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June 10, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

50:53

Ep. 560 - Real Institutional Oppression

Candy companies issue statements on race riots, Merriam-Webster changes the definition of racism, crime soars, and the experts change their tune again on the coronavirus. If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Since all this civil unrest started, I have wanted to know what my candy companies think about racial relations and oppression in America.
	And finally, we've got the answer.
	Gushers, the little fruity candy where when you bite into it, the juice kind of shoots out Gushers.
	They've finally issued a statement on Black Lives Matter.
	So Gushers said, Gushers wouldn't be Gushers without the black community and your voices.
	We're working with fruit by the foot on creating space to amplify that.
	I'm not joking.
	They actually sent this tweet out.
	We see you.
	We stand by you.
	And this was followed by a long statement on why Black Lives Matter, which was then followed by the Gushers logo.
	At this point, Dunkaroo's silence is deafening on this issue.
	Gusher's statement on the race riots, and that is a statement that I never thought that I would ever utter.
	Gusher's statement on the race riots tells us a lot about institutional power in the United States.
	We'll get to all of it.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Gushers, Dunkaroos, I want to know what Capri Sun thinks about this.
	I haven't heard from them yet.
	Lots of institutions weighing in on our deepest social questions.
	We will get to that because I think this actually gets to the heart, not even just of the Black Lives Matter issue, not even to the lockdown issue, but really to deep political questions in the U.S.
	We hear a lot about institutional power in the United States, institutional racism, institutional oppression.
	The left keeps using that phrase.
	I'm not sure that it means what they think it means.
	We'll get to that in one second first, though.
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	You hear this phrase all the time, institutional power.
	There is institutional racism.
	And most conservatives react to that by just simply denying that that exists.
	Is there institutional racism?
	No.
	Fair enough.
	But let's think this through one level further.
	Let's say that the left is right.
	Let's say that there is institutional racism and institutional oppression.
	Let me ask you one question.
	Who controls the institutions?
	In the United States today, who controls virtually all of the major institutions?
	Is it the right or the left?
	Is it conservatives or is it liberals?
	Any reasonable person looking around at the media, looking around at the bureaucracy, looking around at the academy, looking around at all of them.
	It would say it's the left.
	And last night on Sean Hannity's show...
	I think he hosted a debate that perfectly exemplifies this.
	This was a debate, I guess, meant to heal race relations in America.
	Don't think it quite accomplished that.
	It was a debate between the Marxist professor, Cornel West, and the talk radio host, Leo Terrell.
	Just take a listen to a quick maybe 30 seconds, a very telling 30 seconds of The Exchange.
	It's my turn.
	You try to conflate protesting and police misconduct.
	And shame on you.
	And you're absolutely wrong.
	You won't address the issue.
	You refuse to address the issue.
	I'm talking to you.
	You're not my brother.
	You're not my brother.
	You are hurting black people by acting in this position.
	You are taking the wrong position.
	No, my brother, that stuff plays out.
	That plays out.
	Address the question.
	Do you?
	Oh my gosh.
	You have lost control.
	You're a dinosaur.
	You're an outright dinosaur.
	Okay.
	How many IQ points do you think you lost listening to that exchange?
	Because I don't know, man.
	It might be up in the double digits.
	That was an exchange that, if you didn't see it, you have Leo Terrell, who's reacting to this crazy person, Cornel West.
	And Cornel West is the Marxist professor who is dressed up like Karl Marx.
	If you look at his outfit, if you look at the way the guy looks, he looks in many ways like Karl Marx, which is not particularly surprising.
	For those of you who haven't followed Cornel West's career, I'm not just using this phrase loosely.
	He is a Marxist professor.
	He's the head of the African American Studies Department at Harvard.
	At least he was, which by the way, like all critical studies departments, is a fake academic discipline that is really just pushing political ideology rather than a traditional academic discipline.
	He very famously, though, while running the AFAM department at Harvard, He clashed with then Harvard President Larry Summers because Larry Summers suggested that Cornel West should perhaps show up to class rather than campaigning for Democratic politicians.
	He had missed, I think, weeks of class because he was campaigning for Democrats.
	He said that Cornel West was contributing to great inflation because Cornel West was giving people easy A's.
	And then, most outrageously, instead of publishing serious scholarly work while he was running the department at this time, he instead put out a hip-hop CD.
	Seriously, this is what a Harvard professor was doing.
	So Larry Summers criticized this.
	And then Larry Summers was accused of racism because if you tell people to actually publish scholarly work while they're professors at top universities, apparently that's racist now.
	Regardless, I think these two guys who were debating on the show last night, I think they are a perfect example, not just of the individuals here or the content of the debate.
	You couldn't say there was very much content to that debate.
	It was just Cornell Wesley yelling crazy things at Leo.
	They're representatives of institutional power in the United States.
	In the U.S. right now, the left owns the academy.
	Cornell West is a great example of American academics, right?
	They own corporate America because radical left-wing messages under the guise of racial healing or something, but they are at bottom politically radical leftist messages, Marxist in fact, are coming out from corporate America like Gushers or like Fruit by the Foot or whatever or by every other company that you've gotten emails from over the past few weeks.
	The left owns government.
	Even when Republicans manage to get elected, first of all, very often those people aren't conservative.
	They're more of the liberal strain of Republicans.
	But even when they get elected, if they try to fight back and push too much, then the bureaucracy, what's called the deep state or the administrative state, pushes back because the administrative state is...
	By its very character, left-wing.
	The left owns Hollywood, obviously.
	The left owns the mainstream media, virtually every news organization that has influence in the United States.
	The left owns big tech, which controls the flow of information around the United States.
	Virtually every institution is left-wing, with one exception.
	Talk radio, and maybe a few podcasts.
	So Leo Terrell over there, a radio host, is representative of the one institution that the right kind of has.
	And so the debate actually makes perfect sense.
	You've got this academic, sort of ridiculous, maybe pseudo-academic, at least for much of his career, versus this radio host, as evidence of the left and the right.
	Who owns the institutions?
	If you've got a problem with institutional racism, allegedly, even before you deny it, just go out there and say, okay, if it's true, maybe you should blame yourselves, leftists, because you run the institutions.
	A friend came up to me the other day.
	A friend came up.
	Talking about these messages of BLM, you know, which, as we pointed out on the show, is not just about black lives mattering, far from it.
	BLM on their About page says that they want to destroy the, quote, Western-prescribed nuclear family.
	BLM, really radical stuff, using words like comrade, you know, typical Marxist language.
	Frank came up to me and said, With all of this BLM stuff going on, the media is so focused on ginning up racial tension and ginning up racial division, it almost seems to me like they want to make people racist.
	And isn't that so crazy?
	And I thought about it for a moment and I thought, that's exactly what they want to do.
	That's exactly what they want to do.
	Why is that?
	Well, it ties in a little bit to some conversations we've been having over the past few weeks about liberalism itself.
	You've heard some conservative critiques over the past few years.
	Critiques of liberalism, the broad liberal project, including classical liberalism, including libertarianism.
	The whole idea of liberalism, if you had to boil it down to a line or two, is this idea of emancipating yourself from this oppressive past.
	The past, the tradition, our forefathers, they were terrible and bad and oppressive and we systematically, progressively are liberating ourselves from that.
	And there's a version on the right that you see of that and there's a version on the left that you see.
	And so intrinsic to liberalism is this idea that you're constantly, you have to be liberating yourself from something.
	There's always got to be a bad guy, there's always got to be a boogeyman oppressor that you're overcoming.
	And the problem for the left right now in America...
	Is there just ain't that much oppression.
	There just ain't that much.
	They always talk about the white supremacists, the phantom white supremacists that are constituting the majority of Americans and they're so evil and terrible.
	And that's why we've got to stand up and courageously say Black Lives Matter, even though that's a statement that everybody agrees with.
	Nobody disagrees with that statement.
	But we all have to pretend like there's a huge number of people here who disagree with that simple and obvious statement.
	And there just isn't.
	So, for instance, when the allegedly peaceful protests turned violent, the mainstream media told us, well, it turned violent because of the white supremacists who showed up.
	Well, you know, I'm looking at the footage.
	I don't see a lot of white supremacists.
	Oh, the big threat here is the Ku Klux Klan.
	The last image I saw of the Ku Klux Klan was an image from the Democratic governor of Virginia's medical school yearbook, okay, when he dressed up as a Klansman for Halloween, or possibly in blackface.
	We still don't know which one he was in.
	The Ku Klux Klan, how many of them are there in the country?
	Like four?
	But the media has to invent this phantom so that we can then overcome it and extricate ourselves from it.
	You know, we might be able to celebrate in America that we have a period of...
	You know, relative justice, equity, prosperity, liberty.
	You know, things are pretty good in this country, aren't they?
	But it just doesn't work.
	And so the left invents the phantom.
	They invent this phantom of institutional oppression without realizing the irony that they control all of the institutions.
	And it's only going to get worse, you see.
	It's not...
	I think some squishes...
	On the conservative side of things, they think that if we can just prove to the left that no, actually, there isn't that much oppression, no, actually, we aren't racist, that then the left will say, okay, good, that's not how it works.
	The left is going to double down.
	They're going to try to gin up racial tension even more.
	They're going to try to divide people even more.
	They're going to try to invent even more racists and bigots because they need them.
	To then overcome them.
	They need a villain.
	And guess what, Buster?
	No matter how just and nice and wonderful and equitable you are and kind, you've got to be that villain if you oppose the liberal left-wing agenda.
	Merriam-Webster's dictionary just redefined the term racism.
	So racism, according to Merriam-Webster, was, quote, A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities, and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
	That's a pretty basic definition of racism.
	I think we can all accept that.
	None of us want to be racist.
	So that's the problem.
	When you read the definition of racism, people say, yeah, okay, I reject that.
	I'm not a racist.
	I don't think race is the primary determinant of a human being's worth.
	I don't think that, therefore, we should have a politics based primarily on race.
	Okay, I'm done with that.
	Now, the left actually does push race to the forefront when they're considering their politics, but what they have to do to involve everybody in this issue of racism is redefine it.
	So now they're redefining it as systemic oppression, meaning you can never not be a racist because you're in the system.
	And as long as you're participating in the system, you're participating in racism, you are an oppressor.
	This revision is said to be coming in the coming months, though we don't have an exact date on it.
	That is the allegedly institutional oppression now becoming the mainstream definition.
	Some Democrats are pushing back on this.
	Some reasonable Democrats are pushing back, and they are not being treated very well by their own party.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Some Democrats are pushing back.
	There is a pro-Trump Georgia Democrat by the name of Vernon Jones.
	And Vernon Jones, since he's come out and said, yeah, I support Trump, he's gotten a lot of hate that's come his way.
	He has seen a little glimpse of what happens if you are a Trump supporter in any of the major institutions, on campus, around the water cooler, in the media, in Hollywood, anywhere, okay?
	Things don't go very well for you usually in your career.
	So what Vernon Jones has suggested is that since we have all these other protections for all these other characteristics of human beings, since we promote diversity in every other way, maybe we should protect people's political viewpoints.
	Maybe we should protect diversity of opinion, diversity of point of view.
	So he tweeted out, quote, Political affiliation should be a protected class right alongside race, gender, and religion.
	And my legislation will do just that.
	Making any politically motivated attack a hate crime.
	Wearing a MAGA hat should never endanger your life.
	And yet in many cases it does.
	And in many cases you will be excluded from the major institutions.
	Big tech, right?
	Censors conservatives way, way disproportionately.
	This of course makes sense, and yet the left can't handle it.
	Just on its face, it's so common sense, right?
	If you get a protection based on your sexual preferences or your sexual behavior, shouldn't you get a protection based on your political point of view?
	You know, your sexual behaviors are just more kind of basic passions of your body.
	So if that's going to be protected, shouldn't your higher intellect be protected as well?
	If you're going to be protected on the base of, you know, I don't know, your skin color or your sex or your gender identity, whatever, shouldn't you also be protected at that higher level of the intellect, things you're actually thinking through and choosing?
	You already are in some ways because of religion.
	You are protected by your religious beliefs.
	So why not your political beliefs as well?
	And yet, the left is going to push back hard on this.
	The left is going to push back hard in some ways, I think, because their political beliefs very often are of a religious nature.
	Right?
	They've got original sin in the form of what they call white privilege or systemic racism.
	Right?
	They've got atonement in the form of taking a knee.
	I mean, that's quite...
	Visibly a liturgical sign of kneeling down a religious ritual.
	They've got all sorts of religious characteristics to them, right?
	They've got a utopia at the end, which is progressivism.
	We're progressing toward utopia.
	And so what I think the reason is that they don't want to protect political affiliation here is that they can't accept a challenge to their dominant political religious worldview.
	It's just outrageous.
	We can tolerate anything and are tolerant with a capital T liberal culture, but you can't tolerate intolerance of liberalism.
	You can't tolerate a challenge to the political system itself.
	So I think this guy Vernon Jones has a great idea here, and I think any sane society, if they're going to protect all those other things, should certainly protect political points of view.
	But something tells me that they're not going to do it.
	What Vernon has done here has gotten to the heart of that liberal problem.
	Meanwhile, talk about the boogeymen.
	Talk about the villains that we've had over the past few weeks.
	The cops, right?
	The cops are being smeared by both parties, mostly by the Democrats, but also by some squishes, as hopelessly racist, bigoted, unjust, evil murderers.
	And we went through the numbers the other day.
	We said, wait a second, the numbers don't hold up.
	We're being told there's this scourge of racist cops hunting down unarmed black men in this country.
	Even though unarmed doesn't mean not dangerous, let's just use unarmed.
	How many unarmed black men are killed by the police every year?
	9,000?
	No.
	900?
	No.
	90?
	No.
	Nine is the answer.
	Nine.
	Single digits.
	Every death's a tragedy, but that is not evidence of a systemic scourge.
	And yet the cops are being smeared.
	So, head of a police union came out yesterday, addressed this issue, and said, hey guys, enough is enough.
	I know in your fantasy land, you need a villain, you need the devil, and that's currently being played by us, but it just ain't reality.
	375 million interactions with the public every year.
	375 million interactions.
	Overwhelmingly positive responses.
	Overwhelmingly positive responses.
	But I read in the papers all week, we all read in the papers, that in the black community Mothers are worried about their children getting home from school without being killed by a cop.
	What world are we living in?
	That doesn't happen.
	It does not happen.
	Everybody's trying to shame us.
	The legislators.
	The press.
	Everybody's trying to shame us into being embarrassed about our profession.
	Well, you know what?
	This isn't stained by someone in Minneapolis.
	It's still got to shine on it.
	And so do theirs.
	So do theirs.
	Stop treating us like animals and thugs.
	And start treating us with some respect.
	Great point.
	When he says this is not stained by someone in Minneapolis, he's pointing to his badge.
	He says the same thing is true of their badges as well.
	He says we're being smeared as thugs by the press, by the legislators, by everybody.
	According to the left-wing fantasy, the evil cop...
	Basically, according to the left-wing fantasy...
	I think that's the fantastical, delusional worldview that the left is pushing.
	And yet, what this cop is saying is, guys, every institution in this country is smearing us undeservedly.
	We aren't doing this sort of systemic awful stuff.
	375 million interactions every year between cops and civilians.
	How many go really wrong?
	You could count them on one hand, practically.
	Okay?
	That's the reality of the situation.
	And yet, even the people smearing the cops, when you look at them, even the most left-wing, hardened, cynical politicians are relying on the cops themselves.
	They just don't want you to be able to rely on the cops.
	When reality hits, when the thugs and the criminals show up at their doors, they want to be protected.
	But you, you, you're just fodder for their social experiments and their ideological games.
	We'll get into that in one second.
	First, though...
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	So, even the most ideological leftists who are calling to abolish the police and all that sort of thing, one thing I notice about them is they rely on the police themselves.
	L.A. City Council President Nuri Martinez, a Democrat, Pushing to make huge cuts to the LAPD. Now they're announcing could be $100 million, could be $150 million cut from the LAPD budget.
	Time for me to get out of Dodge.
	Decided that while she's defunding the LAPD for everyone else, she's going to have an LAPD detail stationed outside of her private home.
	Not just recently, not just in June, not just in May, going all the way back to April.
	Private security, paid for by the taxpayers, for this woman, who's then saying no one else should be able to get that security either.
	That sums it up right there.
	You do have this one group, the cops, being totally maligned here for things that they don't do for lies, and yet the people who really control the strings of power, using them.
	Using them not only for their own protection, but then using them as a prop to try to hide the fact that they're the ones pulling the strings.
	And expect to see this in cities around the country.
	It's becoming a real push now to defund the police.
	Don't forget, we played those clips yesterday.
	Some Democrats are trying to say, oh, when we say defund the police or abolish the police or dismantle the police, what we really mean is we want to reform the police.
	No.
	No.
	We heard from those major politicians yesterday.
	Do you mean dismantle?
	Yes.
	Do you mean abolish?
	Yes.
	What does it look like in the future?
	A police-free future.
	What happens when you call 911?
	You're not going to call 911 because there's not going to be any cops.
	Okay, that's what they're telling you.
	And so what's going to happen, ironically, they're talking about doing this in the name of equality.
	What's actually going to happen is that elites like the LA City Council president are going to get that private police force for themselves.
	And poor people who live in bad communities with lots of crime, disproportionately ethnic minorities, are going to be left to fend for themselves.
	Huge disparity then in inequality, which then, by the way, the leftists who pushed all this can use and exploit and pretend as evidence that there's institutional oppression that they're not controlling.
	But they're the ones who did it in the first place.
	Guess what's happening since they're defunding the police?
	Give you one hint.
	What happens when you tell the cops they can't do anything, you tie their hands behind their backs, you defund them?
	Do you think crime is going to go down or do you think crime is going to go up?
	I guess the ideologues tell us that if you get rid of the cops, crime is going to disappear because somehow cops are responsible for crime.
	Well, the reality of the situation is a little bit different.
	So just for the week of May 31st to June 6th, the most recent data we've got, homicides in L.A. increased not 2%, not 25%, 250%.
	Victims being shot went up 56%.
	That's just week over week.
	Just in the 24 hours from yesterday, Tuesday, to before that Monday, just that 24-hour period, there were four shootings, one of those resulting in a homicide.
	Detectives are trying to follow leads to ID and arrest suspects, but the detectives need people's help because their hands have been tied behind their backs.
	That is like a little preview.
	A little amuse-bouche type of appetizer of what's going to happen around the country when these cops are defunded.
	The reality of the situation is going to be very different than the ideology, and the left running the institutions is going to use that, ironically, as reason to give them even more power.
	Now, some Democratic politicians, it's not just that guy Vernon in Georgia, other Democrats are waking up and saying, look what's happening to our neighborhoods because of your stupid ideas.
	That happened in Chicago, too.
	We got leaked audio of a very hostile conversation between an alderman in Chicago and the mayor of Chicago.
	They don't talk very politely.
	We'll get to that.
	We'll get to riders overtaking Seattle.
	We'll get to riders in Richmond pulling down a statue of Christopher Columbus.
	What did Christopher Columbus have to do with any of this?
	I don't know.
	They just hate his guts.
	We'll get to all of that.
	But first, I've got to thank you.
	I've got to thank you.
	For pushing my total subscribers on YouTube past Drew Klavens.
	Because that's what we're all here for, folks.
	That's what this is really all about.
	So thank you very much.
	You know, we put some bonus content over on the YouTube channel.
	I have an exclusive interview with a panel of mine, Tim Gordon, a Catholic author and podcaster, who was just fired from a Catholic school because he opposed the radical leftist aims of Black Lives Matter.
	He dared to criticize them.
	Even a Catholic school, an allegedly conservative institution, now dominated by the left.
	Also, You know how crazy this year has been already.
	And it's just the start of the year, okay?
	We've got still five months before the presidential election.
	And the media are the ones pushing this.
	So, if you don't think that you can rely on the mainstream media to get a reliable source of news, which I'm glad you're awake.
	I'm glad you figured that one out.
	Then head on over to The Daily Wire.
	You know, we've got some exclusive in-depth content that is only for members.
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	Today, we'll be right back with a whole lot more.
	Even Chicago aldermans, okay, these are the guys who are kind of like the city council there.
	They're running the government in Chicago, notoriously left-wing city for a very long time.
	Even they are beginning to realize that this is not working out terribly well.
	We have leaked audio of an alderman speaking to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot saying, Hey, over the past few weeks, it's even crazier than usual in Chicago.
	Our neighborhoods are burning down and you're not doing anything about it.
	You know what Lori Lightfoot had to say to him?
	No thanks, don't care.
	No, I want an answer.
	You commented on everybody.
	I want an answer.
	It's not something you ignore.
	This is a question that I have.
	I think you're 100% full of is what I think.
	No offense to that.
	Who are you to tell me I'm full of?
	If you think, if you think we were not ready and we stood by and let the neighborhood go up, there's nothing intelligent that I can say to you.
	Well, maybe you should come out and see what's going on.
	That's the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
	I understand you want to pre.
	I understand that you think that you...
	Mayor, you need to check your attitude.
	That's what you need to do.
	I love these guys.
	I really like this alderman, too.
	I mean, they're a little more polite when they know that the cameras are on, but they're really going at each other.
	Because even this alderman says, wait a second, this city, which has been run by Democrats forever since the prehistoric times, is a trash heap of crime, right?
	This city, on a good day, has crazy crime in it.
	On a good day, more people are being shot and killed in Chicago over a weekend than any number of unarmed black men killed by police in a whole year, right?
	And yet, you're only focusing on this one issue and you're letting our neighborhoods go up in flames.
	And the mayor says, yeah, I don't care.
	I don't care.
	Because it actually serves their ends.
	I know there's this hope among conservatives where we say, gosh, these leftist policies are so bad that hopefully people will just totally wake up and they'll realize they're really bad policies and they'll flip them.
	I don't think that's what's going to happen.
	I don't think that's what has already happened.
	If that were true, Chicago would have woken up by now and elected Republicans, but they aren't doing that because the chaos and the violence and the madness actually serves to reinforce the left-wing control of the institutions.
	Look what's happened in Seattle.
	Seattle is a left-wing city, okay?
	And yet the rioters are getting really, really intense there.
	Seattle is a hotbed of Antifa, you know, the anti-fascist, allegedly.
	Another term for communist or anarchist lunatics and violent lunatics who are going out terrorizing people.
	The rioters in Seattle broke into and took over City Hall.
	Take a listen to them.
	So they've taken over there and they're yelling this at the mayor, liberal mayor, you're about to lose your job.
	One thing that these guys also chant a lot is, this is what democracy looks like.
	You hear that, this is what democracy looks like.
	A really dark view is, gosh, maybe that is what democracy looks like.
	If so, not a great recommendation of democracy.
	But I think the more reasonable view is, that's not what democracy looks like.
	Democracy looks like showing up to vote and being a responsible citizen and taking care of yourself and trying to live a virtuous life.
	Mobs taking over and trying to occupy whole territories and throw people out and tar and feather them.
	That's not democracy.
	That's a mob.
	And that kind of unrest is taken as evidence that the Democrats should keep controlling things.
	Antifa has taken over whole parts of that city.
	There's a place now around Seattle called the CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
	There's an area where these far-left protesters, peaceful protesters, also known as rioters, and anarchists and communists, have taken over an area and they've declared it their own zone.
	Okay, and the thing here is, people look at that and they say, wow, this is so kooky and crazy.
	Whatever, though, it's just a sideshow.
	It'll go away.
	It doesn't actually pose a threat.
	But it does.
	Okay, in every revolution that's ever taken place, every successful insurrection, the establishment has looked at the first stages of that and said, oh, that's silly.
	That'll be put down.
	It's no big deal.
	We could easily put down these insurrections.
	Except, we are being told to have no faith in the police department, that the police shouldn't be able to do anything and not use any force.
	We are being told that the so-called peaceful protesters, also known as rioters, also known as in some ways political terrorists, defended by Chris Cuomo and CNN, have the right idea, the right premises, they're in the right.
	We're being told all of these things.
	That's how you get a little crazy violent event turning into Antifa anarchists taking over a whole region, okay?
	They're not even just attacking the present.
	That is happening.
	They're attacking the past.
	So in Richmond, last night, a statue of Christopher Columbus was ripped down and thrown in a lake.
	I think this should be the final straw to show you.
	This is not about black lives mattering, okay?
	This is about a radical, dishonest organization called Black Lives Matter that has nothing to do with black lives mattering.
	What does Christopher Columbus have to do with Black Lives Matter?
	Christopher Columbus, whateverills you want to throw on this guy, whatever evils you want to accuse him of, real or imagined, he didn't have anything to do with black people.
	He came over from, well, first Italy, then he went to Portugal, then he went to Spain, then he sailed over to the New World.
	Any things that you want to accuse him of doing, terrible, awful things, he did against the Native Americans.
	It's not like he was the chief of colonialism in Africa or something, and yet he is being attacked here as well, because this is not about black lives mattering.
	This is about an attack on the fundamental traditions and institutions of the West, hollowing out.
	The left goes in and invades these institutions, pretends that it's not controlling them, hollows them out from within.
	Christopher Columbus founded the New World.
	In many ways, he is the forefather of our modern civilization.
	So they've got to attack him.
	If you want to have a radical progressive vision, then you've got to radically attack the past.
	You've got to leave it so there's nothing left to conserve.
	So all you can do is move into that wonderful utopian future.
	And that's what they're doing there.
	Expect more attacks.
	Not just on Robert E. Lee.
	Not just on...
	Christopher Columbus on George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, you're already beginning to see it.
	And another thing you're seeing is people afraid to fly the American flag in their home.
	Four homes in the Sun Garden neighborhood of Citrus Heights, California, were targeted early Saturday morning Because they were flying the American flag.
	And they were targeted by these peaceful protesters, who are actually just rioters who hate this country.
	And they were targeted for supporting the symbol of our country.
	I've got to tell you something.
	When the riots were moving through my neighborhood in L.A., I'd fly an American flag in the back of my car.
	Across the back windshield, I've got an American flag lying down on the top of the seat.
	I had this thought.
	I said, gosh, I'm going to leave the car there.
	They're torching cars all over the place.
	Should I take the flag inside?
	Should I put it in the trunk or something?
	I said, no, I'm not going to do that.
	If we've gotten to the point in this country where I've got to hide the American flag in a nice neighborhood in California, then the country's lost.
	Let them bash my windshield.
	I'm not going to do that.
	I'll go get my windshield fixed with dignity rather than be ashamed of my country or something like that.
	It would make me no better than the cowards who are kowtowing to this radical movement.
	But it's a thought.
	And that's the point of all of this.
	It's the point of political correctness.
	That's the point of the leftist social movements.
	It's to make you think twice.
	Make you second guess.
	Just to be safe, maybe I shouldn't fly this flag.
	Just to be safe, maybe I shouldn't say that Christopher Columbus was a good guy.
	It's just easier for me to kowtow to these radical leftist bullies.
	And that's how they win.
	Because even if they don't get it right off the top, We're good to go.
	First, this is a black issue.
	The call needs to be black lives matter, not all lives matter.
	So right off the top they say, white people, you don't matter.
	You're bad.
	Only black lives matter.
	Not you.
	Not other people.
	Just you.
	Just black lives.
	Sometimes the best way to ensure that all lives matter is to give black people room to own a space.
	Meaning, hey, let's push for segregation.
	That's apparently progressive now.
	I didn't think that was progressive, but it is.
	Protests from our position.
	For example, don't join in chants that say, whose streets?
	Our streets.
	I kid you not.
	These streets are not our streets.
	White people in West Hollywood, by the way, a very, very white neighborhood, are not allowed to say, these are our streets.
	White people have no...
	Ownership or citizenship at all over any streets.
	They are only run by black people, according to this silly document being promoted.
	I don't know about, what about Hispanic people?
	Do they not, they don't have any ownership of the streets either?
	No.
	Call in and collect white folks who are causing harm.
	Reign in those fellow white people.
	Do not start chants.
	Do not grab the microphone.
	Do not speak.
	Shut up on the basis of your race.
	I mean, this is disgusting stuff.
	The way you know it's disgusting is even the modern culture would call it disgusting if you just replaced the word white with black and black with white.
	And they'd say, this is a white issue.
	It's got to be white lives matter, not all lives matter.
	Give white people room to own a space.
	Don't allow black people to chant whose streets are our streets.
	They're not your streets.
	I mean, this is stuff we'd say is disgusting if it were flipped.
	And yet this is the kind of stuff being pushed by not just influential nonprofits, but government leaders too.
	Who really owns these institutions?
	Whose streets are they really?
	I don't think it's a racial question at all.
	I think it's an ideological question.
	And the streets are liberal, leftist, progressive, radical.
	All those sorts of things.
	I think this is a point that we've got to show.
	Getting back to who owns the institutions, look, the right owns talk radio.
	The left has tried to get into talk radio and they're no good at it.
	The right does own it.
	But this creates a problem, because we can talk about this kind of hypocrisy, we can talk about this kind of radicalism, this awful stuff, until we're blue in the face.
	But so long as the only institution that the right owns is talking, then all we can do is talk.
	You've heard some calls in recent days.
	They say, ah, gosh, enough with the talking, guys.
	Do something.
	We'd like to do something, but we don't have any institutional power.
	We've allowed the left to dominate all of that institutional power, and you can't just talk your way back into that.
	Not overnight, not right away.
	But we need that power.
	We need to be able to do something.
	Because while we talk and we talk ourselves hoarse, The left is still running those institutions, ironically the very institutions that they pretend are being run by the awful, oppressive, terrible, no-good, dirty, rotten conservatives.
	Speaking of institutions that have been manipulated, even public health is this way.
	You remember yesterday we talked about how the World Health Organization is now saying that asymptomatic people can barely spread the virus, even after they had all said that asymptomatic people do spread the virus?
	They keep changing their minds.
	Masks are bad.
	Masks are good.
	The virus is spread on surfaces.
	The virus is not spread on surfaces.
	So now the WHO has flipped again, even in just 24 hours.
	They're now walking back their claim that asymptomatic transmission is very rare.
	Based on what?
	Couldn't possibly tell you.
	I have absolutely no idea.
	That's the first one.
	Second one.
	Remember we were told the virus had started in January.
	It didn't start before January.
	Don't say it started before January.
	Come on.
	China's telling the truth.
	WHO's telling the truth.
	Then we found out it was December.
	Then we found out it was November.
	Then we found out it might have been as early as October.
	Now we've got a non-peer-reviewed, yet, Harvard Medical School study showing that coronavirus may have appeared in Wuhan as early as late August.
	Of last year.
	Late August.
	So that one totally changed again.
	And then this is the pièce de résistance.
	The riots, the peaceful riots that have been going on for the last week or two, forced the closure of 70 coronavirus testing sites, at least.
	They just had to shut down because there was chaos going around.
	We were told by the left, by the public health institutions, that the most important thing is testing.
	Everyone's got to get tested.
	Why?
	I couldn't possibly tell you, but they all got to get tested.
	Trump's not testing enough.
	Trump's killing people because they're not testing enough.
	And then the protesters come through for left-wing causes and the rioters and the arsonists and the looters.
	And all of a sudden, testing doesn't matter at all.
	It doesn't matter at all.
	They change their mind.
	They have no regard for the truth here.
	They only have regard for the ideology that they're pushing, which, by the way, is very different from the truth.
	Before we get out of here, I've got to get to the dumbest article on the Internet today.
	This one goes to Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor for Barack Obama and well-known liar about the Benghazi attack.
	Susan Rice in the New York Times, which still exists, they almost fell apart because that dirty, rotten Tom Cotton, Republican senator, published an op-ed a few days ago, and that truly tore the newspaper apart, almost destroyed it.
	But they're still back.
	Contributing opinion piece from Susan Rice called Washington, D.C. Deserves Statehood.
	This place does not deserve statehood.
	I am in Washington, D.C. right now.
	The whole purpose of Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia, is that it should not be a state.
	The whole reason it was created is so that the federal government is not owned by a single state.
	We need a place for the federal government.
	Federal government's different than state governments.
	Federal government needs its own space that is different from state government.
	That's how the balance of power works.
	If you give D.C. a state...
	You've completely upset that.
	They say, Washington is the only national capital in the democratic world whose citizens lack equal voting rights.
	Yeah, right.
	People aren't supposed to live in D.C. It's supposed to be a federal district.
	People can live out in Virginia or they can live in Maryland.
	If you choose to live in D.C., that's going to come with certain costs because D.C. is not a state.
	By the way, since when do we follow the rest of the democratic world?
	The rest of the democratic world follows us.
	We're the leaders in it.
	We lack any senators or voting representative in the House of Representatives.
	Yes, that's true.
	By design.
	The real reasons for opposition are racism and political interests, she writes.
	Nope, it's just design.
	That's the real reason, is federalism.
	Why does this injustice persist into the 21st century?
	Because it was set up for a reason when it was set up, before the 21st century.
	And those reasons haven't gone away over time.
	Okay, Now, really, before we go, there is one thing I've got to get to.
	I got an email yesterday from factcheck.org asking me if I had spread fake news.
	Seriously.
	Because, you know, we have our thumbnails every day on YouTube, and they're these kind of crazy designs.
	We have an artist who draws them up every single day, and they're always really wild.
	One of them recently, apparently, went around the internet as fake news.
	And it was an image of a ridiculously defaced Abraham Lincoln memorial.
	And it's like part of his head was chopped off and there was spray paint.
	I didn't think it looked real, but apparently some people sent it around and said, this is being defaced, this is fake news.
	So I get this email from factcheck.org, which is a left-leaning institution, like so many institutions.
	I said, were you spreading fake news?
	Are you guys responsible for this?
	And yes, of course, our artists drew up this thumbnail as they draw up thumbnails every single day.
	So just to give you a little bit of context, though, I want to go through a few of the other thumbnails we've drawn up and just assuage your fears and let you know that those are not real either.
	So what else do we have in recent days?
	We've got the Lincoln one.
	We've got the Statue of Liberty kneeling on top of a bunch of protesters, taking a knee.
	So I want you to know that actually the copper statue given to us hundreds of years ago by France did not suddenly come to life and does not now have bendable knees and things like that.
	That We've got President Trump as Hercules with a ripped, ripped Greek god body, wrestling a bull by the horns with the face of the Twitter logo.
	That didn't really happen.
	Okay, that's not really Donald Trump, and the Twitter logo is not a bull.
	Then we've got two Karens.
	They're Karens with a Karen haircut, you know, and a little dog in a mask standing staring at you.
	That's not a photograph.
	That was drawn up by an artist.
	We've got Dr.
	Fauci shaking hands with...
	Satan himself.
	You can see his pulsating red devil hand there.
	Dr.
	Fauci, at least to my knowledge, has never literally shaken hands with the devil.
	Metaphorically, I don't know, I can't speak to that, but literally has not shaken hands with the devil.
	President Trump dancing around as money falls from the sky.
	This very possibly did literally happen, but I am telling you that image, at least, was drawn by one of our artists.
	This one's my favorite.
	President Trump dancing at a beach, shirtless.
	We ought to talk to my artists.
	There's a lot of shirtless Trump in these images.
	Maybe there's some Freudian thing.
	I don't know.
	A shirtless ripped six-pack abs in a bathing suit dancing in front of the protesters at the beach who are saying, stay inside and wash your hands.
	This is not Donald Trump's body.
	Everyone knows that is my body that we photoshopped President Trump's head onto.
	So don't confuse that with fake news.
	Anything else?
	Yes, Bernie Sanders wearing a fur coat, holding up a skull like Hamlet with a hammer and sickle emblazoned on the skull.
	That is not the skull of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin.
	Bernie Sanders is not the Prince of Denmark, though I often hear him talk about how Denmark is a socialist country.
	It is not a socialist country, and Bernie Sanders is not Hamlet.
	This one could be real, and I think a lot of people want it to be real, but it's not real.
	Donald Trump, in a WWE ring, Body slamming a very sad looking Mitt Romney.
	That did not happen in the physical world.
	It did happen politically, symbolically, metaphorically, but it did not happen in the physical world and so that is not a photograph.
	I hope this clears up.
	Fake news?
	I don't want to be accused of spreading any more fake news by factcheck.org, so keep that in mind when you talk about the photos of Dr.
	Fauci shaking hands with the devil or President Trump literally body-slamming Mitt Romney.
	Those are artistic creations.
	I hope you've enjoyed the thumbnails, and I hope that we haven't confused anybody any further.
	Get your mailbag questions in for tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	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 Ben Davies.
	Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Supervising Producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Technical Producer, Austin Stevens.
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	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	If you prefer facts over feelings, aren't offended by the brutal truth, and you can still laugh at the insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to The Ben Shapiro Show.
	We'll get a whole lot of that and much more.

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