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June 11, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

47:54

Ep. 561 - American Taliban

Leftist rioters tear down more statues, Antifa deputizes it’s own police, and “Gone With The Wind” gets canceled. Plus, the Mailbag! 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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	When you tear down your own history, expect to get smushed.
	That is the lesson that the left taught us yesterday.
	It's a very important lesson.
	I don't think they meant to teach us this.
	I don't think they meant for all this symbolism.
	But that is what happened when they literally pulled the statue down and it literally smushed one of the rioters.
	This happened in Virginia.
	It's a very sad story.
	It is actually a genuinely sad story all around, every single part of it.
	A bunch of these leftist goons went around the American Taliban, tied a rope around a statue, pulled it down, and they didn't expect the statue was going to hit them on the head.
	Let's take a listen.
	So they've got the statue here.
	They're all very excited.
	They're pulling it down.
	It goes down, and their excitement turns to terror in just a moment because...
	They realize that the statue has crushed one of their own guys.
	Get a medic!
	Get a medic!
	All of a sudden, by the way, all of a sudden they want the services of the state, you know, the cops, the ambulance, the EMT, all of that, because it has crushed them.
	All the other statues around this had been beheaded in the moments just before they pulled this one down.
	A few takeaways.
	There are no cops stopping these guys, right?
	Of course not.
	If I were a cop, I wouldn't want to stop them either because there's no institutional support for the police.
	Another big takeaway.
	We are tearing down our history to liberate us, but the destruction of our traditions will actually kill us.
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	We are living through the rise of the American Taliban.
	Bam.
	That's what it is.
	Senator Cruz tweeted that out yesterday when he saw these videos of people beheading statues, pulling them down.
	It's just like the Taliban when they go through Afghanistan.
	They see 2,000 or 2,500 or 3,000 year old statues and they blow them up.
	That's what we're getting with American history.
	And these are statues that are 150 years old or 100 years old or maybe 200 years old.
	And they're pulling them down.
	That's what these left-wingers are doing.
	And it's not just the Confederate statues.
	The one they're going after the most.
	Is the guy they always go after the most.
	In recent years, you've seen statues of this guy beheaded.
	You've seen this guy's celebratory day renamed.
	You've seen his other statues vandalized and graffitied.
	I'm talking about my man, Christopher Columbus, whose statue was pulled down just yesterday as well.
	Oh, how happy they were. - Sure.
	They got him.
	I mean, these are images that you saw during the Iraq war.
	These are not with Columbus.
	They pulled down Saddam Hussein.
	These are images you see during times of war.
	Except we're not in a time of war.
	At least I don't think we're in a time of war.
	This is supposed to be a time of peace.
	And we're not pulling down other people's statues.
	is we're pulling down our own.
	This is about a lot more than George Floyd or Black Lives Mattering.
	Okay.
	And we'll get to that in just one second.
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	So when I saw the Columbus statue come down, I realized this is about a lot more than Black Lives Mattering.
	Okay, this is about a lot more than George Floyd.
	This is about a lot more than police brutality.
	My first question was, what does Christopher Columbus have to do with Black Lives Matter or the police in 2020?
	Obviously nothing.
	He has nothing to do with it.
	What this is about ultimately is an attack on our very civilization, on Western civilization, This has been building among the left for a very long time.
	You saw it really start to come to fruition in the 70s and 80s in the United States, where you had Jesse Jackson marching on college campuses, leading kids in chants that said, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go.
	Western cultures got to go.
	And Columbus is the first guy they got to go for because Christopher Columbus is the symbol of Western civilization.
	They hate Christopher Columbus for the exact same reason that I love Christopher Columbus.
	This guy was a devoutly Catholic, transnational, autodidact.
	He was mostly self-taught.
	He was not a noble when he was born, right?
	He was of low birth.
	He married pretty well.
	He was...
	First and foremost, so intrepid.
	He was afraid of nothing.
	He was the greatest navigator of his age, sailed all over the world.
	He wanted to sail to get a new trade route to the Indies.
	So what did he do?
	He went to Portugal.
	He lobbied the crown in Portugal.
	They wouldn't give it to him.
	He was dogging about it, but it didn't happen.
	He goes to Spain.
	He studies for years all the great works in Spain so that he can converse with the courts, so he can win them over, so he can get funding for his voyage to the Indies.
	They say no, but finally, just as Columbus is leaving to go regroup and try again, they call him back in.
	His biographers say it was because of the brilliance of his personality and his determination.
	The crown says yes.
	Queen Isabella says yes.
	Another great hero of Western civilization that people don't talk about.
	He does it.
	He manages to make it to the new world, running on nothing but prayer and dead reckoning.
	Okay, this guy didn't have any instruments, at least on his first voyage.
	He's just looking at the stars.
	He makes it to the West Indies.
	He has this first encounter with a primitive native peoples.
	And he actually, they accuse him of treating the natives horribly.
	They say he's a murderer, he's a genocidal maniac.
	None of that is true.
	He was a conqueror in the sense that he came over and he established the West in this new world.
	But he was actually much nicer to the natives than any of the Spaniards he was traveling with.
	He would intervene on their behalf a lot.
	He adopted the son of a Native American friend of his and raised him as his own son.
	The guy is totally misunderstood and attacked, but he expresses so much of our civilization.
	And that's why they hate his guts, okay?
	The leftist radicals are tearing things down, not for principles, but for power.
	You think, and they want you to think, that they are tearing these things down because they hate them per se, but it's not that.
	The left here hates this specific civilization they're tearing down.
	So, for instance, they tear down history not because they oppose all history.
	It's because they oppose history.
	Our history.
	They tear down churches, not because they oppose religion.
	In a way, politics is religion for them.
	So they do like a certain kind of religion.
	They just don't like our religion, okay?
	They tear down the government not because they oppose government, but because they oppose our government.
	They have their own governments, which we'll see in a moment.
	They abolish the police, not because they hate the police, even, but because they hate our police.
	And guess what's going to happen the minute they get into power?
	They're going to set up their own governments and their own police.
	And trust me, those governments and those police are going to be a lot less just than our own.
	You saw this in Seattle.
	So in Seattle right now, Antifa radicals have set up an autonomous zone.
	They're calling it the City Hall Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. This is an area where the civil authority in Seattle and the cops and the mayor and everybody else have lost power.
	They are not running those streets anymore.
	And you've got these leftist radicals now running the streets.
	And the thing that's so ironic about it, they talk about how they want to open borders.
	They talk about how they want to abolish the police.
	What's the first thing these guys do the minute they take any power in the city?
	They set up rigid borders.
	They don't let people in.
	And they set up their own system of cops.
	Obviously, it exposes them as total hypocrites, but it's pretty spooky too.
	Take a listen to some video that was captured within the autonomous zone of these leftist radicals taking justice into their own hands.
	You don't know the owner of this place?
	The owner that's actually being nice and letting us stay here?
	Don't go.
	We are the police of this community now.
	We are the police.
	I thought you wanted to abolish the police.
	Oh no, you just want to be the police.
	Okay.
	Different, different things.
	Now there's no law and order, so they're not the police in that way.
	They're thugs.
	They're being disrespectful.
	That's what the point is.
	They're a gang.
	Uh-oh.
	Getting a little bit violent over here.
	Getting a little bit loud.
	The camera starts shaking.
	Now we're starting to lose the picture.
	That is the police without law and order.
	That police looks a lot worse than the other kind of police that these leftists want to abolish.
	This is not a situation that you want to be in because if you're one of these utopians, one of these radical communists or anarchists who think that abolishing the police means abolishing the police, well, you're in for a rude awakening because when you abolish the police, all that means is that a new set of police are going to come in.
	When you abolish the government, all that really means is that a new government is going to come in.
	There's a line about communists which is that Christians go to heaven and socialists go to communism.
	What they mean by that is you're not going to get there on earth at least.
	This is a utopian vision that as long as we're in a fallen world is not going to exist.
	These leftist dreams of abolishing the state, abolishing the police, it can't happen.
	That's why every communist or socialist regime that's ever come around maintains a tight grip on power.
	The police don't go a little lighter.
	They go a lot harder when you get these regimes.
	The state doesn't fall away.
	The state becomes much, much more important.
	The Seattle police abandoned this precinct, okay?
	And what they're now receiving, according to Como News out there, is that they're getting reports of armed people manning the checkpoints, intimidating people, trying to enter, and people committing extortion.
	You have now got, as always happens with these revolutionaries, these insurrectionists, you've got a politics much less just, much less equitable policy.
	Much less prosperous taking its place.
	That should terrify all of us.
	And how are our civil leaders responding?
	They're denying that any of it's happening.
	We'll get there in one second.
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	You get to the civil authority in Seattle and Washington.
	You get to Governor Jay Inslee, who you probably forgot ran for president.
	I kind of forgot that, but there he is.
	Jay Inslee was asked, what's going on in this freaking autonomous zone?
	You know, are we some two-bit banana republic?
	Inslee's response puts his head in the sand and says, I don't know nothing about it.
	I'd like to ask you about what's going on in Seattle.
	There's this thing called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
	What's your thought on that?
	The fact that the protesters have taken that over and not allowing people to come and go freely?
	Well, that's news to me, so I'll have to reserve any comment about it.
	I have not heard anything about that from any credible source.
	Not that you're not credible.
	It's just like before I... Espouse an opinion I should know of which I speak.
	What you're saying?
	Terrorists took over one of the most important cities in our state?
	I mean, I just don't know.
	And you're saying that's the main news story and it's the only thing that's being reported in Washington?
	I guess, well, it's just so funny because I guess I haven't seen the news.
	Please, please, please don't ask me about that because I don't have an answer.
	He doesn't have an answer and he's not doing a very effective job of lying about it either.
	Because he doesn't have an answer.
	He's got to lie about it because he doesn't have an answer.
	Because in his rhetoric, in his ideology, he's supporting these wackos and he's seeing in real time the effects of that.
	He's saying, one, it's going to take power away from him.
	But two, it doesn't look like it does in the picture books.
	It doesn't look like it does in the leftist daydreams of this utopian vision, because so long as human nature is broken, you're not going to get that utopia on earth.
	And he's seeing it played out in real time.
	And it's left his ideology exposed as bankrupt.
	So there's a follow up question on this.
	They say, well, what about these takeovers of the streets, even hypothetically speaking?
	Here's a hypothetical answer.
	As far as the National Guard, I'm only going to keep them there And if there is a takeover of a street in Seattle where they're barricading and keeping people out, the protesters are, would you want people to be involved?
	You know, that's a hypothetical.
	Look, we've got to have safety.
	I'm sure that people will find a way to have public safety everywhere in the state.
	I'm confident of that.
	The National Guard is demobilizing.
	Over two-thirds of them were demobilized of yesterday.
	I don't know if they're completely demobilized at this point or not, but if not, that'll be shortly, I believe.
	So you see what the reporter has to do, because Jay Inslee's not playing on the level here, is he's got to pretend like it's hypothetical.
	Say, okay, so hypothetically, if a bunch of communists and anarchists took over an entire neighborhood of Seattle, what would you do?
	You're not giving us an answer on what you're going to do, because it is happening, so what about hypothetically?
	And then Inslee says, well, you know, look, that's hypothetical.
	He then doesn't answer the question, and then the best he's got is...
	We're demobilizing the National Guard.
	The best he's got is, we're going to use less police force.
	We're going to use less force on the streets to stop this.
	Because he's like a robot.
	He's like a non-playing character in a video game, right?
	He's only got one mode, and the mode is leftism.
	At least in his rhetoric.
	So he says, well, the only thing I can possibly say about the police is...
	We're going to take away their power.
	Even though, guess what?
	Right now, I think the people in Seattle probably want a little bit more police power on the streets.
	I think even if they're super-duper left-wing, they're looking around and saying, I don't want warlords running around and controlling my neighborhoods, so maybe give us a little more police power.
	But Inslee, a prisoner of his own ideology, can't compute that.
	And so even in the hypothetical, which is really happening, he can't give that answer.
	This gets to something that yesterday I talked about and some people sent me some criticism.
	I pointed out that the left controls every major institution in America.
	They control the mainstream media.
	They control education and the academy and higher education, the college campuses.
	But they control education all the way from pre-kindergarten on upward.
	They control Hollywood.
	They control big tech.
	They control administrative government.
	They control all of these things.
	And so some people wrote in to me and they said, what about the police, Michael?
	You know, the cops and the military.
	Those are right-wing controlled institutions.
	And there's a little bit of truth to that.
	They're definitely a bit more right-wing than, for instance, the New York Teachers Union.
	But they're still subject to the civil authority.
	And ultimately, what we're seeing around us right now is they don't have all that much power.
	You know, they're still being run by bureaucrats and occasionally by the elected people.
	So, there was a really idiotic tweet going around yesterday.
	Got 151,000 retweets, 442,000, 443,000 likes.
	And the tweet said, Defund the police?
	Impossible!
	They cried as they defunded education, healthcare, social security, welfare, Planned Parenthood, public transit.
	And one thing that makes this a really stupid tweet...
	Even though everyone thinks it's true, is that none of those institutions are being defunded.
	Education funding has only increased over the past several decades, increased dramatically in many cases, both private and public.
	Think about the cost of schooling now in terms of where your taxes are going and in terms of when you go to a private school, the cost of college, for instance, or a state college, right?
	It's gone through the roof.
	Health care prices gone through the roof.
	Social security has exploded.
	We haven't cut a single thing from social security.
	That's the third rail of American politics.
	Welfare.
	We haven't seriously cut welfare in this country.
	If anything, we've expanded it dramatically.
	Planned Parenthood's market share of abortions has increased dramatically.
	And even with a Republican elected president, their funding hasn't really been cut all that much.
	A little bit here, a little bit there, but actually much of the funding that was cut from Planned Parenthood was Planned Parenthood's own choice because they didn't want to play by the laws that were already on the books.
	Public transportation, same thing, on and on and on.
	The only institution that's actually being cut right now in real time is the police.
	During the Obama administration, what was getting cut?
	You had military cuts.
	You had the sequester, right?
	You had those institutions, which I think a lot of people consider to be the most powerful because, you know, it's guys walking around with guns on their hips.
	Compared to those other institutions, they don't have a whole lot of power.
	The conservative influence that is on them It's not particularly strong.
	And when you think about shaping a country, I know it doesn't seem like it at the time, but the teacher in the New York Public School Union who teaches pre-kindergarten actually has more influence than any beat cop or any soldier who's being deployed.
	When you think about actual nation-crafting influence.
	The cops are coming under such fire.
	They're being so defunded that even the show, Cops, is being canceled.
	Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do, what you gonna do when they come for you, bad boys, bad boys, is getting canceled.
	So, you know, I mean, I've been watching Cops.
	Cops is older than I am, actually.
	Cops has been on the air for 33 years, or maybe 32 years.
	It was about to be 33.
	But their network, the Paramount Network, just spiked it.
	They killed it.
	They killed it because the cops are unpopular now.
	Okay, and this is a kind of absurd way of the politically correct cancel culture showing you something that the broader popular culture has already decided.
	Cops are bad, so even now TV shows about cops have to be bad.
	It's not just cops getting canceled, by the way, which is too bad because I always thought that was a great, great show.
	One of the early reality TV shows.
	Even one of the great films of all time, Gone with the Wind, is being cancelled because it depicts the South in the 19th century.
	And that is very politically incorrect, and so it's being pulled from HBO Max.
	And there's a real irony to this, which is that the movie Gone with the Wind, depicting the 19th century South, actually played an important role in the development of racial relations in the country.
	Because Hattie McDaniel, the black actress in Gone with the Wind, won an Oscar, broke a barrier for her performance.
	So just listen to her introduction at the Oscars ceremony, which was much more bearable Much, you know, back in those days, it wasn't all glitz and glamour and Jimmy Kimmel.
	They kept things much shorter.
	It was much more humble.
	But listen to this beautiful introduction and a recognition that her winning the Oscar was an important step in American race relations.
	I'm really especially happy that I'm chosen to present this particular plaque.
	To me, it seems more than dust a plaque of gold.
	It opens the doors of this room, moves back the walls, and it enables us to embrace the whole of America, an America that we love, an America that, almost alone in the world today, recognizes and pays tribute to those who give of their best, regardless of creed, race, or color.
	It is with the knowledge that this entire nation will stand and salute the presentation of this plaque That I present the Academy Award for the best performance of an actress in supporting roles during 1939 to Hattie McDaniel.
	Listen to that introduction.
	What we're being told by the left now is that everybody before yesterday, everybody before we, our wonderful selves, were born, was hopelessly bigoted and racist and terrible, and now it's up to us to tear down their statues if we want to continue to be good people.
	That introduction was very self-aware.
	That introduction was aware that there was a race problem in America, and there were concrete steps you could take to ameliorate that race problem, to bring people together.
	And this is true going back a long way.
	If you go back all the way to the Declaration of Independence, Declaration of Independence, written by that terrible guy, Thomas Jefferson, who is a mean old racist who is so much worse than we are, You see that Americans at the time understood there was a race problem.
	There was this peculiar institution of slavery that a lot of people really didn't like and that everybody recognized was foisting a very difficult dilemma on the American colonies.
	They complained about it.
	In the Declaration of Independence, they're complaining about this and trying to work their way through it.
	That kind of nuance is lost when you're in the business of tearing down statues.
	So Hattie McDaniel gets up there, first black woman to win an Academy Award, Is her speech about how it's damn well about time a black woman wins an Academy Award and all you people in the room who gave it to me are terrible bigot racists.
	No, not quite.
	Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, fellow members of the motion picture industry and honored guests, this is one of the happiest moments of my life.
	And I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of the awards.
	For your kindness, it has made me feel very, very humble.
	And I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future.
	I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.
	My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel.
	And may I say thank you and God bless you.
	So this is one of the great acceptance speeches in the history of the Oscars, and most notably because it was short.
	Back in these days, people had class and decorum, so they knew not to make their rambling speeches go on for 10 minutes.
	They kept it to, I think, Hattie McDaniel did it for a minute or 90 seconds.
	But you heard what she said.
	She used phrases that are very politically incorrect.
	She said, I hope to be a credit to my race.
	Now, that phrase you certainly couldn't say anymore.
	But what is in that phrase?
	What is in that phrase is an acknowledgement of the racial significance of this moment.
	And to say, I hope that I am representing my race in a good way, just as the presenter was representing her race in a good way.
	Imagine if the presenter came out and said, you know, she was wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and, you know, she made some sort of bigoted comments.
	That woman would not have been a credit to her race.
	But what this is representing is a moment of coming together, two people recognizing their significance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognizing the significance of this and trying to help American race relations.
	And then the word she used that's probably even less popular now is humble, humility.
	You're not allowed to be humble anymore.
	We've got to be prideful.
	Pride, which we've always considered to be the queen of all vices, the queen of all sins, is now considered the paragon of virtue.
	But humility is a lot better than pride.
	When you consider the great saints of history, do you remember them for their pride or their humility?
	If you're familiar with the real saints, then it's probably the humility.
	St. John Vianney, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most intelligent, brilliant minds ever to exist on earth, was known for his humility.
	At the end of his life, after Thomas Aquinas had written the greatest works of theology of philosophy ever written, Thomas Aquinas, after a religious vision said, everything that I have written seems like so much straw to me now compared to what I've seen.
	All of my efforts, my humble efforts have been really nothing compared to the, to the immensity of God himself.
	A perfect example of humility.
	Even the secular saints, even if you reject the real saints and you're just talking about political saints or leftist saints or secular saints, I think of guys like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.
	These are people who are really by the secular culture considered some of the greatest men to ever live.
	Well, what are those guys known for?
	Their humility, not their pride.
	Gandhi, in particular, puts forward this image of humility.
	And Nelson Mandela, you know, the guy was imprisoned for a long time.
	Nelson Mandela was involved in some very radical, radical left-wing politics, which is why conservatives have a little bit of an issue with him.
	But when he came out of prison, he represented a political humility, a political healing, a political coming together.
	That's what we want.
	That's what we need more of.
	If you want to come together and heal as a country, you need that sort of thing.
	But unfortunately, humility, along with going with the wind, has been canceled.
	Race and sex are being used as tools of prideful ideologies to tear down everything that we once held dear.
	Sometimes, both race and sex are being used at the same time to do that.
	This is my favorite article that I saw on the internet yesterday.
	This is from Amru Al-Khadi in The Independent, British paper.
	The headline is, How Britain's colonial past can be traced through to the transphobic feminism of today.
	Huh?
	What's that mean?
	Well, the tweet about it is even weirder.
	Tweet about it, title, opinion.
	What the white supremacist roots of biological sex reveal about transphobic feminism.
	Let me try to delve the depths of that very bizarre statement.
	Transphobic feminism.
	These are people like J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, who came out and said men are men and women are women, and if men can be women, then women don't mean anything at all, and I'm a woman and I want to identify as a woman, and I don't want men wearing a dress to tell me that I'm not really a woman, or that they are women and can tell me what a woman is.
	Okay, so that's transphobic feminism.
	Biological sex, obviously, is an offense to the transgender ideology.
	And so biological sex has to be bad, but the only way that we can understand good and evil today, where we've lost that kind of dialogue, is to say that anything bad is white supremacist, or white nationalist, or white...
	Or privilege or something to that effect.
	That's the political way that we can understand ideas like good and bad and evil and virtue and things like that.
	So biological sex now is white supremacist.
	News to me because I actually am under the idea that black people have biology too and Asian people have biology too.
	But I don't know.
	Allegedly, that is not the case.
	It gets down to this debate that happened between Daniel Radcliffe and J.K. Rowling.
	JK Rowling, you know her position on it.
	Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in JK Rowling's movies, came out and said, Transgender women are women.
	And any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional healthcare associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Joe or I, referring to JK Rowling.
	First of all, Professional healthcare associations don't know anything about the nature of mankind.
	They're not philosophers.
	They don't understand the human nature itself.
	They don't understand these eternal sorts of questions.
	They have no more expertise on it than anyone else.
	And as we've seen in the past few weeks, the public health experts don't appear to have much expertise.
	They are tools of political ideology.
	But moreover, look at how ridiculous this is.
	You've got a man...
	Daniel Radcliffe, attacking a woman, J.K. Rowling, who's been very good to him, by the way, because she said women should be able to define what a woman is.
	Women should exist.
	And Daniel Radcliffe says, no, how dare you?
	I'm a man.
	There's an article, this is such an outrageous article.
	The article is titled, J.K. Rowling is still talking.
	J.K. Rowling is still talking, written by a man.
	How outrageous.
	You've got one man who J.K. Rowling has really helped to create his whole career, attacking her.
	Another man attacking her, telling her to shut up because she says that women are women.
	Because she says, rightly, that if the transgender ideology is correct, then to be a woman doesn't mean anything at all because men can be women too.
	That's the state that we're in.
	That's what happens when you start pulling down the statues, not just of our history, but of our philosophy, of our understanding of ourselves, of human nature.
	We think that we're liberating ourselves from that.
	In a way, we're liberating ourselves.
	We're liberating ourselves from every single thing that grounds us.
	We're liberating ourselves from ourselves, and we're going to get smushed by that statue.
	We've got to get to the mailbag first, though.
	I've got to thank our friends over at you.
	We're very, very close to 60,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel, which is very important because my friend Drew Klavan decided to start this little race to beat me on the YouTube subscribers without telling me about this.
	So thank you for allowing us to pull ahead here.
	I really appreciate it.
	You know we got a lot of content over there, bonus interviews, segments, breakouts, things like that.
	We're going to have more for you next week.
	So thanks for subscribing.
	And as you know, this year's been insane.
	The media have been insane.
	And when you want to get the real story, you've got to go to good news websites such as The Daily Wire.
	The Reader's Pass gives you far more in-depth coverage.
	It's just three bucks a month usually.
	For you though, for you right now, my friend, my friend, for you, two-thirds off for your first month.
	99 cents to get started.
	Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and join today.
	We will be right back with The Mailbag.
	And speaking of exclusive bonus content, you know, I'm going to be heading over to my friend Stephen Crowder's show right after I'm going to be heading over to my friend Stephen Crowder's So you can check that out.
	That's going to be on Crowder's YouTube channel when it goes up live.
	But it should be a lot of fun.
	I always like hanging out with that guy.
	It's usually one expects the unexpected.
	So I'll see you over there.
	Let's get into the mailbag from Stacy.
	As the history nerd, I'm seeing something odd on social media, perhaps you are too, that those lovely African stoles that the Democrats were wearing for their photo op were Ashanti in origin.
	Perhaps Democrats didn't research enough to know that the Ashanti tribe was one of the trading partners with Portugal for enslaved Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries.
	So I ask you to ask the Democrats, one...
	What happened to the evils of cultural appropriation?
	Two, does this mean they actually support slavery and the slave trade?
	Three, recreating the position that caused the death of George Floyd, this sort of irony that people are now kneeling.
	Really, keep up the good work.
	Daily Wire is where I get my sanity check.
	You make a good point.
	First of all, on cultural appropriation, that was always a cynical attack.
	That's just an attack to shut up conservatives.
	Okay, there was always going to be a double standard there.
	The left is going to do whatever they want in terms of cultural appropriation, and the right doesn't get to do anything.
	It's just a way of saying shut up, which is what the left does to us all the time.
	On the Kente scarves that they were wearing, which I'm really sorry that Chuck Schumer didn't go the full way and wear the full dashiki with the kufi hat or something.
	He just wore the stole.
	You know, I didn't know this about the Ashanti tribe.
	I mean, I'll look into it.
	It wouldn't surprise me at all because the left does this a lot.
	you'll see very often white liberals are the people promoting the socialist holiday, the invention of the 1960s, Kwanzaa.
	Kwanzaa, which virtually nobody on earth celebrates.
	It was created by an African-American critical studies professor in Los Angeles, and it's supposed to be a pan-African holiday, but it's just a socialist invention.
	And the irony of it is that the phrase Kwanzaa comes from Swahili, which is an East African language, and yet virtually every African-American is of West African origin.
	It doesn't matter, okay?
	The specifics there don't matter because it's just ideological.
	It's just a narrative creation.
	It doesn't have a root in real historical experience.
	And so I'm not surprised at all that Chuck Schumer, who's also contriving these sort of political conveniences...
	Doesn't know the whole deep history of the African stole that he decided to wear for a photo op.
	From Mitch.
	Hey Michael, with all of the washing of the feet, genuflecting, kneeling, and reciting of creeds, does the Roman Catholic Church have grounds to sue Black Lives Matter over copyright infringement, asking for a friend?
	Also, what are your personal thoughts on this event?
	Love the show.
	Yeah, this is a good comparison, I think.
	Which is that you now have a secular liturgy of liberalism and like all liturgies that have come out of the secular West, they are mimicry of Catholic liturgy because that is the defining liturgy of the West that has shaped so much of our history and our culture.
	But it's perverted at least or it's inverted.
	It's just like a weird liturgy.
	Because instead of worshipping the Creator, we're worshipping certain creations.
	Instead of recognizing the original sin lurking in all of our hearts, we're just recognizing this little portion of sin, which is called racism.
	Still sinful, but not the whole story here.
	Instead of recognizing our own brokenness and fallenness, we're recognizing only the brokenness and fallenness of white privilege, for instance.
	And so things go off-kilter here.
	In a way, I have empathy for the Black Lives Matter, left-wing, even Antifa.
	Even these insane, violent, thuggish Antifa guys.
	I have a sort of Empathy or at least sympathy for.
	Because they have natural religious longings that they cannot express religiously because they've convinced themselves of a bunch of stupid religious ideas.
	So they still have to express them some way.
	It's like steam.
	You know, the steam's got to come out of the engine somewhere.
	Or the steam, rather, has to come out.
	You know, it's too full of pressure.
	So it's got to be released somewhere.
	It's being released in politics.
	And that is not going to make anybody happy.
	That is not going to fulfill that longing.
	And it's going to make things a lot worse.
	So I would recommend, since they've got the cheap knockoff of the Catholic liturgy, maybe they head over to a church whenever those reopen, attend a mass, and get the real thing.
	From Jenna.
	Speaking of Catholicism, I'm a Catholic woman in her mid-twenties.
	I met my boyfriend three years ago when I was struggling with my faith.
	Due to this, we did not wait until marriage to sleep together.
	But especially in the past year or so, I've been struggling with guilt and wanting to stop until we're married.
	How do I tell my boyfriend?
	He respects your opinion.
	So what are some arguments as to why this would be a good decision for ourselves and future marriage?
	Thanks.
	I think this is a great idea.
	And I, you know, it's weird because a lot of people beat themselves up over this.
	They say, okay, well, I did one thing in the past and then I've now changed my mind about that thing.
	But I feel like I've still got to do that thing, which I now think is wrong.
	No, you don't.
	You've changed your mind.
	Now change your behavior.
	It's a little bit easier to change your mind than to change your behavior sometimes, but surely your behavior should follow from that changed mind.
	What are some good arguments for this?
	Well, a good argument from tradition is simply that this has developed when our society had a sane sense of social relations, and it developed presumably for a reason.
	And you actually don't need to boil that down to an explicit, rationalist, ideological summation of why it works.
	The very fact that it has worked for so long and led to flourishing cultures is in itself actually a pretty good argument.
	Why is it better to wait until marriage?
	Well, it's better to wait until marriage, even though in this culture virtually nobody has done that, especially among millennials or Gen Z. But when we realize it is better, why is it better?
	Well, because it represents a commitment.
	It represents a giving wholly of yourselves to the other person.
	Presumably, if you've been sleeping together before marriage, probably you're using contraception, I would imagine.
	That in itself, also part of Catholic teaching, is withholding a very important piece of yourself from your spouse.
	And so in a way, it represents you and your spouse using each other merely for pleasure, not to give yourself wholly to someone.
	Norm MacDonald, the comedian, has a great bit on sex.
	I forget which album of his this is, but go back and check it out.
	He walks in, he goes into this nightclub, he goes, okay, so I was thinking the other day that sex is a filthy, shameful thing that is obviously only meant for procreation.
	And it gets this big shock and surprise from the whole audience.
	But the thing is, he's sort of right.
	And he goes through all the reasons why.
	So that's a more comedic way of thinking about why this is.
	And Another reason that it might behoove you to stop now and then wait until you get married, which by the way, good friends of mine have done.
	Friends who were definitely getting down to business before they had a reversion to the faith, and then they have paused it before their marriage.
	One of the reasons is...
	That the anticipation will make the marriage itself, one of the most significant events of your life, more special.
	You know, the kind of Catholic idea of the world is first the fast, then the feast.
	The idea is we live in time and space, and so it is important discipline for us to fast sometimes, to deprive ourselves of certain things, to discipline ourselves a little bit, and then on feast days to gratify some more of those longings.
	and through this process, we come to a fuller understanding, not just of our bodies, but of our spiritual selves as well.
	And the tough line on other religious ideas, and certainly on secularism, is instead of first the fast, then the feast, you have first the feast, then the hangover.
	That's the culture that we're living in right now, and that's just not the best way to live for human flourishing.
	So I hope somewhere in there, you get a good argument to convince your boyfriend, because I'm telling you, if you take a little break for a while, it'll be that much better when you start again.
	Okay.
	from Daniel.
	Congrats on beating Klavan's YouTube subs.
	Thank you very much.
	I'm a conservative member of a very far left music industry.
	I've always kept my mouth shut on politics among my peers.
	So far that's been easy.
	However, with the new rise of BLM mandating that the huge majority of people I work with start talking about these things, I'm starting to think that I'm going to be forced to either voice what side I'm on or risk being exposed by somebody else due to my silent complicity with white supremacy.
	Should I continue to censor myself or should I go all in for patriotism, justice, liberty, dying in a blaze of glory?
	Patriotism, justice, and liberty are important things.
	More important even than that is the truth.
	Okay, and what you're being asked to do is lie, and you shouldn't lie.
	I think that there's good reason to sometimes not just go all out with what you think.
	You don't need to go to every water cooler conversation and tell them how much you love Donald Trump.
	You can be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
	But you shouldn't lie, okay?
	And we're in this very dishonest political moment, very scary political moment, where you're being told if you don't go along with a radical, false, dishonest political movement, then you're a terrible bigot, white supremacist murderer.
	And so you've got to constantly perform your affirmation of this crazy leftist movement.
	I wouldn't lie.
	I haven't lied generally in my public life, and that has cost me certain things.
	That does come with costs.
	Every night I go to bed, I put my head on the pillow, I'm grinning ear to ear, I sleep like a baby.
	But there was a cost to that.
	You might have to pay a cost to that.
	There are times in life when you are told, lie and have a pleasant professional life.
	You know, get more money, get more success, whatever.
	Or tell the truth, be honest, live with integrity, and take a cost.
	This is an eternal decision that you could make.
	I mean, this is up to you.
	It's your life.
	But you know which one I would be making.
	Alright.
	Let's see, what do we have?
	Last question from Nick.
	Dear Knowles, master of words and phrases that have been dead for 100 years.
	Oh my god, are you serious?
	You think that I use old-timey phrases?
	That's so embarrassing.
	I feel like I'm sweating like a whore in church here.
	As a white man, I'm doing everything I can to listen and be aware of my whiteness, like BLM tells me to do.
	Unfortunately, after spending weeks refraining from speaking and only listening, I'm no closer to fixing my whiteness.
	I'm still white.
	However, I've discovered a possible solution.
	Since the crime is not an action, but rather actual skin color, I've come to the conclusion that I must literally erase whiteness by darkening my skin to cover up the shame and fully become an ally.
	Do you think this is the best approach to erase whiteness in America?
	Only if you want to get elected governor of Virginia.
	Then it's a good...
	And only if you're a Democrat, by the way.
	It's not going to work if you're a Republican.
	You have...
	Made a really good point here.
	Which is, if you're white, you'll be smeared as a bigot.
	Just by virtue of being white.
	But if you try to change the fact that you're white, you'll certainly be smeared as a bigot because you'll be wearing blackface.
	If you speak up against racism, you will be smeared as presumptuous as using your white privilege ultimately as a bigot.
	But if you are silent, And you don't voice your support for these radical leftist movements, you will also be smeared as a bigot.
	Because as we've been told, silence is violence.
	Silence is consent to white supremacy.
	What the radical left has done here is set you up in a situation where you cannot win if you accept their premises.
	So perhaps the key is not to accept their premises and certainly, certainly not to dress up in blackface.
	I don't think that's going to help the situation at all.
	That's our show.
	I'll see you over at Crowder, and then I'll see you next week.
	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.
	And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
	We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
	Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
	Assistant director, Pavel Widowski.
	Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
	Audio mixer, Robin Fenderson.
	Hair and makeup, Nika Geneva.
	Production assistant, Ryan Love.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
	I think there are enough of those already out there.
	We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
	So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
	Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.

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