It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of “Make America Great Again.” It was the age of “America was never really great.” It was the election season of hope. It was the election season of despair. The Atlantic Monthly, and many others, thinks America is headed for a civil war, and it dedicates its entire December issue to how it might be avoided. We will examine our biggest divide. Then, a Canadian broadcaster loses his job for calling on his countrymen to honor their veterans. Honoring veterans is now apparently racist. Democratic senator Mazie Hirono admits that global warming is a religion, and Americans warm up to the idea of men beating women—at sports. Date: 11-13-2019
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The Atlantic Monthly and many other outlets and people think America is headed for civil war.
how that civil war might be avoided.
We will examine how to bring our country back from the brink.
Then a Canadian broadcaster loses his job for calling on his countrymen to honor their veterans.
Honoring veterans is now apparently racist.
Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono admits that global warming is a religion, and Americans warm up to the idea of men beating women at sports.
All that and much more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
What schizophrenic times we live in.
We live in the age of Me Too hyperfeminism.
We live in the age of men beating women at sports and women can't do anything about it.
We live in Make America Great Again, the height of patriotism, most patriotic we've seen ourselves in a long time.
We live in an era where we can't even celebrate our nation's history, where we're ripping down statues of George Washington and the people who founded this country where we hate ourselves as a country, where Canadian broadcasters are getting fired for honoring veterans.
I know Canada's not America, but it is America's hat and Washington's greatest mistake.
So, you know, I think it's kind of lumped in very similar culture here.
We'll get to all of that because a lot of people have called our moment a cold civil war.
I have refrained from using that kind of language.
And friends of mine have used it.
Dennis Prager uses it.
A lot of other guys were very sharp guys.
I've refrained.
I felt it was a little hyperbolic.
But now it is getting real.
Why is it getting real?
How has our division deepened so much that I'm pretty much willing to use the term?
Because Ann Coulter is calling for Donald Trump to get out of the White House.
Ann Coulter, whom I love, tweeted out, Okay, that does it.
I give up.
They can stay, referring to DACA illegal aliens.
You must go.
That was to President Trump.
That was in response to a Trump tweet where he said, quote, Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from angels.
Some are very tough-hardened criminals.
President Obama said he had no legal right to sign the order, but would anyway.
If Supreme Court remedies with an overturn of DACA, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay.
So he's saying, look, this is a mess.
I inherited this mess on DACA. The whole concept of the Dreamers is obviously political propaganda.
But if the Supreme Court overturns DACA, which it may well do right now, then we'll get a deal and we'll let the Dreamers stay.
And Ann Coulter says, it's over.
I feel like a true child of divorce.
I hate it.
I don't want them to fight.
But the divisions are real.
And it's not just Ann Coulter and Donald Trump.
It's not even just on the issue of immigration.
Donald Trump Jr.
was heckled the other night at UCLA at his own event, not by the left, but by very, very far right activists.
San Francisco is now officially turning one of America's great cities into a giant, very expensive outhouse.
Even as we're like the richest country ever on the face of the earth, even as San Francisco is one of the richest cities ever to exist and has, as far as I can tell, the highest real estate prices in the whole country, You've also got that once great city, once golden city, turned into an outhouse.
Americans are now warming up, according to polling, to men beating women at sports, to men saying that they can be women, to men disadvantaging women.
And this Canadian broadcaster is now fired for honoring veterans.
Obviously, that's across the border in Canada.
We're seeing many similar things in the United States.
Things have gotten completely insane.
We are divided over ideology.
We're divided over race.
We're divided over religion.
We're divided over even basic scientific facts.
And people are throwing out a whole lot of ideas as to how we can bridge that divide.
But I think I've got the best answer to that.
So we'll get to that in a second.
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So America is really divided in these extremely schizophrenic times where on the one hand everything looks like it's going so great and yet people are losing their minds.
So how are we going to bridge the divide in America?
A lot of very stupid answers and nobody's focusing on the real answer.
Some people are calling for moderation from conservatives.
They're always calling for moderation from conservatives.
Even conservatives are calling for moderation from conservatives.
If only those conservatives would just lay down and let the left run roughshod over the entire culture, then we could all get along.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Some people are calling from moderation for leftists.
Good luck.
Good luck, buddy.
We'll see how that's going.
Some people are calling for a return to the founding of the country.
If we just would regain that spirit of 1776, if we would just live like we lived 250 years ago, then we could reunite the country.
Some people on very specific policy are calling for an end to all immigration.
Because they see immigration as this hot button issue, as the central issue of the Donald Trump campaign.
It's a central issue of the fights that we're having right now over the southern border, over DACA, at the Supreme Court, even on the right.
Some are calling...
For greater government involvement in social questions.
It's those social questions.
It's the role of the state.
Because you can say, okay, you've got this pie in the sky philosophy.
What are you actually going to do?
Are you going to get the government more involved in social policy?
Or are you going to try to get the government to back away and not have anything to say about social policy?
That's the kind of debate you saw with Saurabh Amari and David French.
David Frenchism, as it's called.
Do you want the government to start making some value claims, saying this thing is better than this thing and government policies are going to be geared toward virtue?
Or are we going to say that the government needs to totally back out of these issues?
You can't legislate morality.
You've just got to let people live as they're going to live, come what may.
That's the best way to preserve a good society.
Let's go through each one of these because I think they're all pretty flawed.
Moderation from conservatives is absurd.
We've moderated.
We've moderated so much.
We nominated John McCain.
We nominated Mitt Romney.
You can't moderate any more than that.
I mean, listen to just the issue of the Dreamers, which got Ann Coulter all upset at President Trump.
When President Trump was running for office and early in his administration...
He said, we need to end this dreamer thing.
The language is absolutely absurd propaganda.
It's exploitative.
It's a euphemism that's being used to create open borders here.
And we want dreamers in America.
We want Americans to dream again themselves.
Here he is.
I want dreamers to come from the United States.
I want the people in the United States that have children.
I want them to have dreams also.
We're always talking about dreamers for other people.
I want the children that are growing up in the United States to be dreamers also.
Okay, he wants to, yeah, that's perfectly fine.
Who could object to that?
The whole left objected.
They said it was racist to say that we want Americans to thrive, that we want Americans to do well and to be able to dream.
That was considered racist.
How is it racist?
Because they call everything racist.
And when everything is racist, nothing is racist, right?
Now President Trump moderates that and says, look, just overturn DACA and we'll even let them stay.
I'm going to put my cards on the table.
We'll let the illegal aliens, some of whom are pushing 40 now, we'll let them stay.
Even that is too much for the left.
So there's no conservatives moderating.
That ain't going to happen.
We moderated enough pretty much unsuccessfully, at least in recent years.
And how else would you like us to moderate?
If we're not going to moderate on policy, then are you saying we need to moderate on our language, on our civility?
We already did that.
We've done that very well.
And I think that's a good thing.
But you're not going to do that anymore.
We've been respectful.
We've gone after right-wingers who we find distasteful.
The left never does that.
You never hear about never Hillary on the left.
There's no significant movement of never Hillary.
No, they come together.
They never police their own ideologues.
So that answer ain't going to work.
I mean, that'll just push the acceleration button on the vehicle and we're going to careen off into a leftist nightmare.
How about moderation from the left?
Is that going to work?
Also completely absurd.
I'll give you an example up in San Francisco.
The new DA of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin.
I'm probably butchering that name, but so what?
Chesa Boudin is the new DA of San Francisco and says that He will not prosecute cases involving, quote, quality of life crimes.
Those are his direct words.
Quality of life crimes meaning public urination, meaning shooting up drugs on the street.
He says it.
He actually goes on verbatim.
Crimes such as public camping...
Meaning, being a bum.
Offering or soliciting sex, prostitution, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.
Should not and will not be prosecuted.
Now, of course, it should be prosecuted because there is self-government in San Francisco, or at least there used to be, and there are laws against those things, and it's this guy's job to enforce the laws.
But he's not going to do it because he's made himself dictator of San Francisco.
So now he says that he's not going to enforce these laws.
One of what was the nicest cities in America has become a public toilet.
Same thing in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, just in Hollywood over here, a woman was, a few months ago, pulled out of her car by a homeless person and he poured a bucket full of human feces on her head.
She's now going through psychological counseling because of how traumatizing this was.
Fortunately, she didn't catch any physical diseases from it.
That's what's happening in the cities right now.
That's what the left is campaigning on.
It's not even like that's just happening because of the maladministration and the bad unintended effects of their policies.
They're actually campaigning on it.
The DA of San Francisco is campaigning on, yes, we're going to have more public urination.
Yes, we're going to have more homeless people living in squalor on the street.
And you know what else?
We're going to have more drugs and prostitution, too.
That left is not going to moderate, guys.
Ain't gonna happen.
How about what happened up in America's Hat in Canada?
A guy was fired from his job for saying that we should honor our veterans.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So you've got the left campaigning on turning our beautiful cities into public toilets.
Then up in Canada, and this is the most recent example, but you've seen plenty of this PC censorship go on in the United States.
There's an NHL broadcaster, Don Cherry, who for Armistice Day said that, you know, this is a day that Canada is honoring her veterans, that people should wear the little poppies.
Buy a poppy, wear a little poppy on your lapel to remember Armistice Day or to remember the sacrifices made by Canadian veterans during that first world war.
And he said, look, it's very important to do this, and even as there's mass migration all over the West, including in Canada, it's important for new migrants to honor the customs and traditions of Canada, which is now their adopted home country.
Here is what Don Cherry had to say.
You know, I was talking to a veteran.
I said, I'm not going to run the poppy thing anymore, because what's the sense?
I live in Mississauga.
Nobody wears...
Very few people wear a poppy.
Downtown Toronto.
Forget it.
Downtown Toronto.
Nobody wears a poppy.
And I'm not going to...
He says, wait a minute.
How about running it for the people that buy them?
Now, you go to the small cities, and you know, the rows on rows, you people love, they come here, whatever it is, you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple of bucks for poppies or something like that.
These guys pay for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada.
These guys pay for The biggest price.
Anyhow, I'm going to run it again for you great people and good Canadians that bought a poppy.
I'm still going to run it.
Anyhow, love you for it.
He got fired for those remarks.
Does anybody actually object to those remarks?
Honor your veterans.
And especially if you're a recent immigrant, you should be especially grateful to this country that's taken you in and done so much for you.
If you're, say, a refugee or just an economic migrant, you should be very, very, very grateful to the country that took you in and you should take part in their customs and traditions and you should honor their veterans who helped build that country.
Totally unobjectionable stuff.
He gets fired from it.
Sportsnet issues this apology, quote, Don's discriminatory comments are offensive and they do not represent our values and what we stand for as a network.
That was the president of Sportsnet.
We have spoken with Don about the severity of this issue and we sincerely apologize for these divisive remarks.
He didn't say anything divisive.
What he said was uniting, uniting Canadians, including immigrants, including recent Canadians, uniting all of them And saying, get behind these customs and traditions and be grateful to your people who went before you.
But according to the left, division is unity and unity is division.
That left is not going to moderate.
I mean, a left that in Canada is firing people for honoring their veterans, in America is protesting the American flag on the sports network.
Same thing.
That left is not going to moderate.
It's wishful thinking.
It's false optimism to say that it will.
By the way, in general, moderation doesn't usually serve anybody, right?
You know, I always loved, we were talking about Dennis Prager earlier, and we'll talk about Dennis Prager's movie a little bit later because I was at the Hollywood premiere last night.
Prager always says to his guests when he's talking to people, he'll say, I don't really care if you and I agree.
Probably we don't agree.
But we don't need to pretend that we agree in our conversation.
We just need clarity.
We just need to be clear about where we disagree so that we can understand the issue.
What moderate middle ground can there be between the left and the right right now?
At this moment, the left wants open borders, at least the political left.
The majority of Americans, by the way, want radically lower rates of legal immigration.
That's according to a Harvard Harris poll that came out a year ago.
But that's where you get kind of what you would call populist movements from.
The political left, however, wants open borders.
They've advocated for it very openly at Democratic presidential debates and on the Hill.
So you've got the left wanting open borders, the right wanting a reduction in immigration.
So what's the compromise?
We take in nearly two and a half million people a year now We're going to take in a million and a half?
Is that going to appease anybody?
Is that going to solve the problem?
I don't think so.
The left wants to erase your constitutional rights.
The right wants to keep your constitutional rights.
So what's the middle ground?
You're only going to sort of take away your right to free speech?
You're only going to sort of take away your right to guns?
That doesn't solve anything.
That moderation there doesn't address any issue and it doesn't please anybody.
So, I think we've got to throw moderation out the window.
Then, one way that people want to avoid the civil war, as the Atlantic puts it, one way that people want to unite the country is they want to return to the founding.
The founding era.
If we could just go back to 1776, everything would be great.
That was kind of the idea behind the Tea Party, and it was great.
You know, I loved the Tea Party.
I thought it was a terrific movement.
Tea Party's gone.
Why is the Tea Party gone?
Because it doesn't really work.
It's kind of a charming and beautiful idea.
And it works in short spurts.
The Tea Party worked really well from 2010 to like 2014.
But it's not sustainable in the long term.
Why not?
Because it misunderstands what tradition is.
Tradition and conservatism, right, conservatism, we're trying to conserve something, is not about picking some random date in history and saying, that's the date that we're all going to live in.
1776, that's when history's going to stop, that's when fashions are going to stop, and we're all just going to wear those triangle hats and buckle shoes and shoot muskets, and that's it.
No true conservative, nobody who has any conception of the founding itself, or the founders themselves, wouldn't have wanted to do that.
I mean, that's kind of the argument for getting rid of the Second Amendment that the left makes, is they say, those founders couldn't imagine any world outside of 1776.
They couldn't imagine any guns other than muskets.
They were pretty smart guys.
They were smarter than you and me.
They understood that history moves on.
Technology advances.
The way that we conserve things, the way that we have a tradition, is we follow in this sort of unbroken line throughout the ages and we preserve and cherish those institutions which endure.
The tradition isn't some old thing that happened 200 years ago.
The tradition is the newest thing on earth because it's endured.
It's that lively.
It's that fresh.
It's that renewing.
It's that innovating.
It sort of innovates in its own durability.
It's kind of the same thing with libertarianism and communism.
You know, there are people who love libertarianism.
They say, look, if we could all just agree to live in this anarcho-capitalist environment without any government, then we'd all be happy.
You say, okay, maybe that's true, but that's never going to happen in reality.
That never has happened in reality.
That's an ideological utopian pipe dream.
It's kind of nice to have those fantasies, but it is a fantasy.
Same thing with communism.
The left will always tell you true communism has never been practiced.
Capital T, capital C with a trademark over the M. Okay, maybe it hasn't.
Maybe there's a reason for that, though, because it's not practicable.
It has no relation to reality.
What's another solution?
One solution that's being advanced by the right and people in the center is to end immigration.
Just stop immigration right now.
That's a real hardcore policy position, right?
Stop immigration, then we'll all learn to assimilate and we'll get together and it'll be much, much better.
They think this would unite the country.
It could help to reduce immigration, right?
A great reduction in immigration would be popular and it would help to assimilate people who are already here.
But Even that solution could not work.
Even that solution is a pipe dream.
We'll get to why in a second.
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They always do.
So this idea of, look, stop immigration.
And we'll just hunker down and that will unite the country and avoid the civil war.
First of all, the left is pushing mass immigration and has been for decades and decades.
That's the problem that a lot of people, especially on the right, don't understand.
But there's another structural problem, which is that we actually can't turn off immigration right now.
We can't do it because our society is not having any kids.
They're not having very many kids at least.
Our birth rates are way below replacement levels.
We're at about 1.7.
You need to get to about 2.1 or 2.2 for the population to sustain itself.
It's not.
Now there's a kind of irony here, which is that we kill a million babies a year through abortion.
If we just got rid of abortion and had those million babies a year, you would have no problem.
You would have no population shortfall and you would have no need for this kind of immigration on the level that we're seeing right now.
That is an us problem.
That is a social and cultural problem.
That's not a problem of just lots of people trying to come to America.
At the extremes of the immigration debate, and the immigration issue seems to crop up a lot in all of this Civil War talk, At the extremes of this debate, there becomes a debate over race.
I would say extreme left, although it's really become the mainstream left, there seems to be an antipathy for white people.
Meaning on the New York Times, you'll see these stories about how whiteness is terrible.
Or you'll see classes and workshops at colleges about toxic whiteness and how terrible whiteness is.
And so you have this racial obsession from the left that you've had for...
At least 60 years now.
I mean, that is what identity politics is, and the left is what embraced it.
However, the fringe right, not the mainstream right, but the fringe right, also appears to have an antipathy to people of other races.
The very fringe right wants to become some sort of white identitarian movement, and both of those things are completely absurd.
Now, the left is absurd because the majority of America is white.
So if you're going to form a movement that basically is antipathetic to white people, then you're going to have a problem winning any sort of hearts and minds if you're in a country where most people are white.
The rights, the very fringe rights obsession with race is also absurd for a few reasons.
One, Because there's not white ideological solidarity, and there never has been.
White people are quite divided ideologically.
Okay, there's a real irony here to this kind of white identitarian politics because it presumes that there is some sort of pan-European solidarity.
One need only crack the spine of a history book of Europe to find out there is not, will not be, and never has been pan-European solidarity.
All the various nations of Europe have spent most of history murdering each other and at war with one another with brief moments of partial unity.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
It also doesn't make a lot of sense with this white racial politics focus from the fringe right because America has always been multiracial.
It began when English pilgrims who had actually moved to Holland came over to Massachusetts and formed a very close alliance with one Indian in particular, Massasoit, Thank you.
really productive alliances with various Native American tribes in the early and mid 17th century.
And then they imported black slaves from Africa.
And from the very earliest days of this country, you had a lot of different ethnicities, nationalities, races here together, working together in working relationships.
So, So the idea of some kind of white as the driven snow racial politics in America just has never existed and doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The other aspect of this is it's blaming the wrong people.
It's blaming immigrants for mass immigration.
The immigrants are not the ones who pushed mass migration.
It's leftists in America.
Specifically white leftists.
Specifically a white leftist named Ted Kennedy in 1965.
That cannot be boiled down to race.
It's an ideological question.
So then we're left with a choice.
If we throw away even that argument, which is the most sort of tangible issues argument, then we're left with a choice.
We can...
Debate the nature of the government.
Should the government get more involved in social questions and moral questions and religious questions even or should it get less involved and just keep a totally neutral stance and simply let the culture and people in their civic associations decide these questions for themselves?
The right is divided on this.
The left is not.
If we have a civil war in this country, it will not be a war like 1860.
It will not be a war over a particular political issue such as slavery, which it was back then.
If we have a war, a civil war, it will be a religious war.
People are pretending that we have religious neutrality in this country.
A separation of church and state.
People who don't understand what that phrase meant when it was written.
Those people are kidding themselves.
We do not have a separation of church and state in this country.
We have a state-established religion here.
And that state-established religion is leftism.
And that is the problem.
It's not an effect of mass migration.
It's not an effect of some university policy even.
It's not an effect of some tax policy.
It's not an effect...
Of any of those particular political issues, it is the root cause of it.
The civil war will be a religious war, and leftism is a totalizing religion.
Don't take my word for it.
A Democratic sitting senator, Maisie Hirono, is making the point for me.
She's admitting it.
We'll get to that in a second.
We'll get to what that means, how we can fix it.
And we will get to 2020, because there is major, major news afoot.
A presidential candidate has dropped out.
In 2020.
It's breaking news.
For many people, it's breaking news that this guy was running in the first place.
Plus, news on the whistleblower.
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The root cause of this division is religion.
It's a religious division.
It's the hard religion of the left and it's religious denial on the right.
The right which wants to pretend that we don't have any established religion.
Or the right that wants to pretend that secularism and atheism is somehow value neutral, which it's not.
Trust The left on this, when they admitted, Maisie Hirono was talking specifically about global warming, and she said it's important for people to think about global warming not as a scientific fact, but as a religion.
For a lot of us, protesting, marching, that's not something that we normally do.
But these are times that call for us to do those things that we believe in and to march, and not just to march, because that's important, to show solidarity.
But then to do those things, such as voter registration, get people out to vote, so that we can have people here who truly are committed to human rights, environmental rights, climate change, believe in climate change as though it's a religion, it's not a science.
And all of the things that remains to be done, and there is a lot.
That's it.
She's admitting it.
I've said this many times.
I've said it on TV. I've said it in debates.
I've said it on this show.
I've written about it.
Global warming is a religion.
It's part of the left's religion.
And the left always tells me that's a lie, and then Maisie Hirono accidentally tells the truth.
It's obviously a religion.
Leftism broadly is obviously religion.
It is a totalizing worldview that encompasses all the eternal questions.
It gives people meaning.
It gives people a sense of the beautiful.
It gives people a sense of purpose.
It gives people an original sin, the original sin of privilege, for instance.
It gives people redemption.
Redemption in wokeness and public apologies.
It is a religion and it's, I don't even blame them for having this religion.
It's no coincidence that as religiosity in the United States, in traditional religion, Christianity, Judaism, as that has declined, adherence to leftism has increased.
It was ever thus.
It was always going to be that way.
I mean, you don't just see it in the global warming example, although the global warming example is so clear because they actually now have climate confessionals and they sell indulgences in the form of carbon tax credits.
So there you can really see it.
But you see it, for instance, on gender ideology.
There was a poll that just came out from Rasmussen.
Rasmussen tends to lean right.
The poll shows that a slim majority of Americans Oppose allowing male-to-female transgender athletes to compete in women's sporting events.
Meaning men who are pretending to be women, can they compete in women's sporting events and then almost inevitably beat them at them because men are physically stronger.
The good news is a majority of Americans still think that's wrong.
The bad news is it's only 51%.
29% of Americans think it's totally fine to let men compete against women and beat them.
And 20% are undecided.
But this is moving in a pretty bad direction here.
And it's, by the way, entering into the school systems now.
So there was an organization that was, I think it's called LGBT Questions or something.
It's putting out a proposed curriculum to teach elementary school students, very, very young students, this gender ideology, to indoctrinate them in a completely unscientific gender ideology that tells you that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.
Here's just a clip from it.
Hi, I'm Nadine, a sex educator.
And I'm Eva, a sex researcher.
I use the pronouns she and her because I'm a woman and when I was your age I used to be a girl.
Gender is how you feel on the inside about whether you're a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.
If you're non-binary, feel like neither or both.
People can also be fluid, feel more like female, more like male, based on a different day or time.
It's really individual.
Absolutely.
Everyone born with a vulva is a girl.
True or false?
Not everybody is sure, and that makes sense, but our genitals actually don't determine our gender, so some people born with vulvas can be boys.
So what I love about this clip, I mean it's a horrifying clip, but what I love about this clip is they say, so okay, boys can't become girls just by thinking it, right?
All people who are boys are boys, right?
And how many people think that?
And then all the kids raise their hands, because the kids...
They don't know maybe advanced calculus, but they know basic biological facts.
They say, yeah, that's right.
Boys are boys and girls are girls.
They say, actually, that isn't true.
So they're indoctrinating these kids younger and younger.
They have to do it because their religion of leftism is so disconnected from reality.
Then they go on.
They have a person who's a woman who now identifies as a man telling children that they can be whatever sex they want to be.
I have been through the spectrum, if we were to say a spectrum of, like, boys and girls, I have been everywhere in between.
I was born a girl, and then when I was two years old, I told my mom for the first time that I was a boy.
And I think that I framed it, I don't remember it, I've only been told stories, but I framed it because my brother's middle name was the same as my dad's.
And so I insisted that my middle name was also the same as his.
But back in the day, there was no talk shows and there was no internet.
There was no resources.
So she just ignored it.
And then nothing happened for many, many years.
And then it still took me a long time into my 20s before I decided to transition.
But in there, I was a, you know, a tomboy, if that's what we say, or like I was sporty.
I had short hair.
Look at how How exploitative this is.
Look at all the advocacy here.
This isn't just presenting some facts to children.
It's not presenting any facts to children.
It's presenting fantasy.
But the suggestion here is, look, I was a tomboy.
Maybe if you're a tomboy, you're actually the opposite sex.
Yeah, I had short hair.
Maybe if you've got short hair, maybe you're the opposite sex.
It's horrifying.
I mean, it's horrifying to...
Subject children to this kind of sexual confusion at such a young age.
To subject them to such a bizarre, radical, new ideology that has no basis in science and it's only been around for a few years.
But they're doing it.
They're doing it because leftism is a totalizing religion.
And this is not just something that's neutral with the neutral government.
The government is pushing this on kids.
Why?
Because education is inherently, intrinsically, Coercive.
You can't just be educated by consent because you're being taught a curriculum.
So you consent to go to school, but then you are taught from a teacher who has a different power dynamic than a student does, and they're teaching you something.
That's why you have fears about political indoctrination rather than proper education.
We have to acknowledge that this leftism is the state religion.
And we have to acknowledge that America has a religion, that all societies have a religion.
You know, it's true in the First Amendment, we don't have any established particular sect of religion.
There's no established church, right?
And that is forbidden by the First Amendment, rightly so.
But that doesn't mean that there's no religion in public life.
That's impossible.
And that's certainly not what the founders thought.
It just means that there's no official American Methodist Church, and the official Church of America is Methodism, or the official Church of America is Anglicanism, or Presbyterianism.
At the founding, there was a national religion.
That religion was a vague but shared Christian religion.
And it was Protestant, and it was pluralistic, and it was tolerant.
And it made room for Catholics and it made room for Jews.
But it was clear there was this vague, tolerant religion.
Then in 1962, long after the founding, and not that long ago, but right around when the whole country started to lose its mind...
The Supreme Court outlawed reading the Bible in schools.
That was no longer permitted.
From the beginning of the country until 1962, it was permitted and encouraged just about everywhere.
And then that went away because the Supreme Court decided to rewrite the country.
Also in 1962, they outlawed prayer in schools.
So that kind of national religion, the vague, tolerant Protestantism, went away.
As a result of that, people started to focus on what's called the American civic religion.
You know, fireworks on the 4th of July, the idea of American nationalism, the idea of America's divine institution, that America is a sort of quasi-religious entity.
And that kind of dominates mid-20th century understanding of ourselves all the way up at least through the 1980s.
That focus on American civic religion failed to particularly In recent times, in light of the failed interventions abroad, we tried to plant American-style Madisonian democracy in these deserts around the world, and it didn't work out the way that many people told us it would work out.
That's why I think so much of the American civic religion kind of lost faith in itself, and we lost faith in it, particularly in light of mass migration.
If the American civic religion were really a totalizing religion or a sufficient religion, then you could flood the country with unlimited aliens or illegal aliens or legal immigrants.
You could have millions and millions per year and they would simply assimilate by divine fiat or something.
But that's not what happened.
And that's why the wars abroad are such a touchy issue right now.
It's why mass migration is such a touchy issue.
Is there something practical we can do?
Absolutely.
What we need to do immediately is to reverse the decisions that banned the Bible from schools and banned prayer from schools.
Not saying we need to make it compulsory.
Not saying we need to make any of those things compulsory, but we need to permit it.
We must encourage proper religious and civic engagement.
We have to do away with the lie that secularism is neutral.
Secularism is not neutral.
It is atheistic and it is intrinsically leftist.
We have to do away with the lie that you can't legislate morality.
All legislation is moral.
All laws are moral because they draw on the moral law.
That's obviously true when you look at issues like abortion.
It's true when you look at tax rates, too, because tax rates are talking about property rights.
Tax rates are talking about the dignity of the human person when you get down to the end of it.
That's what we have to do.
I remember the scene in Breaking Bad.
There's a scene right after a big moment in the show, and the kids in the high school are at an assembly.
And one of the girls says, I just don't know why God would allow this bad thing to happen.
And the principal cuts her off and says, hey, hey, hey, let's keep it secular.
As if secularism were neutral.
It's not.
It's not neutral.
It's radical.
And it doesn't help us to explain anything or to understand ourselves or to live in a harmonious society.
John Adams said, our country is built for a moral and religious people.
The religion he was talking about is not leftism.
Leftism is immorality and that's the religion that we're living in now.
The creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy, as Winston Churchill called it.
We need to acknowledge that religious reality or we're not going to be able to avoid that civil war.
This is urgent now because censorship is heating up, okay?
The Trump election bought us some time on this, but it's heating up.
Right now YouTube just issued a policy, it hasn't even been that well publicized, that says that YouTube basically has the right to kill any channel that it finds not commercially viable.
So if YouTube is not making money on your YouTube channel, it reserves the right to take away your YouTube channel.
Now most people don't make money on their YouTube channels It's not going to affect most people.
But what it's going to do is, in the run-up to the 2016 election, allow the left to censor conservatives.
Because first what they do is they cut down your reach of your channel, then they demonetize you, and then once they've demonetized you, you're obviously not making money, they can delete your channel altogether because it's not commercially viable.
This is a really tricky and dishonest way that YouTube is trying to silence conservatives.
It's all about 2020 and cutting off any momentum that conservatives and the right have.
Now, speaking of 2020, before we go, I do have to point out major story.
A candidate has dropped out of the 2020 race and it's a candidate you didn't even know was running.
Former South Carolina governor who left the governorship to go run away to Argentina with his mistress and then ran for Congress and got re-elected.
Mark Sanford has dropped out of the race.
I'm not even going to play the clip for you because you've never heard him before and you're not going to hear him again.
So he's out.
The right-wing challenges to Donald Trump fall apart every day.
Hillary Clinton wants to run again in an interview with the BBC. She has again opened up this possibility that she's going to run.
She said, I say the same thing every time people ask.
I'll do everything I can to retire the incumbent.
That can be by supporting those running.
I'm just grateful for the opportunities I've had.
A lot are pushing hard for me to run again, but I believe we have to keep our focus on what it will take to get a new president.
She obviously wants to do this and maybe the opportunity is right for her to get back into this race.
Why would she get back in?
Because as much as the right is divided, the left is very divided too.
They've had 25 candidates for president.
They can't pick a single one of them.
Then a little preview on the whistleblower.
We'll get to this a little bit more, hopefully, tomorrow.
There is now a whistleblower blowing the whistle on the whistleblower.
This second whistleblower has filed a complaint with the intelligence community IG because the first whistleblower is using his whistleblower status to make money and raise funds on GoFundMe.
So, we've now got the whistleblower on the whistleblower on something that we already saw the transcript for.
It is a total joke.
It is a total farce.
As impeachment heats up, I think the Democrats are going to get a lot more than they bargained for.
They're getting a lot more than they bargained for because the right is not sitting down.
We're not giving up.
We're not letting them run roughshod over us and shut us up and kick us off of the internet and kick us out of the mainstream media and overturn the 2016 election.
We're not doing it.
We're not doing it on campuses either.
I was at the premiere last night of No Safe Spaces, which is Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager's movie on the college censorship issue.
It is really good.
I told them that since we're friends, I would have told them it was good even if it wasn't good, but...
There's this extra nice thing, which is that the movie is really, really quite good.
I highly recommend you go see it.
It's shocking.
It was shocking even to me, and I live it.
I go to these college campuses, and some of what you see in that movie is so, so terrifying.
It's playing this weekend, I think, in Burbank.
They're kind of doing a little bit of a slow rollout, and then it's going to go to a lot more theaters around the country.
There's a little Easter egg.
You'll be able to see me in the movie if you look very, very closely.
So go check it out.
We've got a lot more to get to.
I don't know how we ran out of time like this.
We'll have to get to all of it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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