YouTube demonetizes Steven Crowder’s channel and declares all-out war on conservatives. This is the most significant change in the character of the Internet since YouTube first came online 14 years ago. We will examine how conservatives can fight back. Then, one of the OG conservative YouTubers, Zo Rachel, stops by to discuss how social media has changed. Finally, the Mailbag! Date: 6-06-2019
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YouTube has demonetized our pal Stephen Crowder's channel and declared all-out war on conservatives.
This is the most significant change in the character of the internet since YouTube first came online 14 years ago.
We will examine how conservatives can fight back.
Then, coincidentally, one of the OG conservative YouTubers, Zo Rachel, stops by to discuss how social media has changed, what it looks like moving forward.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This is being called Vox Adpocalypse because it was brought on by a Vox journalist trying to get YouTube to censor, deplatform, demonetize conservatives.
Initially, YouTube said they wouldn't do that.
Then they gave way to the mob and they have done this to Crowder.
Crowder has almost 4 million subscribers on YouTube.
This is monumental.
It means none of us are safe.
It means they're going to go after every conservative channel.
Coincidentally, right before the 2020 election, we will explain what it means, what we can do about it, and why we shouldn't sit on the sidelines and throw up our hands.
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And then you have YouTube, which is Push Button Sensor Conservatives.
That's how they're going to do it.
YouTube is demonetizing Steven Crowder, who has one of the biggest channels on YouTube, for using the words queer and gay to refer to a gay journalist.
But we here at The Michael Knowles Show have an even bigger scoop, because it turns out that there is another YouTube creator at Vox.com who is referring to a gay journalist with those exact same words.
Take a listen.
Vox used to call themselves bare and balanced.
It's like They're corrosionally stable.
Straight people on TV talk about what it was like to be gay.
Queer people.
Queer people cares at all about queer people.
Touting out queer creators.
Being baited towards queer people.
Let's be queer is not an interesting or useful idea.
Calling me a let's be queer is not an idea.
I'm a queer tree-hugging atheist with immigrant parents.
Because like the feeling of being queer in a world that doesn't love queers, as a queer person, and also even within queer spaces, I am also an advocate.
And part of the work as a queer person of color is to be like, I mean, it was kind of like growing up queer and being queer and doing, like, queer activism.
I am literally shaking.
I can't believe that YouTube would allow such a horrific bigot on their, oh, excuse me, I'm sorry, I'm hearing right now, oh, that's Carlos Maza, the Vox journalist who started this whole censorship crusade in the first place.
By the way, that clip could go on about seven or eight minutes longer.
There is an endless supply of Carlos Maza using the word queer, gay, all of these different words to refer to himself.
So when Carlos Maza from Vox.com, a left-wing website, uses exactly the same words that Steven Crowder used, it's okay.
That's fine.
That's great.
When Steven Crowder uses those exact same words, he gets demonetized.
He is told by YouTube that You can't make any money on here because you have opinions that we don't like.
When is YouTube going to demonetize Vox.com for using the exact same words that Stephen Crowder used?
I'm not kidding.
I'm not just trying to make a point.
I think YouTube should demonetize Vox.com.
I think YouTube should deplatform Carlos Maza because he's using those exact same words.
I'm not making an absurd argument here.
YouTube is enforcing some brand new policy that they just wrote yesterday in response to Carlos Maza and Vox.com calling for Crowder to be deplatformed and demonetized.
They're enforcing that on Crowder.
They have to enforce that on Vox.com.
In fact, they should enforce it on everybody who makes any gay joke, who uses the word gay, who uses the word queer, any of them on YouTube.
By the way, YouTube uses the word queer because YouTube is now promoting Pride Month and a month to celebrate LGBTQ.
Guess what the Q stands for?
It stands for queer.
They all need to be deplatformed.
Their channels need to be deleted.
They at least need to be demonetized.
Until Vox.com is demonetized, YouTube is...
Taking an obvious, bigoted swipe at conservatives.
Why is it okay when Vox uses certain words, but not okay when Crowder does?
Washington Post showed this just yesterday.
Washington Post put out an article about this whole controversy, and they wrote, when they described Carlos Maza, they said he is, quote, a video producer for the news site Vox, and they described him as a, quote, gay and Latino.
Then, two paragraphs later in the article, they criticized Stephen Crowder for referring to Maza as a gay Latino from Vox.
So, Washington Post says he's a video producer from the news site Vox, and he is gay and Latino.
Then Crowder calls him a gay Latino from Vox.
That's hateful.
Two paragraphs later.
What is actually happening here?
YouTube has decided to punish the creators that it doesn't like with demonetization.
When you post a video to YouTube, you can turn on monetization and then when you get half a million people to watch it, they'll run ads on that video and you can make some money.
And that's how YouTube creators sustain themselves online.
Now they're going to demonetize them.
And they're already saying that they're going to deplatform thousands of creators that they don't like.
YouTube is punishing people, not who violate the rules, but who they just don't like.
I'm not exaggerating here.
YouTube concluded that Steven Crowder did not violate their rules.
They admitted that in a statement.
Then, once they got more pressure from Vox.com, journalists, journalists, quote-unquote, who are trying to censor everybody else from speaking— When they gave into the pressure, they said, all right, Crowder didn't violate the rules, but we're going to demonetize him anyway.
This is their Orwellian statement.
Quote, even if a creator's content doesn't violate our community guidelines, we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action.
They said, in the case of Crowder's channel, a thorough review over the weekend found that, individually, the flagged videos did not violate our community guidelines.
However, in the subsequent days, we saw the widespread harm to the YouTube community.
Now listen to that.
You see what they're doing?
They're, once again, as the left always does, conflating speech with violence.
They say, look, we have rules against threatening...
Speech that actually could incite violence, that is being used to threaten violence.
We have rules against that.
Crowder didn't violate those rules.
But in the broad context of his speech, it's harmful to the YouTube community.
Quote, resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior.
We took a deeper look and made the decision to suspend monetization.
In order to be considered for reinstatement, all relevant issues with the channel need to be addressed, including any videos that violate our policies, as well as things like offensive merchandise.
And there, what they're alluding to is he has a shirt, which is Che Guevara with a limp wrist, and it says socialism is for figs.
And instead of a letter there between the F and the G, it's a little fig.
Coincidentally, Che Guevara was killed in a town called Higuera, which means the fig tree.
Just a little extra information on that.
YouTube is promising that they will write the rules arbitrarily.
Because they had rules.
When they instituted the rules, they said, here are the rules, don't violate them, we won't kick you off.
Crowder doesn't violate them, now they say we're going to kick you off anyway.
We're going to demonetize you at least anyway.
So it's just YouTube picking winners and losers based on the content, based on the opinions, based on the ideology of the creators that are going out there.
How are they going to do this?
YouTube is now promising that it will be, quote, removing violative content, content that violates their agreement, they already were doing that, raising up authoritative content, Okay, let's see what that authoritative content is.
Reducing the spread of borderline content, so content that doesn't violate their rules but they don't like it anyway, and rewarding trusted creators.
I wonder who those trusted creators are.
I mean, I seem to recall that the Young Turks, a very far left-wing channel, would film their shows in YouTube's headquarters, in the YouTube studios.
I guess they're trusted.
The very far left-wing sources are trusted.
I don't film in YouTube's headquarters, do I? Stephen Crowder doesn't film in YouTube.
I guess we're not trusted.
And they're going to raise up authoritative content.
What is authoritative content?
Is authoritative content the New York Times?
New York Times has botched huge high-profile stories over the last three years.
CNN botched huge high-profile stories.
Is it those guys?
Something tells me authoritative content isn't the Daily Wire.
But then, how are they going to boost that authoritative content?
They write, this is YouTube writing, quote, If a user is watching a video that comes close to violating our policies, our systems may include more videos from authoritative sources, like top news channels, in the Watch Next panel.
So let's say that you decide that you're going to watch the Michael Knowles show, Heaven Forfend, and you're watching and you're listening to ideas that are a little more conservative.
What YouTube will do then is, after that, when you look at the Watch Next channel, all the videos that are suggested next to the page at the end on the screen, you're going to get the New York Times, you're going to get CNN, you're going to get the Young Turks filmed in YouTube studios, you're going to get all this left-wing content.
What is this about?
What's the takeaway?
It's a two-fold political stunt.
Why did Carlos Maza do this now?
He said that Crowder's been calling him a lispy queer for years.
Maza's been calling himself a queer for years.
Why right now?
Well, it's because this is Pride Month.
Carlos Maza launched this whole crusade on May 30th, two days before the launch of Pride Month.
This was not an exasperated emotional reaction to harassment.
This was a highly calculated, premeditated attempt to censor conservatives on YouTube and other social media, which are, by the way, the largest public squares in the entire world.
Certainly in the country, but in the entire world as well.
This was a highly calculated attempt by a highly calculating political operative named Carlos Maza to censor conservatives from the public square.
And it has mostly worked, by the way.
I mean, he's a whiny, un-American authoritarian, but Carlos Maza is pretty effective.
But it's not just launched at the beginning of Pride Month, it's launched at the beginning of the 2020 cycle.
It's 2019, the elections are underway, and now YouTube is going to mobilize to help Democrats, unfairly.
You know, the left complains about Citizens United, how that Supreme Court decision upheld the corporation's right to donate to political campaigns.
They said it was awful.
They said corporations aren't people.
Corporations can't donate.
What is this?
What this is, is just one giant, completely unregulated corporate donation to Democrats.
They're admitting it.
They say they're going to censor conservatives and they're going to help Democrats.
At least after Citizens United, other corporations have to disclose their political contributions.
Not YouTube.
YouTube doesn't have to disclose this.
It's a huge, in-kind contribution for Dems during a very contentious election year.
So how should conservatives respond?
This reopens the same debate between conservatism and classical liberalism or conservative liberalism or whatever that we have been talking about for the past two weeks.
Some libertarian classical liberal types insist that the government should take no action.
They say YouTube is a private company.
They can kick off whoever they want.
It's not the government.
No big deal.
That's one idea.
They're uncomfortable with the government stepping in to regulate social media.
Now the less classical liberal, more conservative-minded people say absolutely the government should prevent this mass censorship on a national and global scale of conservative ideas.
So which is it?
Should we say hands-off, YouTube can do whatever they want, or should we get involved?
This is based on a faulty premise.
This is based on the premise that the government right now doesn't already have its finger on the scales.
It does.
The government is already giving these corporations, like YouTube, an unfair protection.
The law in this country is supposed to treat publishers and platforms differently.
Right now, however, the law is treating social media companies like publishers when it suits them and like platforms when it suits them otherwise.
In some cases, it's one.
In some cases, it's the other.
This is not exactly on the question of censorship.
It's on the question of what these companies are.
So at The Daily Wire, we have no obligation to publish views that we disagree with.
We do because all of the writers and the hosts, we all disagree with each other all the time.
But we don't publish every single opinion in the world.
We're not a left-wing news site.
We're a conservative news site.
We don't need to worry about charges of censorship because we're a publisher.
We decide what we want to publish.
We pick which stories to run.
But since we're a publisher, we have to worry about a lot of other things.
Copyright infringement, defamation, libel, IP theft, fair use, all these different things that YouTube, Facebook...
Twitter and all the other social media companies don't have to worry about because they say that they are platforms, not publishers, sometimes.
They say they're just an internet platform which gives them a whole lot of government help, a whole lot of protections.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 says,"...no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." What's the purpose of that?
It's so that the internet could grow.
And this has led to incredible growth.
By protecting tech companies from copyright and other publisher issues, it allowed them not to get totally bogged down and stifled as the internet was growing.
It's created billionaires.
It's created billion-dollar corporations.
It has allowed the internet to flourish.
Now, those platforms are abusing that protection.
The protection that was made to allow the internet to grow, to allow these companies to exist, they are now abusing that protection and behaving as publishers.
Obviously, they're choosing what content they want on the platform, what content they don't.
Not just YouTube, it's all of big tech trying to have it both ways.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg trying to say, on the one hand, he's a CEO of a social media platform.
You said you are responsible for your content, so...
Which are you?
Are you a tech company?
Are you the world's largest publisher?
Because I think that goes to a really important question on what form of regulation or government action, if any, we would take.
Senator, this is a really big question.
I view us as a tech company because the primary thing that we do is build technology and products.
But you said you're responsible for your content, which makes you kind of a publisher, right?
Well, I agree that we're responsible for the content, but we don't produce the content.
I think that when people ask us if we're a media company or a publisher, my understanding of the heart of what they're really getting at is, do we feel a responsibility for the content on our platform?
The answer to that, I think, is clearly yes.
But I don't think that that's incompatible with fundamentally, at our core, being a technology company where the main thing that we do is have engineers and build products.
Right.
Okay.
So he's saying we are primarily an open platform.
However, while they were fighting a lawsuit in California last July, Facebook claimed that they were a publisher.
Facebook was being sued by a tech startup that was told they were developing apps with Facebook, and the premise was they would be able to use the data from Facebook to develop the apps.
Then Facebook pulled the data from the apps, and they sued them.
The lawyer for Facebook, Sonal Mehta, said, quote, The publisher discretion is a free speech right irrespective of what technological means is used.
A newspaper has a publisher function when they are doing it on their website, in a printed copy, or through news alerts.
So he said they're a publisher.
He then said that decisions about data were a, quote, quintessential publisher function and constituted protective activity, adding that this, quote, includes both the decision of what to publish and the decision of what not to publish.
So Facebook is a publisher when it suits them.
Right, they are.
These tech companies are behaving as publishers.
And the data are important here because the data show you how...
Powerful these companies have become.
They know everything about you.
There are no competitors to them.
They control the flow of information on the internet.
There is this debate on the right, and we'll bring Zoe in and have this debate.
Some of the liberal libertarian school say, who cares how powerful big tech gets?
Who cares how they censor?
Who cares how they mold discourse and block conservatives from the public square?
Just so long as they're not the government.
That's one school of thought.
That is no consolation to me.
I don't care that they're not the government.
I don't care if I'm being censored and my politics is being cheated by government, by just a giant government entity, or by a handful of the biggest companies on earth who are getting special protections from the government.
I don't care.
It needs to end.
We need to stop the special protection for big tech, and conservatives need to grow a Launch an all-on legal assault on these companies.
This is an unfair advantage that they are giving to Democrats in 2020.
This is censoring the public square.
This is abusing their power.
This is abusing the law.
And frankly, it's illegal what they're doing.
We should take the Vox adpocalypse as a great opportunity.
To say enough is enough.
This has been creeping censorship for a long time.
And it's over.
This also reminds us why we need to go over to dailywire.com.
You know, I mean, this is the big issue of the day.
If you care about free speech and diversity of thought, go to dailywire.com right now.
Dailywire.com slash YouTube.
And add your name to the list of people standing up against the bullies at YouTube and speaking out for free speech.
It's very important.
Dailywire.com slash YouTube.
Join the fight with us.
We're going to bring on one of the OG conservative YouTubers, Zo Rachel.
Luckily, coincidentally, was coming by the studio today.
If you don't remember Zo, this video is from 10 years ago in the old days when social media really were the Wild West.
It's got half a million views on YouTube back when YouTube wasn't censoring conservatives.
This is Zo Rachel.
Okay, so the question is, why am I a Republican?
As a conservative Republican, I believe that war sucks.
Oh, but there are things that suck way worse than war, y'all.
Slavery, genocide, tyranny, peace through strength, y'all!
I'm a conservative Republican because I'm pro-life.
I'm a conservative Republican because I believe the marriage should be between a man and a woman.
As a conservative Republican, I support the Second Amendment.
As a conservative Republican, I appreciate what America is.
As a conservative Republican, I believe in a maximum of a 10% consumption tax.
As a conservative Republican, I think if we're smart enough to earn the money, then we're smart enough to know how to spend it.
I'm a conservative Republican because I believe that abstinence should be taught in school instead of having free condoms in the office.
As a conservative Republican, I'm proud of my country.
I'm proud that our country is seen as the place that if you want the best chance to realize your dream, it's the place to come to.
Oh man, I don't think we're better than anybody else.
It's America.
We are everybody else.
I could go on, y'all, but I'm just going to say that I'm a conservative Republican because I believe in God and I like We're joined now by Zo Rachel.
What's going on, man?
You look exactly the same.
Well, thank you.
I can't even see the difference.
Ten years and nothing has changed at all.
Well, I appreciate that.
This was such a lucky day, such a coincidental day for you to be walking by the studios.
Nice.
Why, is it because it's Gay Pride Month?
No, not because it's Gay Pride Month, because YouTube is in the news and you were one of the OG conservative YouTubers.
I mean, ten years ago, you're talking about 2009, that video came out.
Mm-hmm.
What changed between the old days when you could get half a million views on just a, here's my opinion on conservative politics, to now when Stephen Crowder uses the word queer, the same word that is in LGBTQ, and he gets demonetized and they're threatening to deplatform him.
What changed?
Ooh, ooh, how long do I have?
You could go on for days about this.
Yeah, we could, because it's been going on for years.
And, man, I would say, you know, I don't want to say I told you so, but I've been trying to let folks know that, man, you know, As conservatives, we gotta be careful not to underestimate liberals.
Their worldview may be foolish, but they're not exactly stupid people.
And they've created the platforms that conservatives have been dependent on to get their message out.
And I've said for a long time, man, it's like, you know, these Silicon Valley liberals ain't gonna sit there and let us talk about, you know, their worldview, the way they've been doing them before they pull the rug up from underneath us.
We're going to have to come up with some sort of viable competitor.
And I don't mean some sort of conservative platform or something like that.
Hey, this is the right thing.
No, it's going to have to be something that's just as interesting.
The content and the way that it's organized and all that sort of stuff.
I can't be the guy to do it.
I'm not that tech savvy.
I'm an artist.
But anyway, these people, how this came about is basically, they created this stuff and we just can't use their stuff and do what we're doing.
Right.
We must have been crazy to think that we could get away with airing our views, destroying their stupid ideas for 10 years.
Eventually, they're going to get sick of it.
I remember in the early days of YouTube, right around the time you made that video, I was working on a Republican campaign in New York and nobody was using social media.
So we used it in all these sorts of new ways.
We were doing music videos to attack the other guy.
And they were catching a lot of traction.
And you could do that back then.
Conservatives thought social media are here.
Finally, the monopoly of the mainstream media is broken.
You had PJTV early on, which you were at.
I mean, obviously Daily Wire, CRTV, all of these different companies blew up.
And now...
They are totally attacking us.
They're pulling the rug out from under us.
And what's been part of our content is letting folks know that Democrats is crazy.
You know, this isn't a new thing.
Like, you know, we talk about the Democrats are becoming unhinged and, you know, and they're going crazy.
They've been crazy.
You know, these are people who blow up churches.
You know, these are people who have lynch mobs.
These are people where we had, you know what, that's illegal.
You guys can't keep doing that.
You know, so we had to make, you know, anti-lynch laws.
These people have been crazy.
So, you know, at this point, it's like, you know, we might need to take that and get out of crazy folks' backyard and create our own thing like you guys are doing right now.
How does this end, though?
I mean, does this end with...
Conservatives, they just shut us up and we've got to wait for some new technology to develop?
Or does this actually energize conservatives as we look at 2020?
Well, I hope that it would energize conservatives and use the formula that's always been under our nose.
We see how liberals have been able to do it.
Music, movies, education, cinema, they're in everything.
And where conservatives...
Usually aren't.
And the thing is, we're, as conservatives, we tend to think that people, I think we give people a lot of benefit of the doubt that we can reason with them.
You know, we're going to go and we have this solid reasoning that people are going to understand.
And every once in a while, you may make a connection.
I was a liberal, you know, and I figure if a knucklehead like me can get it, anybody can get it.
But reason is just not a language that they understand.
And I'm not being literal here.
It's just something that they really don't get.
Their world is imagination.
That's why all the stuff that they believe is filtered through imagination.
Their information, their education, all that sort of stuff is imagination land.
And that's just an area that conservatives really don't tap into.
Well, it's all the narrative, right?
They construct a narrative.
Even if it's false, if everyone sticks to the narrative, then they get to do what they want.
And, you know...
Like me, you're a Hollywood conservative.
You're in the Gosnell movie.
You got a new album out.
I mean, you've been working around show business for a long time.
Conservatives don't want anything to do with show business.
Well, I don't know, man, because Netflix is getting that money from somewhere.
Let's not pretend that conservatives don't have a Netflix account.
We at least stole somebody's password to log into Netflix to watch the show.
Right, right.
Get them hacks going, man.
Netflix, HBO, all that sort of stuff.
And we're wondering, how are liberals able to do it?
It's because we're funding them to do it.
And, you know, it's about time that the supply and demand party start supplying and demanding interesting ways to promote our ideas.
Because that's what you got to do.
Should the government go in and either regulate these big social media companies or enforce the existing law?
Or do you think hands-off will just make our own platform?
Oh, man.
Okay.
You know, the government getting involved to make this kind of regulation...
My instinct is no.
Right.
The conservative instinct is I don't want the government to touch it.
Everything it touches turns to dust.
In the case of YouTube, maybe it should turn to dust.
That's another discussion.
However, when you do have an entity that is...
Interfering, you know, at the scope that they're doing, interfering with people's lives, their livelihood, tapping into, and this opens up another discussion about privacy.
You know, people would say that privacy, well, it's not in the Constitution.
I would argue, yes, it is.
And they are violating our right to privacy because your privacy is your property.
And we do have a constitutional right to property.
And they're infringing upon that.
They're infringing on our right to pursue happiness by infringing on our livelihood.
My contention with that, though, is that, well, we volunteered for it.
We don't have any sort of monetary covenant with them or anything like that.
We gave them the data.
We gave it to them.
My only issue is they pretend to be platforms when it suits them.
Then they say that they're publishers when they're actually in their own behavior.
And I don't think they should be able to get it both ways.
Indeed.
I don't know that we should go in and write new laws and write new regulations.
We certainly should enforce laws that we already have.
I actually think...
This helps us in 2020.
I think this helps.
I think Republicans and conservatives do best when it's so clear that the pop culture is stacked against us, that the mainstream media is stacked against us.
And Donald Trump does very well when he's got an adversary.
And I think this is totally going to backfire on them.
What about you?
I hope so.
I like to go along with that thinking.
You know, I get discouraged when I think, man, we lost the Congress.
We've got to be careful with how we may hope things go our way.
But Donald Trump, if we could use him as a model, how is he successful?
Because he had that pop culture connection.
He took his whole campaign and brought it into his reality TV show, Wheelhouse.
And these are things that conservatives, look, I understand.
Conservatives, to make up a conservative, there's a formula.
Just the same way there's a formula to make up a liberal.
Liberals are imaginative people.
Conservatives are practical people.
You know, and conservatives, you know, with doing what they're doing, because they have this practical nature, it doesn't lend a lot to creativity.
Well, that's where conservatives have to say, well, you know what, maybe we need to find the people who are and support them.
That way we can have a means to promote our narrative in a way that captures people's attention long enough to tell them the truth.
You're an imaginative conservative.
Where can people go and support you?
Well, thank you.
At bronzeserpentmedia.com, they can catch my book, A Solid Right Cross.
They can catch a new album by my band, 20 Pound Sledge.
Best band you've never heard of.
My only issue with, the new book sounds great, but one of my favorite titles for any book of all times is the name of your first book.
Well, and that was strategically planned.
Weapon of ASS destruction.
And, you know, I titled that, you know, because ASS stands for American Socialist States, which it seems where we're trying to be dragged to.
But I figured, you know what?
I think maybe people looking for gay porn might look up this book.
That's a big, I mean, that's like half the internet, I think.
Right.
And they might either be very enlightened or very disappointed.
So...
Well, it's great.
I'm sure the new book is a great read, too.
But, Zoe, great to see you, man.
Always great for you to come by.
Come by more often.
All right, man.
Thank you.
All right.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We're probably going to say goodbye to them forever pretty soon.
Go over to dailywire.com now more than ever.
Seriously, guys, join us in the fight against...
Big tech censorship.
YouTube has demonetized Stephen Crowder's channel.
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I don't think they're going to win the war.
I think this is going to energize conservatives in 2020.
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Go over, get the Leftist Tears Tumblr before you drown.
We'll be right back.
Let's get to the mailbag with what little time we have left.
First question from Nicole.
As Pride Month starts, including all kinds of sexualities and genders, I wonder if heterosexuality will ever be included.
I believe leaving them out creates a narrative of conflict between heterosexuals and everyone else, which is completely unproductive, and I'd love to know your thoughts.
Thanks.
It does create a conflict and a division.
That's the whole point.
Of course, it used to be gay pride.
So if you were gay, as opposed to straight, you would go out and march in the pride parade.
Then it became gay and lesbian pride, gay, lesbian, and bisexual pride.
Now it adds transgender, it adds queer.
I'm probably going to get banned from YouTube for saying that.
It adds IA. I don't know what those stand for.
The acronym gets longer by the minute, but it will never include straight people.
It can't.
The whole purpose of the pride movement or of all of the other left-wing political movements is to create an enemy and then to create solidarity among everyone who isn't the enemy.
So in this case, the mean, awful, terrible oppressors are the straight people and then everyone who isn't straight is in solidarity with each other.
Gay, lesbian, transgender.
I mean, it's really strange that gay and transgender go together.
The premise of homosexuality is that It's boys who like boys and girls who like girls, people who are attracted to the same sex.
The premise of transgenderism is that there's really no such thing as sex, that sex is totally changeable, that it's a social construct, you can move fluidly from one to the other.
Those are antithetical concepts, but they come together to fight the oppressor.
This is the idea of the 99% versus the 1%.
It's a pretty brilliant political strategy.
Of course, a mob of 99% of people is always going to overpower 1%.
It's the leftist strategy of division, of finding a scapegoat, of targeting them, of censoring them, of shutting them up, even if the interests of all the other groups don't quite align.
So no, they're not going to add straight people to the parade, although in Boston there's going to be a straight pride parade, apparently, with floats, and maybe we'll try to head over there and see what it's like.
From Paul.
Other than technology, what is the difference between spying on the GOP campaign in 2016, President Trump, and Watergate?
There's a big difference between the Obama administration's spying on the Trump campaign, which we now know for a fact happened.
We don't know for a fact that it was improper, but we know for a fact that it happened.
Big difference between Obama's administration spying on the Trump campaign and Watergate when Richard Nixon's re-election campaign spied on the Democrats.
The big difference is Richard Nixon didn't use the force of the state to spy on the Democrats.
He hired his own goons through the campaign and they totally bungled a burglary at the Watergate building, DNC headquarters, and they got caught.
The Obama administration used the full power of the American intelligence community to spy on a rival presidential campaign.
That's not a conspiracy theory.
We know that happened.
The question now is whether that spying was adequately predicated, whether it was appropriate or whether it was inappropriate.
Hopefully we'll get answers to that now that Attorney General Barr has a U.S. attorney working on the case and we're waiting for the inspector general's report as well.
But if the spying on the Trump campaign was not appropriately predicated, it is so much worse than Watergate, it's barely comparable.
From Nicole, a pro-choicer on Twitter made the argument that, medically speaking, an abortion is more of an induced miscarriage than murder.
Which is most medically accurate?
Good question.
It's true that an abortion is an induced miscarriage.
The instrument of the murder is the induced miscarriage.
It would be like saying that if I walked up to you on the street and slit your throat, that's not really murder.
It's an induced hemorrhage.
You died from an induced hemorrhage.
It's true.
It was induced.
It was induced by whom?
By me.
When I committed that act, what did I do?
I committed murder.
Of course.
What they're confusing is physical descriptions and the act itself.
I can cut your throat and have it be an induced hemorrhage.
I still committed murder.
I can induce a miscarriage in a baby.
That's committing murder.
And I won't get into the gory details, but when you look at how abortions are actually carried out, it is even visually indistinguishable from murder.
From Patty.
Regarding abortion, I have several friends that argue that when you see crack babies and abused and neglected children that an abortion would be preferable to all that suffering.
I know it's wrong, but I can't come up with any good analogy that would be comparable and make the issue crystal clear.
That argument seems the only one with merit.
Can you help me out with this?
Sure.
I live in Los Angeles.
I see miserable people all the time.
People who are suffering, people who are miserable, people who didn't get that audition that they really wanted to get, people who are completely lost wandering the streets of LA. So can I kill them?
Because I think it's better, I just think, it would be better for them to be dead than for them to be living in the squalor and misery and suffering that they're living in, in Los Angeles.
So can I kill them?
No, of course not.
Why?
Because I would still be killing them.
It would still be murder.
But also, in a more important level, the purpose of life is not to avoid suffering.
Everybody suffers.
It's not just crack babies who suffer.
It's not just neglected children who suffer.
Everybody suffers.
Suffering is a feature, not a bug, of life.
We all do it.
Now...
What sort of suffering justifies killing yourself?
Obviously, nothing for any of the people that we're talking to, because none of the people we're talking to have killed themselves.
We have a bizarre fascination and incorrect idea in this society that suffering is a justification for ending life, that the chief purpose of life is to feel happy all the time.
That isn't true.
If suffering justified ending life, we would all kill ourselves.
And so you have to find a better argument.
I guess the argument that they're making is...
My suffering doesn't justify taking my life, but their suffering justifies me taking their life.
That's a totally incoherent point.
Tell them to go back to the drawing board and start again.
From Garen.
Hi, Michael.
Despite Ben's best efforts to thwart his viewers from listening to your terrible show, I'm a major fan of the execrable Michael Knowles.
Hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Michael.
Thank you very much.
I noticed that Democrats attempt to undermine Republican achievements, such as ending slavery.
They will say things like, the Democrats and the Republicans switched platforms.
What is your take on this?
Sincerely, Garrett.
I don't know.
What's my take on Bigfoot?
What's my take on the abominable snowman?
It's just completely ridiculous.
To say that the Democrats and the Republicans switched platforms?
How do you think that happened?
Do you think one day, just around the time that all of the prominent Democrats who are around today happened to come of age in politics, the Democrats and the Republicans, Mr.
Democrat, Mr.
Republican, sat down at a table and said, okay, so now for no reason whatsoever, you, Mr.
Democrat, are going to start being Mr.
Republican.
And I, Mr.
Republican, am going to start being Mr.
Democrat.
Why are we going to do this?
I have absolutely no idea.
How is it possible to get two parties to completely switch?
I can't even imagine.
But we're going to do it because a bunch of boomer Democrats in the 90s and 2000s said it was true.
That's the argument.
It doesn't make any sense.
It is true that the parties change over time, but it isn't because they just switched parties one day.
The Republican Party was founded to end slavery because the Republican Party has had a fascination with American-style liberty from the very beginning, and it continues to this day.
Now, during the 20th century, geographically, you saw a beginning of a change in political alignments.
So what the Democrats want you to believe is that it was over the issue of civil rights, and because of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, black Republicans became Democrats.
That isn't true.
The move of black Americans from the Democrat to the Republican Party began decades earlier.
It began during Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and it also coincided with a shift as they moved from the South up to the North.
The realignment of certain Southern states coincided not with the Civil Rights Act, but actually happened decades later.
It really only solidified in the late 80s and 1990s.
Why is that?
It's because the Democrat Party moved staunchly to the left.
They moved radically to the left and they abandoned a lot of the cultural conservative ideas that all Americans used to share.
They boo God at their national convention in 2008 or 2012.
They become highly secular.
They become radically pro-abortion.
They embrace gay marriages.
So they're taking on all of these radical leftist ideas.
They go soft on communism.
There used to be anti-communist Democrats that has really ceased to exist anymore as Democrats have embraced socialism.
So a lot of cultural reasons why certain areas moved more to the right or moved more to embrace the Republican Party.
But they didn't switch.
I mean, the reason the Democrats want to take credit for all the Republican achievements is because the Democrat Party is one of the worst political forces in the history of the world.
It is just a 200-year record of untold mayhem and destruction and immorality.
So they're trying to take credit for Republican achievements.
But sorry, ain't going to work.
From Michael.
Hey, Michael.
It's Michael.
Hey, Michael.
I'm a graduating senior.
I'm making a turn in my life, and I want to go into politics.
Any suggestions on where to start?
Yes.
Turn away and go do something else.
Depends what you mean by politics.
Working on a political campaign is some of the best training you can get in your life for anything because you get paid peanuts, you work 18 hours a day, you are interacting with people all the time, strangers, new people, really getting to understand human nature, really getting to understand People, if you don't like people, it will chase you away from it because you're always interacting with strangers.
And if you do like people, it will deepen your love of people because you see that everyone is different.
You can celebrate their diversity, their foibles, what makes them tick, what motivates them.
So I think working on campaigns is great.
If you want to start just spouting your political opinions all the time like I do, I would wait at least a few years and go do some other things, get some life experience before you start that at the tender age of 22.
If you want to run for office, don't do it.
Don't run at 22.
You just haven't lived enough to run and be a serious candidate.
If you want to work as a Hill staffer or somebody for an elected official, I think that's pretty good training too.
You won't make a whole lot of money, but it'll teach you a lot.
And if you aspire to be in high office someday, maybe a route for you to do is go and...
Make some money.
Go work in business.
Go have a regular career.
Then start running when you're 35 or 40.
And you'll bring something more to the table.
From Eric, last question.
Ahoy, Michael!
Did you know Alexander Graham Bell proposed answering the telephone with Ahoy?
I didn't know that, but now I do.
Happy belated anniversary to you and sweet little Elisa.
My question is about movies.
Whenever Drew has you review a movie, it's typically something Drew has made you watch, meaning that we get to hear about how awful it is.
Avengers Endgame, Sorry to Bother You, that Anita Hill movie on HBO, for example.
Are there any movies besides The Godfather and The Godfather Part II that you really like?
Yes, there are many.
On the Waterfront, Streetcar Named Desire.
I don't know.
I loved All Is Lost, that Robert Redford movie.
I loved Hail Caesar.
Those are more recent movies.
But perhaps my favorite movie.
It's one of the most underappreciated films ever made, starring a complete lunatic leftist wacko.
But nonetheless, it's one of the greatest movies ever made.
And that movie is Me, Myself, and Irene by the Farrelly brothers.
A true masterpiece.
I could watch it endlessly.
Enjoy the weekend.
Go watch Me, Myself, and Irene.
We'll see you on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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.
D-Day was 75 years ago today, and for all the sentimental remembrances and heartfelt tributes, it's virtually impossible to recapture or convey the scale and scope of the heroism and sacrifice that was required to begin the rollback of the Nazi conquest.
You have to ask yourself, could we do it today?
Would we?
Why did they fight?
Why did they win?
And have we lost what it takes to pull off that kind of monumental triumph?
