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Sept. 17, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

46:55

Ep. 416 - Comedy Is Canceled

The “cancel culture” claims another scalp. Who's to blame? Then, the Left ratchets up the rhetoric on climate change, and Andrew Yang's vote-buying scheme might break the law. Date: 09-17-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Time	Text
	The cancel culture claims another scalp.
	The media are mostly to blame, but we delve deeper to a much more disturbing truth.
	The media give us exactly what we want.
	Then the left ratchets up the rhetoric on climate change.
	We examine why the new environmental militarism is doomed to fail.
	And finally, Andrew Yang learns that his vote-buying scheme might not be totally legal.
	Who would have thought that?
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	They got another one.
	The cancel culture got another one.
	This is a guy, Shane Gillis, I think his name is pronounced, who you've probably never even heard of.
	Shane Gillis was just brought on to Saturday Night Live, gets this big new gig, and he's gone.
	And they take it away, and it's all over.
	We knew this would happen.
	This was the inevitable consequence of two or three days ago when Shane Gillis first came into the cancel culture crosshairs.
	Now it has happened.
	He gets brought into Saturday Night Live, then he loses Saturday Night Live.
	And this is how he responds.
	He tweets out...
	I'm a comedian who is funny enough to get SNL. That can't be taken away.
	Of course, I wanted an opportunity to prove myself at SNL, but I understand it would be too much of a distraction.
	I respect the decision they made.
	I'm honestly grateful for the opportunity.
	I was always a mad TV guy anyway.
	Just funny.
	That's obviously very gracious, a witty way to end it.
	He has this little joke about how he prefers the rival comedy sketch show, Mad TV. Really, it's the only decent option he had.
	He could either make a big deal about it and complain and whine, but that wouldn't be a good look, and nobody knows who he is anyway, so it wouldn't reflect well on him.
	Anybody who still likes SNL, you know, all ten people in the audience, are going to prefer SNL to this random guy.
	So he made the correct choice.
	He made the best option that was in front of him.
	But this is wrong.
	This is outrageous, and this is wrong.
	Show business is very hard.
	All of it.
	Acting, writing, directing, all of it.
	All of it is very difficult to get work of any kind in show business.
	Comedy is probably the hardest of all.
	It's the hardest of all to make it in.
	It's not hard to get these little gigs, but you get a few gigs in comedy.
	You get paid peanuts, and pretty much you're guaranteed to die in obscurity unless something magical happens, which is you could get picked up maybe for a role in a sitcom.
	Maybe you get a role in a movie or something, but those are really hard.
	Or you get the pinnacle of the comedy jobs, which is Saturday Night Live.
	And then maybe from there, like Jimmy Fallon, you go from Saturday Night Live to having your own late night talk show or something.
	But there are one or two of those jobs.
	Saturday Night Live is it.
	That's the gig.
	This guy made it.
	Against all odds, he makes it to the top of the comedy pack.
	And then the swarm came in and took away every single thing from him because of jokes he made a year or more ago that were just jokes and he's a comedian telling jokes and now it's all gone.
	This is exactly what Dave Chappelle predicted in his own Netflix comedy special a few weeks ago.
	He said this cancel culture comes out And they say, hey you, if you've ever done anything wrong, anything that's not even wrong, just something I object to, we're going to take away every single thing you have.
	Here's Dave Chappelle.
	The next one's a little harder.
	I want to see if you can guess who it is I'm doing an impression of.
	Alright, let me get into character.
	You've got to guess who it is, though.
	Okay, here it goes.
	Duh!
	Hey!
	Duh!
	If you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I'm going to try to take everything away from you.
	And I don't care when I find out.
	It could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now, if I find out you're fucking, duh, finished.
	Who's that?
	That's you!
	That's what the audience sounds like to me.
	That's why I don't be coming out doing comedy all the time, 'cause y'all n** is the worst motherf* I've ever tried to entertain in my f***g life.
	That clip, it's made the rounds, People have loved it.
	Conservatives, obviously, who hate cancel culture, but a lot of liberals, a lot of just comedians, a lot of regular people love that clip.
	But that clip is so much wiser.
	So much wiser even than people give it credit for.
	What is interesting about this whole saga with Shane Gillis, a guy that I don't know anything about, don't really care about, don't care about SNL, never watch it.
	What's interesting is not that it happened.
	This is happening all the time.
	What's interesting is how it happened.
	Because the strangest aspect of cancel culture is it just seems to happen.
	It doesn't seem like it's one person or one group or just this person is controlling all of it.
	It's this swarm that comes in and it feels as though we are powerless to stop it.
	But that is not exactly the case.
	And there's a lot of insight in Chappelle's diagnosis.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	We'll get to who's really behind cancel culture.
	But first, if you have bought a timeshare You probably know the pitch, right?
	It's a great investment.
	It's a legacy for your kids.
	You can stay whenever you want, wherever you want.
	You get vacation all the time.
	Guess what?
	None of that is true.
	None of it.
	It's a scam.
	It's a total scam.
	The ugly truth is that with a timeshare you can never tell how much it's really going to cost or when it's going to end.
	And a lot of owners who are trying to sell their timeshares online find out the hard way that it's not an investment.
	Not only is it not a good investment, it's not an investment because they can't get a single dollar for it.
	And on top of that, when you factor in the rising annual maintenance costs and assessment fees and whatever other fees you're going to get, buying a timeshare is like giving the timeshare company a blank check for life.
	Even when you die, even when you are dead and gone, your family will get stuck with that burden.
	So stop the insanity today.
	There is a way out.
	I have family members who have been stuck in timeshares.
	It can be brutal.
	Right now, go to Icanceltimeshare.com.
	Tell them that I sent you.
	The Wesley Financial Group guarantees they will legally get you out of your timeshare, out of the contract permanently, or you pay nothing.
	To get your free information kit telling you all about how it works, go to Icanceltimeshare.com.
	That is Icanceltimeshare.com.
	Go there now.
	You don't want to pay a dollar more to those scam artists than is necessary.
	Icanceltimeshare.com will help get you at or you pay nothing.
	So what's interesting about this cancel culture is the question of who is behind it.
	It's the swarm.
	It's the Twitter mob.
	It's the crazy angry mob.
	So what happens is the swarm comes and then the object of the swarm's ire loses their job.
	How does it happen?
	Who is to blame?
	Specifically, journalists.
	Quote-unquote journalists.
	They are.
	I'm not going to say it's just everybody and everyone is all to blame.
	No.
	It is very practically the journalists, so-called, and the mainstream media who are driving this.
	Because journalists, from your one independent reporter on Twitter all the way up to the New York Times, they are not reporting newsworthy stories.
	They are simply dredging up character assassination.
	And all you have to do is look at yesterday's news cycle.
	The New York Times ran front page, big cover story, completely unsubstantiated allegations.
	They hid evidence that was exculpatory.
	They hid the fact that the people alleging crimes against Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, weren't actually alleging anything.
	It was people alleging crimes about people who were alleging things who didn't actually allege them.
	It was bogus character assassination.
	That's the New York Times, the gray lady, all the news that's fit to print.
	Same thing is true of the Washington Post.
	Same thing is true throughout the mainstream media, all the way down to so-called independent journalists or independent outlets.
	So it is those guys.
	They are doing worse right now.
	It wasn't always this way.
	It's been better before.
	Just remember, when FDR was president, the journalists didn't report on the fact that FDR was bound to a wheelchair.
	The president of the United States, cameras on him all the time, a lot of people didn't know he was in a wheelchair.
	The journalists didn't report on FDR's mistresses.
	They didn't report on JFK's mistresses.
	They didn't report on LBJ's mistresses.
	Now, those guys all have two things in common.
	One, they are simply known by three letters, an acronym.
	And two, they're all Democrats.
	So maybe that has something to do with it.
	But regardless, it was a time when journalists exhibited discretion.
	Frankly, all those mistresses were certainly more newsworthy than this cancel culture.
	Some guy sent three tweets ten years ago and now you've got to ruin his life.
	This is being driven by the journalists.
	They deserve our scorn.
	When Trump goes out and says they're the enemy of the people, he's half right.
	He's also half wrong.
	Why is that?
	Because what are the journalists responding to?
	They're responding to you and me.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	First, how did this happen?
	The way that this cancel culture thing occurred with Shane Gillis is, first, an independent journalist, which means a guy with a Twitter account, named Seth Simons, came out, dredged up a bunch of old clips of the comedian telling jokes, and then framed it in a way that this was supposed to be some horrible offense, and then framed it in a way that this was supposed to be some horrible offense, and then Saturday Night Live on NBC ran scared and The New York Times picked up this story, those scum-sucking bottom feeders at the New York Times.
	They blew the whole story up and the guy loses his job.
	What did they find?
	Here's what they found.
	Here's what they found.
	Apparently a year or two ago, the comedian, Shane Gillis, the comedian, I'll note, made some jokes.
	Here is one joke about going to Chinatown.
	It's a dishonest food, dude.
	There's nothing to it.
	It's shitty meat.
	A chemical they made up to fuck your body up.
	And noodles.
	Neuters.
	Cheapest thing in the world.
	Chemical.
	Worst meat you can find.
	We got in there, and we sat down, and baby girl was like, I'm so excited for neuters!
	And I was like, yo, chill, chill, chill.
	But we had to end the translation between you and the waiter.
	Yeah.
	It's just such a f***ing hassle.
	It's like, can you?
	I'm pointing at you.
	Like, this is the f***ing neuter.
	Well, that's why I put number, like, 57.
	The joke is that Chinese people have different accents from English-speaking people.
	That's the joke.
	And it's true.
	It's like the most obvious joke in the world.
	I'm not saying it's a good joke, but it's an obvious joke.
	It's a completely harmless joke.
	The joke is that stereotypically, East Asians mix up the L and the R sounds in English.
	So he says neuters instead of noodles.
	But that's true.
	That is true.
	Those two letters do get confused.
	Absolutely harmless joke.
	Less offensive than making a joke about Irish people drinking.
	I mean, so obvious.
	It's a joke about language.
	He should lose his job for that.
	Because he says, yeah, I go to Chinatown and sometimes the people speak with funny accents.
	They do.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Of course, that's what happens.
	Here's Seth Simon's next example of Shane Gillis' terrible, awful racism from the same podcast, from the same conversation about Chinese restaurants.
	It's funny, too, because that's more annoying than any other minority playing music at a restaurant, loud on their phone.
	Do you think an Asian trying to learn English bothers me more than someone listening to Lil Uzi Vert while I'm trying to eat dinner?
	That's hilarious.
	Yeah, nice racism.
	That's nice.
	That was good racism.
	I loved it.
	It's basically the stereotype of white people that we walk around all day and are like...
	Yeah, that's what happens.
	But it's funny, too, that, like...
	If you were over there, they'd be the white people being like, ugh, shut up.
	Now, what's incredible about this clip, and actually, I guess the last clip, too, is not only are the jokes not an example of racism, whatever that means anymore, because racism has been defined down to nothing by the left, We're good to go.
	I mean, even he says to his girlfriend, because she said the word neuters, and he said, oh, stop it, stop it, chill, be cool, because he knows you're not supposed to say that.
	And the joke is that incongruity, how you're supposed to behave and how you're actually behaving.
	And they talk about it in the second clip.
	They say, yeah, this is sort of what...
	What ethnic minorities must imagine white people are doing all the time, complaining about minorities.
	But I guess if we were in China and we were speaking the way that we speak, they would probably say the same things about us.
	That is a joke about race.
	Specifically a joke about racism.
	He's got to lose his job for that.
	Of course he does.
	Because Seth Simons, this random Twitter account, wants to ruin someone's life.
	He wakes up in the morning and he says, well, I'm going to ruin someone's life today.
	I don't, I don't know what's going on in my life, but I've got such an empty pit in my own life, in my own soul, that I'm going to fill that today by destroying somebody's life.
	And so he pulls together, pulls the whole narrative together that this comedian Shane Gillis, I guess hates Chinese people or something by finding a different Chinese joke from a different podcast that he told.
	The podcast has a bunch of guys on it, and Shane has the audacity to joke that the Chinese have a lot of abortions.
	Here's the joke.
	Shout out to NYC Grappling Club, grapplingclubnyc.com.
	You're speaking like him now?
	Thank you, Grappling Crub.
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	You have taught me many valuable lessons, not just about fighting, but the mental game as well.
	I can't tell if you mean Asian or handicapped.
	Both.
	Lewis' training is just...
	I have not seen an Asian handicapped person.
	Asian?
	Asian?
	You can't tell.
	They put them down early.
	Did you catch the joke at the end?
	So they're all telling the same joke about the L's and the R's, which every comedian and virtually everyone else has told at some point.
	And then someone says, I can't tell if you're handicapped or Chinese.
	The joke being, I can't tell if you are Speaking English poorly because it's not your first language or if you're speaking English poorly because you have mental deficiency.
	Isn't it really funny to explain jokes?
	And then they say, well, I've never seen a handicapped Chinese person.
	They put them down earlier than that.
	This is a dark joke, very dark humor.
	Specifically, it's a joke about abortion.
	It is a joke playing on a fact that is obviously true, which is that China very famously had a policy of compulsory abortion for over 35 years.
	And that policy was called the One Child Policy.
	The joke is, they kill their babies as a government policy, which is true.
	Doesn't make it nice, doesn't make it a nice fact about life, but it is true.
	And what comedy does is it subverts all these sorts of awful things, like Coercive government, or like mandatory abortion, or like cultural mores.
	That's what it is doing.
	Now the crowning achievement of this guy's career, this comedian Shane Gillis, Ruined.
	It's gone.
	You can't have it because of some jerk named Seth Simons.
	And Seth Simons is indeed a very bad man who did a very bad thing, who should apologize and seek forgiveness.
	But it is not just his fault, and it's not just the journalist's fault.
	There is another group of people very much at fault here who should seriously take a look inside of themselves.
	We'll get to that group in one second.
	But first, I've got to thank our friends over at ZipRecruiter.
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	So this guy Seth Simons, this critic who got Shane Gillis' job taken away, is a jerk.
	He's a huge jerk.
	The journalists who do this generally are huge jerks.
	Not just their fault.
	H.L. Mencken said, democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and that they deserve to get it good and hard.
	And that's it.
	Look, journalism is increasingly driven by clicks.
	It's also subscriptions.
	You know, we have subscribers, but largely, mostly clicks.
	And so journalists, again, increasingly in many ways, give the audience what they want.
	Not like you just have the regular subscribers and you've got them and you've got their trust and you keep it going around like in the old days.
	I mean, you were going down to individual clicks at this point.
	That's how you make money through online ad sales.
	And so the journalists give the audiences what they want in the immediate moment, how they can monetize every last penny out of their content.
	And audiences want this trash.
	They do.
	They want it.
	They want the thrill of cheap drama.
	Increasingly, they want a replacement for the virtue lacking in their own lives.
	They want something to fill the God-shaped holes in their heart.
	And in our Sikh culture, that takes the shape of vindictiveness and politics.
	You just want the drama.
	You know, the silver lining here for Shane Gillis is that absolutely nobody has watched Saturday Night Live since Bill Murray left, or at least since Norm MacDonald left.
	And so I'm not sorry for Shane Gillis in particular.
	You know, he'll probably go on and have a fine career.
	I am sorry, though, for us.
	I'm sorry for us.
	I'm sorry we live in this culture.
	We are living in a colder, less funny, less humane society today because of cancel culture.
	And look, it's so easy to condemn cancel culture.
	It's so easy because it's ugly.
	It's so ugly.
	We all know it's ugly.
	But why do we have cancel culture?
	We have it.
	We have that culture because we live in a colder, less funny, less humane society.
	Grace is the only thing that prevents life from being miserable.
	Life can be miserable.
	I don't think it's miserable.
	I have a great time.
	I am as joyful as I've ever been.
	Because of grace.
	Not because I think I deserve something and I'm so proud and I'm going to go get that guy and I'm going to ruin his life and I'm going to take that guy's career away and then I'm going to go home at night and feel really good about myself.
	No.
	Grace.
	Grace is the only thing that prevents life from being so miserable.
	The quality of mercy.
	It's wonderful.
	We pray for it and we give it out to others.
	That's what the Lord's prayer is.
	Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.
	Those who trespass against us.
	Forgive us our debts.
	Forgive us our trespasses.
	Please, please forgive us.
	And we will forgive others in the same way.
	And we are losing the sense of grace more and more each day.
	We're celebrating pride.
	We're celebrating entitlement.
	We're growing the entitlement state.
	We're turning to a culture of pride and entitlement, away from one of grace and humility.
	This actually has a big lesson for conservatives.
	There is a lesson beyond the unfortunate aspect of cancel culture.
	Beyond the graceless society.
	The lesson for conservatives is this.
	Shane Gillis lost out because he was playing the mainstream game.
	He was trying to win the approval of the mainstream culture, go on the mainstream comedy show, keep everything mainstream with the mainstream advertisers and the mainstream television network.
	If you seek The approval of the mainstream popular culture.
	You are suspended so precariously, like a spider held over a burning fire, to use the imagery of sinners in the hands of an angry god.
	If you don't care about the approval of the mainstream popular culture, if you mock that mainstream pop culture, that bizarre, perverse pop culture, if you hold it in disdain, then it can't hurt you.
	It can't come get you.
	They can't get me.
	They can get Shane Gillis because he's playing their game.
	They can't get me.
	They can't get Drew.
	They can't get Ben.
	If you just say, no, I don't want it, they can't get you.
	You know, the reason I even mention me and Drew and Ben in this, and Matt Walsh, is that those ghouls over at the leftist media operative organizations like Media Matters and a couple of others, they could have power over us.
	But only if we give it to them.
	They actually have no power over us.
	Why?
	Because we just make fun of them.
	They only have power if they make you flinch.
	They only have power if they make you blink.
	They only have power if you grant their ridiculous premises.
	But if you don't, If Shane Gillis, I mean, he was in trouble because he was already trying to get his way into the mainstream.
	But if Saturday Night Live or some other comedy program just turned to that awful little independent journalist and said, yeah, you know what?
	I don't care what you have to say.
	Get out of here.
	I mean, even he made some joke about Andrew Yang, this comedian Shane Gillis.
	And Andrew Yang said, yeah, that's fine.
	We'll sit down and talk, but, you know, whatever.
	You shouldn't lose his job.
	That's grace.
	That's forgiveness.
	That's nice.
	What is this Awful Twitter person, this cancel culture person, what right does he have to get Shane Gillis to lose his job?
	Because this awful Twitter person is offended on behalf of other people?
	On behalf of Andrew Yang?
	On behalf of Chinese Americans?
	No, you can't be offended on behalf of somebody.
	Just make fun of him.
	Say, who cares?
	The lesson for the conservatives here is don't do it.
	Do not seek the approval of the New York Times.
	Do not seek the forgiveness of Media Matters.
	I mean, Media Matters, they're a bunch of degenerates.
	They're absolutely disgusting people who hold disgusting views and live a disgusting life where their whole life is just trying to ruin the careers of others because they don't have any arguments to answer the arguments of their political opponents.
	They deserve pity in a certain sense.
	I don't care.
	I'm not going to try to destroy their lives.
	But they have no credibility.
	This Twitter guy who spends all his days trying to ruin people's careers, you don't owe him an answer.
	You don't owe him an answer on anything.
	That's how we got to look at the left.
	That's how we got to look at that mainstream culture.
	They're never going to like you.
	They're not.
	They're simply going to try to destroy you.
	And you've got to get that through your head.
	And then, only then, can you start building up a decent culture yourself.
	Now the hysteria is not just on cancel culture.
	It's not just all the way up.
	They're turning up the dials and amping up the rhetoric on everything, all the way up to and including climate change.
	They're amping up their rhetoric.
	They're using bellicose language.
	They're talking about climate change like it's World War II. Not just AOC saying it, but other people as well.
	We'll see why, because...
	There's nothing new under the sun, and the left doesn't know anything about history, so they don't realize they are just repeating the same old, tired tropes of past leftists.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	We'll see why it's an old idea.
	We'll see why there's nothing new under the sun in the Andrew Yang campaign.
	He thinks he's got a novel idea to pay voters.
	It's the oldest idea under the sun.
	We'll get to all of that in a second, but first you've got to go to dailywire.com.
	$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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	You get me.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	The left is totally amping up its rhetoric on climate change.
	That's the old euphemism.
	Now they're calling it something different.
	And it's no accident.
	You know, we went from in the 70s global cooling to then in the 80s and 90s global warming to then in the 2000s climate change to then in the 20-teens climate crisis.
	Now they're calling it climate catastrophe.
	That's what they're saying on...
	Presidential town halls on CNN. So a major environmental activist, Jonathan Safran Foer, who is also a novelist, he was on MSNBC and he openly invoked the imagery of World War II in the battle against the sun monster, climate change, climate catastrophe, to describe how we need to mobilize and unite to fight this awful foe.
	Here he is.
	Acting on one's values can feel really good.
	You know, it can feel inspiring.
	No, I'm with you.
	I agree with you.
	I think we probably shouldn't use the word sacrifice in this context because if you don't act on your values You don't feel good, and the consequence could be the wrecking of the earth.
	Absolutely, and there's a good model for this in World War II, the home front efforts that regular Americans made, regardless of their political leanings or their socioeconomic backgrounds.
	Driving at 35 miles per hour, we had a 94% income tax, highest rate income tax.
	We had rations on foods, and in a really wonderful fireside chat that I could never imagine our president giving, but FDR gave at the time, he said, Look, not all of us have the privilege of fighting on the other side of the ocean against the enemy.
	Not all of us have the privilege of producing munitions, but we can all participate on the home front.
	And when we look back at the changes that we've made during this period, after we have saved our free way of life, sacrifice is not the word we're going to use.
	And I think it's the same thing here.
	When we look back or when our kids...
	It's a contribution.
	So this is it.
	This is World War II. Here we are.
	And he's not the first one to do this.
	Just a few months ago, AOC, the future of the Democratic Party, according to Tom Perez, the head of the DNC, compared climate change to World War II as well.
	Here she is in a talk with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
	I think that the part of it that is generational is that...
	Millennials and people and, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.
	And your biggest issue is...
	Your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?
	And, like, this is the war.
	This is our World War II. This is it.
	This is like our World War II. You know, like?
	It's just like what it is.
	They think this is a novel idea.
	They think this is a new strategy.
	Joshua Safran, or Jonathan Safran Foer, and AOC. They think this is a new idea.
	This is what we're going to do.
	We're going to compare our domestic policy agenda to a war.
	And that way we'll get all this unity.
	It's not a new idea.
	It's an old idea and it's a very bad idea.
	And it's certainly doomed to fail because it's never actually worked.
	This idea of comparing your domestic policy agenda to a war goes all the way back to an essay by the philosopher and psychologist William James.
	And the essay is called The Moral Equivalent of War.
	It's worth reading.
	The essay addresses how to sustain the political unity and civic virtue characteristic of war during times of peace.
	So the idea is, you've heard this before, why can't America be as united as they were, as we all were, after 9-11?
	Why can't America go back to being so united like we were during World War II? How do we get that back?
	So the theory is that you get that back by injecting regular old domestic politics with a heavy dose of militarism.
	And this idea has been embraced by a whole slew of people, but especially by modernists and leftists for over a century.
	So Mussolini did this.
	He did this very directly.
	This isn't some kind of crazy conspiracy theory here.
	He gave a speech called the Battle of the Grains speech in which he explicitly invoked William James, in which he invoked this essay, the moral equivalent of war.
	LBJ did this in our own country in the war on poverty.
	Richard Nixon did this.
	By the way, Richard Nixon pre-left on his domestic policy.
	He did this with his war on drugs.
	He declared the war on drugs.
	Jimmy Carter did this.
	He gave actually a speech called The Moral Equivalent of War, which was directly based on the William James essay.
	And he did that on the energy crisis.
	We need to rally and unite and Get all of our civic virtue back to address the energy crisis just like we would in war.
	And conservatives tend to make fun of this kind of language because it's hysterical and ridiculous.
	To hear AOC compare recycling and using those stupid paper straws instead of plastic straws, to compare that to landing on the beaches in Normandy is a little ridiculous.
	This is not a World War II. This is us inventing problems because we're too decadent and luxurious.
	So we make fun of it.
	You know, Ronald Reagan joked, he said, And poverty won, which is true.
	We fought a war on poverty, made things worse.
	We ended up spending a ton of money, didn't make anything better, and in many ways it harmed the people that it was intended to help.
	What does it mean about the language of war?
	Everybody uses war as a matter of rhetoric.
	I mean, we use war as a synonym for civil battle or fights or debates.
	Obviously, we talk about the culture war.
	That's very different.
	That's a figure of speech to refer to some debate with the hyperbolic and heightened language of war.
	That is a figure of speech.
	The culture war, when we use that phrase, describes political divisions in the country.
	What the left does with their war rhetoric is actually the opposite.
	They're not trying to talk about divisions in the country.
	They want to fabricate an actual equivalent to war so that the whole country is unified behind certain radical domestic policies.
	That is not going to work in the long run.
	Why not?
	Because there is no actual equivalent of war.
	Drinking your plastic straws is not like landing on the beaches of Normandy.
	It's not the same.
	We know that the sun monster is not as big a threat as al-Qaeda terrorists who knocked down our buildings and killed 3,000 Americans.
	We know that the sun monster and the temperature increasing possibly, possibly by one degree over 100 years Isn't the same as the Nazis invading.
	Isn't the same as the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor.
	It's just not the same.
	We all know that.
	And even if it were, though, think about this.
	They're calling for the moral equivalent of war.
	They've been calling to use this World War II militaristic language for a long time now.
	Even if there were a way to do it, if you are the one who's really eager for war and to create the sense of war and the sacrifice of war and the feeling of war, if you are encouraging war, You're probably on the wrong side of that equation, aren't you?
	You're probably on the wrong side of that question.
	Maybe you've got to rethink that.
	If you're saying, we need to feel like we're in a war all the time, maybe what you're selling isn't what we need as a society.
	I'm not eager for war.
	I like peace.
	Peace is really nice.
	It's so ironic that the left accuses the right of being warmongers because we like a big, strong military.
	We want a big, strong military because the only way you can have peace is to be prepared for war.
	You have peace through strength.
	A strong military is a good deterrent for war.
	Whereas a weak military is welcoming a war.
	It's encouraging a war.
	It's daring your opponents and your enemies to come attack you.
	So they call us warmongers because we want peace, whereas they pretend that they want peace and all they ever do is clamor for war and the feeling of war.
	Bad idea.
	And they're doing it around climate change because this is the sort of central religious issue for the left.
	In the fall of the Soviet Union, after the advance of secularism, what took the place of communism and socialism in the left-wing religious imagination, what took the place of traditional religion, Christianity, is...
	Environmentalism, increasingly.
	And so, I think that the war language is really weak for them, but the religious language is really good.
	And we just found out, New York City, I'm broadcasting from New York right now, they announced that 1.1 million public school students are allowed to skip class without penalty to join the global youth climate strikes on Friday.
	This is being reported by a lot of people, including the New York Times.
	1.1 million public school kids get the day off to go to a climate change rally.
	Now, People are shocked by this.
	I'm not shocked at all.
	I think this makes perfect sense.
	The New York City school kids get off for Christmas.
	They get off for Hanukkah.
	They get off for the Christian holidays and the Jewish holidays.
	Of course they should get off for the leftist holidays.
	Because leftism is a much more popular religion in New York City, at least among the elites and the people making these decisions, as Christianity or Judaism or anything else.
	It's a religious holiday.
	It's not a protest.
	This climate change rally is not a political protest.
	The rally is being organized by the government.
	It's being organized by the mayor's office and by the public schools.
	So who are they protesting?
	They're not protesting anybody.
	What they are doing is putting on a religious ritual where they're taking off from school and they're going out and they're doing oblations and they're trying to stave off the sun monster and to appease the weather gods.
	And to signal their virtue.
	And to signal to everyone around them that they are good and moral and upright and religious people.
	Even in a world that laughs at actual religion.
	Makes perfect sense to me.
	That is going to be more successful for the left in the long term.
	It's too bad because everybody's got to serve somebody.
	And so what I would rather the left do is actually come back to real religion and worship God.
	But I don't know that that's going to happen anytime soon absent a miracle.
	So instead what they're going to do is get more and more pulled into...
	The religion of leftism.
	The religion of climate change.
	Totally unfalsifiable.
	It's sad, too, that they need to exploit kids this way.
	Look, I'm pretty conservative.
	I mean, I was born basically smoking a cigar and campaigning for like Bob Dole in my first grade classroom.
	But If you told me that I could get a day off from school to go out there and wear a hippie bandana and protest the Sun Monster, sign me up, man.
	You just met your biggest environmental activist in the world.
	I'll even drink through paper straws that day if it got me off of school.
	And so I bet a lot of kids are going to take them up on this opportunity.
	That's pathetic, though.
	I mean, that is a sign of true demagogues to have to exploit children this way.
	The left does it all the time.
	Doesn't make it any less pathetic, but it's an old idea, and it's going to be fairly effective.
	Conservatives need to find a way to fight back, and you're not going to fight back on just little political points.
	Andrew Breitbart was right.
	Politics is down from culture.
	Culture is down from religion.
	We need to speak in as compelling a religious way as the left is doing with their false religion and their false religion of materialism.
	Now, speaking of old ideas that people are pretending are new again, Andrew Yang, Andrew Yang, the wackiest candidate, Andrew Yang came out and offered people $1,000 If they donate to his campaign, they have a chance of winning $1,000 a month for a year to show them how great his universal basic income plan is.
	Here's Andrew Yang at the debate promising the plan.
	My campaign will now give a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for an entire year to 10 American families.
	Someone watching this at home right now.
	If you believe that you can solve your own problems better than any politician, go to yang2020.com and tell us how $1,000 a month will help you do just that.
	This is how we will get our country working for us again, the American people.
	What's amazing is after Yang said this, Pete Buttigieg was on the stage and he sort of laughed and he said, it's original.
	That's an original plan.
	It's not an original plan.
	What Yang is saying is, hey, if you support me, I'll give you money.
	Hey, can I buy your vote?
	That's not a new plan.
	That's the oldest plan in politics.
	That has been a plan in politics since the first caveman was running for mayor of the cave city.
	And it looks like it may be illegal.
	I was wondering when I watched the debate, I thought there's no way this is legal.
	How are you allowed to take campaign donations and then just give it away to bribe people to vote for you?
	So now, because the Yang campaign has said that they've checked with lawyers and it's totally kosher and it's absolutely fine.
	There is now a former FEC lawyer who is a top litigator with the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
	His name is Adav Nody.
	He's saying, not looking so good.
	Direct quote to CNN. Although it's hard to say with 100% certainty until we know the details of the payouts, Yeah, gee, you don't say.
	He says, An anti-tax candidate couldn't use campaign money to pay people's taxes, and a pro-income candidate can't use campaign money to give people cash.
	Of course not.
	And this is my big issue with Andrew Yang.
	He seems like a perfectly nice guy, I guess.
	His campaign is the wrongest campaign in the entire Democratic field.
	And there are some wackos.
	You've got the furry.
	You've got Liawatha.
	You've got Joe Biden beating up old corn pops with a six-foot-long metal chain.
	You've got a lot of weirdos.
	You've got Bernie Sanders singing shirtless in the Soviet Union during his honeymoon.
	I mean, you've got some wacky people in there.
	And yet, Andrew Yang, who has mostly ironically, but somewhat earnestly, attracted the support of some conservatives.
	He is still the wrongest candidate in the whole race because what he's essentially doing is bribing people.
	He's corrupting the system in a way that the founders of our country really feared, which is that he's purchasing votes.
	He's trying to bribe the people with their own money.
	He's trying to turn the government into a slush fund for people.
	And not just that.
	It's not even just the money because there's always corruption in government.
	He's undermining the dignity of the person, human dignity, by saying he's predicting that automation is going to destroy all the jobs.
	I don't think there's really evidence for that.
	We're at the lowest unemployment, record low unemployment right now.
	So that doesn't even really ring true as a prediction.
	But let's say the prediction were true.
	Let's say some great advancement happens with artificial intelligence and all of a sudden you've got very high unemployment rates.
	Andrew Yank says the answer is to basically bribe people.
	Brive them to go away.
	Here's some money.
	Go play video games or do drugs or kill yourself.
	Whatever you've got to do.
	But just don't bother me because we're going to be over here in Silicon Valley making a lot of money.
	That is not a serious answer.
	The charitable read of that is that he's simply naive and uninterested in people.
	The more cynical read or perhaps the more realistic read, depending on how you look at the guy, is that he just wants to Live his own life to help the elites, to help the go-getters, to help the people at the top.
	And he doesn't want the hoi polloi and the proletarians to come out and overthrow this system.
	I mean, it's everything wrong with modern capitalism or neoliberalism.
	Everything wrong about it is in this Yang campaign, right down to the unbelievably corrosive effects, disrespectful effects of purchasing people's vote, perverting our democratic republic.
	Getting back to the perversions of our democratic republic, it's not just happening in the pop culture with cancel culture.
	It's not just happening in our government with the democratic presidential campaign.
	It's happening in our academic institutions, too.
	This is probably the biggest threat because the academy, the campus, is just a preview of what your country is going to look like.
	So you look at the campuses, that's what your country's going to look like in 20 years.
	It happened in the 60s.
	You had all this craziness on campus.
	Within 20 years, you had tenured radicals who were totally subverting the country.
	And that's what's happening now.
	So I bring this up because I'm about to kick off my YAF tour, my Young America's Foundation speaking tour.
	We just released the dates.
	It's starting up, I think, September 26th at USC. And then we're going to Yale.
	We're going to GW. We're going to stop in Ohio and Kentucky and Georgia and Florida.
	going to be all over the place.
	You can check those dates on my Twitter page and on Young America's Foundation.
	But last semester when I was giving a speech at Cal State Los Angeles, YAF just discovered through leaked internal emails that it wasn't the students who were so crazed with my speech and trying to get me canceled at the academy.
	It was the faculty members.
	There was a faculty member, Carlos Tejada, the faculty member, This is what he said.
	He said that I triggered him emotionally and physically.
	How did I trigger him physically?
	Couldn't possibly tell you.
	He writes a letter to the whole faculty and staff.
	Dear faculty and staff is a faculty member who is emotionally and physically triggered by last week's free speech attack on our campus.
	Yada, yada, yada.
	He goes on and on.
	He's not a very good writer, so he's very wordy.
	He says, how can we communicate to you who have been entrusted with the well-being of our students that this poses a threat to the mental well-being of many of our students, staff, and faculty, that it violates their sense of safety on their campus?
	This is campus cancel culture.
	This is cancel culture brought to institutions of higher learning, which is Terrible.
	If you cancel ideas in the university, then there is truly no reason for the university to exist.
	And that's exactly what they want to do.
	I mean, this guy said it was an outright attack.
	My speech.
	I give a speech on how nations should have immigration laws.
	That was the whole speech.
	He said it was an outright attack on the psyches and well-being of more than a few students, faculty, and staff.
	An outright attack, and that's why it's got to be banned.
	That's why it's got to be canceled.
	I nearly had to cancel class because of how shaken I am about seeing a build-the-wall banner on our campus.
	If you are so mentally weak, like this Professor Carlos Tejada obviously is, that you cannot handle hearing an opposing view, much less the view that nations should have immigration laws, which is the entire thesis of my talk.
	If you can't handle that, you shouldn't be teaching.
	You should be canceled.
	You should have your job canceled.
	It's unbelievable because I'm paying this guy's salary as an L.A. resident.
	They go on.
	There were so many more of these.
	They referred to the Young America's Foundation as white supremacist.
	They referred to me as a racist person.
	He said it's a blatantly racist message for...
	Saying that a nation should have immigration laws.
	I mean, it goes on and on.
	I don't know.
	I mean, obviously, this guy's not getting a lot of work done, and the other professors who are with him aren't getting a whole lot of work done because they're just spending all their time trying to get conservatives banned from campus, yelling at the administration for not banning us.
	What it forces is the uncomfortable conclusion that we can't just let this go and see where the chips fall.
	We have to cancel cancel culture, which is an act of the will.
	It is a very specific act.
	How do we do this?
	G.K. Chesterton wrote about it pretty well.
	He said, there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
	You have to stop that.
	You can't just wait and hope it turns out for the best.
	You have to actively cancel, cancel culture.
	You've got to cancel the cancelers, whether they're on or not.
	College campuses, especially if they're on college campuses, or whether they're in politics, or whether they're in the pop culture, writing about and hiring people for television shows.
	You've got to cancel the cancelers.
	This problem won't fix itself on its own.
	We've got to do it.
	That's going to take some moral clarity, some cultural clarity, and some political will.
	Unfortunately, we're lacking in a lot of that these days, but that is the only way that we're going to fix the culture.
	That's our show.
	Come back tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you then.
	If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
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	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.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	Cancel culture.
	It doesn't just destroy people's dreams, people's lives.
	It's an offense against everything that makes this country great.
	That's what it's supposed to be.
	What the left really wants to cancel is America.
	We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.

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