental trees do it.
It is from our sexual nature that we're born, that we're begotten in the first place.
And, as all those silly scientific studies show, men then think about sex every, what,.2 seconds or something?
I don't know, whatever they say it is.
It's not that we're just focusing on some little frivolous thing.
It's that the impulses of liberalism are naturally pushing us toward this madness.
This is not just about some small percentage of people who have this condition.
It's about ultimate liberation from our nature.
You know, the communists and the socialists did this all the time.
They say, we're going to remake human nature.
Human nature is greedy and selfish and broken and fallen and sinful.
It doesn't need to be, though.
Well, no, that's okay.
We'll just fix it.
This was what the radicalism of the French Revolution did.
And that's what this new gender ideology is trying to do as well.
There was an article in Scientific American that came out, I think just today, it either came out yesterday or this morning, that is now advocating for genderless pronouns.
They want to use the singular they.
So it would be like, they is really hungry.
Michael is really hungry.
They is really hungry.
Maybe it's they are really hungry.
Maybe they conjugate the verb as though it's plural, too, even though it's referring to a singular.
It's very confusing.
The first question, of course, is why does Scientific American have an opinion about pronouns at all?
Why on earth does Scientific American think that they can tell me how to destroy the English language?
It's not...
The literary American, it's not the grammatical American, it's the scientific American.
Why are they weighing in on this aspect of culture?
It's because, first of all, the mainstream media broadly all have this leftward push, and because this is what's coming out of the nature of the West, the nature of modernity.
When we think of the modern era, what do we think of?
We first think of science.
We think of Western science exploding.
In the, I don't know, 16th or 17th centuries.
Obviously, there were many scientific advancements before that, but modern people in the West don't want to admit it.
But that's what we think of science, and along with science, we have this theme of liberation.
That's the first question.
Why does Scientific American have an opinion on pronouns at all?
The second question has even greater irony, which is, why is Scientific American accepting a completely unscientific premise?
The premise here of the pronouns is that men are not necessarily men and women are not necessarily women.
And there aren't necessarily only two biological sexes.
I don't know, maybe there are 20 or 30 or 56 genders, like Facebook says.
The premise here is completely unscientific.
But the premises are the key.
The premises actually are the key, because ultimately, what are we trying to liberate ourselves from?
When we're thinking about it, about logic, when we're thinking about arguments, we're trying to separate ourselves from premises.
This is the kind of now cliche political line.
They'll say, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
That sums it up.
That actually does sum it up.
You have to begin any train of thought with premises.
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing, to quote the great philosopher, what's that guy's name?
Billy Preston, one of the great political thinkers of 1970s rock music.
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
You have to begin with premises.
And because we're so obsessed in the West with progress, we've forgotten that all trains of thought require premises.
All logic, all argumentation is based on certain fundamental axioms that you can't prove.
It's based on certain fundamental premises, fundamental principles that you just can't prove.
You can't begin with nothing and get something.
You can't...
We like to think that we can do that.
We like to think that we can get all of this creation, all of this sense and logic and meaning and matter and all this stuff without a creator.
We have creation, all of which is contingent, but we think we can get there without an unmoved mover, a creator.
We think that...
If we spin something out of nothing, that will be the pure idea.
This is the suicidal idea of the West.
Arguments and beliefs begin with first principles.
If you don't assume the first principles, you will eat your own society.
You will absolutely destroy it.
You get nothing.
And we are uncomfortable with our premises.
We're now uncomfortable with the fact that we have premises.
So what the Scientific American thinks here is they're thinking, well, listen, we want to take away all bias, all prejudice, all assumptions, all questions of faith, We will apply this even to biological sex.
We will apply this even to questions of nature.
Instead of he or she or him or her, we'll get rid of that.
That might be prejudicial.
That might be biased.
We'll just have they.
That seems less biased.
That seems less prejudicial.
That seems to make fewer assumptions.
Except it's not true.
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This is a fact of nature.
What the Scientific American wants to do is reject scientific premises.
So they think, they think that they, the they singular pronoun, is totally inclusive.
It's totally unbiased.
It's totally unprejudicial.
Actually, it's just a different premise.
It's just a different prejudice.
It's just a different leap of faith.
To say that sex is meaningless, that there isn't really no biological sex, that sex can change and it's mutable, that's just a different premise.
And one that's really difficult to stomach.
I mean, this is why people have never arrived at this idea.
That's why we've only started thinking this for the last five seconds or so.
What scientific American is trying to escape, to liberate themselves from this overburden of meaning, all they're doing...
Is assuming something new.
And they'll get sick of this one.
They'll get rid of the singular day.
They'll move on to something else.
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And you can't be.
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This is what we're doing now.
We're demanding to be everything to everybody.
That's all we want.
We don't want to offend anybody.
This is why everyone is so timid now in modern American culture.
They say, well, and I just, I feel like.
I don't want to offend you.
I don't want to state an opinion or a fact.
I won't even say I think.
I won't even say I believe.
I'll just say I feel like.
When I hang out with my left-wing friends, I notice this.
They never disagree with each other.
I mean, they do, obviously.
People have disagreements.
They have different points of view.
But they'll never openly disagree with one another.
They'll say, yeah, yeah, no, that's true.
That's true.
Some guy says, yeah, you know, I think that the moon is made of green cheese.
You say, yeah, yeah, no, I see that.
I see that.
That's true.
Um...
Yeah, but also maybe it's made of rock.
You know, but your opinion's true, too, because you can't be wrong, because it's cool.
It's all good.
It's all the same.
It's all right.
It's all true.
This is why universities now have offices of diversity and inclusion.
How Orwellian does that sound?
If you told a guy, if you took a time machine back to the way, way back days of like seven years ago, and you said that a university would have an office of diversity and inclusion, they would say, what kind of Orwellian nonsense are you talking about?
What on earth does that mean?
But it's the inclusion.
You want to bring people in.
You want to...
Nothing can be exclusively true.
Everything has to be true.
Everything has to feel good.
Everyone has to be included.
You know, when I was in college, the president of the college was a left-wing guy, for sure.
But he had a more old-school liberalism, an earlier-stage liberalism before this crazy liberation from meaning.
And he one time said something very profound.
He said, the truth is arrogant.
The truth is arrogant.
What does that mean?
The truth is exclusive.
The truth is not inclusive.
The truth would not do very well if he got called into the dean of diversity and inclusion.
True statements exclude untrue statements.
True conclusions from certain premises exclude other conclusions.
You can't be everything to everybody.
I had a friend of mine, this great guy, left-wing kind of guy, and we were talking about religion and he said, why can't all religions be true?
You know, I mean, you know, man, why can't you be Christian and Buddhist and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu?
Why can't you just be like all of those things?
You can't be all of those things because they make conflicting claims.
Two plus two cannot at the same time equal four and equal five.
God cannot at the same time have one nature and then have a nature that contradicts that nature.
Those two opposing things cannot be true at once.
You can't be everything to everybody.
A painting is a painting because it's not a photograph.
Coffee is coffee because it's not orange soda.
Why can't it be both?
It can't be both.
A cathedral is a cathedral.
Because it's not a mosque.
It's not a mosque.
Notre Dame is not a mosque.
It's not a synagogue.
It's not a whatever Buddhists have.
I don't know what Buddhists have.
It's not a brunch cafe.
It isn't those things.
Clearly they're very upset about this.
That certain things cannot be true at once.
The left hates this fact.
The left hates the fact that a thing cannot be a different thing.
Talia Lavin of the Washington Post went after Ben yesterday.
Went after little old Ben Shapiro because...
Ben called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization.
So, she writes in the Washington Post, quote, Shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame, quote, a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
Given the already raging rumors about potential Muslim involvement, these tweets evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West that is already part of numerous far-right narratives.
What?
So Ben said that Notre Dame is a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
This is obviously true.
You see it in the facades.
You see it in the Old Testament imagery in Notre Dame.
You see it in the New Testament imagery.
You see this is obviously a monument to Western civilization.
It's an embodiment of Western civilization.
And she said that by even using that phrase, by saying that Notre Dame is Western, is Judeo-Christian, it is therefore anti-Muslim.
Because it's not Muslim.
Notre Dame's not Muslim.
It's Christian.
Judeo-Christian in so much as Christ is a Jew.
And therefore it's not Buddhist, it's not Hindu, it's not Muslim, it's not those things.
Even the phrase Western Civilization...
is now considered too exclusive for the left.
And this is the irony, because Western civilization is the only inclusive civilization in history.
Western civilization is the only civilization that says, come on, come in, come in, you can be part of this.
Obviously in America, anybody can be an American.
Americans look completely different.
If you point to someone and you say, is that person an American?
You couldn't tell by the color of his skin, or the way he looks, or where he's from, or even how he talks.
This is even true in Europe.
It's less true because these countries are based on peoples.
France is based on the Franks.
England is based on the Angles.
But even in Europe you have people, especially after colonialism, especially after imperialism, Europe bringing in all of these people to Western civilization, spreading Western civilization.
So you've got the most inclusive civilization in history, and yet for liberals, for the left, it's too exclusive.
For the liberators, it's too exclusive.
And this is why we can't rebuild Notre Dame.
We can't do it.
Because we're too busy liberating ourselves from our civilization.
We're too busy liberating ourselves even from the thing that defines us.
Emmanuel Macron, the head of France, promised to rebuild Notre Dame more beautifully than before.
Now, I see he's trying to make the country feel better.
They've just lost this pillar of their country and their civilization.
You're not going to rebuild Notre Dame more beautifully than before.
It's not going to happen.
Because the trouble here is that beauty is particular.
Homogeneity is sterile.
It's clinical.
It's ugly.
It's unpleasant.
Beauty is particular.
Beauty is in that spire of Notre Dame that we saw collapse in flames.
Beauty is in every little nook and cranny of every little statue on that facade.
You'll notice in modern architecture, everything is flat, homogenous, sterile.
It's all the same.
There's nothing particular about it.
Think of modern office buildings.
Think of modern churches.
Modern churches and Notre Dame, they don't even look like they're in the same category.
Modern show, they're all sleek.
They're all flat.
They're all...
You can put on them any idea you want.
There's nothing particular about them.
But the beautiful ancient cathedrals and medieval cathedrals, those are particular.
And it's something in our whole culture.
We want to say, there's no such thing as men and women.
There's no such thing as differences of thought or differences of idea.
There's no such thing as any of that.
It's all the same.
It's all the same.
But of course not.
Beauty is particular.
Think about why you are attracted to your girlfriend or your spouse or your husband or your boyfriend or whatever.
Is it because they're completely plain-looking and they look exactly like everybody else and everything's exactly the same?
No.
It's her eyes or her nose or her other things, maybe, or her hair, which is why Joe Biden is attracted to certain women, many women.
It's because of these particular things.
If I said, describe your wife to me, You wouldn't say, she's completely plain.
She looks exactly like everybody else.
No, you wouldn't.
You would go on about these particular things.
The same is true of ideas.
The culture that created Notre Dame, that was able to build Notre Dame Cathedral, is a very particular one.
It's particularly a culture shaped by a particular man who is God incarnate, who lived in a particular place at a particular time, who was crucified at a particular time, who conquered death and rose again on a particular day, who formed a particular church that spread throughout particular places.
That's Where that beauty comes from.
That's where every statue on the facade of Notre Dame, every relic, every work of art, every beautiful aspect of architecture comes from that particularity, not from this plain Jane sterility.
It's one of the great lies of our era that detail and particular things are bad and plain, generic, clinical, cynical things are good.
This is a great lie, but it does affect the way that we think.
It affects our very thought.
There was a tweet that came out yesterday from Library Journal.
Which I haven't subscribed in years to Library Journal.
I don't know about you.
There's apparently a journal called Library Journal.
And Library Journal now believes that libraries are tools of white supremacy.
If it weren't so hilarious, it would be tragic.
And it is tragic.
Library Journal sent out this tweet.
They said, quote, Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness in their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries.
Which I gotta tell you, if I were an ethnic minority, I would be very offended by that tweet.
Because what you're saying is that books are white.
Reading is a white activity.
Writing is a white activity.
Following arguments to their logical conclusion, that's a white activity.
That's whiteness itself.
It's a very offensive statement to make.
And what Library Journal was doing is linking to this weirdo blogger lady, Sophia Lung.
Lyon.
And so I read the blog entry in so much as it was...
Coherent or understandable, I read it, and this is what she wrote, quote, If you look at any United States library's collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections, books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc., are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things or ideas, people and things they stole from people of color and then claimed as white property.
Whatever that means.
So she says most of the collections are written by white dudes.
This is true.
Most of the people in the history of Western civilization are white dudes.
That's true.
And it's a testament to Western civilization, actually, that they're able to include other people who don't look like them.
Other civilizations don't do that.
But then she goes and says white ideas.
What's a white idea?
What's a white idea?
Inclusion and diversity?
I guess that's a white idea.
It's kind of ironic, isn't it?
It does appear to be a white idea.
The civilization of white people came up with those ideas and then brought everybody else in.
That's a pretty good idea.
I guess it's a white idea that becomes everybody's idea.
But it's also a distrust of ideas themselves.
It's saying even ideas are tribal.
We cannot actually communicate.
What is the purpose of a book?
The purpose of a book is to put down ideas, narratives, thoughts, artwork, and you put them out of your own head, you put them down on paper, then you hand it to somebody else, and then that person can have those ideas in their head.
It is communication.
It's bridging gaps between peoples.
And what Sarah Lung, Sophia Lung and Library Journal are saying is, no, that is not possible.
Communication is not possible.
That premise is not possible.
And then, of course, she contradicts herself because she says they're white ideas stolen from people of color.
So I guess they're people of color ideas.
I don't know what those ideas are either.
And then they're claimed as white property.
Whatever that is.
Okay.
And Library Journal is posting this.
This is the irony, right?
You've got Library Journal saying that libraries are terrible.
This is a telling example of what the West is doing constantly.
This is a telling example.
They're just constantly saying we hate ourselves, we hate our peoples, we hate our institutions, we hate our culture, we hate our religion, we hate our nations.
It's the suicide of the West.
This This is what is meant by that phrase.
This is the suicide of the West.
And this also helps to explain the madness that you see with these left-wingers.
The other day, when I was in Kansas City, and I'm looking there at these crazy protesters who were shrieking and screaming, and they said, we're oppressed!
And they've got this far-off, wacky look in their eye.
I saw madness.
I saw insanity.
Texas A&M last night, the topic of the discussion with me and Drew was, can we survive the crazy left?
This is a madness, but it's a madness born not of some psychological condition, but of a philosophical condition of erasing our own premises.
Because when you go back far enough and you say, okay, I'm going to erase our political institutions.
I'm going to erase our cultural institutions.
I'm going to erase our religious institutions.
I'm going to erase our assumptions.
Then you're left with nothing.
You're left with a blank mind.
This is what is meant by the phrase, when the left always says, you've got to open your mind.
Conservatives are closed-minded.
This is always ironic, because conservatives are much more willing to entertain different ideas than left-wingers are.
However, they say you've got to be open-minded, open-minded.
And what the left does, they do open their minds.
They open their minds so much that their brains fall out.
And so there's nothing in there.
It's like you could play Pong all day inside the head.
Because there's nothing in there.
And this is by design.
This is why the left always says we've got to listen to the children.
Listen, the wisdom from the mouths of babes.
We've got to listen.
Because it's an elevation of ignorance.
Because they think that knowledge, wisdom, maturity, ideas, premises, conclusions, all of that, what that really does, is it just amounts to bias and prejudice and bigotry and exclusion.
Because the truth is arrogant.
So what you've got to do is get all of that out of there.
So little children who are completely ignorant, they don't know anything...
They're the ones we should listen to.
That's why we need to lower the voting age.
Because they know.
Those little children, because they have nothing going on in their heads, they are the most likely to give us a good government, to give us a good culture, because they're not filled with bias, they're not filled with prejudice.
This is ultimately what the left always does, is attack the tradition.
This is what liberalism ultimately is liberating us from.
How do we find meaning?
How do we find our history?
How do we find our culture?
It's in traditions.
This is why what conservatism ultimately boils down to is the tradition.
What unifies them all is basically a defense of the tradition, maybe one aspect of the tradition over another, but that's what it is.
And it's why intersectionality makes sense to left-wingers.
It's because even if you've got various victim groups who all hate each other, who all disagree with each other, who are skeptical of one another...
What they all have in common is they want to attack the tradition.
They want to destroy it.
They want to burn it down to rubble.
They want to liberate themselves from it.
They want to emancipate themselves from it.
And the only way to liberate and emancipate yourself from meaning is to burn it down.
And once it's burned down, once it's in ashes, then the left-wing, liberal, liberating innovator comes in and says, we will rebuild it more beautifully than before.
This is what they told us during the communist revolutions.
We're going to burn down human nature, we're going to send them all off to the gulags, but we're going to rebuild it more beautifully than before.
Every totalitarian system.
And it's what the naive Emmanuel Macron is saying.
We are going to take the ashes of this cathedral and rebuild it more beautifully than before.
Rebuild it on what?
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
A sad note to end on, but it does explain the madness.
It does go a long way to explain our current cultural madness.
Is there some way to restore sanity?
Perhaps there is.
But we can't burn things down.
It takes 200 years to build a cathedral.
It stands for 800 years.
You can burn it down in 66 minutes.
Are we willing to not just let the whole world burn?
Are we willing to rebuild it?
How are we going to rebuild it?
We're going to have to start rebuilding ourselves.
Rebuilding our civilization.
That's it.
Alright, we'll get to much more tomorrow.
There's always more to get to, but we'll have to do it tomorrow.
I'm flying out.
I'm probably going to miss my flight.
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 Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
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.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Mueller Report is scheduled to be released tomorrow.
The press and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are already spinning it every which way, but the one way that tells the truth.
That's on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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