All Episodes
Previous Next
May 16, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:23
Ep. 350 - The SAT Now Tests For Victimhood

The College Board has announced that its revised SAT test will now give students a victimhood score. Then, a 23rd confirmed candidate enters the 2020 Democrat race for president, right-wingers question the new pro-life laws, and finally the Mailbag! Date: 5-16-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The college board has announced that its revised SAT test will now give students a victimhood score.
We will examine how grievance became the left's most prized currency and why the new SAT is bad news for everybody.
Then a 23rd confirmed candidate enters the 2020 Democrat race for president and this one may be the worst of them all.
Then I will respond to To abortion law criticisms from right-wingers.
Some have been directed at me personally.
And finally, The Mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
Obviously, we've been covering abortion all week because of these laws.
There are now more laws.
Missouri's state Senate has just passed a highly restrictive abortion law, a heartbeat bill.
I told you that was going to happen after I met with the Missouri state senators last week.
Now it has.
Louisiana is about to pass one.
The governor of Alabama, who is a woman, just signed that heartbeat law.
It is all happening right now.
This is the pro-life moment.
As Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt, things happen gradually and then suddenly.
The pro-life movement has been gradual.
Now it is suddenly all happening.
So we will get to that later.
I want to talk about this SAT scandal because the college cheating scandal has gone mainstream.
Then we've got to get to Bill de Blasio.
But first, let me tell you how good I feel.
Not just because of all the great news we've had this week.
I feel good because I feel safe.
I feel secure.
And part of that is because of wise company.
If things go wrong and you've got to get out of Dodge and you can't rely on all the modern niceties that we have, it's important to make sure that you and your family are protected.
Wise Company takes an innovative approach in providing dependable, simple, and affordable freeze-dried food for emergency preparedness and outdoor use.
This is important, too, by the way, not just for when the zombie apocalypse hits, but for natural disasters as well.
I live in Southern California.
They keep telling us every five months, they say, the big earthquake is about to happen.
We're due for the big one.
We're 50 years overdue.
It can be a natural disaster.
And at least I feel that I, sweet little Elisa, my family are safe.
Wise company meals are designed to protect your most valuable asset, your family.
When government resources are strained, it can be days, if not weeks, before you can get fresh food and water.
And you can't rely on someone else.
You have to rely on yourself.
You know this.
You know a lot about personal responsibility.
You can't know what tomorrow may bring, but you can have peace of mind knowing that you'll be ready with all you need.
Don't put yourself in a situation where you need something and you don't have it and you can't get it.
All the ingredients from Wise Company...
Are chef prepared internally by Wise Company.
Wise Emergency Food is an investment in peace of mind for your family.
And that's the big thing here.
The food is great.
I mean, it's really good, high-quality food.
But it's just that peace of mind.
It's just one thing you don't have to worry about.
Do it now.
Forget about it, and when you need it, thankfully you will have it.
This week, my listeners get any Wise emergency or outdoor food product at an extra 25% off the lowest marked price at wisefoodstorage.com when entering Knolls, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, at checkout or by calling 855-453-2945.
Plus, shipping is free.
Wise has a 90-day, no-questions-asked return policy.
There's no risk in taking the initiative to get yourself and your family more prepared today.
Do it and forget about it until you need it.
That's wisefoodstorage.com, promo code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, to get any Wise emergency or outdoor food product and an extra 25% off and free shipping.
Be responsible, make the right choice, and have some peace of mind.
The college cheating scandal is going mainstream.
You remember a few months ago, Aunt Becky and a few other celebrities were caught cheating their kids' way into college?
And they would cheat a few different ways.
They would cheat by pretending they were student-athletes, they would bribe coaches, and they would also cheat on the SAT. They would cheat on the standardized test score to try to get their kids into college.
Now, the college board itself, the organization that administers the SAT, is setting up a system to cheat on the SAT. It's the only way to describe it.
The big takeaway is here, the left is trying to turn victimhood, a grievance, suffering, into an objective, measurable currency.
You know, they've been talking about victimhood now increasingly for at least the last 10 years in major parts of their conversation and their political advocacy.
Now, this is intersectionality going mainstream.
And frankly, if this goes through, if this is accepted by colleges and by society broadly, I don't know how we come back from this.
I don't know how we take a step back.
So the question, I guess, is will it work?
And then the question is, what does it actually do?
What does it mean?
So what the College Board is going to do is assign an adversity score to every student to try to capture their socioeconomic background.
Ideas like this have been floated for a while.
They say don't take into account affirmative action.
Don't take into account race or sex or something like that.
Take into account socioeconomic status.
And the college board now wants to make this part of the SAT. So it will include the crime rate and poverty levels from a student's high school and neighborhood.
And it actually will not factor in race.
There are already other ways for the colleges to get that sort of information.
The students will not be told their scores, but the colleges will see the scores.
Also probably not a great idea.
There obviously seems to be some room for abuse there.
What if a student gets a score that he disagrees with?
He has no recourse.
He doesn't know what the college board is doing.
And the college board won't say how it calculates the score.
This is what they say.
They say, quote, There are a number of amazing students who have scored less on the SAT but have accomplished more.
We can't sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT. They've accomplished more.
According to whom?
I don't know.
But they score less on the SAT, and so now it's up to the SAT to fix it.
Now, look, they might be right.
The students might score lower on the SAT, but actually accomplish more in their lives.
Sure.
The question is, why would you then factor that into their score on the SAT? This isn't the first time they've tried this.
The college board tried this two decades ago.
Same kind of thing.
Put in a grievance, victimhood measurement.
And the colleges roundly rejected that in the 90s.
But are they going to reject it now?
This is a very different time in 2019 than in 1999.
Culture is very different, and we have this obsession with victimhood.
So I don't think the colleges are going to stop it now.
The colleges are being run by maniacs.
The worst people at these colleges are the administrators.
The administrators who protest Andrew Klavan.
The students don't protest Andrew Klavan at Stanford University.
The administrators do.
It's the administrators who smear me as some kind of bigot because I say men aren't women at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
It was the chancellor of the university.
It wasn't the students organizing some massive protest.
Some students, but it's the administrators who are doing it.
So, just a little personal anecdote on this, because this really bothers me.
People get the question of college admissions so wrong.
Elite people just do not understand what it's like to grow up with relatively not that much money.
And they think they do, and they're very condescending about it, and they're very elitist, and they just don't get it.
They make a whole slew of assumptions.
Just a little personal anecdote.
I grew up in more modest socioeconomic circumstances than I think all of my friends.
I also scored higher on the SAT than all of my friends.
And I'm very glad that I didn't have an adversity score on my SAT to help me out.
I didn't have any grievance score.
I don't know what I would have gotten on the grievance score.
But I'm very pleased that I didn't.
Because the adversity score puts a little asterisk on your college admissions.
It would have diminished the accomplishment of getting into college and also it would destroy the academic confidence of any students who rely on it.
I mean, this is the problem with affirmative action.
Clarence Thomas hated affirmative action.
Clarence Thomas, one of the most brilliant guys in the country, He's on the Supreme Court.
He's maybe the best jurist on the Supreme Court.
He despised his experience at Yale Law School.
He got into the best law school in the country.
And then when he went to get a job, he realized that the employers assumed he only got in because of affirmative action.
He didn't get in because of affirmative action.
He got in because he's extraordinarily intelligent and hardworking.
But that little asterisk destroyed his achievement, and there's no way to come back from that.
So this score, this adversity score, it's going to be out of 100, 50 is going to be the average, and if you get higher than 50, you are a victim, and if you get lower than 50, you're privileged.
You don't know how you're going to come up with that.
This is exactly the backwards approach.
This is exactly the wrong approach.
So, I'm not saying that the question of socioeconomic difficulty is not a serious question.
There is a problem that this is trying to address.
The problem this is trying to address is, generally speaking, rich kids have an advantage in life.
I mean, they have an advantage in most things, and this includes getting into colleges.
We all know that that is the case.
So, okay, if that's a problem, you want to equalize things and you want to level everybody, okay, what are the current solutions that we have?
We already have some solutions for that.
There are scholarships.
So people who come from more modest socioeconomic circumstances can go to school for not very much money or for free.
That's what happened to me.
I had to pay very little money to go to college, and I'm very grateful for that.
I'm glad that that program exists.
You don't need an adversity score on your SAT for that to happen.
What's another way that we solve this problem?
One way that they try to solve it is race-based affirmative action.
That's the idea.
I mean, the assumption with race-based affirmative action is that black people are at a disadvantage, mostly because of money.
I guess there's systematic racism that is claimed by the left, but also it's just a matter of black people as a demographic group have less money than white people as a demographic group.
So when they talk about race-based affirmative action, what they're really trying to talk about often is socioeconomic circumstances.
So, okay, now you're trying to get more specific with this new program.
And fair enough, the race-based affirmative action often doesn't work because it doesn't factor in wealth.
So a lot of times you'll have people getting into good schools or jobs or whatever who are actually just immigrants from Africa or the children of immigrants from Africa.
They're not the descendants of American slaves.
The purpose of affirmative action, ostensibly, is to get rid of the legacy of slavery in the United States.
But if that's the case, why would you then give that preference to a recent immigrant from a wealthy part of an African nation?
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Okay, there's some problems with that.
What else do we have to address this problem?
We have programs at the school level, right?
At the universities.
It's not like the universities are unaware of socioeconomic disparities.
Universities all have programs to go into other states, right?
To go into certain neighborhoods, to go into certain towns, to go into certain schools that are disadvantaged.
The admissions offices already take all of that into account.
That's why schools send admissions officers to all sorts of different states.
If they just wanted to get the highest SAT scores, they wouldn't have to send students into all of those states.
And they then would get students from disproportionately small pockets of wealth in the country.
Okay.
So you've already taken that into account.
The reason this is so awful is the entire purpose of standardized testing is that it's standardized.
If you take standardized testing and you stop standardizing it, there's no purpose.
You might as well get rid of the SAT. But Michael, you might say, surely things matter beyond the SAT. Yeah, of course they do.
We already take that into consideration.
Schools take into account athletes, and athletes get preferential treatment.
Legacies get preferential treatment.
Children of big donors get preferential treatment.
Favored racial groups, favored racial minorities get preferential treatment.
Yes, we already take a lot of people who get grades, right?
Your grades, your GPA, is not standardized across every school in the country.
Some students have grades above a 4.0.
I don't know how they do that, but because some schools give extra credit or something.
You already have all of that.
You already take into account socioeconomic status a lot of the time.
Also, there is a standardized measurement that different schools take into account to different degrees.
And what this would do is get rid of that standardized movement altogether.
It wants to take away standardized measurement.
Now, The last standardized measurement that we have is becoming arbitrary.
And the reason that this is so pointless and actually damaging is you can't measure suffering.
You can't measure grievance.
You can't measure adversity.
Objectively, you can't do it.
There are a lot of poor kids who grew up with both of their parents and who were told to study all the time and who then worked their way into good high schools and good colleges.
This is obviously the case among recent Asian immigrants and the children of Asian immigrants in New York City in particular.
Now they're trying to fix this in New York.
They say there are too many Asians at the magnet high schools.
They come from very modest socioeconomic circumstances.
There are plenty of those people.
There are also rich kids.
Let's say you have a rich kid, right?
And he comes from very high up socioeconomic circumstances.
And then his parent dies when he's 15.
And he's got to work through that in high school.
And he works through that and he takes the SAT and then he's dinged because he hasn't gone through adversity.
I think that kid's gone through a lot of adversity.
He's going through more adversity than most kids are going to face.
How do you measure that?
How do you put that on the test?
How about even if you took your stereotypical rich kid, your stereotypical, you know, he gets a brand new car when he's 16 and he never has to get a summer job and he's just a total rich kid, right?
And he develops a drug addiction by 15 or 16.
I've seen this happen.
I grew up in a pretty wealthy county.
I saw this happen a lot.
And he develops a drug addiction.
His life is spiraling.
And then he turns it around.
He cleans up.
He sobers up.
He works hard by the time he's 17, 18, and he's ready to go to college.
That guy certainly overcame a lot of adversity.
Now, he kind of foisted it on himself.
He made some bad choices when he was a young teenager.
But then he made it through that adversity.
He clearly improved his life.
That kid went through more adversity than the poor kid who grew up in a good household with two parents and he always made the right choices.
How do you measure adversity and why is adversity the main measure?
You can't measure adversity in that way because all people suffer.
Everybody suffers.
The left wants to convince you that only certain people suffer.
Only their favored group suffer and everybody else doesn't suffer at all.
Well, guess what?
The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
Now, not everybody talks about their suffering because it's unseemly to talk about your suffering all the time.
It's so ugly.
It's not manly.
It's not mature.
It's whiny to complain all the time.
It's ungrateful.
It's impolite.
It's not good.
It's also completely incoherent.
This whole measure victimhood thing doesn't make any sense.
Think about why we're even talking about victimhood in the first place.
Why has the left focused on grievance and victimhood for the last 20 years?
The main reason, I think, is because you can't measure it.
So the right comes out and we say, look, there are these objective measurements and this guy's getting what he deserves and you're getting what you deserve.
And what the left comes out and they say, you don't know my pain.
You can't possibly know my lived experience.
Stop trying to use your oppressive logic and your oppressive facts to erase my experience of the world.
I am suffering and the only reality that I know is my suffering.
And you can't know that because it's subjective.
Also, now it's objective and you can measure it.
When it's convenient for me.
You can't have that both ways.
Either suffering is subjective and I can't know your experience and so we are where we are or it is objective and I can tell you, no, you're not actually suffering that much.
No, you actually haven't gone through that much adversity.
You can't have it both ways.
Either you can measure it or you can't.
The left wants to have it both ways right now and I think we just need to point out to them Everybody suffers.
I mean, there's a great line in a play by, I think it's by Tennessee Williams, called Orpheus Descending.
I think that's the play.
And anyway, it's this guy, this kind of vagabond.
He's walking around, and he wants to stay at a lady's house for the night.
He's trying to sweet-talk her and say, come on, let me stay at your house.
And she goes, nope, you get out of here.
He says, come on, I have nowhere to go.
And she says, everybody's got a problem, and that's yours.
Everybody's got a problem.
And your problem is your problem, and his problem is his problem.
But if we start trying to measure this, if we make this the be-all and end-all of society, first of all, we're going to get into a very ugly culture because all we'll be doing is talking about suffering and complaining and everything's wrong all the time.
It's going to incentivize people to suffer more and it is going to deny the very real suffering of certain people.
It's so wrong, it's so arbitrary, and it's perfectly to be expected with what the left has given us for the last 20 years.
On some brighter news, we are in the pro-life moment right now.
It is happening.
Pro-life, since Roe v.
Wade, the pro-life movement has proceeded gradually.
Now it's happening suddenly, all at once.
Missouri just passed a major abortion law that will restrict, will outlaw abortion after eight weeks after a heartbeat.
It would be detected, so it's actually not even reliant on a doctor detecting it.
We know that at eight weeks the heartbeat does exist.
There's a law in Louisiana that is about to go into effect.
It's about to be passed.
We had the female governor of Alabama yesterday sign that law.
This is terrific news.
And yet, some longtime right-wingers are not happy about it.
This puzzles me.
I think this moment...
This pro-life moment is, it's finally real.
You know, it's very easy for everybody to talk and say, oh, I'm pro-life.
Yeah, no, I'm pro.
Okay, sure, I'm pro-life.
Now it's real.
And so it's going to separate the pro-life wheat from the pro-life chaff.
And here is even, I mean, just to show you how widespread this is, even Pat Robertson, about as hardcore as it gets, about as pro-life as it gets, about as conservative as it gets, he's getting this wrong and he's questioning these laws.
I think Alabama has gone too far.
They've passed a law that would give a 99-year prison sentence to people who could commit abortion.
There's no exception for rape or incest.
It's an extreme law, and they want to challenge Roe versus Wade.
But my humble view is that this is not the case we want to bring to the Supreme Court because I think this one will lose.
Okay, that's his argument.
Pat Robertson.
Pat Robertson, about as hardcore as it gets.
Pat Robertson, the man who said, quote, the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.
It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
That guy, he says this law is too extreme.
He's not alone.
He's not the only one who's saying it's too extreme.
The publisher of the new reboot of Human Events, Human Events is an old conservative magazine.
It went out of business and then this year a couple guys restarted it, rebooted it.
The publisher of that new reboot criticized specifically me and Matt Walsh for defending these laws.
Not just defending them, for celebrating these laws.
And I think a lot of conservatives are having these ideas.
I don't think they really quite have arguments here, but they do have feelings.
And so I think we should address those feelings because I get it.
I understand where those feelings come from.
I just don't think they hold up to the rigor of logic.
So let's take a look at their arguments and see if they've got any point.
I wanted to do a take on this one.
I really did.
I really wanted to do one.
I couldn't deal with it.
I normally do not like sticking my finger in the eye of the pro-life movement, which I see as a core part of our coalition, and I have deep sympathy for the perspective.
But, like, I can't let this stuff go.
The things that Michael J. Knowles and Matt Walsh are justifying today appall me, like, very, very deeply.
Like, the things, the way they're deciding to argue this position strikes me as so unbelievably flippant and incoherent and ridiculous that it just needs to be called out.
Like, in general, there's a way to be pro-life without making arguments that are just disgusting.
I mean it.
Like, these arguments genuinely disgust me.
And I'll try and explain why, why I think they're so flippant and they're so dismissive of concerns about bodily autonomy and essentially any sort of idea that you have a liberty interest in your own body.
They are so, so flippant that they just appall me.
Okay, so this goes on for like four or five minutes.
You'll notice he's talking and he's saying it's disgusting and it's awful and he's terrible and you'll notice he's not making any arguments.
He's just sort of venting his emotions.
You'll notice, too, at the beginning, he says the arguments he's making, the things he's saying, the content of what Knowles is arguing is awful and disgusting, and the way in which he's arguing them is awful.
So he switches.
At first, it's the actual thing itself.
What is my argument?
I'm saying we shouldn't kill babies before they're born.
That's the beginning and the end of my argument.
Don't kill babies in the womb.
That's it.
That's the whole content.
So he's saying, that I disagree with.
That appalls me.
That's disgusting.
And then he's saying, the way in which he's arguing it is also disgusting.
And so, on that latter point, he's saying I'm being flippant or glib or something.
I actually don't think I have been.
I certainly can be, but I don't think I have been on this topic itself.
He doesn't give an example, obviously, in that part of the rant, so I just can't judge it.
But he's also saying that the argument that we shouldn't kill babies in the womb is appalling to him.
But why?
Does he go on and say, this thing goes on for half an hour.
I haven't even listened to the whole end of it because I didn't have that much time, but I did listen to the parts where I at least found that he was addressing my arguments in particular.
So here's what he takes issue with specifically.
So Michael Knowles basically has been trying to defend the law Which imposes these enormous punishments on doctors who commit abortion but do not punish the women who get the abortions, right?
It says, and this is one tweet, quote, abortionists in Alabama face potentially harsher punishments than rapists because murder is considered a more serious crime than even than rape.
And says also that Alabama has tough rape laws.
And then he says, and then somebody asks him, it's like, okay, but if that's true, he says, if it's murder, why shouldn't the woman be punished?
At least it's a conspiracy to commit premeditated murder.
And Knowles says, quote, and this blows my mind, because conservatives, why ego or justice are compassionate and conscious of human frailty.
I'm sorry, you just said abortion was worse than rape.
We don't look at whether or not...
Our compassion and consciousness of human frailty does not lead us to not punish rapists, right?
Okay, there are a few factual things wrong with what he said.
I actually didn't say that murder is worse than rape.
I said that murder is considered by our society, by every one of our states, and the whole country, and the whole civilization, murder is considered worse than rape.
And therefore, it follows that people who commit murder will be punished more harshly than people who commit rape.
I then also point out that Alabama has some of the toughest rape laws in the country.
I'm all for making the rape laws much worse.
I'm perfectly fine with capital punishment for rapists.
I have no problem at all with killing rapists.
I totally...
I mean, I would support that.
If I were the king, I would kill rapists.
Once we convict them, I would kill them.
I'm not the king.
I understand why our laws don't do that.
But those are totally separate issues.
The crime of rape and the crime of murder.
The crime of abortion.
Now, he goes on...
To say, he acknowledges my answer to the question, well, if abortion is morally equivalent to murder, why don't we punish the women?
And the reason we don't punish the women is because conservatives, while eager for justice, are compassionate and we are conscious of human frailty.
So he says, ha ha, I've got you there.
Because if abortion is murder, then you should punish the women.
No, we shouldn't.
Abortion is different than killing somebody out on the street.
It is morally similar if not morally equivalent but it is circumstantially quite different.
Obviously.
And the motivations that would compel a woman to try to procure an abortion, the personal motivations, the cultural motivations, and because the Supreme Court invented a fictitious right to abortion, what we now consider the legal conditions that would lead her to do that are different.
And so, because we are taking all of those circumstances into account, we recognize that we probably shouldn't punish those women.
There is a difference in the motivation to commit that crime.
There is probably not, however, a moral difference in the crime itself.
If I kill a baby at one day old, does anyone really believe that's morally different than killing a baby two days before he's born?
No, of course not.
Nobody really believes that.
This guy, Will Chamberlain, the publisher of the new Human Events, I don't think he believes that.
How about three months before the baby's born?
Is it really morally different?
You're killing a baby.
A baby with unique DNA who is its own person.
The fact of killing that innocent human being is not different.
However, there are different circumstances that lead to that crime.
I acknowledge those historical, cultural, and today legal differences, and so it seems perfectly defensible to punish the doctor who is...
An outside force who is actually committing the act, who is actually killing the baby, who is not compelled by all of those various circumstances, and it makes perfect sense to punish him, according to the law, but to not punish the woman.
I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be the case.
I know it's not neat and clean.
It doesn't have that perfect ideological clarity, right?
All shallows are clear.
And Will Chamberlain acknowledges, as I do, that the circumstances that lead one to shoot some guy in the street and that lead a woman to get an abortion are different.
And so I'm saying we can treat those people differently according to the law, perfectly fine, while still defending the victims of those crimes who are the victims of exactly the same crime.
They're being killed.
They're innocent and they're being wrongly killed.
Now, Will gives up the whole story in his last bit.
He explains the real issue that he has with my argument, and I think it shows you why these squishy pro-lifers, the people who are pro-life but don't want to actually have real pro-life laws, We're good to
go.
All of that at dailywire.com.
$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get the Matt Wall show.
You get the conversation.
And you get to ask questions in that.
You get to ask questions backstage.
You get another kingdom.
You get so much stuff.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Sea to Shiny Sea.
We're protecting the unborn.
And the left is furious.
Get your Tumblr before you drown.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
So before we get to the 23rd Democrat in the race and before we get to the mailbag, I just want to finish up this point because Will Chamberlain, the I just want to finish up this point because Will Chamberlain, the publisher of the new Human Events, he does explain his And this, I think, is the central question of pro-life.
Here is what I think is essentially why he's so upset and offended and appalled by the arguments that Matt Walsh and I and other pro-lifers are making.
The issue I have with the way that Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh try and think about the ethical questions with regard to abortion is they're extremely deontological, meaning that they are entirely trying to logically reason their way through semantic arguments to the idea that it is never okay under any circumstances to allow abortion to be legal, even in the most extreme cases.
Sure, you're right.
You're right.
So deontology, for those who are not familiar with that word, is the moral concept of considering a moral act in and of itself.
Not considering the consequences of some act.
Not saying, well, this act is right or wrong because of what it will lead to, which is called consequentialism.
But saying, this act is right or wrong in and of itself.
It's wrong to kill an innocent baby.
Making that claim to him is being too deontological.
And then he uses the word logical.
He says what Knowles is doing is he's starting with the premise that it's wrong to kill innocent babies.
And then he's semantically, by the way, the word semantics means meaning.
So in the meaning of what that is, he's following it logically to the conclusion that we should not have legal abortion.
Right, that's what I'm doing.
I'm considering the act of abortion itself, then I am following it logically to its conclusion, and I'm saying we should not have legal abortion.
Right.
And what he's saying is, stop thinking so logically about this.
It's bad to make women give birth to the babies they have.
It's bad not to let people kill babies in the womb.
Okay, that's not an argument.
But I do...
I do see...
The impulse for that.
What he's saying is the extremes are so wrong.
What Pat Robertson is saying is the extremes, they're not going to win.
Most Americans aren't on the extremes.
Okay, fine.
I'm with you.
You're right.
Two-thirds of Americans don't want to overturn Roe v.
Wade.
I understand that political reality.
And so with these guys, the kind of the moderate guys, the incrementalist guys, the gradualist guys, what they say is...
We shouldn't follow the logic of abortion to its logical conclusion.
Which, by the way, the people who are seriously thinking about this now, on both sides of it, are following abortion to its logical conclusion.
New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo, Virginia's Governor Ralph Northam, they are following abortion to its logical conclusion.
If it's okay to kill innocent babies, then we shouldn't not be able to kill them after 26 weeks.
We should be able to kill them as they're being born or right after they're born.
Okay, yeah, that is the logical conclusion of abortion if you support abortion.
The logical conclusion of abortion if you don't is a baby's a baby, you shouldn't kill babies who are innocent, so therefore you shouldn't kill them at 26 weeks, you shouldn't kill them at 20 weeks, you shouldn't kill them at 6 weeks, you shouldn't kill them because they're babies.
Doesn't matter their circumstances, doesn't matter who the mother is, who the father is, you shouldn't kill babies.
And there are hard cases that come out of that.
Hard cases make bad law.
Fortunately, the hard cases that everybody is citing right now Cases of a baby being conceived because of rape or incest or that pose a threat to the life of the mother.
That accounts for less than 1% of abortion.
So it's very disingenuous for people to bring that up.
Also, these laws make an exception when the life of the mother is at risk.
So even the argument that Will is making on that point just is not the case.
However, I see it.
I get that people want a middle way here politically.
Okay, fine.
If you want a middle way, There are two options.
You can either pick some arbitrary point and pretend that the Constitution allows you to kill babies before a certain point but not after a certain point.
And I don't know, you're going to have to look really deep into the Constitution to find that arbitrary point in there.
That's one version of finding a middle way.
The other version is...
Let the states make their own abortion laws.
The Constitution says nothing about abortion.
It isn't one way or the other.
It is not in there.
Let the states make their own laws.
So New Yorkers can live the way they want to live.
Alabamans can live the way that they want to live.
And hopefully, as has been happening over the last 50 years, people will see the moral reality of abortion and then they will change their laws because they're not hamstrung by some ridiculous...
The Supreme Court decision that invents a right to abortion, they can actually change as their moral clarity changes, which will change in New York.
That's what should happen.
Some conservatives are disapproving of these laws because they go too far.
Oh, I don't know if the Supreme Court will go for it.
Oh, maybe we should water it down.
Give me a break.
Guys, fight the fight.
Fight the fight.
If you're not going to fight the fight, what are you doing?
Well, maybe we should pass laws that won't try to overturn Roe v.
Wade, but they'll just chip away at Roe v.
Wade.
No, guys, fight the fight.
Actually, I got to meet Antonin Scalia twice before he died, and one time that I was meeting him, some of us asked, What about stare decisis?
What about...
Stare decisis is the legal principle that gives weight to precedent.
So we've got Roe versus Wade, 1973.
Then we've got Planned Parenthood v.
Casey in 1992.
Both uphold the imaginary right to abortion.
So what about that precedent?
And I support taking precedent into account.
I think what these conservatives are saying is, think about the precedent.
Think about the precedent.
Some decisions are so egregious.
This is what Scalia said.
Some decisions are so egregious that they simply have to be overturned.
Dred Scott decided that black people couldn't be U.S. citizens.
That was a Supreme Court decision.
There's no incrementalism there.
There's no way to chip away and change it gradually over time.
Either black people can be citizens or they can't be citizens.
You have to overturn that decision.
Either the Constitution gives you a right to kill babies or it doesn't give you a right to kill babies.
There's no incrementalism there.
There's no gradual change.
Fight the fight.
Before we get to the mailbag, we have a 23rd Democrat running for president now.
And because he's my old mayor, Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York, we've got to talk about it because Bill de Blasio is launching his campaign on a pro-theft agenda.
There's plenty of money in this world.
There's plenty of money in this country.
It's just in the wrong hands.
Here in New York City, a place that is legendarily tough and big and complicated.
The good thing about New Yorkers is they look the same whether they're really pissed off at you or they like you.
We built an agenda that puts working families first.
We had to fight all over the city, all over the state to make sure that people got a decent wage.
We are raising the wage to $15 an hour.
Waitresses and dishwashers and store clerks and people who work in small manufacturing firms, a backbone of New York City.
You will have the legal guarantee for the first time of paid sick leave.
This has never existed anywhere else in this country.
Fully comprehensive, guaranteed health care.
My wife, Shirlane, and I believe health care is a human right.
It has to be available for all.
It has to be affordable.
And it has to include mental health services.
Okay.
day.
First of all, the only guy who needs mental health services in this entire video is Bill de Blasio.
I just would like to point out, being a New Yorker myself, I'm in New York all the time.
I've lived in New York for a long time.
Bill de Blasio is a terrible mayor, and he's extremely unpopular, not just among conservatives.
There are only about 20 conservatives in New York anyway, but among liberals too.
They hate this guy.
He has made the city worse.
He's made it dirtier.
He's made it more crime-ridden.
It's just bad.
The homeless problem has gotten out of control.
He's a very bad administrator.
The Democrats were going to try to challenge him last election.
They weren't able to get their stuff together.
But he's not popular in New York, so I think he's thinking, I've got to get out of New York.
I've got to run for the big office.
Now is my shot, because there's no clear frontrunner.
The other thing we know from this is, just as the whole election is shaping up, this is going to be the free stuff primary.
All he's talking about is giving stuff away for free, except he's taking it to a little bit of that tougher extreme.
He said, New Yorkers are tough.
If we don't like you or we like you, we have the same look on our face, which is basically true.
And so he's taking the free stuff primary to that tougher level, and he's saying we're going to steal stuff from people.
He's actually turning it not just into the free stuff primary, he's turning it into the theft primary.
He said there's a lot of money in New York.
Problem is it's in the wrong hands.
He's saying your money is in your hands, and therefore it's in the wrong hands.
The money you've earned is in your hands, but it's in the wrong hands, therefore.
Well, whose hands does my money belong in?
De Blasio says, my money belongs in somebody else's hands.
Okay.
I want Bill De Blasio to tell me whose hands my money belongs in.
He's not going to speak in those kind of terms.
I also want to point out, he's not a real New Yorker.
He's a Boston Red Sox fan, and he's got an Italian last name, but he's not Italian.
I think it was his stepfather's name or something like that.
So we just, I just, as a New Yorker, as a descendant of Italian heritage, I just want to say, please don't blame him on us.
We don't even like him.
New Yorkers do not like this guy.
Okay, let's get to the mailbag.
We're going to cut the mailbag a little short today because we got the conversation later on, but let's get to as many questions as we can.
From John.
Michael, with respect to Alabama's and Georgia's new abortion laws, I haven't seen any coverage related to in vitro fertilization.
My understanding of IVF is that many eggs are harvested and fertilized at once, and at times, many embryos are implanted in the uterus, some of which are removed.
How should laws be crafted with respect to aspects of IVF? Thanks, John.
P.S. Thanks for taking my question last year regarding coping with my wife's multiple miscarriages.
As an update, we kept open to the possibility of new life in our marriage and are happily awaiting our new son this summer.
Congratulations.
That's great news.
I'm very glad to hear that.
Yes, nobody talks about IVF. And now IVF is coming up because the left is throwing this in the pro-life movement's face.
They're saying, wait a second.
You're saying that it's a murder to kill an unborn baby.
But IVF can very frequently creates many...
Fertilized embryos.
It creates many new human beings and then it freezes them away or it implants them in the uterus and then if you don't want to carry all those kids, it takes them away.
It aborts them.
See, this is a contradiction.
Fair enough, yeah.
IVF, in the way that it is usually practiced, fertilizing multiple embryos and then freezing or destroying them, is not defensible.
This is something the pro-life movement doesn't talk about because there's some disagreement or it just would create divisions.
But nevertheless, it is the case.
I mean, from a prudent political matter, right now we're talking about abortion laws and we're having so much great effect on that.
So I think we need to keep pushing until that goes to the Supreme Court and overturns Roe versus Wade.
However, it's also the case that IVF, as it is usually practiced, is not defensible from a pro-life position.
From Derek.
"Hi Michael, the claim that making abortion illegal will only decrease the number of safe abortions rather than abortion in general is all over social media.
Can you please speak to any evidence that supports or negates this?
Thanks." Before Roe v.
Wade in 1970, there were 52 abortions in the United States per 1,000 live births.
After Roe v.
Wade, the year after that, 1974...
That number jumped up to 242 abortions per 1,000 live births.
By the 80s, it reached its high of 364 abortions per 1,000 live births.
Roe v.
Wade caused the abortion rate in the United States to skyrocket.
Not just the legal abortion rate, the total abortion rate to skyrocket in the United States.
And as we discussed before, the year before Roe v.
Wade was decided...
39 women died from illegal abortions, 24 women died from legal abortions, and when you factor in the legality of abortion throughout the United States, you find out that proportionally it was just as dangerous to have an illegal abortion at that time as it was to have a legal abortion.
Those are the facts.
You can look at the statistics from the CDC. Abortions skyrocketed after Roe v.
Wade.
From Landon.
Dear Mr.
Knowles, I'm a Christian and recently started a wedding DJ business, and I had the thought, what should I do if I'm asked to perform at a same-sex wedding?
What do you think?
Thanks, Landon.
What are your views on marriage?
I know that certain Christian denominations or sects now approve of same-sex marriage or the redefinition of marriage.
So if you're in one of those, I guess it doesn't prove a problem to your faith.
If, however, you say that marriage has a meaning and that meaning does not include monogamous same-sex unions, but it does Or any other version of that, that marriage is between a man and a woman, if you believe in the traditional definition of marriage.
Yeah, I guess it would be pretty hard to participate in that marriage.
I suppose it depends, though.
If it's a gay couple that is not having a marriage, they're just having a party, and they say, yeah, we don't...
I mean, I have many gay friends who do not agree with the logic of redefining marriage.
They say, no, marriage has a meaning, and...
I have a life partner or I have a special friend or I have a whatever, but that is not the same thing as marriage.
So if they're having a party, which they explicitly say this is not a marriage, this is not a wedding, I guess that gives you some leeway.
But this is a very difficult question that is changing daily because marriage continues to be redefined every single day.
If you had talked eight years ago, people had civil unions.
Is civil union the same thing as a marriage?
I don't know.
That's another question.
The New York Times said, When they were talking about etiquette on how to refer to a gay man's gay husband, you call him husband or this, and they suggested the word partner.
Now probably that term is bigoted.
Probably now you're politically correct, supposed to say husband or something.
I don't know.
It's changing every day, and you will have to answer that question as regards your faith.
If, however, you believe that marriage has a meaning, and if marriage The clients are saying this is a gay wedding.
This is a marriage.
This is a wedding.
And you don't want to participate in that.
You shouldn't participate in that.
From Evan.
Dear Michael, the man who loads European football.
That's me.
It's called soccer.
Last night on Ladder with Crowder, Stephen said he once considered creating a company baseball team.
He implied that Ladder with Crowder would play against the Daily Wire.
I know that baseball is your favorite sport.
Would the Daily Wire accept if the challenge was ever made?
And what would the starting lineup be?
Have a swarthy day, Evan.
No, I would never accept that.
I played Little League for eight years.
I think I hit the ball four times.
No chance, man.
Actually, I should point out, I didn't hit the ball very much, but I did lean into pitches like Don Baylor, so my on-base percentage was very high.
But no.
Also, by the way, Virtually everybody in the political media is like 5'10", 5'9", somewhere around there.
Stephen Crowder is a giant man.
So no, uh-uh.
No thank you.
I'll play ping pong with him or something.
All right, we have a lot more questions, but unfortunately we do not have time to get to them.
We'll get to them on the conversation today, so be sure to watch it live and ask your questions.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you on Monday.
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.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, controversy continues to swirl around Alabama's new abortion laws.
▲
Export Selection