Rioters tear down a statue of Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic senator blames America for inventing slavery, and Michael sits down with the WH Chief of Staff. 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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| Thomas Jefferson is cancelled. | |
| He's cancelled. | |
| It was only a matter of time, but the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, one of the fathers of our country, he's cancelled. | |
| A statue of Thomas Jefferson that was erected outside of Thomas Jefferson High School was toppled in North Portland, Oregon. | |
| It was then spray-painted. | |
| One of the bits of spray paint said, slave owner. | |
| There were lots of signs and insulting things written all around it. | |
| Rioters knocked down two more statues on the very same night. | |
| And I'm trying to remember, I'm thinking back to way, way back, like maybe two years ago, if somebody could have predicted this. | |
| George Washington was a slave owner. | |
| Was George Washington a slave owner? | |
| So will George Washington now lose his status? | |
| Are we going to take down — excuse me — are we going to take down statues to George Washington? | |
| How about Thomas Jefferson? | |
| What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? | |
| You like him? | |
| Okay, good. | |
| Are we going to take down the statue? | |
| Because he was a major slave owner. | |
| Now, are we going to take down his statue? | |
| So you know what? | |
| It's fine. | |
| You're changing history. | |
| You're changing culture. | |
| He's right. | |
| You're changing history. | |
| You're changing culture. | |
| And no one, including many, many conservatives, is willing to do a damn thing about it. | |
| And I have a hunch why. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back. | |
| Not just Thomas Jefferson who got knocked down. | |
| Basically anybody who was involved in any way in the creation of this country is getting knocked down. | |
| And even some conservatives are... | |
| Kind of okay with this. | |
| I'm not saying they're calling for the statues to come down, but they're kind of okay with this. | |
| They're playing into the left-wing premises. | |
| I have a hunch why, and I think the problem actually runs a lot deeper than anybody's talking about. | |
| I think most of our modern political problems all tie in to the same central issue. | |
| Jefferson goes down. | |
| Two other statues go down in Portland a couple nights ago. | |
| Columbus. | |
| Christopher Columbus. | |
| You know, they've been tearing down statues, beheading statues, vandalizing statues of Columbus for years now. | |
| A Columbus statue is officially coming down. | |
| This is according not just to the rioters, but to the school administration at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. | |
| I don't know if they thought through this all the way. | |
| If they're going to give in to the premise here that Columbus is a really bad, terrible, racist, bigot, terrible guy... | |
| That they're going to take the statue down. | |
| They're probably going to have to rename the school, right? | |
| Well, if they rename the school, they're probably going to have to rename the town, right? | |
| You can't live in this racist town named after a racist person. | |
| If they're going to rename the town, they're probably going to have to rename the country, right? | |
| Colombia, you know, like Pablo Escobar Colombia, they're named after Christopher Columbus. | |
| Why aren't there popular uprisings in Colombia? | |
| We have to rename the country because of the terrible history of this terrible, terrible man. | |
| This according to the president of Columbus State Community College. | |
| The removal of the Christopher Columbus statue is a symbolic gesture of our commitment to our college and in our community to continue and accelerate the fight against systemic racism. | |
| Recent events, including the senseless deaths of African Americans and the resulting anguish across the nation, compelled us to act on a years-long internal dialogue about the statue and the message it sends to our community. | |
| The message, namely, that the place is named after Christopher Columbus. | |
| It's a pretty simple message, right? | |
| This inflection point will inform college policy and action, both now and for years to come. | |
| It will. | |
| You're right. | |
| It will inform college policy, and probably town policy, and probably state policy, and probably national policy as well. | |
| The most dispiriting part of this for me, but I think also the most illuminating, is that it's not just these liberals running colleges. | |
| It's not just the far-left rioters running Chaz and Chop and every riot around the country. | |
| Even some conservatives are buying into this bogus premise. | |
| We'll get to that in one second. | |
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| Really dispiriting here that pretty much everybody is going in on the statue toppling. | |
| Most conservatives are not saying we actually need to pull down the statues or we actually need to rename things. | |
| But what some conservatives are doing is granting the left's premise that these people, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, actually were terrible, rotten people. | |
| And the reality is, it's just not true. | |
| So there's a writer at the Washington Examiner, Tiana Lowe, who, you know, I like watching her when she goes on cable news. | |
| I have nothing against her personally. | |
| I don't mean to attack her. | |
| But she published a very bad take, a very incorrect take, which is titled, Christopher Columbus was pretty evil by the standards of his own time. | |
| We've heard this, I've read versions of this article many, many times, specifically since 2006. | |
| That's when it's become especially popular. | |
| And the story runs something like this. | |
| We think Christopher Columbus is a good guy, but actually, there are accounts that came out that say he was a monster, he was the tyrant of the West Indies, he was evil by the standards even of his own day, and everyone around him thought that he was a no-good, terrible, rotten person. | |
| Not true. | |
| All of those accounts rely on one defamatory letter written by Francisco de Bobadilla, Columbus's chief political rival in the New World. | |
| To rely on this guy's account to give us the whole picture of Columbus's life would be like relying on Hillary Clinton's biography of Donald Trump to tell us everything about Donald Trump. | |
| Maybe there's a thing or two that's true in there, but the bias is so overwhelming. | |
| The conflict of interest is so overwhelming that it's not a reliable source. | |
| And every one of these attacks on Columbus uses this one guy who had it out to get him. | |
| And Columbus, by the way, was so offended by the account that Bobadia wrote of him that he actually turned down money from the Crown and To fight against this defamatory stuff. | |
| Okay, he spent every moment practically until his dying day after this was written trying to get this written out of his record because he felt it was so untrue, so defamatory. | |
| And the crown, by the way, the Spanish crown, That set Columbus on the voyage and then picked Bobadia to replace him. | |
| The Spanish crown had a lot of interest in believing Bobadia's account because then it could withhold the full amount of money that they owed Christopher Columbus. | |
| There was a lot of politics involved. | |
| The reality is Christopher Columbus is one of the greatest men who ever walked the earth. | |
| Okay, even on this issue of how he treated the natives, compared to the Spaniards who he traveled with, Columbus was relatively a pretty good guy, who weighed in on their behalf, who adopted the son of one of his Native American friends, who even Bartolome de las Casas, the first resident bishop of the Americas, one of the great defenders of Native Americans, probably the first great defender of Native Americans, wrote of Columbus that he was a good guy. | |
| He was an admirer of Christopher Columbus until the end of his life. | |
| On top of that, he was the greatest navigator of his age. | |
| He was more or less self-taught. | |
| He was of relatively low birth. | |
| He married well. | |
| You know, he moved up. | |
| He was relentless. | |
| He traveled all over the place. | |
| He lobbied Portugal to send him on this quest around the world to the Indies. | |
| He lobbied Spain to do it. | |
| He Read books and books and books. | |
| Worked every angle of the system and then he made it to the new world using nothing but dead reckoning. | |
| He didn't even have the most basic equipment as he was traveling. | |
| He was dead reckoning and discovered this world that we now get to enjoy and from which we get to spit on Columbus's memory. | |
| It's just unfortunate. | |
| Not to put too fine a point onto it. | |
| Why are we doing this? | |
| Why are even conservatives buying some of these premises? | |
| Maybe we shouldn't tear the statue down, but Columbus was a pretty bad guy. | |
| Ah, he wasn't great. | |
| Ah, you know, Thomas Jefferson, he was a pretty bad guy. | |
| Ah, Robert E. Lee, that guy. | |
| Especially Robert E. Lee. | |
| I mean, he was a Southerner. | |
| He fought for the Confederacy. | |
| Dagnabbit, that's the only thing they ever say about him. | |
| Why are some conservatives willing to do this? | |
| Some people still don't get it. | |
| Some people think that this is just about only the left or only the right, and they're totally different and totally different perspectives. | |
| They think we only have economic problems. | |
| They're totally different from cultural problems. | |
| They're completely separate. | |
| They think that one odd feature of our culture today is we're not replacing ourselves. | |
| No one's having any kids anymore, so our birth rate is below replacement. | |
| They think that problem is totally disconnected to the fact that our nursing homes are overrun and just got wrecked by coronavirus. | |
| Specifically in New York, that story came out with Andrew Cuomo packing up the nursing homes. | |
| They think these are totally disconnected, that we're not replacing ourselves, we're not having any kids, and we don't know what to do with our old people, with our parents and our grandparents. | |
| Seems to me they're not completely separate problems, any of these things. | |
| Seems to me all of these issues derive from the same central pathology of modernity, Selfishness. | |
| I think it's simple. | |
| I think it's actually a simple answer. | |
| You don't need some highfalutin political jargon here. | |
| I think it comes down to selfishness. | |
| And you know that we're a bit of a selfish culture now. | |
| We spend an entire month celebrating pride. | |
| Pride, the definition of selfishness and self-obsession. | |
| I think there's a real connection here. | |
| A culture that does not value its inheritance, whether it's a money inheritance or whether it's a cultural inheritance, is going to squander that, and it's not going to pass anything along to its posterity except for debt. | |
| This is a weird thing. | |
| We live in a culture now that does not leave an inheritance to the future generations. | |
| It leaves debt. | |
| Likewise, a generation that's not interested in the future, not interested in posterity, not interested in having kids or leaving them anything, has no reason at all to pass on their cultural inheritance or their financial inheritance or anything. | |
| Who cares about the history of America? | |
| Who cares about Thomas Jefferson? | |
| Who cares about any of our traditions? | |
| We don't even care about the future. | |
| We don't care about who comes after us. | |
| The fact that we're forgetting about our past ties into the fact that we're forgetting about our future and vice versa. | |
| And what you have, I'm remembered of this line from George Orwell in 1984. | |
| The line goes, every record has been destroyed or falsified. | |
| Every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted. | |
| Every statue and street building has been renamed. | |
| Every date has been altered. | |
| And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. | |
| History has stopped. | |
| Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right. | |
| That's George Orwell describing this sort of dystopian hellscape in 1984, And that description, I think, suits progressives pretty well. | |
| Progressives hate the past. | |
| It's right there in their name. | |
| They want to progress beyond the past. | |
| The progressives always want to topple those statues down. | |
| And maybe even the sadder part is, it basically suits conservatives well as well. | |
| Because conservatives, at least in recent years, have only been focused on the present. | |
| They haven't been focused on conserving very much of anything. | |
| You saw this at the Supreme Court just this week. | |
| But you've seen this in recent decades. | |
| We've lost on so many issues. | |
| We've given up so many things. | |
| And then there's this irony, which is that conservatives always talk about fiscal responsibility. | |
| Yet when we get into the government, we spend just as much money, if not more, as the left. | |
| Because we're trying to paper over cultural problems by just spending our way out of it. | |
| By just having this facade of prosperity. | |
| We don't care if the left topples all the statues and ruins our whole culture. | |
| As long as we get a few tax cuts every once in a while. | |
| Yeah, not permanent ones, but you know, just every so often give us a tax cut. | |
| And then that's fine. | |
| Well, that doesn't conserve much of anything at all. | |
| And I think it just comes down to this myopic focus on the present. | |
| Not the past, not the future. | |
| Not the people who came before us, not the people who come after us, just us, ourselves. | |
| Just this kind of selfishness. | |
| We conserve nothing. | |
| I made this point just a few days ago. | |
| If you are not able to conserve anything, That there's no point in being conservative, right? | |
| They're in the word. | |
| If you're not doing the thing the word says, then what's the purpose? | |
| And I said this specifically with regard to the conservative legal movement. | |
| Call it originalism. | |
| Call it textualism, I guess. | |
| Call it the Federalist Society. | |
| I don't know. | |
| We've gotten a lot of conservative judges and yet we haven't gotten a lot of conservative decisions. | |
| We've kept Obamacare. | |
| We haven't overturned Roe vs. | |
| Wade. | |
| We've radically redefined marriage according to modern ideas from the bench. | |
| Now we've redefined sex to mean whatever I want to think that I am. | |
| We've redefined sex to be modern gender ideology. | |
| We haven't conserved much at all. | |
| Senator Josh Hawley, who I think is one of the senators kind of waking up to these ideas, he gave an absolute barn burner speech on the Senate floor yesterday addressing this precise point. | |
| This decision, this Bostock case and the majority who wrote it, it represents the end of something. | |
| It represents the end of the conservative legal movement or the conservative legal project as we know it. | |
| After Bostock, that effort as we know it, as it has existed up to now, it's over. | |
| And I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism and originalism in order to reach a decision, an outcome, that fundamentally changes the scope and meaning and application of statutory law, Then textualism and originalism and all of those phrases don't mean much at all. | |
| So Hawley is part of a trend that you're seeing, not just in the Senate, but among conservatives broadly, to actually fight back a little bit, to actually try to conserve some things, to not just focus on the occasional tax cut and let the left take over the whole culture. | |
| And I think it's about damn time that people started thinking that way. | |
| We'll get to that in one second. | |
| We'll get to how he's doing it. | |
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| Josh Hawley is one of the people pushing back, finally, in the conservative legal movement. | |
| I guess. | |
| What's the movement? | |
| I don't know. | |
| The movement's changing right now. | |
| The old consensus was, don't ever use the government when the left attacks you. | |
| When the left attacks you, don't use the government because if you use the government now to fight an actual attack from the left, then maybe, someday, hypothetically, the left will use that same government mechanism that it's already using against you. | |
| You understand the illogic here? | |
| But I still hear this. | |
| I hear this from friends of mine. | |
| They'll say, Michael, conservatives can't use the few levers of power that we have to fight back against, for example, big tech censorship right now. | |
| Because if we empower the government to fight back against censorship in this way, that the left is foisting on us right this very minute, then the left someday, hypothetically, might censor us. | |
| Right. | |
| I don't need to think about that hypothetically. | |
| I don't need to imagine that. | |
| It's already happening. | |
| They're already doing it. | |
| The question is not whether we're going to set ourselves up in this terrible position for the left to censor us. | |
| That's already a given. | |
| The question is, are we going to fight back? | |
| Yes or no? | |
| Hawley and others are saying it doesn't make sense to worry about this future hypothetical problem and because of that future hypothetical problem ignore the current one that is attacking us. | |
| And I think censorship is the best example here. | |
| We saw a huge story on this yesterday. | |
| NBC News I put news in quotes because NBC News is not a news organization and they've more or less admitted they're a leftist activist organization and they lobbied Google to kick off a conservative investigative outlet. | |
| So NBC News. | |
| I read The Federalist. | |
| Maybe you read The Federalist. | |
| They do great journalistic work. | |
| They were really good on the Obamagate scandal. | |
| They've been really good on some of the corruption that's going on in the government. | |
| They tried to get them kicked off of Google's advertising platform. | |
| And what that means, by the way, Google has, I think, the largest advertising platform in the world. | |
| What that means is, it's not like you're totally banning The Federalist from the internet, but you're cutting off More or less any way it could make money. | |
| And so if it can't make money, obviously the company is going to wither and die. | |
| This is what NBC writes. | |
| Google's ban of the websites, which would be the Federalist and another website, Zero Hedge, comes after the company was notified of research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British non-profit that combats online hate and misinformation. | |
| They found that 10 U.S.-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protest. | |
| Pause right there. | |
| The Federalist is not a racist website. | |
| If the Federalist is a racist website, then the word racism truly has no meaning. | |
| What they mean by racist is contradicting the leftist narrative. | |
| What they mean by racist is in any way disagreeing with leftists at NBC News. | |
| They call it racist and they smear it baselessly. | |
| They found that 10 U.S.-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, you know, the riots, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google ads. | |
| Google blocked The Federalist from its advertising platform after the NBC News verification unit brought the project to its attention. | |
| Zero Hedge had already been demonetized prior to NBC News' inquiry, Google said. | |
| Now, Google came out yesterday after a big hubbub. | |
| The Federalist was trending all day on Twitter, and they said, oh, no, The Federalist wasn't. | |
| Wasn't demonetized. | |
| A big misunderstanding. | |
| Don't worry. | |
| It was an issue with the comments section, but don't worry. | |
| We got rid of that. | |
| It's a trial balloon. | |
| That's what they always do. | |
| The fake news, truly fake news, NBC News, Made a political operative attack on a competitor and a conservative, the Federalist. | |
| Google obliged and demonetized it and more or less said they were going to destroy the business. | |
| Then there was enough of an outcry that NBC backed off and Google backed off as well and said, oh no, it was a big misunderstanding. | |
| Meanwhile, by the way, the other website, Zero Hedge, demonetized because no one made a big hubbub about that. | |
| This is going to increase throughout the election. | |
| We are still five months away. | |
| The old consensus would have said, well, you know, if you don't like what Google's doing, just make another Google. | |
| Yeah, sure, they have a monopoly over the flow of information around the internet, but, ah, well, that's too bad. | |
| Nothing we can do. | |
| My hands are tied. | |
| Let the left destroy the culture. | |
| Let's just hope for another tax cut at some point, please. | |
| We got to get those judges. | |
| Look, we'll get the judges in and the judges will stab us in the back. | |
| But hey, it's okay because I guess we'll get another tax cut or something. | |
| That's not a good way to conduct politics. | |
| That's the old consensus. | |
| I think the new idea says hold Google to account by whatever means are available to us. | |
| Section 230, right? | |
| The Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act that is one way that conservatives might be able to go after big tech oligarchs for abusing their powers and violating the law. | |
| Break them up as a monopoly. | |
| Just do it. | |
| Why not? | |
| Why wouldn't we? | |
| They are now trying to tip elections for the left. | |
| They are barring conservatives from doing business anywhere even. | |
| Go after them. | |
| Got to grow a spine, folks. | |
| Got to grow some cojones if you want to have an effective political movement. | |
| Speaking of these sorts of questions, just to see what we're up against from the other side of the Senate aisle, Tim Kaine, U.S. Senator, the man who was almost one heartbeat away from becoming the second woman president, Tim Kaine gave a speech yesterday on the Senate floor in which he blamed America For inventing slavery. | |
| And the only problem with Tim Kaine's speech is that it was completely untrue. | |
| We need to do much more within the criminal justice system, but also within all of our systems, to dismantle the structures of racism that our federal, state, and local governments carefully erected and maintained over centuries. | |
| We know a little bit about this in Virginia. | |
| The first African Americans into the English colonies came to Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619. | |
| They were slaves. | |
| They'd been captured against their will. | |
| But they landed in colonies that didn't have slavery. | |
| There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. | |
| The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. | |
| We created it. | |
| Um, I think maybe Tim Kaine should check up on his history. | |
| Actually, in the Declaration of Independence, written by that guy who got canceled, Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson complains about how the incipient United States inherited slavery from the British and complained about that as an institution that has had a negative impact on the country. | |
| Where does Tim Kaine think the slaves came from when they landed in Virginia? | |
| The slaves came from Africa. | |
| And they were bought from African slave traders, people who still practice slavery to this day. | |
| Slavery still practiced in the Middle East to this day. | |
| Slavery still practiced in East Asia to this very day. | |
| Because slavery goes back not just to those slave traders in the centuries before the United States came to be. | |
| It goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, for instance. | |
| It might behoove Mr. | |
| Cain to read the Bible, see what the Egyptians did to the Jews in Egypt. | |
| It goes back throughout all of human history. | |
| Ironically, the West is the only place that's ever abolished slavery. | |
| It's not that we invented slavery. | |
| We didn't. | |
| But we did abolish it. | |
| And virtually no one else has. | |
| That's a good thing. | |
| Ironically, Tim Kaine mentions how slavery came to Virginia. | |
| The first officially declared owner of an arbitrarily declared slave for life, the beginning of what we would call our modern system of slavery in America, was a black man. | |
| He was a black man from Angola. | |
| Now, obviously, slavery then went on to become a highly racialized system that led to racial consequences that went on for centuries. | |
| But it shows you that the situation of how slavery began, much more complicated than Mr. | |
| Cain would have you believe. | |
| A lot of people believe this thing. | |
| If a sitting U.S. senator believes a lie like this, think about how many people have been taught the very same lie. | |
| Our goal as conservatives, our job, is to push back against those things, and yet, unfortunately, we keep giving in to left-wing premises. | |
| And unfortunately, I think even some of the advisors around the president are beginning to buy into some of those premises. | |
| We'll get to that in one second. | |
| We'll get to President Trump's big announcement yesterday. | |
| We will get to how the riots actually did cure coronavirus. | |
| I called that one, too. | |
| And we will get to my interview with the White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, at the White House. | |
| I was in Washington last week, got to stop by the White House and take a minute to sit down with the Chief of Staff. | |
| We'll get a little bit of that. | |
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| So President yesterday made a big announcement. | |
| The announcement was on police reform. | |
| And I get it. | |
| I get the political calculation here, but I think the president is getting bad advice from his advisors. | |
| We'll get to that in just one second. | |
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| President Trump announced yesterday a big police reform plan in the Rose Garden. | |
| The plan is receiving mixed reviews. | |
| I will tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. | |
| Here's the president. | |
| Thank you all for being here as we take historic action to deliver a future of safety and security for Americans of every race, religion, color, and creed. | |
| We're joined today by law enforcement professionals and community leaders. | |
| Though we may all come from different places and different backgrounds, we're united by our desire to ensure peace and dignity and equality for all Americans. | |
| Okay, of course, we believe all of this. | |
| It's good that President Trump is taking charge. | |
| We need strong leadership as the cities are burning. | |
| But is this the way to do it? | |
| Police reform. | |
| If I had my druthers, if I were advising the president, I would have President Trump release an executive order on criminal justice reform that puts more of these criminals burning the cities down into prison. | |
| I think that's probably the better angle. | |
| I think, unfortunately, some of President Trump's advisors are convincing him to buy into the left-wing premise that the police are hopelessly racist and bigoted and slaughtering innocent black men around the country. | |
| We know that isn't happening. | |
| We have the statistics. | |
| We went through them just last week, I think, on the show. | |
| How many unarmed black men were killed by police last year? | |
| And by the way, unarmed does not mean not dangerous. | |
| Unarmed does not mean that the use of force was not justified. | |
| But let's even use that number, unarmed. | |
| How many? | |
| 9,000? | |
| No. | |
| 900? | |
| No. | |
| 90? | |
| No. | |
| It's nine. | |
| Every death is a tragedy. | |
| But nine is not evidence of systemic police brutality and racism. | |
| And yet, that's the premise that the left wants us to buy into, and it wants us to buy into that so that they can get their agenda in there without really having to sell it to the American people. | |
| So I just think the whole idea of this, am I against police reform? | |
| No, I think powerful institutions should constantly be reforming themselves, of course. | |
| But is that the message we want to send now? | |
| I mean, what does the EO do? | |
| It doesn't do very much at all. | |
| It requires new federal credentials for police departments, which is just another federal regulation being foisted on states and local governments. | |
| And it bans chokeholds in most instances. | |
| This is the only part of the EO with teeth. | |
| The Attorney General's standards for certification shall require independent credentialing bodies to, at a minimum, confirm that the state and local law enforcement agencies' use of force policies prohibit the use of chokeholds, except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law. | |
| So even there, if the use of deadly force is allowed, then they can use a chokehold. | |
| But are they saying they can't use a chokehold now in any case? | |
| That seems like you're tying law enforcement's hands behind its back. | |
| The problem, it's not going to do very much as an EO. I guess the White House thinks it's going to be good messaging for people. | |
| I don't think it's good messaging, though. | |
| I think we lose ground. | |
| I think we lose debates because we give up premises. | |
| The best example of this would be how we lost the marriage debate on the right. | |
| The marriage debate, where are we going to expand the definition of marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions? | |
| The marriage debate focused on a question. | |
| What is marriage? | |
| For all of human history, sexual difference seemed to be at the center of marriage, whether it was polygamous marriage in certain instances in some places, whether it was monogamous marriage for most of the history of the West. | |
| Does sexual difference have something to do with that? | |
| Does the logical possibility of the creation of life have something to do with that? | |
| Yeah. | |
| The answer to that was always yes. | |
| And then a few years ago we decided, no, that doesn't have anything to do with it. | |
| So that's a debate. | |
| That's an interesting debate to have. | |
| The way the left avoided that debate, which is favorable to the people who want to maintain a traditional meaning of marriage, is they just presumed the new definition of They said, oh, marriage is a union of two people who love each other. | |
| They redefined it first, and then they said, the marriage debate is about rights. | |
| Do you have the right to get married? | |
| But that was never what the debate was about, and nobody opposes equal rights. | |
| So by the time they got that premise through, the people who wanted to keep a traditional definition of marriage already lost the debate. | |
| It was already over. | |
| There was no debate to be had. | |
| I think that's what the left succeeds at maybe more than anything. | |
| And that's how they get so much institutional power. | |
| If you cede the premise that the police are racist, terrible, bigoted people who are brutal and they use too much force and they need to be reined in, then it's a lot easier to get through BLM's radical leftist premises, most of which have nothing to do with Black Lives Mattering or civil rights for racial most of which have nothing to do with Black Lives Mattering or civil rights for But they get the premise in and so they get their policy solutions. | |
| We lose ground because we give up the premises. | |
| You see this not just on these racial issues, you see this on the virus as well. | |
| You know how much I hate to say I told you so. | |
| I would never do that. | |
| Me. | |
| Well, sometimes. | |
| Maybe. | |
| Okay. | |
| And on this case, I will. | |
| I did a show a week or two ago that said, Race Riots Cure Coronavirus. | |
| Because the mainstream media and the public health experts and the politicians told us coronavirus was super duper deadly. | |
| If you ever walk outside your home, you're going to kill grandma. | |
| And then all of a sudden there were all these leftist riots and the public health officials, the very same one said, oh no, go out there. | |
| Yeah, go out by the tens of thousands and breathe all over each other. | |
| That's fine. | |
| You're not going to get coronavirus. | |
| That'll actually help stop the spread of coronavirus. | |
| But if a few conservatives want to maintain their civil liberties, that is deadly. | |
| You can't do that. | |
| So I said, oh, I guess the race riots cured coronavirus. | |
| Turns out, turns out that might be true. | |
| Or in a way, it's true. | |
| Minneapolis, which had the biggest uprisings, is now reporting, over two weeks later, few new positive cases, according to health officials. | |
| So you would think, after this craziness out there, two weeks later, past the incubation period, you'd have a spike in cases, right? | |
| Hasn't happened. | |
| More than 3,300 protesters have shown up to be tested for coronavirus. | |
| 40% of them, so about 1,300, have gotten their results back already. | |
| 1.4% tested positive. | |
| That is lower, significantly lower, than the positive rate statewide. | |
| The positivity rate statewide is 3.7%. | |
| And among the rioters, peaceful rioters, protesters, it's 1.4%. | |
| That's also lower than the current seven-day average rate of positive tests, which similarly stands at 3.7%. | |
| And this trend isn't just in Minneapolis. | |
| It holds up in Chicago, Illinois, Philly, Pennsylvania, Boston, throughout Massachusetts. | |
| They've also seen very few cases, new cases of COVID-19 cropping up. | |
| So when they tell you, and this is going to be inevitable, that There's going to be a second wave. | |
| You can't go outside if conservatives want to hold a protest or something. | |
| The RNC is going to happen. | |
| They're going to say, no, you've got to stay indoors. | |
| Forget about our encouragement of those riots. | |
| You have to stay indoors because of coronavirus. | |
| Just point to all that great science and show that the science, at least the latest science, doesn't back them up. | |
| Speaking of cures... | |
| President Trump is being unfairly attacked. | |
| I know you'll be shocked to hear that. | |
| He's never unfairly attacked, is he? | |
| Well, yeah, I think he is pretty much every single day by the mainstream media. | |
| He's now being attacked because he spoke a little loosely. | |
| He got a little wording wrong when he was talking about whether or not we had found a vaccine for AIDS. But the attack that the left is making on Trump, I think, reveals a lot about their own hypocrisy. | |
| They have come up with things, and they've come up with many other cures and therapeutics over the years. | |
| These are the people, the best, the smartest, the most brilliant anywhere. | |
| And they've come up with The AIDS vaccine. | |
| They've come up with, or the AIDS, and as you know, there's various things, and now various companies are involved. | |
| But the therapeutic for AIDS, AIDS was a death sentence, and now people live a life with a pill. | |
| It's an incredible thing. | |
| Now, lots of people are attacking Trump. | |
| They say, we don't have a vaccine yet for AIDS. We've got very effective preventive measures and we've got very effective treatments and we've got a vaccine in development. | |
| But we don't have an officially certified vaccine yet. | |
| So you're spreading fake news, Trump. | |
| I can't help but notice, though, That this minor gaffe is revealing a big flaw in the left's argument about coronavirus. | |
| Because many of the same people who are mocking Trump right now for saying that we have an AIDS vaccine when we still don't have an AIDS vaccine, even after, what, 37 years of research, are the very same people telling us that a coronavirus vaccine is right around the corner. | |
| What makes you so confident that we're going to have this coronavirus vaccine within the next few months? | |
| We've been spending 37 years on an AIDS vaccine. | |
| We don't have it. | |
| How many other diseases have gone around? | |
| We don't have a vaccine. | |
| We're nowhere close to a vaccine. | |
| It's not as though when scientists go into the laboratory, they say, okay, we're going to make a vaccine. | |
| I'm going to estimate it's going to take us about four or five hours, like making a pizza. | |
| We know we're going to get it. | |
| No, you're discovering the vaccine. | |
| You're developing the vaccine. | |
| You don't know what your timetable is going to be on that. | |
| So fine, you want to attack Trump for misspeaking about the AIDS vaccine. | |
| That's okay. | |
| But then I think we need to drop what has become the new left-wing argument, which is we need to shut down our whole country until we find a cure. | |
| Initially, it was flatten the curve. | |
| We did successfully flatten the curve and slowed the rate of transmission and didn't overwhelm the hospital system. | |
| Then they transferred flattening the curve to finding a cure. | |
| No evidence that we're going to get that cure. | |
| It's one of these gaffes, quote unquote, that Trump makes that I think actually was pretty advantageous. | |
| I think it shows a flaw in their argument. | |
| Now, speaking of the White House, I was hanging around there last week and I sat down with the White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, on my show with Senator Ted Cruz called Verdict. | |
| This was Mr. | |
| Meadows' first interview since he became the chief of staff, and I figured there's no way this guy's going to tell us anything. | |
| He's got a very private job, arguably the most powerful man in the world, right, because he's the chief of staff at the White House, so he's deciding who gets to come and see the president, what makes it to the president's desk, all from behind the scenes. | |
| He's going to be a behind-the-scenes guy, and he's not going to tell us much. | |
| He spilt some tea. | |
| I gotta tell you, Mark Meadows really took us behind the scenes a little bit on some of the challenges that the administration is facing, specifically when it comes to leakers. | |
| And the good news out of that is the White House is finally beginning to figure out how to identify those leakers. | |
| The other thing that I think that is critical is, you know, you've got this massive bureaucracy with agencies, and you think, well, there's a Republican administration, but there is the swamp that continues to go on, whether it's a Democrat or Republican in the Oval Office. | |
| Yeah, and they just kind of wait them out. | |
| It's exactly what Ted was saying. | |
| They wait them out. | |
| And so one of the great things is that if Ted or one of his colleagues, they're getting the stiff arm, I call it the legislative Heisman, if they're getting that, it's real easy for me to pick up and say, you know, why am I getting this phone call from this senator on you not responding to their phone call? | |
| Oh, well, we were busy. | |
| Well, I was busy too, and I took his call. | |
| I mean, why aren't you taking it? | |
| And so sometimes it's just making them aware that there's somebody else willing to hold them accountable. | |
| And two branches there. | |
| I mean, this is actually something, Senator, I know you've talked a lot about, is you've been talking now for years about social media censorship, censorship of conservatives. | |
| Well, just recently we got out of the executive branch this executive order on social media censorship. | |
| We still don't know a whole lot about that. | |
| At least I don't know a lot about that. | |
| Maybe could you tell us a little bit about how that came to be? | |
| Well, I think Ted and I know that as conservatives, sometimes our conservative voice doesn't reach the audience as quickly or as effectively as it is normally intended. | |
| It's a diplomatic way to put it. | |
| Yeah, well, I can tell you I was one of the few members of Congress back when I was in Congress that was actually shadow banned by Twitter. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so we ought to put that out on a tweet and see if they take that down. | |
| They'll say it wasn't shadowbanned, but it only happened to be four conservative members of Congress, myself, Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes, and Jim Jordan. | |
| So you're saying AOC didn't fall into that? | |
| No, she didn't make it into that. | |
| So one of the things that's important is that we need to make sure that the free press is really the free press. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it's not censored. | |
| And what Twitter has done, probably more so than some of the other social media platforms, but YouTube is doing it as well, is they come in and they start to actually monitor content. | |
| And so it's not this free, open, what I call the wild, wild west of social media. | |
| That's the way... | |
| And as freedom-loving individuals, we want the free market to work. | |
| But when the free market starts to get monopolized by content police, then it's important for us to step in. | |
| So we did an EO that actually has the potential of taking away their protection from litigation. | |
| So if we can't fix it or if Congress can't fix it, let the trial attorneys fix it. | |
| It'll happen real quick. | |
| Unleashing the trial attorneys is a really powerful weapon. | |
| And I got to say, this is an issue where White House leadership was so needed and it's so important because you and I have talked about this before. | |
| One of the challenges on the issue of big tech censorship is Is all the federal agencies are siloed. | |
| And it's a hard issue where the antitrust division at the Department of Justice doesn't quite fit into what they think they want to do. | |
| The FTC, it doesn't quite fit in what they want to do. | |
| The FCC, everyone is sort of looking at their own slice of the problem. | |
| And the president's executive order on this was important to say, damn it, this matters. | |
| I think it's the biggest threat to democracy in the whole country. | |
| But we needed the president. | |
| Well, the interesting thing, and so I always try to give you a little bit of a backstory that no one else knows. | |
| So that EO, as it relates to Section 230, we started putting it around for a little bit of comment on a very limited basis. | |
| All of a sudden, this proposed EO shows up in the New York Times. | |
| And it really was fed to the New York Times by a federal worker that didn't agree with this administration, or at least it appears that they didn't. | |
| And they didn't agree with the EO. And so they took it and fed it to outside sources. | |
| And I'm glad to say that we were able to track that person down. | |
| They no longer work for the federal government. | |
| Wow. | |
| Let me ask a question here. | |
| I hadn't heard that story. | |
| That's a great story. | |
| Let me take it in a slightly different direction. | |
| So the job Mark has now, I think, may well be the hardest job in all of Washington. | |
| I think that's probably true. | |
| And I love seeing the surprise on Cruz's face when he hears about this leaker. | |
| It's funny, you just expect everybody's on the same page in Washington, and they all are constantly talking to each other. | |
| And I have found, talking to a lot of big players in Washington, that is not the case. | |
| There actually is surprise. | |
| These human interactions really do matter, and I love the way that Mark Meadows says that. | |
| He says, That individual is no longer working for the federal government. | |
| Yep, that's a very diplomatic way to put it. | |
| A lot more great stuff in that interview, so head on over. | |
| You can check that out at the Verdict Podcast. | |
| Also, I'm on Dave Rubin's show today. | |
| I'm on the Rubin Report. | |
| This is my first time, believe it or not, going on the Rubin Report, even though I've been friends with Dave for years. | |
| So head on over, check that out too, and then I'll see you tomorrow. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
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